When I left primary at Woolbrook Public School to start at Riverview at the age of 11 I was seriously asked by my fellow Woolbrook students, a school as old as Riverview being founded in 1880, whether I knew certain aunties and other relatives who happened to live in Sydney. Their concept of Sydney was that it was a town a little bit bigger than Woolbrook (population 200), possibly the size of Walcha, population (about 1500). It seemed absolutely illogical to them how I could go to high school in Sydney and not know their cousins as surely everybody would see each other at the one high school in town.
Even though I knew their proposition was slightly ill-informed it was still a major cultural shock to go from living at Danglemah, where the families were the O’Briens and the Joyces, to a school with over 1000 students in a city of 4 million.
Two of my older brothers who had been to Riverview had left boarding school in the country, at De La Salle College at Armidale. Because there had been a disjuncture in their schooling against their wishes, as they had no control over De la Salle closing down, they had been, for want of a better word, unsettled at Riverview. Their circle of friends, peer structure, academic process and location had all been changed and on the teenage platform of snakes and ladders they had arrived back at square one on their arrival in Sydney. There was a certain indoctrination of my views due to their experience prior to my arrival.
Goodwill and anticipation had been somewhat replaced by fear and foreboding.
The question was at the time what would a Jesuit education deliver to a child from Danglemah. If academic accomplishment was the product I wished to attain, then I was to be bitterly disappointed. I was not a brilliant student and when I received my HSC I honestly thought my score was my student number. I successfully managed to attain my fifth choice of six for matriculation to university.
In sport I had represented every A team in basketball and every B team in rugby but arriving in Years 11 and 12 I never managed to get past the thirds in basketball and only played my last game in the seconds in rugby. Maybe it was to be the creation of character at school that was to be my forte yet I was never a prefect and, to be honest, I think I caused a few problems.
The tutelage of my older brothers and sister, well-indoctrinated with the 70s subculture whose high priests were Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Lou Reed and Jimi Hendrix, saw me, to paraphrase Marc Bolan, of T-Rex, on a self-determined destiny to be a child of the revolution. To the mix I would have to add an age-appropriate hormonal fascination with the opposite sex. All these distractions seemed not to matter because in my mind I believed my life after school would be that of a grazier. It should be noted I always had in the back of my mind, however, a career in politics as a second tier to agriculture and said as much in those peculiar seminal career statements that attach themselves to the leaving photos at the back of the Alma Mater.
It would seem that the good priests and teachers of Riverview could have exchanged what I had to offer for better material than I was providing. However, in my scholastic and sporting mediocrity I had in a fashion truly opened myself to what in hindsight does matter when one participates in a Jesuit education. Riverview allowed the seeds of faith that had been planted by my parents and other family members to grow beyond what either group would have understood or acknowledged. It was and remains the cornerstone of my formation and a backstop towards all decisions I make. I do not for one moment presuppose that I always make the right decisions but I generally do know what the right decisions should have been, even if I make an alternative one.
The metaphor I draw for Riverview is the first 300 metres of a 1500-metre race and if our numbers are three score and some, then let us say every 400 metres is 20 years of our life. The hype and celebration of that first 300 metres puts you in contact with some brilliant coaches and other athletes who know you better than anybody else on this planet from that point forth ever will.
That first 300 metres of the 1500 metres is Riverview. It shows you the way you can run for the rest of your life if you choose to maintain the pace. My message to you here today is do not sit in the grandstand in self-congratulatory splendour after the first 300 metres. In fact, if this first 300 metres becomes your race then the reality for you is that Riverview will have been a complete failure. This is no more than the start and though some at this point may be at the front of the pack that is hardly even an indicator of the final ascertaining of potential to outcome. At the start of the race there are many clapping and cheering in the grandstand and there has been much exuberance and jostling on the track but the ultimate realisation is both the crowd in the stand and the runners on the track dwindle till at the end you will be the only one running with only one person watching.
For me there is a definitive culture that is Riverview. It is a culture that differentiates between informed and intelligent scepticism from the proverbial chip on your shoulder. When someone proclaims at the barbecue that the moon “is made of cheese” it is the capacity to note, “I hear what you say and I am considering my reply and I will get back to you”. The Riverview culture is not to be part of the chorus saying “Yes, yes, the moon is made of cheese, I always thought it was”. Nor is it the culture to use differentiation to be a point of denigration. The culture of Riverview is meeting your mates at 5.30am for a surf at Bondi then pulling the tables together for breakfast and accepting that in that group the CEO walks with equal virtue on the Earth as the person who is a labourer for the landscape gardener.
The culture of Riverview is that incredible lack of ability to dress with any sense of aplomb whatsoever; no matter how vigorous the labels you will still manage to make them look like a complete fiasco and return, much to the chagrin of your future partner, to the same pathetic boardshorts and T-shirt that should have made it to St Vincent de Paul many years before.
Yet as you sit down to have a quiet beer at a pub in Tamworth there will be people who have made it to the top but they will have no respect from you unless they are delivering back a vision that is a sincere benefaction of theirs to the nation even if it may not be your vision of what is appropriate. Once more it is the capacity of a student at Riverview to call “rubbish” and for the person who said it to know he is caught out.
Riverview to me is Greg Moran, a person from my football team, the 15Bs, made a quadriplegic in a game against Shore in 1983 and I have never heard him complain about his affliction although he lies on his back to this day.
My Riverview can’t tolerate the malingerer but insists on compassion and maturity for those who have been afflicted by the unfortunate arrows of life. My Riverview is those who pushed Greg in his wheelchair and changed his ureadams and cleaned his backside and never blinked because they were truly men, and for some, men at the age of 16, more man than others would ever be.
My Riverview demands that leaving the establishment at Lane Cove is not the end of your education; it is to whet the appetite that will be monitored through the course of your life. My Riverview reads Murdoch and Fairfax and News Weekly, considers all the opinions and will discuss them without the conceit that presupposes my views are more informed or more just than others. My Riverview says that if you only went to this institution so that you could be the smartest stockbroker in Sydney or in Wall Street or banker in London then it would have been better had the Jesuits taken their resources from Lane Cove and invested them in Mumbai. You must be successful if you have the talents to be so but you must be more than that. You must put yourself in the capacity to affect the community you are in for the better on whatever terms you are capable to do it.
In my maiden speech in the Senate I mentioned three names. Dr Father Laurie Drake, a Jesuit seismologist and director of Riverview Astronomy and a senior lecturer in geophysics at Macquarie University until 1992. (He went to the Observatorio San Calixto at La Paz, Bolivia in 1991. He died in Melbourne in 2007). He did the early morning mass, which I tried to go to often but should have attended more often, and he had one sermon and it went for 15 seconds, which I thought in itself was one of the best reasons for his service, which went something like “Beware of false laurels as they are the work of the devil”. It stuck with me and is such a clear and concise message. He did not say do not try to attain laurels or sit on your backside and do nothing, it was basically when you get there, don’t get carried away with yourself but definitely try to get there wherever there is for you.
I see this clearly in the guys I see today who went to school with me. I mentioned Mel Morrow, who began teaching at Riverview in 1962 and left in 2007. He was an English teacher, drama director and Campion Housemaster and had a passion for what he taught and there were no personalities and favourites. There was just the love and the passion for what he did.
I mentioned James Rogers because he committed his whole life – he was teaching me in year 7 to year 11 and he is the Director of Students now. I would think people can’t understand what sort of dedication that is but I am proud that I mentioned him and the others because I want to them know that I am where I am because of them. I remember James Rogers putting The Sydney Morning Herald editorials on our desks in the morning and saying to correct them for grammar. Now, I am not saying I became proficient in that but it set a standard and a relentless pursuit for the Jesuit ideal of proficiency.
There are many others that could be mentioned but those three are part and parcel and semblances of what is in so many facets of education that you will not appreciate until years after you leave here. The question really is now what is Riverview to you.
Will someone be able to meet you in 20 years time and identify the traits that show quite clearly you were at one of the best schools in Australia and the reason you were there was not for you to think you may be an asset back to your nation for the benevolence that was bestowed on you by others.
Are you going to be the Corona-sucking, sports car driving, private box occupant or are you going to be all those and also be the person who goes out on night patrol with the Matt Talbot Hostel or does their bit for the community in other ways. One person is the shallow babbling brook and the other is making an endowment of their talents.
You will not think of Riverview much in the next few years but will be in a fog of self-indulgent emancipation but that seed now planted in you will start looking for sunlight in the not too distant future.
The call is yours as to what Riverview was and what you are.