63/ 123
OPENING OF ADDITIONS TO WAVERLEY CHRISTLN
BROTHERS COLLEGE SYDNEY ON
OCTOIER, 1963
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt, Hon., Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. Chairman, My Lord Bishop, Mr. Headraster, Your Honours,
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys, and in particular, Captain Bernard
Jones, the Captain of the School
As I am constantly being warned that the habit of
speech grows on a man as he gets older and that he therefore
sometimes forgets I at once declare these building additions
open. ( Laughter) ( Applause)
The next thing that I want to say to you is that
my friend, Mr. Robson, so justly described as one of the great
headmasters, has expressed some embarrassment at being with
me speechmaking for the fourth time. I can assure him that the
embarrassment is reciprocal. ( Laughter) We are joint brothers
in misery: He has listened to i: 2e four times and I have had to
listen to him. The only difference between us is that he is
usually present because he has persuaded a great number of
businessmen to get rid of a great deal of money in a good cause
and I an here in my dubious, ambiguous capacity as a politician
who, from time to time, is the enemy of all mankind. ( Laughter)
But, Sir it must be said for me and I would like
to say particularly to the boys that, contrary to all your
expectation after my npny years in public affiars I still
retain a considerable trace of Christian spirit because I
have been sitting here on the dais next to an old boy of St.
Patrick's College in Ballarat. St. Patrick's College in
Ballarat a school which, when I was in the football team
a kind of football you don't understand ( Laughter) for another
school much smaller, inflicted on us the greatest thrashing in
the history of football in my State. I hesitate to tell you
what they scored, All I know is that we didn't score at all.
( Laughter) And every time I meet a distinguished old boy of
St. Patrick's College, I find myself looking at him and saying
" Should I be nice to this chap, or shouldn't and the fact
that I am says something for me that you might not have supposed
to exist. Now, Sir I of course, as you have been reminded,
have a tremendous interest in education in Australia, I,
myself, am the half-etc-cated product of a series of scholastic
institutions. I began my life learning if you may so describe
it in a little country State school with about thirty or
forty children in it. I then went to a much larger one in a
much larger town and then I went to a secondary school which was,
in effect, privately conducted, and then I went to what you call
a great public school in Melbourne and then to a university.
So that I may claim to have seen the educational process at
various levels and in various ways and out of it all, I have
come, firmly persuaded, as His Lordship the Bishop has just
stated to you as his own view, that there is no greater
superstition in the world than the idea that all education
has to be uniform and uniformly conducted.
One of our dangers in a democracy is this passion
for everything being uniform. We must all be the same as the
next man. I am all for us all having the same rights as the
next man but I am not a bit in favour of being the same as the
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next man. Heaven forbid that we should all be exactly the same
type of people with the sane body of ideas, with the same formal
educational equipment in our own minds as if in some sense this
would mean that we would all think the same. If anybody in
Australia thinks that everybody thinks the same because everybody
is in a democracy, he'll have a great disillusionment on November
( Laughter) Now, Sir, this is, I think, the basic truth: We
must not get into this deplorable habit of thinking that there
is virtue in uniformity for its own sake, This is not to
criticise the State forms of education. I am, of all people,
their beneficiary. But this is merely to say that the greater
the variety that we have, the greater the versatility of our
educational system, the more people are encouraged to choose
the school that they want for their children, the better for
all of us. ( Applause) Of course, Mr. Chairman, this is something
that goes deep. We have heard. today, very properly, words about
science, the importance of science in the world. Of course,
tremendously important increasingly important, but it would be
a strange world wouldn't it in which we were all scientists,
a strange world in which we had forgotten that, after all, the
proper study of mankind is man, the relations between man and
nan, the relations between man and his Maker. All these great
humane studies which, of course, could co-exist with science, are
not to be forgotten. Education is, in its nature, an all-round
business. The humanists must learn more about science and, if
I may say so, the scientists must learn more about the humanities,
otherwise we may get to the stage, of course, of becoming so
scientific, so knowledgeable on God's creations that we begin
to think we know all about God. This is a cardinal error,
Now, a school like this, a school like the one I
went to in Melbourne; other schools the school that Mro Robson
conducted with such distinction such schools have a double
aim. Those aims should produce the highest level of education,
meaning by that not only the acquiring of knowledge vastly
important as that is, not only the acquiring of accurate habits
of thought, rare and splendid as they may be, not only the
acquiring of habits of courtesy and tolerance and understanding,
but also realising all through that we are not here today and
gone tomorrow we are not a mere dusty phenomenon that will be
blown away but that we have solme of the stuff of immortality in
us0 When I say that I don't mean just reputation or something
of that kind, but some of the stuff of the spirit, something that
is based upon the whole religious feeling that we have and the
religious background against which we do our work. This is
tremendously important. Sir, if you didn't believe this, this
school wouldn't be here0 If other people didn't believe it,
other great and famous schools would not be here. These schools
do not, this great school does not exist just in order to
indicate that it is a bit superior to the firm next door. Not
at all. It is here because the parents who send their boys here
want something more than ordinary lay education. ( Applause)
They want some background.
Sir, I must tell you and perhaps Mr. Robson has
heard me say this before I hope he has a faulty memory but
when the war ended, I was at that time in that strange place they
call politically, " the wilderness". You may know what it means.
But I had one idea in my mind which turned out to be utterly
wrong. I thought that with all the tremendous rates of taxation
that then existed, necessarily so for the conduct of the war, 000/ 3
3-
with all thlat, wouldn't it be terribly difficult for people to
send their children to schools where they have to pay fees for
them and make some sacrifice for them; wouldntt this mean that
the great number of schools n-) w well knoinwould feel the pinch
and tend to disappear? I couldn't have been more wrong. It is
one of the most astonishing things in post-war history in
AUstralia that these schools, about whose future I was nervous,
before long had waiting lists, before long began to expand and
expand. Why, I noticed on the back of the programme today a
very very interesting figure ' Waverley College was opened in
January, 1903 with a roll call of twentytwo pupils, Twentytwo
and it now has 1,420 and so magnetic obviously has been the work
that it has done thal a distinguished Judge is able to get up
and announce the completion of an enterprise running into
what did he say? œ C390,000. This, I think, is one of the
great phenomena of the post-war era, a wonderful thing, I have
had a good deal to do with it on the university side as you
know, and a little to do with taxation remissions ana~ so on,
on donations to schools, but the whole essence of this thing
has been that people have been able and willing and when I
say able, I know what sacr'ifices are involved in this to give
to their children that form of education which they regard as
best here and best in eternity. This is something tremendou~ s,
I am proud of a country that has done it. I am proud of peqple
who can work to produce a result like this. ( Applause)
Sir, I have a singular pleasure in being here.
I am sorry my wife is not haere but as you may have heard by
countesy of the press we now have a tenth grandchild. ( Applause)
I thought for a raomenz a little earlier that somiebody wanted'
mie to adopt an eleventh. ( Laughter) If you know my wife as
well as I do, you will know that she is a tremendous grandmother
and so for a variety of reasons, my daughter coming back~ last
evening from hospital, she decided she couldn't come but her
heart is with me. She shares rmy views on these matters
( Applause) and therefore it is a great thing, a pleasant thing
for me to have been able to declare open this building and
express my hope that it will for many many years to come serve
both God and man in this city.