Great Scot September 2018 Gt Scot_154_September_online | Page 4

Chairman
The Hon. Dr David Kemp AC ('59) – School Council Chairman
The responsibility of
service
THE HON. DR DAVID KEMP
AC SCHOOL COUNCIL
CHAIRMAN
In 1914 Scotch College changed its motto from
‘Deo et Lit(t)eris’ – For God and Learning – to include
the word ‘Patriae’ – For Country. It was a measure of
the level of concern among Australians at the expansion
of the German empire into Australia’s region, with
German colonies being established in New Guinea,
Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall
Islands, Samoa, and the build-up of Germany’s naval
forces in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It was also a
signal of Scotch’s sense of responsibility to serve the
new nation of Australia that had come into existence
less than 15 years before, on the first day of the
20th century.
The commitment to serve Australia was not, from
the School’s point of view, simply an expression of
national pride. As Samuel Griffith, the principal
author of the Constitution, and then Chief Justice,
had said, there was always the risk of patriotism
being an ‘elevated form of selfishness’. From Scotch’s
perspective, the new nation had a claim on its citizens
because it stood for ideals that had been inherent in the
School’s very foundation: ideals of freedom, personal
STAINED GLASS WINDOWS, MEMORIAL HALL
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Great Scot Number 154 – September 2018
responsibility, self-government, the dignity of all people,
and service to the wider community and the world.
The School’s founder, the Rev James Forbes, had
said that an education in principles was essential so
that knowledge could be used for good, not evil; that
education ‘must be regarded as the great remedy for
the ills of the body politic, the basis on which must
be mainly rested all hopes of its amelioration, and of
its future generations being better than the present’,
and that ‘public liberty and public virtue have almost
universally been found together’. The School aimed to
support that public virtue with private virtue, and the
imminent threat to the nation called it to defend the
ideals of its foundation.
Four years later, with the Australians led by a
former Scotch boy, Sir John Monash, and with the
participation of some 1300 former students and staff
in all military ranks and in medical as well as fighting
units, the School witnessed the achievement of victory.
Over 220 students and staff had lost their lives in the
service of their country. The planned great hall on
the new Hawthorn campus would now be a memorial
to those who had fallen defending their ideals.
Sir John Monash returned to the School to lay its
foundation stone.
The School gave much thought to how it could
commemorate the students who had died in the service
of their country, and within the Memorial Hall a Roll
of Honour was installed, beneath which were inscribed
words adapted from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress: ‘So they passed over, and all the trumpets
sounded for them on the other side’. How did the
School view those who had fallen?
The stained glass windows later installed provide
an answer: those who had given their lives were young
warriors motivated by the highest ideals, represented
by the legendary King Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table through the one who had made it his
lifelong mission to see the Holy Grail, Sir Galahad.
The perfect knight was flanked by the patron saints
of Scotland (St Andrew) and England (St George), by
St Michael the guardian of warriors, and St Martin,
whose day was 11 November, the date of the Armistice.
The principles of that chivalrous world were Courage,
Honour and Service, and across the windows are
emblazoned values that underpinned the service of