News from the Murri Jarjum Room

It has been another busy couple of weeks in the Murri Jarjum Room! As well as our usual visits from Krurungal, Kalwun Deadly Choices and helping the girls with their assessments and homework we are also working hard to be ready for our NAIDOC Celebrations in Term 3. If any of our Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students would like to have input into our NAIDOC Week activities please see Mrs Apanui or Kylie in G Block Murri Jarjum Room as one of our amazing Year 7 students, Harpa Whittnall, is setting up a committee to discuss possible activities for the whole school.

ATSIAP Academic Challenge

Over the last 6 weeks a small group of Year 9’s have been working on four tasks for the ATSIAP Academic Challenge. This included working for one hour a week to produce a poem around the 2021 NAIDOC theme of Heal Country, a speech regarding Changing the date for Australia Day, an artwork portraying the message, “What does country mean for you?”  and a commercial for a new and/or improved invention. After lots of laughs and hard work all four tasks were uploaded. Well done to Shaylee Borg, Mackenzie Woods, Tayah Chilcott and Will Mann for your hard work and commitment. 

NAIDOC Showcase Display

In preparation for NAIDOC celebrations PBC SHS joined a large number of other South East Qld primary and secondary schools to set up a display at Cleveland District State High School. The display consisted of the bark paintings and dob sticks made by the girls at our Currumbin Valley excursion days as well as artwork created by Mackenzie Woods around the theme of Country. Thank you to Myrisha Bartman, Shaylee Borg, Tayah Chilcott and Mackenzie Woods who travelled to Brisbane to help set up the display.

Clontarf Academy News

Our Year 9’s trekked on a weeklong adventure to take place in our first Clontarf Qld Rugby League Carnival. Leaving early Sunday morning to pick up students from Ambrose Tracy College who we teamed up with for the camp. The students clicked right away and has a fantastic drive watching documentaries and playing bus games. We stopped in at Gympie for lunch and continued our journey to our first destination at Akuna Pikes Crossing Caravan Park. The students cooked up their own beef burgers for dinner, had a crack as public speaking ice breaker games along with starting their camp goal setting booklets.

We were up and out early back on the road to get to Rockhampton to cook up a hot breakfast at a drive and revive. Shortly after heading to Clairview for lunch and explore of the North Queensland beach. Clairview is a coastal town and locality in the Isaac Region, Queensland.

We arrived in Mackay mid Monday afternoon to set up camp with the other 24 competing Clontarf Academies in the carnival at Rowallan Park. Monday evening we joined together for dinner at the Mackay Northern Beaches Bowls Club before returning back to camp to talk around the fire and retiring for the night before the big day.

Tuesday morning and hot breakfast was cooking as fog covered the camp grounds for our pregame meal. We started the morning completing our goal setting booklets, presenting our jerseys and wishing each other good luck before we left for a big day of footy. Clontarf style footy is played hard but fair. We played valiantly against Woree SHS (Cairns), Kirwan SHS (Townsville), Trinity Bay SHS (Cairns) and Dalby SHS. It was great for our young men to see that they are part of something much larger than one Academy on the South Coast. They have brothers as high up as Far North Queensland and as low as Goondiwindi.

The trip home starting Wednesday afternoon through up some hurdles with our Academy vehicle having problems. We ended up staying in Rockhampton for two nights until we were back on the road. The boys enjoyed an action packed day off doing Tenpin bowling, laser skirmish, Mini Golf and dodgem cars. We played basketball for hours and got time to reflect on what an amazing time we had. We practiced gratitude by rehashing some great stories and made it home safely Friday afternoon.