At Speech Night last week, Year 10 student Xanthe O’Loan read a moving speech, which won her House Public Speaking for the Years 9 and 10 category this year. The passionate text about girls’ education, privilege and the symbolism of our red bricks is worth sharing with all. Read it in full below. 

Our red bricks symbolise our school’s undoubted privilege in a world that beckons us to help.

Those historic bricks hold with them the memory of a time when female education was considered taboo, and education itself was not only globally inaccessible but not even universal within our own state. The bricks remember a time when they were the gates of Eden, protecting the students from the cruel reality of the outside. They were the line in the sand that marked to the world that our school was a fortress of female empowerment.

Yet now, most of the students in this room will go to university without a question of gender roles; we have stability and near equality in our network. We are surrounded by female intellectuals, athletes, artist and leaders. We have the privilege that our greatest challenge has been the Italian tiles for our Chapel.

It is a rare and expensive luxury that the main point of turmoil for our community this year was what was going to happen to the red brick walls. It’s ironic that at the time they were built, the main point of turmoil was if women would get the vote. In this contrast, we see how fortunate we are.

The aesthetic of the red bricks is a privilege, not a right nor a need. It is from a place of fortune that we are able to put such tremendous amount of energy into the preservation of these walls. And from this, it is clear that they symbolise our school to be a place of privilege. But it’s what we do with that privilege that will define how proudly we can say we are from Melbourne Girls Grammar.

Cracking and crumbling at every step around them, perhaps the once sturdy protector of our school is trying to show us something. Trying to shine light from the outside world, explaining that we no longer need our fortress, the home fight is done.

But the war is far from over. One hundred and thirty million girls are currently denied education in an attempt to systematically suppress our sex. Pushing them into a cycle of reliance and subjugating them into a blank void of voicelessness. In our so-called developed nations, women’s rights are being barbarically wound back in our nearest global partner, and in Australia, female CEOs are paid significantly less than their male counterparts, to the tune of $170,000.

Somebody fought for us. And without them, none of us would be here; I wouldn’t be giving a speech, you all wouldn’t be pretending to listen, and our executive team wouldn’t be nervously smiling behind me.

But yet we are here, and we now have a responsibility to see past our own privileges and identify that there are bigger problems than our bricks. We have to see past walls and into the rest of the world that doesn’t have the comforts that we do.

If we were to push the bounds of global citizenship, our world would take the shape of the theorised ethos of Australian philosopher Peter Singer:
“Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can”.

From here on, let the red bricks always symbolise that we are in such a position of high privilege to worry about them, when millions will never get the opportunity to be raised as ethical women of action.

Thank you.