Rosewood History

The speech made by Governor, Sir Matthew Nathan at the Rosewood State School Jubilee in 1925.

I am sure you will all have been told that this fete that we hold here today is to mark the jubilee year of your school, that is, the 50th year that it has been opened. No doubt 50 years-the time it takes for a boy or girl leaving school to become an old man or an old woman-must seem to you a very long time, and when you think of what can happen in 50 years it will seem still longer. It is within the last 50 years that it has become the law that every child must go to school, and learn reading and writing and figures, and about its own and other lands. Before that, many children were allowed to grow up knowing nothing of these things. Within 50 years people have learnt to make and to use electric light and telephones, motor cars and aeroplanes, to hear sounds half across the world, and to cure diseases that it was thought could never be cured. Within 50 years the Australians have become known as among the freest and the bravest of the peoples of the world. Twice 50 years ago the first railway had only just been built in Europe, and there were no telegraphs and very few steamships. The interior of Australia was little known, and Brisbane had just come into existence. It is only just over three times 50 years ago that a white man first saw the Queensland coast, and a little less than five times 50 years that the first Englishmen to set eyes on Australia left a little village in England where, presently, I am going to live. Ten times 50 years ago was the beginning of the age of discovery, which led to ships from Europe first sailing round the south of Africa, and then across the Atlantic to find America, and later to their going to islands north of Australia, and later again into the Pacific and to find Australia itself. This time has also been called that of the re-birth of learning, and of the close of the Middle Ages. Twenty times 50 years ago was the beginning of those ages which followed that are called the Dark Ages, when Europe was steeped in ignorance and confusion. These had begun 30 times 50 years ago with the break up of the world empire, that had ancient Rome as its centre. Forty times 50 years ago takes us to a long life time be-fore the birth of Christ, to before the beginning of the Roman Empire, and to the day when barbarians painted blue inhabited the green forests of Britain. Fifty times 50 years ago Greece had not yet reached its glorious times; it was the early morning of civilisation as we know it now. 

When 50 times an ordinary man’s working life takes you all that way back, it is natural that you should think 50 years a very long time. The time will come at the end of another 50 years when it will seem to you to have been all too short: when you will look back on it and think of the things you might have done, but did not do, because they did not seem so important then when there were many years in front of you, or because there were other things that at the moment you wanted to do more. I am not talking of making your own position in the world. As regards that, a man fulfils his duty when by his own work he makes his livelihood independent of the work of others, when, as oarsmen would say, he pulls his own weight in the boat, and a woman when she either does that or helps a man and teaches his children to do it. I am thinking of the short time there is, unless one seizes all opportunities to carry out the duty of every one born into the world of trying to make it a better place to live in. It is in many ways a very splendid place, with all its beauties of sky and sea, of hill and vale, of tree and flower and of bird and beast, and with its many people that have happy lives and are filled with right thoughts. There are also ugly things in it; ignorance and ill-health, want and war and the evil qualities and passions that lead to these -sloth, greed, envy, anger and hatred. Every person has it in his or her power to lessen these passions by keeping them down In himself or herself, and by removing the cause for them in others. In this every person counts, and if one multiplies what one person can do by the number of children I see before me the sum of their power to help Queensland to be the wonderful place to live in that it ought to be will be great. For this the 50 years of working life is, as I have said, not a long period, and opportunities must not be wasted. When the jubilee of today comes I hope all the children here will be able to look back with, on the whole, a feeling of content with the way they have filled the years that will have passed by all too swiftly. This is the same thing to wish them lives as happy as wisdom and goodness can make them. I heartily do that.”