St Joseph’s students honour the Anzacs

YEAR 9 students at St Joseph’s College Geelong have again commemorated Anzac Day with a service at the Westcourt campus.

The April 27 service was the third held by the college and a number of veterans were present, including guest speaker Nathan Mullins.

Westcourt head of campus Mark Deverall said the event commemorated not only 100 years of Anzac service, particularly the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, “a symbolic event in our nation’s history”.

“This event provides an opportunity for our young men to engage in our great nation’s wartime history while paying respects to all those who have fallen.”

Mr Mullins has served as a police officer, a soldier with the Army Reserve special services in Afghanistan and as a security consultant in Iraq, and is the author of books including Keep Your Head Down and How to Amputate a Leg (And Other Ways to Stay Out of Trouble).

He spoke to the students about an incident in Iraq where he correctly decided not to open fire in a situation in which he otherwise might have.

“I always went back to my police training, my military training… those values about accepting risk for the sake of trying to save someone else’s life became important, and I’m sure when I studied it, it became important at school.

“I know the sort of morality I picked up became important there.

“To a high degree, you don’t really notice at the time, but these rules you’re under now, the sort of virtues you are having imparted on you are really important, they’re the things that will allow you to make those decisions in the future.

“And those decisions are very hard. I would warn you that everyone in the room here is going to be involved in a tragedy in their life or some sort of emergency – at some time you’ll be pressed, and you won’t really have necessarily a great moral code or legal code to understand at that time, and the only thing you’ll have to guide you is your own morality.”