Hunters Hill High School

Opera Ad Maiora – By Hard Work to Greater Things

Telephone02 9817 4565

Emailhuntershd-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au

Alana Bourke, Graduates in 2013 receiving 40/40 in her Society and Culture Personal Interest Project

Alana Bourke, Graduates from Hunters Hill High School in 2013 receiving 40/40 in her Society and Culture Personal Interest Project (PIP) and ranking 9th in the State

This is her HSC journey in retrospect…

Stopping and starting. The more I think about my experience with the HSC, the more it seems to be a series of pauses and leaps and stumbles and hurdles. The same can be said for writing my PIP. The start was excruciatingly slow. Settling into an idea was utterly impossible while I wrestled with topic choices that were so clearly wrong but that I justified with desperate vigour. I was falling behind. It was terrifying. It took taking a huge step back to realise what I was doing wrong – trying to reconcile my past through a Personal Interest Project as only a seventeen year old could do – but finally I was overcome by the idea, the one that would change everything. I began to study photography.

For me, it took picking up a different lens and taking a real look at the world around me before I was able to unearth my topic. Again, I think there is a strong connection between this reality and the HSC as a whole. Perspective quickly became everything. With three major works and a mountain of assessments I had to invent different ways to ensure I didn't drown beneath the weight of the present – when you are deep within a process such as the HSC it's so easy to forget that it isn't everything that you are and everything that you will be. I endeavoured to hold on to my lens and to continue looking hard at the world around me and see both far beyond the HSC and deep within it – and as such for the most part I was able to remain grounded which in retrospect I think was a total miracle.

As my PIP took shape it become something I was truly proud of – a work that sung with my passion and reflected a process I never wanted to end for its challenging yet addictive nature. In writing that final passage, I released a part of myself that I think had always been somewhere inside, waiting to be written. I realise that sounds ridiculous but the same can be said of each of my major works – the history of the Biloela Girls I constructed for Extension History, Daughter, my Extension English Two narrative, and even each of the final exams. As I wrote furiously I released a year's worth of words and thoughts and feelings and actions and somehow only in releasing them could I feel whole. In releasing the process I could finally understand it, finally appreciate it. I could only truly see it, the essence of the HSC, on the day that I graduated. That insight was the greatest gift I had been given all year. Such a truth reveals more about your own life than hours of introspection, and is so utterly personal you will have no use for knowing mine. Hold on to that final piece of insight for the rest of your life. Undoubtedly, this truth will be the most beautiful thing born of your experience as a student navigating the perilous world of the HSC.