College Dean | Mr Chris Ryan

Staff News

Next week, we welcome back Mr Peter Whitehouse from long service leave. Thank you to Mr Tony Nicita who has relieved for Mr Whitehouse during this time. We wish Mr Nicita well and look forward to other such opportunities in the future.

Mrs Melissa Deacon has had to take some leave this week and we welcome and thank Mrs Kaylene Campbell for joining us for this time.

Br Patrick Ambrose Treacy

Celebrating the Feast of Blessed Edmund Rice as a community is always a significant occasion and especially so this year as we celebrate 150 years of the Christian Brothers' mission in Australia.

Ambrose Treacy, the Founder of Terrace, must have been an extraordinarily determined and charismatic person to have founded 27 schools in 30 years, up and down the east coast of Australia and in New Zealand. More than a pioneer, people like him border on being like astronauts due to how different from their native Ireland the Australia of the late 1860s to the early parts of the 20th century would have been. He is an inspirational figure.

My own paternal family commenced our Australian journey from Ireland aboard the ship Indus in 1876, the same year Br Treacy brought Terrace from Pugin’s Chapel to our present-day site. My Great Grandfather, Denis Ryan, came from a small farming township called Bruree south of Galway and settled near Allora on the Darling Downs where the original farm still stands. My father received some of his education from the Christian Brothers in Warwick and I was educated by the Christian Brothers from the age of nine in Toowoomba and have worked with Edmund Rice Education for 27 years. My office at Terrace is where Br Treacy spent his final days before passing away in 1912. It is not lost on me that I spend much of my working day standing on the shoulders of the Irish Catholics who paved the way for people like me in Australia and in the company of the spirit of one of the greatest educators Australia has and ever will know-it is both a privilege and an honour to live my very own ‘The Ghost and Mr Ryan’! I sincerely pay my respects to Br Treacy and all of the Christian Brothers who built up the two communities at Nudgee and Terrace where I have spent much of my life. It was appropriate that Dr Carroll, at our Mass this week acknowledged the pain and sadness that some have caused Old Boys and parents over the decades and it is also important that we remember the good that so many did and do for people like me and others. The best of these who have shaped my life and I strive to emulate, taught me that Brother is not a noun, it is a verb and a Charism is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is not be kept the same, but is a gift to be given away so that others can make it their own. Terrace has been blessed by that gift of the Charism of Edmund Rice for 143 years.