We would like to thank our community for supporting International Women’s Day and attending our special celebration on Friday 7 March 2025.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2025 was “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” This theme calls for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind. 2025 also marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This document is the most progressive and widely endorsed blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide that transformed the women’s rights agenda in terms of legal protection, access to services, youth engagement, and change in social norms, stereotypes and ideas stuck in the past.
Our community was very pleased to welcome Gabi Elgood as our guest speaker. Gabi grew up in Bungendore and is an ex-student of Merici College, graduating in 2006 when she thought she would pursue a career in Musical Theatre. It turns out Gabi’s singing and dancing skills were average at best so she leaned into her strengths and started talking for a living instead.
Gabi’s first media job was here in Canberra presenting a local TV show called Channelvision which led to scoring a job at Mix106.3 and 104.7 in an admin role while also doing casual radio news and announcing shifts on the side.
To get experience and learn the craft Gabi moved to Orange for her first Breakfast Radio job, from there she was promoted to the Toowoomba Breakfast Show and then to Townsville where Gabi’s show was networked all around regional QLD.
In 2021, after the isolation of COVID, Gabi and her Husband Nev decided it was time to move back home and Gabi managed to get a job where it all began at hit104.7 which is where you can now hear her from 6-10a.
We extend our thanks and appreciation to Gabi for sharing her life experiences with our community and offering advice and support to our students.
Special thanks and appreciation are extended to our Hospitality students and staff who prepared and served delicious canapes.
Reflection – Renee Taylor, Assistant Principal Teaching & Learning
“International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.
The theme for International Women’s Day is For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.
At Merici College we invest in young women every day, because we know that they are of value and importance to our world. We know that when young women are given equal opportunities to learn, earn and lead, that whole communities thrive.
When we look around in many societies, clubs, governments, board rooms, when women aren’t present, we must ask: “if not, why not?”
When women are discriminated against for their gender or biological sex, we must call out poor practice.
When the treatment of women is not equitable, we must take action. And we must do this each and every time.
At Merici College we try to empower our young girls to have confidence in their abilities and that they can take their place in the world with courage and with the knowledge that they are more than enough.
We must continue to challenge and change institutions, structures and attitudes that make it harder for women to be taken seriously or for us to be included at all.
Change is needed at a community level – with families, educators and community leaders modelling positive attitudes and challenging rigid ideas about gender in homes, educational institutions and neighbourhoods. Shifting how children understand stereotypes from an early age can have long-term impacts by changing how boys and girls view themselves and opening up more choices later in life.
Merici College is committed to continuing our work in helping shift and change attitudes and actions into the future.
I grew up in regional NSW, in a small country town. I am a farmer’s daughter and I am one of six children. In my family, I am one of five girls and I am number five in the order of our family. My brother is the oldest and by the time I was born, he had already left home to work, so I only grew up with sisters. It was all I knew. It was only girls who took the roles on the farm and in the family household. It was us girls riding the motorbikes, moving the sheep and cattle, milking the cows, training the horses, helping during the shearing and harvest season. It was all I knew. I also grew up in a time where the internet was only in its infancy, so you only knew what was happening in the world via the nightly news or the newspapers.
It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realised that in the world beyond mine, women didn’t have equal opportunity or equal chances in the workplace or in that in some communities and cultures, women were seen as less than or that they had no voice or no say in what their life path could be.
I became the first in my family to complete Year 12 and go onto university. I often wonder how I managed to break the cycle in my family of women leaving school to become wives and mothers and undertake no training or study.
Part of me knows that it is in my nature to strive for achievement and to do things differently, but a large part of me knows that I was surrounded by strong female role models my entire schooling career. Female teachers who were inspiring, were intelligent and were courageous and who saw something in me that could be bigger than my small country town.
It is no coincidence that I ended up a teacher, a mother to only daughters and a leader in an all-girls school. It is a privilege to do what I do and to work with young women every day and to see them become the best version of themselves in an environment that promotes empowerment, education and confidence as the key to their futures beyond our gates.
As women, we need to pay it forward; break the cycles of discrimination and inequities and help pave the path for the next generation to come so that they may have it just that little bit easier. Help to show them what is possible and what could be possible. It is right that we should be working together to ensure that we are paid equally to our male counterparts, that we should have the right to have control over our own bodies and what happens to them and that socially we should have the same respect as men and that we should have greater representation across all levels of government and in all board rooms across the world. I want more for the young women of the world, our nation, our local community, our families and our school.”
