Presentation Ball Guest of Honour Speech
Sarah Caddy (CPS 2014)- Astronomer
“I’m incredibly grateful and honoured to be invited to enjoy and celebrate this night with all you tonight. When I was chatting with Greg before the Ball, he told me that I’m one of the youngest alumni to be invited back to speak at a Chev presentation ball – in-fact perhaps the only one to have graduated less than a decade ago. But only just! Which is slightly frightening.
As a result, I certainly don’t have the credentials of many of the other guests invited to speak in previous years, however, let me tell you, I do remember what it’s like to be in your shoes. It honestly feels like just yesterday I was staring down the barrel of the HSC, and it is nerve wracking!
But why do we feel this way? Is it because we’ve been told since Year 7 that this is the exam that decides our future? 10 years ago I thought that was the case. Then when I reached the other side, I realised that feeling of uncertainty didn’t just go away. Perhaps it’s because on the other side of this exam, there lies a question mark. One final question that you have to answer – what do I do now? What do I do with my life?
Like it or not, this is probably the last time someone will tell you how to live your life. This next year is the last goalpost. This is the last hurdle. And then you have to decide for yourself what your own path will be.
In my mind, school was like a jungle. You can imagine this vast, dense forest of vines and trees obscuring the pathway forward in the distance. But that’s the thing about school, there is a path to follow. Right now, tonight, you’ve reached the end of that path and walked into a clearing. In front of you is a massive, imposing sand dune that you know you have to climb – and that’s the HSC.
Now you don’t know it yet, but on the other side of the sand dune, you will find yourself on the shores of a vast, barren ocean, that stretches out farther than the eye can see. There are no paths. There are no boundaries. There are no rules. And, all of a sudden, you have to stretch your wings, and fly off into the unknown, all on your own. This is a pretty tricky thing to do when, for most of us, by the time we finish the HSC, do we actually know what we want to do for the rest of our lives? Hands up if you have no idea!
I graduated from Chevalier College in 2014. At the time, I thought I wanted to pursue a career in music. I loved my time at Chev dearly, and I was involved in every possible musical group they would let me join. I played the violin by the way – so I did my auditions at ANU, I even considered getting an audition prepared for the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.
But something wasn’t quite right – you see, ever since I was a kid, my Dad would take me out into the backyard with this little telescope, and, through some cussing and angry moments trying to point it in the right direction, would say look!!! Quick have a look! And I clearly remember seeing Saturn for the first time and going wow. Space is pretty big. That’s pretty cool.
To be an Astronomer however, you need to be good at Maths – and that’s something I was not very good at, at all. In fact I was terrified of it – to the point where I’d come home in tears having failed a maths exam or gotten a bad grade, and I’d have to be consoled by my poor mum who tried to convince me it wasn’t the end of the world – although at the time it certainly seemed like it! In fact I was so frightened of Maths that I and a group of other equally traumatised kids decided we would call Maths, ‘Number class’, just so we didn’t have to say the word.
Faced with the prospect of not being able to pursue my dreams of becoming an Astronomer, I enrolled in early entry at the University of Wollongong. When you do this, you get to have an interview with someone, and you essentially plead your case, you tell them why they should accept you without having seen your ATAR at all. And they said sure, you seem like a pretty passionate person, so we’ll let you have a spot. And so, I rejected my offer at ANU to do music, I started my undergrad at UOW in Physics, regardless of my ATAR.
Not too long after, I decided I really liked science communication. So I rocked up one day to the Wollongong Science Centre and Planetarium and said I wanted to volunteer. And so they put me to work in the workshop, painting and repairing the old exhibits during my weekends and downtimes from lectures. At the same time, I started writing science shows for the presenters and sharing them around, and when the director found out that people were presenting my shows, they offered me a job. And so I operated the planetarium and did science shows for the kids until I left Wollongong Uni.
This trick I had started to discover, that hidden behind all the shiny neon gates in front of every opportunity, there is a hidden back door you can sneak in, as long as you really look hard for it, was starting to pay off.
Towards the end of my degree I knew I needed to make the big leap to Astronomy – but UOW had no Astronomy courses. What to do. Well I reached out – again another cold call – to the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney – and said I would work for free on whatever project they would be willing to give me. Incredibly, they said yes! And sure enough I spent 1 day per week driving up to Sydney at 5am to attend a 1 hour meeting and present my findings. At the end of the 6 months they offered me a paid fellowship, which is where I met my PhD supervisor, who, incredibly, happened to be exactly like me. And the rest is history.
So why did I tell you this story? People have told me, to my face, that life is a game of musical chairs. There are, let’s say, 10 chairs in the room, everyone dances around them and when the music stops, the 100 people in the room all have to fight for a chair. If you are the fastest or the strongest or the smartest, if you get one of these chairs, you’re lucky. You get admitted into the degree you want. You get the job you been searching for. But here I am, rocking up to this game of crazy musical chairs carrying my own chair I brought from home. I walk into the room, put the chair on the floor and sit right down. And trust me everyone goes – wait … can you do that???
Guys, there are no rules. Don’t be the person who waits for opportunity to come knocking at your door, don’t let that number, that ATAR define your chances of achieving your dreams. It means nothing. If you are passionate, take your future into your own hands, and make your own opportunities. Think outside the box, and bring your own chair to that party. I don’t regret for a second, that decision I made to become an Astronomer.
There’s another story I’d like to share with you tonight, and it’s one that has come from my journey into Astronomy. One of things my team and I did during my thesis was build a telescope. We call it the Huntsman Telescope, because it looks a bit like a spider’s eye. Lots of lenses all working together. Ladies and gentlemen, if you thought tonight I would make it through this speech without teaching you some astronomy, you were mistaken, and I do apologise in advance.
When we turned that telescope on for the first time and received our first image, I was absolutely shocked by what I saw on my computer screen. It looked like someone had taken a handful of silver glitter, and thrown it all over a pitch back floor. Every single point of light in that image was a galaxy – and this is an image which only covers about the size of the full moon in the sky. It doesn’t matter where I point the telescope – you will see the same thing. Thousands of galaxies in a single image everywhere you look.
Now each one of those galaxies contains billions of stars. And each one of the stars, just like our star, the Sun, we know probably has many planets. And yet, so far, the Earth is the only one we know that contains life. I want you to hold that picture in your mind now, that image we all know. That blue planet suspended in space – that home we’re all living on. It’s a tiny blue speck, sitting amongst all these stars, and galaxies. And as you do, I’m going to read to you one of the most powerful and thought-provoking pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. It’s called the pale blue dot, by Carl Sagan.
“Look again at that planet. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals in the history of our species lived there – on what is essentially a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this dot on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this single point of pale blue light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image in our mind of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
But it’s no secret that our world now faces unprecedented global challenges. Never before has it been so easy to connect with one another, yet we are so divided. Our lives are more comfortable and convenient than they have ever been, yet our neighbours face famine and poverty. We have the most technologically equipped societies in human history, and yet we continue to use decades-old methods of energy production and manufacturing that disrupt the balance of the global environment and cause widespread loss of biodiversity and threaten our own existence.
The Earth needs her young leaders now more than ever. And tonight, I see them in this room. Tonight is about you – look around at the faces of people who love and support you. Your family and friends, your teachers – they are all betting on you. I’m betting on you. I know all of you will do incredible things. All of you will change the world.
No matter what path you choose, remember to lead with kindness and compassion. Remember to lead with love. And that’s what Chev students do – I don’t even need to tell you that. And it doesn’t matter if next year when you reach the other side of that sand dune, and you’re looking out over that vast ocean, if you decide to become a nurse, or a doctor. A scientist or an engineer. A politician, or a musician. Whatever you choose, do it with your whole heart. Take your future into your own hands, and remember that blue planet.
Strive, in your own way, to make this world a better place. Astronauts who have been to space, and looked back down at the Earth, often describe it as a moment of clarity that changes them forever. It’s called the overview effect. All of a sudden, they realise that we are all on this pale blue dot in space – we are all in this together. If we all learn to start to love and support one another, then that’s the moment we start moving forward into a better tomorrow together. All of us.
Thank you.
