This evening the Newington College community will come together for our Year 7 to 12 Annual Prize Giving to celebrate and commemorate this year of learning and achievement. 

Hundreds of our musicians and choristers will play and sing, our Prefects for 2025 will be presented, the 2024 recipients of the Newington Medal and the Newington Citation will be announced and hundreds of students from Years 7 to 12, who have shown outstanding rigour and perseverance across academic merit and improvement, the creative arts, sport, service, leadership, character and citizenship, will be celebrated. Annual Prize Giving, however, is also a wider celebration of our school as a whole community, an institution of integrity, courage, curiosity, kindness and inclusivity.  

Tonight, as we look forward to 2025 and we celebrate the achievements and robustness of 2024, Newington College Archivist Mrs Julie Daly reflects on some of our past Prize Giving events which have brought us to this place in our College’s exciting future: 

• While there is no mention of the first Prize Giving at Newington College, which began life as the Wesleyan Theological College at Newington House, Silverwater, it is noted in the newspaper coverage of the 1865 Speech Day that ‘the usual distribution of prizes’ was to take place, in the little church of St. Augustine, built by Mr. Blaxland, on the Newington estate’. 

• The Centenary Speech Day, held at Stanmore, recognised this history, noting that the Annual Speech Night on 9 December 1963, was the 101^st such event. 

• The earliest prize book in our archival collection dates from 1870 and was awarded to Francis Curwood (ON 1872). Titled ‘The Buried Cities of Campania or, Pompeii and Herculaneum, their history, their destruction, and their remains’, it was published in 1869 and awarded in acknowledgment of his services as Monitor in the Class. 

• The first Speech Day held following the move of the College to Stanmore in 1880 took place in School Hall, now known as Prescott Hall, where it remained for the next 40 years. 

• Our earliest surviving Speech Day program dates from 1893. 

• From 1920, Speech Days were held in a large marquee on the Johnson Oval, due to the fact that Prescott Hall was no longer big enough to accommodate everyone. This image shows Headmaster P.R. Le Couteur following his first Speech Day, photographed with guest speaker Dr Cecil Purser (ON 1881) and other prize winners. As Newington College had no official school uniform until 1932, the prize winners are pictured here wearing either their College cadet uniform or a grey suit.  

• From 1939, owing to the increasing size of the College, Speech Day moved to the Petersham Town Hall. The numbers attending continued to grow, and from 1953, Speech Night moved to the Sydney Town Hall. At the end of each Speech Day/Night, the prefects sang the traditional “Leaving Song” with the school joining in the chorus. 

• Prize-giving continued to be held at the Sydney Town Hall until 1985, when we moved to the Sydney Opera House. From 2003 Centenary Hall played host, until in 2005 when we moved to the International Convention Exhibition Centre Sydney (ICC Sydney) at Darling Harbour. 

• Some of our earliest prizes were for subjects including Classics, Greek, Latin, Euclid, Geology, Drawing, History and Geography, Shorthand and Bookkeeping and for the younger forms, Neat Exercise Book.  

On Wednesday our Lindfield and Wyvern Preparatory campuses also celebrate their Annual Prize Giving Day at our senior Stanmore campus.  

To every student, staff and family member of our Newington College community, we congratulate you on a wonderful year of learning, creativity, service and kindness.