STUDENT SPOTLIGHT DYNAMIC DEBATING DUO EARN STATE SELECTION
A RADIO STAR IS BORN
In April, Year 11 students Anya Chen and Jaime Leivers earned an opportunity to test themselves against Australia’s most articulate school-aged debaters by winning a place on the Western Australian Debating Team.
Congratulations to Year 12 boarding student Jade Wallwork, who was one of 35 winners of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Heywire Competition earlier this year.
At the time of print, Anya and Jaime were representing Western Australia at the 2022 National School’s Debating Championships in Canberra.
Heywire encourages young people from the regions to tell stories about life outside Australia’s major cities. Each year, every ABC regional station selects a winning Heywire entry to represent their part of Australia. The young winners work with ABC staff to produce their stories, which are later broadcast on ABC Radio and featured on abc.net.au.
The dynamic debating duo endured a gruelling series of trials to make the team, starting with a two-day event involving six debates just to make the initial state squad of 13. They later survived two rounds of cuts to secure their place on the four-person team alongside two students from Perth Modern School and Shenton College. We are also thrilled to announce that Anya was selected to captain the representative team.
Jade caught her local station’s attention with an inspiring tale about her beloved Corrigin Hockey Club. “One of my personal highlights from 2021 was playing for my hometown hockey club, so when I was thinking about my entry, they just sprang to mind,” Jade said. “I wrote my story, workshopped it with an ABC producer to turn it into a radio script and later visited the ABC Radio studios in Perth to record it. “I was interviewed the morning that it was played on the radio and when I heard it for the first time it was so cool.” To listen to Jade’s Heywire entry, visit https://ab.co/3vhbaVI
LINGUISTICS WHIZZES CROWNED STATE CHAMPIONS St Mary’s Year 11 Linguistics Team defeated more than 100 teams en route to winning the state component of this year’s 2022 Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad in March. The team, made up of Anya Chen, Misree Trivedi, Katrina Ailakis and Mae Siah, were given a series of decoding tasks set in several languages, including Waanyi, which is spoken by the Indigenous people of the Gulf of Carpentaria; Austronesian, a native language 20
FIDELITER Student spotlight
of the South Pacific Islands; and Arhuaco, which is spoken in areas of Northern Colombia. Following their victory in the state event, the talented group contested the national finals, which were held at the University of Western Australia on 6 March. The girls acquitted themselves with distinction, placing 15th out of the 66 teams vying to earn their way through to the International Linguistics Olympiad.
