Scotch College

Jim can hear a deepening roar

A new history of Scotch will appear in 2001 on the 150th anniversary of the school's foundation.

The last history of Scotch came out for the 1951 centenary. This new history is to be a fresh one, catching up on the past half century and pulling the whole 150 years into a manageable book.

Scotch has commissioned Dr Jim Mitchell ('64) for the task. Jim taught for a decade in the Melbourne University History Dept and has published on the French Revolution and on the history of the book. He has studied in Paris and worked as a curator at the British Library (British Museum).

How does he see the job? 'Well' he chuckles 'sometimes in my dreams I hear a deepening roar. Several tens of thousands of Old Boys and teachers and groundsmen are all trying to tell me their stories, and it's hard to hear individual voices clearly.

'I've got three years to write this book, which seems like a long time, but to cover 150 years in 150 weeks means spending only a week on each year. The challenge is to capture something of each phase of Scotch's life, and yet to place each event in context among the long themes of Scotch's own career as an institution.

'To live for 150 years means that Scotch has been very good at staying the same and very good at changing. That's no mean feat and it will be fascinating to explore.'