A Long Time Ago…
Today is May the 4th, and if you know, you know. It is the day the world tips its hat to a galaxy far, far away. For me, this date carries something deeper than a pun. It carries a memory.
In 1977, I was young and wide-eyed, a bit like a certain farm boy on Tattooine, when Star Wars first swept across cinema screens. Nothing had ever looked like that before. Nothing had felt like that before. In one darkened theatre, a galaxy opened up and with it, the radical idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. That the universe was vast, yes, but that our place in it mattered. In these days I felt like Luke Skywalker, now slightly more the Obi Wan of the original. Watching Star Wars again with my two daughters always brings me back to the first time at the Regent Cinema in Ballarat.
That feeling never really left me. As I reflect, I don’t think it is meant to.
Years later, the film ‘Interstellar’ offered another moment like that when Cooper says, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars”. We have always reached for the stars. Not because it is easy, but because something in us simply must. Curiosity. Hope. The refusal to accept that the world as it is, is the world as it has to be.
That same spirit drove President Kennedy to stand before a crowd in 1962 and declare that America would go to the Moon – not because it was simple, but precisely because it was hard. His words were not just a political statement. They were a dare.
The dream did not stop there. Right now, through the Artemis program, humanity is reaching for the Moon again. This time with a generation who grew up on Star Wars, who were moved by Interstellar, who carry Kennedy’s words in their DNA.
I look out at our school every day and I see the same wide eyes I had in 1977.
The lesson of Star Wars, Kennedy, and of Artemis is not that the path is clear. It is that you begin anyway. Look up. Believe, even before you have proof, that you and we are capable of so much more than we know.
Together we should dream big, be bold, brave and ambitious.
Dreams can never too big for this world. Our world needs big dreams.
May the Force be with you. Always.