Middle School Performing Arts Showcase

On Monday evening, the CBC Theatre will host assessment performances delivered by our Drama and Music students.

At 5pm, the Year 8 Drama students will be joined by the Year 10 Music students (who are studying SACE Stage 1). At 6:30pm, the Year 8 Music students will combine with the Year 9 Drama boys to show what they can do.

It is important for these boys to have authentic performance experiences as part of their learning – you are all welcome to join us to celebrate what these boys can do!

Music

Congratulations to our brave soloists who emerged from the music studios to share their progress with supportive and appreciative audiences this week.

On Tuesday, students from the Junior Campus performed in the SC music room. It was fantastic to feel the energy in the room and see the pride each musician had in his work.

On Wednesday night, it was the turn of the Year 7–12 boys. The diversity of instruments and styles was truly awe-inspiring, and the courage of boys (some of whom were understandably nervous) was a privilege to witness.

Coming up next week, the JC Rock Band will travel to Nazareth College on Wednesday evening to compete in the Battle of the Bands. Rock hard, boys!

The next event in the Senior School is our Riverlands Tour, and final tweaks are being made here. Thirty-five boys in a range of groups will be based in Berri, entertaining school students in Berri, Renmark, Barmera and Loxton, and performing at the Barmera Football club before joining in their trivia night. What a hoot! Stories and pics to come.

Debating

Round 3 Debates will be occurring next week, from Tuesday evening to Thursday evening.

Of special note is the Senior B Team (our Year 10 boys Elias, Angus, Will and Mohamed), who have their first ‘secret topic’ debate. This means that they will be given their statement one hour before the debate starts and will have to prepare a 7-minute speech. Whilst they know that their overarching subject is law and justice, they have no other guidance, and the preparation room is a technology-free zone, meaning that they can only take in a dictionary, paper and pens. What a daunting task! Stay tuned to the next newsletter to find out how they go…

Chess

Newsletter week means Division 2 Chess week, so we wish the boys the best of luck for this evening’s games. In the last round, Alexander Horlin-Smith had two wins, and there was one each to Rossi Tran and Jas Stewart.

Last week, despite the long weekend, eight young chess players braved the cold wind and rain to assemble at the Chess Centre for a highly successful round. Two wins were achieved by Maxwell Stueve, Gabe Tadiaman and Eton Leonardo; a win and a draw by William Harris and Bentley Reidy; and a win each to Kaleb Smith and Sulayman Ahmed.

And on Thursday in Junior Chess, wins went to Nevin Ratnayake and Jonah Cleland.

Drama Club

We have a date and a venue for the 2025 CBC Drama Club production of Journey’s End, written by R C Sherriff.

The play will be performed at the Star Theatre in Hilton on 11 August.

More details to follow, but save the date!

Astronomy Club

As one of our Year 11 students, Christopher, wraps up his major research project in which he used the CBC remote telescope to photograph NGC 5128, commonly known as Centaurus A, a galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus, we are able to focus on some of the more technical aspects of astrophotography.

The universe does not know colour. Colour only exists in the human brain when energy received into the eyes is converted into a variety of hues by the brain. Outside of the brain in the real world, there is no colour; therefore, when we photograph the universe, our raw images are only greyscale.

To simulate what our brain should interpret when we see a galaxy, we use six different filters: Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III, Sulphur II, red, blue, and green. When we photograph using the green filter, for example, we only allow energy pulses that our brain would interpret as green to be recorded by the chip in the camera, likewise with all the other filters. The camera does not record colour either. Once we have used all the filters to capture the image of a galaxy we then ‘feed’ this into a computer (which takes hours, if not days) and it is the computer that ‘paints’ the different energy signatures into the appropriate colours, recreating for us the world as seen by humans (totally like the brain fabrication).

Our Year 11 Physicist was interested in the real world, not the brain fabrication. Another team of keen CBC astronomers will put these images together and produce the colour version. We are not there as yet.

What we present here are our best single shots from the filtered photos that our Year 11 student has taken over the last month. About 50 ten-minute exposures were taken over the past month. The computer can tell the difference between all of these photos, can you?

Did you notice how some of these photos are upside down and back to front – what’s going on there?? What is going on in the photo taken through the blue filter? It's weird! We’ll explore the strange photos in our next write-up.

As always, questions can be sent through to me at any time.

Ms Alexandra Khafagi
Director of Performing Arts