Mt St Patrick College, NSW
Toilet Doors, 2011
All student poems
- Student - Notice the giant turtle...
- Student - I was climbing through Glasgow...
- Student - Notice...
- Student - Notice the quiet ones...
- Student - Notice the difficulty...
- Student - Notice La Pôrté...
- Student - Notice you can hear...
- Student - Notice that the windows...
- Student - Notice the roof...
- Student - Notice how a thin piece of glass...
- Student - Notice there is a pigeon...
- Student - Notice the man...
- Student - Notice the smudge...
- Student - Falling
- Student - The Silver Boat
- Student - I was hiding in Vietnam...
- Student - I was falling towards the water...
- Student - CAT
- Student - Brawling
- Student - Running
- Student - Simply clever for the space
- Student - Taste
- Student - Racist Killer Ginger Ninja
- Student - The Health Star Surgeons
- Student - Survivor Britain
- Student - Whoever you are
- Student - Hey due, Drive
- Student - The Queen
- Student - Australia Fights
- Student - Mum made me do it
- Student - Mistakes
- Student - Memory
- Student - Anytime, anywhere
- Student - A curious queen
- Student - Maclary is not just a pretty face
- Student - The Shortest
- Student - I want to jump on potatoes
- Student - Everbody Has...
- Student - I am over, reality
- Student - The Morning
- Student - If
- Student - Dangerous cuts
- Student - I was hurtling...
The School
Mt St Patrick is a co-educational Secondary College operating within the system administered by the Catholic Education Office. It was opened in 1926 by the Presentation Sisters and was administered and staffed by them until 1989. It derives its name from St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, whose feast day is celebrated by both the College and local communities.
The College serves the Catholic Parishes of Mullumbimby and Murwillumbah.
The Project
Poet Toby Fitch visited Mt St Patrick College Murwillambah for a three day residency where he worked with each of the six Year 8 English classes, exploring guerrilla poetry activities from the Toilet Doors learning resource. Each class took part in a three hour workshop with Toby in which they created their own newspaper headline collage poems, Blackout poems and Army Poem Dudes. The entire campus was covered with NOTICE poems. Toby worked with Ms Amanda Starr's top Year 8 class to create a treated book of their set text, George Orwell's Animal Farm, using the technique of Blackout poetry. One student transformed the title and their new work, inspired by Tom Philips' The Humument Project, became known as Ogre Farm. Toby's commissioned poem for the school, 'The Living Daylights', is a blackout poem using a page from the Preface to Orwell's novel. He also conducted a creative writing group with a senior Extension English class.
Click here to find student poems (linked below the playlist).
The Poet
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland, a sessional academic in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and organiser of the poetry night at Sappho Books in Glebe, Sydney. His books include Rawshock, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012; The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau; Where Only the Sky had Hung Before; and, forthcoming with Giramondo in 2021, Sydney Spleen.