A fav photo from the photo shoot.
My favourite colour
It’s purple.
It’s no accident that this is one of the four core colours of the new website.
But it is a coincidence that this became a colour I love.
When I made it to high school (for me, in Australia, grades 6-12, ages 13 to 18), I was put in a House. Yes, just like Harry Potter.
We didn’t have a sorting hat, we had … randomness, I think.
My House was Garran. Named after Australia’s first bureaucrat. Symbol: a bull. Colour: muddy brown purple.
None of that is particularly auspicious, but I was particularly underwhelmed by the purple.
It wasn’t cool purple.
It was an ugly purple.
A tired fading bruise of a purple. A left-out-in-the-sun-and-stained-with-stagnant-water purple.
What saved the day was Mrs Scowcroft, mother of one of my best friends, David. (I called him Scowy, he called me Stan. There was also Doodle and Lawry.)
She taught me that purple was the colour of royalty.
You may well know this already … that the emperor of Rome and various high-ranking people had their tunics touched with purple, to display their status. The higher the rank, the more purple, with the emperor going Full Purple on his toga.
Purple was hard to come by — harvesting millions of tiny sea snails created just a tiny amount — so you get a sense of the luxury at play when you read Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra’s commute
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them;
I’ve got a more complicated relationship with status performance these days.
I’m trying to navigate the paradox of wanting to be in the spotlight so I can help others be brave, try new things, keep learning and growing, while also trying to step out of the spotlight to allow others to claim the stage.
But in that moment, a 13-year-old sitting around a campfire on Pebbly Beach in Australia, Mrs Scowcroft turned a mark of shame into a badge of honour.
What’s the point of all this?
Just that I love purple.
And I hope you enjoy the website.
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