One Day, They Will Be The History

There is something remarkable about standing in a place that has outlasted nearly everything around it. In June 1846, Reverend Henry Kane began a school with 24 boys, a rented house behind St John's Anglican Church, and a single, quietly radical idea that young people in northern Tasmania deserved something excellent. No campus. No traditions. No reputation. Just a belief, and the will to act on it.

180 years later, Launceston Church Grammar School marked what that single idea had become as they gathered for the 2026 Founders Day.

Founders Day was celebrated across two services on Friday 12 June. The morning began at St John's Anglican Church, where Junior Campus students, staff, families, and alumni gathered. It was a fitting choice of venue. The church sits within metres of where Kane and those first 24 boys began, making it less a ceremonial backdrop and more a living connection to the School's origins.

The afternoon moved to the Senior Campus, where the school made its bold move from the city in the 1920’s. Guest speaker for the senior service was The Hon. Jeremy Rockliff, Premier of Tasmania, but, most importantly, member of the Class of 1987 and current parent. Mr Rockliff brought a perspective that went well beyond the official, speaking of his humble beginnings as a boarding student in Grade 8, arriving on the first day in a second-hand bright yellow Ford Falcon, and the sacrifice his parents made to send him to Grammar, to better his education.

The stories told across both services highlighted those first modest beginnings. The school built its identity, introducing the colours of blue, black and white, its motto, and its crest by 1895. Students rowed on the Tamar and competed on the cricket pitch, laying down traditions that still hold today. The School weathered economic hardship and the devastating losses of the First World War, when many Old Boys served and many did not return.

Growth continued. Outdoor education arrived in the 1960s, among the first programs of its kind in Australia. Girls were welcomed in the 1970s and the 1982 amalgamation with Broadland House ushered in the co-educational Grammar recognised today. Each of these chapters marks a decision, a risk, a small thing, that in time became something much larger. 

That thread ran through the Founders Day theme: from little things, big things grow. Not as a platitude, but as a precise description of how this school was actually built, decision by decision, generation by generation, across 180 years.

What Founders Day ultimately asked of those gathered – students especially – was not simply to admire the rich history, but to understand their place within it. Everything Grammar now calls tradition began as something ordinary; a choice made by someone who couldn't yet know what it would become.

The current students of Launceston Grammar are making those same kinds of choices now. One day, they will be the history.

From little things, big things grow. Here's to the next chapter.

Mrs Kate Dean, Director of Advancement