Courage is where character shows up

It's been a heavy week to be paying attention to the news in Australia.

Five Sydney Swans players stood down for the rest of the season, including finals, while Victoria Police continue investigating an alleged sexual assault. The Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, telling the country that consent education is "essentially a recruitment ground for Andrew Tate" and calling for less of it in our classrooms. The Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor, sidestepping the chance to properly back consent education for boys at all.

Add in the reports of violence against women that keep rolling through our news feeds, and it's the kind of week that makes you want to put the phone down and walk away.

Then, right in the middle of it, a headmaster stood up in front of a hall full of teenage boys and said the thing everyone else seemed to be dancing around.

The Speech Heard Around the Country

Michael Blake is the headmaster of St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, a prestigious Catholic boys' school in Sydney. This week, a speech he gave to his students went properly viral, and for once, for all the right reasons.

He didn't lecture or lay blame. He told the truth, plainly, to the young men in front of him.

"As tough as this week might have been to hear the media stories, it has been infinitely harder to be a female," he said.

He went further, naming exactly what so many women carry that so few men ever have to think about.

"It has been a life changing week for the women who are the alleged victims," he told the boys, before pointing out that it's been an "extraordinarily hard week to be a survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault or abuse."

Blake reminded the boys that while headlines disappear and social media eventually moves on, for many women the fear, experiences and precautions associated with violence aren't confined to one terrible week. They can be a lifelong reality.

And this is where it stopped being a speech about a bad news week, and became a speech about character.

"There will be moments in your life when being a good man will cost you something."

He talked about the cost of handing back a phone and saying, "delete it", of risking popularity or even a friendship by being the person prepared to say, "No, this isn't right."

And then this:

"Because character is not revealed when doing the right thing is easy. Character is revealed when you choose the right thing."

He finished with this, and honestly, I think every young person, not just the boys in that hall, deserves to hear it:

"I want every young woman who encounters a Joe Boy to be safer because you are there. Not merely safe from you, safer because of you."

A small, proud aside: Michael spent years teaching locally here in our own region before Sydney, and everyone I know who worked alongside him, or sat in his classroom, says the same thing. He was always exactly this kind of human being.

Courage Is Not a Once-in-a-Lifetime Event

I sat with that speech all weekend and thought about how we tend to imagine courage. Something dramatic. Running into a burning building. Standing up to a bully in a movie. The big, cinematic moment.

But that's not what Michael Blake was describing, and it's not what courage actually looks like most days.

Courage is handing the phone back. Courage is being the one person in the group chat who says, "That's not okay."

It may be questioning the content your algorithm has decided you'll like because of your age and your gender, rather than simply allowing it to pull you further down the rabbit hole.

Courage is small and quiet. And it's a series of choices available to every single one of us, every single day.

But I've also been thinking about what makes those small acts of courage possible in the first place. Because before we can stand up for someone else, we have to be able to see them.

Really see them.

And that's where I think drama matters enormously for young people right now.

Standing in Someone Else's Shoes

In previous blogs, I've written about empathy and the unique opportunity drama gives young people to experience the world from a perspective other than their own. Drama asks them, again and again, to step outside themselves.

To ask: What does this person want? What are they afraid of? Why are they behaving this way? What has happened to them? What does the world look like from where they're standing?

Perhaps that's where courage and character meet.

Because it's much harder to look away from someone once you've learned to really see them. It's harder to laugh at someone's discomfort when you can imagine what that discomfort feels like, or to dismiss an experience simply because it isn't yours.

Of course, drama offers plenty of other small opportunities for courage too.

Standing in front of other people and allowing yourself to be seen. Trying something, getting it spectacularly wrong, laughing, and trying again anyway. Making a choice in an improvisation without knowing whether it will work. Offering an idea when everybody else seems to think differently.

It's low stakes enough to be safe, and real enough to matter. In that way, confidence stops being about being the loudest person in the room and becomes knowing, in your bones, that your voice matters enough to use.

This One's for the Good Men, Too

It felt right, this week of all weeks, to also say this isn't only a conversation for boys and young men, and it isn't a competition about who's had it harder. It's a conversation for all of us about the kind of world we're building for the young people coming up behind us, and the kind of humans we hope they become.

So to the dads, granddads, uncles and father figures in the Upstage community who show their kids what quiet, everyday courage looks like, thank you.

The men who listen. Who call something out when it isn't right. Who aren't afraid of kindness or vulnerability. Who teach boys that strength doesn't require dominance and girls that their voices deserve to be heard.

And to Michael Blake, for saying out loud what a lot of us have been feeling all week, thank you, too.

These are the conversations I think are worth having. Around dinner tables, in classrooms, on sporting fields, and in drama studios too.

Because the kind of people our young people become matters every bit as much as what they learn to do.

Read Michael Blake's full speech via the Daily Telegraph.