Five days on the Hawkesbury with strangers
Oscar Donnan didn't know most of the people in the canoe with him.
That's part of how it works. The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award Gold level expedition puts you on the water with people you've barely spent time with, for five days, with no particular option but to figure it out together. Day one, you're polite strangers navigating the logistics of where to camp and who does what. By day five, something has quietly shifted. Oscar's description of how it ended is understated in a way that feels true: "By the time we finished, we were a solid team and had made awesome memories."
Oscar completed his Gold award this year, the culmination of a journey that began in Year 9 with his Bronze award. Each level asks something different of a student: sustained skill development, physical challenge, voluntary service and an adventurous journey. None of it is quick. Bronze takes months. Silver takes longer. Gold asks for a level of commitment that, across three or four years of school, requires a boy to keep choosing something hard when easier options are available. Most students who start don't finish. The ones who do tend to carry it differently.
For his skill component, Oscar chose rugby union refereeing. Straightforward enough on paper, until St Augustine's College took a group of students to Tonga, and Oscar found himself running a referee development camp for local officials in villages far removed from anything familiar. He wasn't observing. He was leading, sharing technical knowledge with adult referees in a country he'd never visited. The trip also brought rugby jerseys and boots to communities that had little and received them with genuine warmth.
"Seeing how happy and thankful the locals were was truly special," he wrote. No grand claims about impact or transformation. Just a boy from the Northern Beaches who went somewhere unfamiliar, did something concrete, and paid close attention to what it felt like.
That quality of noticing without overstating is one of the things the program tends to produce in the boys who see it through. The College has run The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award across all year groups for years precisely because experiences like Tonga and the Hawkesbury do something that a classroom, however good, cannot. They put boys in situations where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and the only way through is each other.
Oscar's advice to younger students considering the program is characteristically direct: give it a chance, you won't regret it.
Then again, five days on the Hawkesbury with strangers who become friends might be reason enough on its own.
