School’s principal

By Elizabeth Hart
HAILEYBURY College at Berwick was still surrounded by mud and rubble when principal John Twist found wedged against a wall what he thought was a blazer button in 1991.
The discovery showed the character of the person whose name has become synonymous with the campus.
Mr Twist had a habit of standing outside the building every morning to greet the students.
He would soon be able to find the owner of the button and return it, he thought.
But on closer inspection, he decided to take it to the science teacher, who quickly recognised it as one of the world’s oldest fossils. It was in fact a trilobite fossil, the remains of a pre-historic marine invertebrate.
The next day, the Melbourne media were there with helicopter and cameras.
The episode is a quirky moment in Mr Twist’s career and in the history of the Edrington campus, which nestles on picturesque slopes beside Cardinia Creek just east of Berwick village.
Had Mr Twist not made it his business to know all of the students at the fledgling new campus, even to the extent of trying to return a lost button, the fossil would have remained buried, much to the loss of archaeology.
This year, the campus celebrated its 20th anniversary. It began with 45 boys in Grades 4,5 and 6 and three full-time teachers. Now the campus has 629 students.
Mr Twist had been teaching humanities at the Keysborough campus for eight years when the school board put in place its plans to set up in Berwick.
“The principal at the time, Michael Aikman, approached me about steering the new campus; I needed less than 24 hours to think about it,” Mr Twist says.
“The move gave me a pathway in my career and changed my life.”
John Twist came from Gisborne. He liked the semi-rural community at Berwick, and soon after starting at the campus he moved there, eventually meeting and marrying his wife Katrina, a champion show jumper and horse trainer, and her sons Brent and Shane.
“As founding head of the campus, I was immediately impressed by the way the community accepted the school and the trust the staff, parents and students put in me in those pioneering days.
“They believed in the school, and everyone worked together,” he says.
The emphasis was on education but also on participation in the community, Mr Twist says.
Beaconsfield tennis and football clubs and Akoonah Park, too, pitched in, offering use of their sheds and playing grounds.
Meanwhile the development of the Berwick campus coincided with curriculum growth across Haileybury’s three campuses.
“The school rolled out programs up to year eight in the 1990s,” Mr Twist says.
“Then we set up the early learning centre and prep classes.”