As a school that spent $60 million building a mock Scottish baronial castle, you might expect Scots College to be an archaic institution. To professional cynics like us, it certainly is.

But this week, we were thrilled to learn that the boys’ school at Bellevue Hill, which charges $51,000 a year per student, has entered the 21st century. You see, like dozens of corporates, sporting bodies and educational institutions around the country, Scots is doing acknowledgements of Country. Somewhere on the fringes of Brisbane, a newly funemployed Peter Dutton is reading this and seething.

According to some parents, who’d noticed the formality’s conspicuous absence in the past, acknowledgements of Country started this year.

The Scots College in Bellevue Hill.Credit: Louise Kennerley

But Scots told us it had included an Acknowledgement of Country at significant events for some years.

Still, the college did put its own Presbyterian spin on things. The exact wording, according to one school community source: “As we meet today under God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, who has declared ‘All the earth is Mine’, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay respects to their elders past and present.”

So the traditional owners are acknowledged, but with a reminder that this was God’s country first. Which reminds us of former prime minister Scott Morrison’s similarly unique approach to acknowledgements of Country,........

© Brisbane Times