A recently-commissioned mural depicting almost 150 years of Parade College life, and featuring students both past and present, now takes pride of place in the newly-built Reception area at the Bundoora Campus.

The mural, was designed by Old Paradian Owen Abrahams (1984), whose company Owen Abrahams Creative was responsible for previous works commissioned by both the AFL and the MCC.

Owen said that the mural concept came about after he was contacted by Parade College Business Manager Paul Harris (1997).

“Paul talked to me about designing a mural for the new reception area. He wanted something close to 4 metres wide x 1.5 height which illustrated the timeline of Parade history through photographs,” Owen said.

“I was then able to access the Parade collection, through the College Archivist Rodney Prusa, and sourced all the images over a three-week period at the start of this year. It was April by the time all the artwork for the mural had been completed.”

Owen revealed that around 200 photographs have been etched into the mural’s glass perspex prepared by Chris O’Halloran (1983) – photos from as far back as day one of College life in East Melbourne (1871) through to the present day.

“The time-consuming aspect of this project involved converting every image into black and white, then recolouring every one of them to go with the flow,” he said.

The mural, a copy of which also hangs in the Frank Mount Social Room at the Garvey Oval, features a balanced cross-section of the many students schooled at Parade, and reflects the great changes along the way – from the College uniform to the curriculum and of course the infrastructure itself.

As Owen said: “There is a lot of imagery to take in which hopefully strikes a chord for all those who come to Parade”.