JACK FULLER, son of Hinterland residents Pat and Mark Fuller, is the 2009 Rhodes scholar for Victoria. The scholarship is one of the most eagerly contested glittering prizes for graduates in the English-speaking world. Having been partly schooled on the Sunshine Coast Jack is completing an honours thesis at Melbourne University on climate change. The 24 year-old has completed degrees in science and arts.
The Rhodes Scholarship will take Jack to Oxford University where he will undertake four years of study for a master of philosophy and international relations, and go on to complete a doctorate with a focus on environmentalism.
“I am interested in the way the environment plays out in international politics”, says Jack. “For example, my honours thesis focused on a climate change treaty for Asia and the Pacific. I interviewed a number of key people in the region including our government adviser, Ross Garnaut”.
Jack has already spent a year in East Timor where he discussed at high levels, the possibility of setting up the country’s first university.
The bar is set high for those seeking a Rhodes scholarship. Not only do they have to be one of their university’s top students, but they have to be a rounded personality with a sense of public service and commitment.
Jack’s teacher at his Montessori school was Hinterland resident, Mark Chapman. “Jack was a socially curious kid even at six and seven”, says Mark. “This shaggy-haired, wiry figure wanted to know everything, and he was most interested in things scientific, particularly artificial intelligence.
Mark is quick to stress that Jack was no nerdy student. “He was very articulate, always pushing the system and yet humble at the same time. He was always reading of course – anything from neural science to poetry.”
Jack Fuller’s long term ambition is public life and specifically politics, because to him it is the most effective way to contribute to society. Before he goes to Oxford next October Jack is working at the Australian think-tank – Per Capita – where he is focusing on how to cultivate virtue and a strong sense of morality in the community.
Jack has no wish to take his glittering prize and become part of the brain drain. “I know this is a privilege and along with it comes responsibility”, he says. “It’s important that people like me call Australia home. I may work in business first or run projects, but whatever I do I want to be involved in public life. “
Jack Fuller is a young man with a thirst for knowledge and an ambition to contribute to society. His Range parents Pat and Mark Fuller, taught him to be socially curious and daring, and chose an educational path that favoured freedom over control. It seems to have worked.
As Mark Chapman says “after 30 years of teaching, Jack is still the most insatiably socially curious bull terrier of a young man that I have ever come across. He simply won’t be fobbed off”.
Who was Cecile Rhodes?
Cecil Rhodes
Rhodes Scholarships were created under the will of Cecil John Rhodes, the British colonial pioneer and statesman, who died in 1902. The allocation of Rhodes Scholarships throughout the world varies slightly from time to time. The largest numbers come from the United States (32 each year), Canada (11) Australia and Southern Africa (9 each), and Germany and India (4 each); smaller numbers are selected from the Commonwealth Caribbean, Hong Kong, Kenya, Jamaica, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Since each Scholar is appointed for two years, and may be reappointed for a third year, over 200 Rhodes Scholars are resident in Oxford at any one time..
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