Politics, Public Service and the Law

John Watkins Class of 1973

Deputy Premier NSW, Chief Executive Officer of Alzheimer’s Australia (NSW), Chairman of Calvary healthcare since 2011 and the eighth Chancellor of the University of New England, since 2013.

Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute.

A former army officer, he had extensive service within the Parachute Battalion Group (PBG) and has had operational service with the UN in South Lebanon and Syria, with the PBG in East Timor, in Beirut during the 2006 war, and in Afghanistan. He was the former director of the Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre, and has also been posted to the Australian Embassies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Dr Shanahan has MAs in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the ANU, and a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney.

He is also a part-time member of the Refugee Review Tribunal.  He has written numerous journal, media and policy articles, is a frequent commentator on Middle East issues for Australian and international media, has appeared as an expert witness for several terrorism trials in Australia and is the author of Clans, Parties and Clerics: the Shi’a of Lebanon.

Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology University of Colorado USA

Chris Myrick graduated from St Pius X College in 1987 and lives in America. He visited Australia in 2018 and caught up with a number of his friends from his time at the college. Chris says the Snowy Mountain hike still remains one of his favourite memories of his times in Australia.

Chris said of his career: I have been enjoying a really neat career – I took my love of fish and biology {Mr. McGinnity would likely call it an obsession) and found a job where I could immerse myself in teaching about fish, doing research on fish, and generally avoiding what I like to call “the real world” … all the while interacting with people who also share an interest in fisheries conservation and management. Colorado is a great place to work . . . The really good thing about the position is that I get to teach about fish – I would have never thought I’d enjoy teaching, but I had an opportunity to help teach a senior-level fish ecology course when I was still an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley and discovered that I not only had an aptitude for teaching, but that it was also more thrilling than even fisheries research. These days I’m forced to teach online because we are under a stay-at-home order, and I fear I might be doing my worst teaching ever, mainly because I don’t have the luxury of being able to interact with my students in realtime and also I’ve had to drop all of the hands-on exercises and excursions that would normally be underway in my Aquaculture and Fish Physiology courses.