On 16th May, 2014 I was invited back to my old school, Camberwell Grammar, to deliver the William Angliss address to Middle School parents. This is the [self indulgent and lengthy] text of that speech.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It’s an enormous pleasure to be here to deliver the William Angliss Lecture to Middle School parents.

Towards the end of year 8, our class photo was taken in front of the now condemned, Old William Angliss building, and if you had have told the young, blonde, poorly-sighted kid in this photo that he’d one day be delivering the William Angliss lecture, he’d have said to you, ‘what’s the William Angliss lecture?’

I can look into this boy’s smiling eyes and remember some of the things that filled his world.

I remember he loved school and liked his Year 8 teacher, Mr Finlay, who wore knee high white socks like a Queenslander over the largest, most bulging calves the world has ever known.

I remember he loved footy and wanted more than anything to play VFL footy just like his dad. It would make this boy’s day to know that his dream will come true, that he will end up playing five years of VFL. Having said that, he won’t be so rapt with the follow up news that the VFL changed its name to the AFL in 1990, and that what he thinks is the VFA is going to become the VFL. And that he’s going to play in that competition. That news will not make his day.

I remember he liked writing stories, but wouldn’t have thought he was particularly great at it. He wrote one entitled ‘Grim Pickings’ about a boy who gets caught by a girl he likes picking his nose on a park bench. Teacher’s comment, ‘Might I suggest you employ the quality of good taste in your next piece of work. One out of ten.’

I remember he had friends, funny, rowdy, friends, who he would routinely terrify at lunchtime kick to kick by turning up with a mouthguard.

I remember these friends came to his party at the indoor cricket centre, and when his mother produced her magnificent green coconut iced cricket pitch cake, direct from the pages of the Womens weekly, this boy would reach across, grab a handful of cake and start a food fight against these funny rowdy friends.

I remember him going to Bambara Camp, and playing kick the can, and fighting on rope bridges and learning the hard way the meaning of the word ‘scullery’.

I remember him lying back on the banks of the Keith Anderson Oval, watching the black smoke from the ash Wednesday bushfire fill the sky, feeling like he was watching the end of the world.

I remember him playing the piano for Mrs Farren Price and being told to loosen up – that he ‘played the piano like a mathematician’.

I remember him being asked to leave the school choir by Mr Henley, and his irate mother going to the school to ask why, and Mr Henley saying that he supposed this boy could stay in the choir, if he really wanted to, which he didn’t.

I remember this boy, and a few of his more hormonally advanced Year 8 friends walking the streets of Canterbury one Saturday afternoon in order to find a girlfriend. I remember returning from this mission with a couple of confirmed sightings of appropriately aged teenage girls, but no success. I now look at this photo and have some idea why this was the case.

I don’t remember anybody telling this boy to get new glasses.

Why, in heavens name, didn’t anybody tell this boy to get new glasses?

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to address you tonight. It does feel as if those visually challenged, bespectacled young eyes are gazing you across a chasm of time. You can see all of life’s big questions burning in them. Will I ever find a girlfriend? Should I ask mum and dad for a VHS video recorder, or is Beta going to make something of a comeback? Is Carlton going to be a powerhouse forever, now they have Kernahan, Motley and Bernie Evans? Is there a God? If there is a God, will he be upset that I just learnt the chapters of the new testament to win a spearmint choc-wedge from our RE teacher, Mr Murray, and not because I have any genuine interest? Will Mr Cox let me off report card soon? Why won’t Mr Cox let me off report card?

Andrew Cox, with his twinkly eyes and his love of a brown suit, was the Headmaster of the Middle School during my time. He was a lovely, quiet man. And fair play to Mr Cox. I’m not sure teachers clamour for the opportunity to teach sex education to groups of giggling, piss-taking year 7s, but like a brown suited Grecian warrior Mr  Cox took on the task himself. It’s now the stuff of legend that Mr Cox began all his classes with the same immortal sentence: “As I expect you boys already know, chairs and tables do not reproduce.”

Mine was a fit, ripe brain in 1986. Nowadays, I slog away, attempting to remember the names of my children but failing to get there, or at least not before I’ve exhausted all options, including all my siblings and the dog. But back then this brain was supple, it was lively, it was pink. It sucked up everything. And the most remarkable aspect of it all is that the information has stuck, without any regard as to whether it is useful, or whether information that I MIGHT REALLY NEED FOR DAY-TO-DAY LIVING RIGHT NOW is trying to get in.

Take this example:

‘The period does not end when the ophicleide hoots.

The period ends, when the master in charge, or mistress, says, as of how, it has.’

Ian Mason made me write that phrase out fifty times in 1987, for being a bit quick on the pack up and leave. ‘Ophicleide’ means ‘horn’ by the way, and  because initially I wrote ‘as of now it has’ instead of ‘as of how it has’, Ian Mason Esquire made me write it out another fifty times. Unfortunately, the sponge like quality of my 1987 brain has meant that the phrase has stuck, and despite a desperate need RIGHT NOW to make room for my wife’s birthday, I can’t get rid of it. Ian Mason isn’t here tonight, but I know what he’d be thinking if he was. He’d be thinking that knowing the word ‘ophicleide’ is far more useful than knowing your wife’s birthday, if only for crossword purposes. And that’s the attitude that’s made the ‘or mistress’ bit in ‘master in charge, or mistress’ sound so tacked on.

Similarly – I’ll never forget that in April the rain comes, the flannelled fools yield. That the brawny, the brainy run onto the field. Or more importantly, given the way orienteering touched my life:

[To ‘Ring Out the Echoes’]

“Orienteers can chew up the laps,

By using their brains a compass and maps

Stamina and Fitness too

Make an allrounder out of you

(sing along if orienteering means anything to you)

Checkpoint by checkpoint head for the line

Orienteers will clock the best time

There’s more fun in cunning running

Onward to victory.”

And don’t think those books of the New Testament are going anywhere … –  “Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts Romans, Corinthians 1, Corinthians II, Galatians, Ephesians, Phillipians” … Right now I’d give away a spearmint choc wedge just to be able to forget.

And still on a religious theme, how about the lyrics –

“Hobgoblin Nor Foul Fiend, Shall Daunt His Spirit

He knows he at the End Shall Life Inherit”

The reason I remember these so vividly is that I consistently backed ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ in Hymnlotto, which was a business venture that fellow Summons student Terry Walker ran at Tuesday assembly. Basically Hymnlotto worked like this. You’d name your hymn and give fifty cents to Walker, who in racing parlance, had bookmaking on both sides of his bloodlines. If the hymn came up, the pool was split between the punters who named the correct hymn. If the Head called a smokey which nobody had backed, Walker kept the pool. Eventually, Mr Hutchison and Mr Mason worked out what was going on, and Hymnlotto was banned. But not before 50 Summons boy let out an involuntary cry of  ‘Yeeeeess’ one day when The Headmaster called ‘All Creatures of Our God King’. What a betting plunge that was.

I remember “HeHeLiBebKnofNeNaMgalSIPSClarka” for the first 20 elements of the periodic table. I remember the taste of tuckshop carab, a substance that needs to be addressed in any updates to the Geneva Convention. I remember the smell of period 8. I remember that “Wah Talamahal” means ‘Wow, Too much,’ in Indonesian. And I remember the parlouf relay at the House Sports, and how with its philosophy of shared result out of unequal contribution, it stands out as the athletic embodiment of the Welfare State.

And then there’s Latin. “Caecilius est in atrium sedet”. “Matella est in culina laborat”. “Ecce, Clemens!” “Ecce, Matella!”  When I did Race Around the World, I travelled the planet relying upon interpreters because THE ONLY LANGUAGE I HAVE ANY DECENT RECALL ON IS LATIN. I’m not saying it’s completely useless – I can find chicken on menus in 125 different countries, just by looking for the Latin root ‘pollo’ – but as the years go on, I have wondered whether I should have looked for a language with a pulse.

The reason I stuck with it, though, was Mr Roy McDoanld, the late great Latin master, the one who the Humanities centre is named after. That man could recite the principal parts of ‘genu genu, genus, genu, genu,’ with the comic flair of a Neddy Seagoon, and had an enthusiasm for words and the written form that helped my English in a profound and life-changing way.

With this in mind, I want to recite for you some Latin that has annexed a part of my brain and refuses to leave. It was learned after school hours, with a friend, when we were bored. Basically, it’s the theme song to Neighbours in Latin and If you can hear this Mr McDonald, all I can say is – sorry.

‘Vicini, omnes opi sunt vicinis

Paulo intelligendo, inveneres meliorum locum

Vicinis, omnes opi sunt vicinis

Cum hoc bones vicini fierunt bonos amicos.’

In year 8, I knew what I wanted to be, I wanted to be a Peter Knights. In Year 12 I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a Peter Knights. Or maybe a Dermott Brereton. For those who don’t follow football, Peter Knights, like Dermott, was a blonde, high-flying Hawthorn legend who was a star during my childhood.

My dad played alongside him. I used to hang around his son, Ben Knights, when we went down to Glenferrie Oval in the late seventies. And I had the blonde hair! Blonde hair so thick and deeply rooted that it would surely last forever. Yes, it’s true my father had gone bald early, but genetically hair loss comes down through the mother’s side. It does, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

I was no Peter Knights, but I was just good enough at football to have my hopes irrevocably raised. Captain of football at school, captain of the under 19s at Hawthorn, father-son selection in the draft. In 1990, I kicked some bags of eight and nine goals. I honestly thought I was going to get there. I so nearly did get there.

For the last game of my VCE year, the First XVIII travelled to Assumption College undefeated, and the senior school was given the afternoon off to cheer us on – hopefully to our second ever 1^st XVIII Premiership and our first since the 1930s. That day, Ian Mason told me that I needed just one goal to kick the record number of goals in a season for the school. The fact that he told me this after the game, while I was crying after we’d lost by ten and after I’d kicked none, is a testament to the sensitivity of the man. Still, he does have another side. He made us memorise some of the more romantic Shakespearean sonnets in Year 9, and quite a lot of women I’ve met have found that very impressive. So on that front, thank you Mase. You old honeydripper.

My Hawthorn dream evaporated in June of 1992.  My time on the list had lasted just 218 days, with a grand total of zero senior games. The Hawks were moving to Waverley, and coach Allan Joyce called me into his office to explain with his dead shark eyes that on the wide expanses of Waverley, my lack of pace would be found out. Thus, twenty years in advance of any layoffs at Qantas, I had the dubious honour of being sacked by an Allan Joyce. I remember as he walked me to the Glenferrie Oval door, I gave an awkward little speech, vowing to him that he would regret the decision for the rest of his life.

He hasn’t.

I also told them that Shane Crawford would have to find a new maths tutor. Yes, not only were Hawthorn getting away with a no base salary, match payments only scenario for young players, they were also squeezing a bit more out of me by requesting I tutor a struggling Shane Crawford in maths. Watching Crawf labour through his simultaneous equations, made me think how much better Camberwell was than Assumption at all things other than footy. And whenever I see Crawf today, with his premiership medallion and his Brownlow, I can tell he’s always thinking the same thing: ‘Willo, how I wish I was as good at simultaneous equations as you.’

My own tutor in senior school was a gentle giant called Peter Hutchinson, and it was he who recommended that I study law, My theory is now is that he did it to try and give me a detention that lasted the rest of my life. Of course I don’t really blame Hutch. My reasons for choosing law were a confluence of getting the marks, parental expectation, and the fact the contact hours fitted in well with footy training. Great reasons, all of them. I remember I was actually choosing between law and medicine, which seems now such a stupid choice to be making. What have law and medicine got in common? To what extent had I actually analysed my talents and ambitions if I had made it a choice between law and medicine. Really, I think I was just choosing success or safety or security, or perhaps, most likely, deferring making any choice at all.

But a choice it was, and as the footy dream evaporated, law was what I was left with. What’s odd about law is that it is often sold as a ‘creative career’, one that will suit those of us who enjoy imaginative writing, whether it be one out of ten masterpieces on nose picking, or something a little more developed. My own view is that law is about exactitude with language, accuracy of word usage. Yes, there can be some tactical creativity, but when it comes to drafting agreements, recording statements, and even writing letters of advice, mainly it’s about being careful. Mainly it’s about covering your own arse, covering your client’s arse. One of the things that shocked me when attending court is that the great barristers often aren’t great public speakers in the way that, say, Barack Obama or Clive james are great speakers. They were just organised and on top of the brief. They said the right answer, rather than saying it in a way that made me want to listen. As I got closer and closer to the end of the degree, I was increasingly unsure as to whether law had been a good idea. But it was too late change. It certainly felt too late to change.

I got articles at a large commercial law firm, Minter Ellison. I think this photo sums up the verve with which I attacked my first professional job.

I was also Santa Claus at not one but two partners’ picnics, and even now, I’m whispered about in hallowed terms as ‘the best goddamned Santa Claus in the history of the firm.’

My break into the media came through Race Around the World, a documentary show on ABCTV that sent 8 young filmmakers around the world to 10 different countries, to make a four minute video documentary from each of these countries. Somehow I managed to get myself categorised as a ‘young fimmaker’ even though the only video I’d ever made before applying was for the 1996 Minter Ellison mid-year revue. That epic 3 minute work was entitiled ’12 Angry Articled Clerks’, and it was a reaction against the ‘Please don’t abuse the photocopiers’ signs that were pinned up in the print rooms. The film had some very complex themes, but to summarise it briefly, a dozen articled clerks assembled in a field and smashed up a photocopier with a hacksaw and a sledgehammer, to the accompaniment of the Carmina Burana.

It was my father who encouraged me to apply for Race. For much of 1997, I’d slipped into the habit of talking about doing something different with my life, like writing a travel book, while always keeping my resignation date safely in the future. If any of you are struggling at work, do what I did – pick a date six months in the future, promise to change your life on that date, and then roll it forward, day by day, month by month. Whatever you do, never allowing that nice, safe six month buffer to shrink. My father spotted what I was doing, and to his credit, made me bite the bullet and lock the date down. We decided that on March 1^st 1998, I was to leave to do six months travel to write the book, half funded by myself, half funded by my parents. To secure my parents commitment, I had to first write a 25,000 word manuscript based on a previous trip. In my annual leave, I wrote the 25,000 words, and today, it’s called A Continental Drift, and has been published in the sense that it’s been spiral bound.

Nevertheless, it did get me writing, and when I heard about Race Around the World, it didn’t seem too big a jump to go from unpublished travel writing, to unpaid travel documentaries.

To apply, you had to send in a 4 minute video, and my application video was on an Italian speaking soccer coach called Paolo who coached the Essendon under sevens with the zeal of a man who has his sights set on the World Cup. Although the kids were just five or six years old, he gave them whiteboard sessions, he prescribed diets recommending that they have tea and dry biscuits two hours before the game and nothing else, and he abused them for not going to bed early enough. And all this was done through a translator, because Paulo himself couldn’t speak a word of English. Not only that but that translator was a mother of one of the boys, so Paulo would say something in Italian like, ‘You’re all hopeless, it’s pointless coaching you’ and the translator would say in English something like, ‘Keep going, you’re doing really well.’ It was  absolute gold, and after a few months of interviews and four weeks in Sydney at documentary boot camp, I got selected in the final eight.

Bolivia, Idaho, Alaska, Italy, Lebanon, France, Israel, Kenya, India, China. One hundred days. Ten countries. Thirty three flights. Six continents. Two lost VISA cards. Travelling alone as cameraman, director, producer, writer, sound recordist.

In Bolivia, I met children who were living in jail with their parents because there weren’t any state run orphanages around to house them.

In Idaho, I met cowboy poet Rudy Gonzales who offered a Boise cowboy’s lament on the encroachment of suburbia.

In France, I took to the streets at the 1998 FIFA World Cup and proved scientifically that  the ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie’ chant is awful, awful awful.

In southern Lebanon, I met a wheat farmer called Faeez whose crop was being devastated by wild pigs. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t kill the pigs because he was only 800 metres from the Israeli border and if he produced a gun, the border guards would mistake him for a Hazbullah rebel and pop him off. ‘What’s the good of war, what’s the good of fighting, it’s only good for the pigs,’ he said as he wandered the hills, rattling a can on a stick, trying to scare off the enemy. After I finished a day’s shooting, I walked for two hours out of the Golan Heights with a herd of cows, hiding my tripod under my jumper because Faeez said that tripods like mine were used to launch rockets into Israel.

In Milan, I met the best looking woman in the world, Miriana Trevisan, who did the Wheel of Fortune job in Italy – except there it was called Ruotta della Fortuna. She was angry because the host, Mike Bongiorno, (which means ‘Mike Good Morning’ in Italian) wouldn’t let her talk enough. After we finished filming, we even went on a date, although it fell pretty flat because of language barriers. She couldn’t speak English, and the only Italian I had was the lyrics to Neighbours in Latin. Effectively it was like trying to chat someone up in old English. ‘Lo, can I proffer thee the soy sauce’

She also found out what the ABC was paying us, $100 a day plus airfares, and declared it a ‘pathetic amount of money.’

In India I attended a laughing club, in China travelled with an acrobatic troupe, and in Kenya, I got to play a dying cockroach in an insect repellant commercial that played out of the back of a truck. The show was live, lasted 5-6 hours per performance, and moved from town to town playing to thousands of people in areas where there was no radio or TV.

Over half a million people watched Race each week. I made the hundred days seem fun, even if the majority were spent panicking, shotlisting or editing. At the end of the show, I’d won the judges’ and audience votes. In news that would have stunned my Camberwell Grammar visual arts teachers, I was suddenly a filmmaker.

Overnight, my life changed. I started getting free drinks at bars on Brunswick street. Girls started approaching me, instead of me not quite approaching them. The Age rang me about writing a summer column. Penguin asked if I had a book in me.  Between 1999 and 2001, I did shows on Channel 9, Channel 7 and the ABC. I was on that Best of the Century special with Ray Martin, an appalling thing where viewers had to vote on whether they preferred the little black dress, or Jenny Kee’s jumpers.

And overnight, I changed as well. I identified that the thing that had won me Race Around the World was application. Application in the sense that I had applied myself to something with the same dedication that I had once applied to football. And application in the sense that I sent in the application form. That’s the thing I now say when I visit schools and universities. Apply, apply, apply … the worst you can get is a rejection letter, and rejection letters actually aren’t that bad. Rejection letters can be worn as a badge, something to wave across the desk when they’re interviewing you on Letterman. Or at the very least, a rejection letter is still more interesting than, say, a Telstra bill.

I decided to act on ideas, to test them to see if they were good enough. I had a kids book idea – Grannysaurus Rex, about a grandma who goes on a lolly binge with her grandson, so much so that he has a sugar hallucination and thinks she has turned into Grannysaurus Rex. I was so sure it was a million dollar idea. Grandmas, lollies, dinosaurs. I sent the manuscript off to the forty publishers of kids’ book in the Australian Writing Guide. Two said yes, thirty eight said no, and two years later, I became a published author. I also found out something about the economics of picture book writing, and can now categorically say that what I actually had was a million cent idea.

But it did lead to kids books. I got stuck at the lights in Swan Street and invented the fourth traffic light, the mauve traffic light. The Minister for Traffic Lights is about a man who finds a cure for road rage. When the lights turn mauve, drivers have to stop, get out of the car, and hug their fellow motorist.

The Thirsty Flowers was my shot at a Dr Zeuss type rhyming book. Harry Highpants a political discourse on pants freedom, as low panters and high panters united for a common cause. The Princess and the Packet of Frozen Peas, and the Emperor’s New Clothes Horse, my fractured Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.

In the next twelve months I’ve got ‘Jack’ in Penguin’s Stuff Happens series, ‘Emo the Emu’ and ‘The Cow Tripped Over the Moon’, an expose on the cow’s previous seven attempts on the moon.

Throw in the two novels and a World Cup memoir, and sometime in the middle of the decade I became a writer. I remember when Players was launched, I invited two of my old school teachers. The first was Ian Mason, who fostered my imagination and gave me somewhere to write, by making me editor of the school magazine in 1990. The second was my year 12 English teacher, John Allen.

I invited Mr Allen for the simple reason that he improved my writing more than anybody else has, before or since. In year 12, he taught me the music of writing. He showed me that writers made choices about sentence balance. He had me read out paragraphs, to hear how long sentences and short sentences can inter-mesh, how different writers choose different rhythms. He taught me about avoiding cliché, about attempting to surprise the reader. He encouraged me to write on Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard’, even though it was the more difficult Year 12 text, because examiners would see it as a place to shine. This is the expertise and care I received from just two of the great teachers in the history of this school. They took a footballer, who mainly wanted to be a footballer, and nurtured a talent he didn’t know he had. Shane Crawford’s school wasn’t doing that. Mind you, Crawf has got a book out himself, ‘Kick it to Nick, The Cursed Cup’ and I’ve got a dubious feeling it’s going to sell about 100,000 more copies than Emo the Emu.

Who needs education?

Who needs book larnin?

Unfashionable glasses frames aside, I believe the parents in the room currently have their own versions of one of these. If you spoke to this one, and told him of what he’d do by the age of 41 – marriage, three kids, overseas trips, nearly a dozen books, TV shows, a law degree, friends, magazine articles, six years of breakfast radio, regular public speaking – he’d be very happy, Especially if you told him he’s going to play VFL footy (Shhhhhhhhh).

But then you might also tell him that his third child is going to be born with a disability. That from the age of 39 he’s going to face challenges that will test him more than all the others combined. That every day is another day of therapy, another day of longing for what can never be. And that this feeling won’t diminish the love he will feel for jack, because Jack is impossibly funny, charming, determined, but that won’t stop the pain. Because he will want his child to have what he had.

But of course I wouldn’t tell Year 8 me that. The glory of being fourteen Is that you shouldn’t have to worry. The future, for the kid in that photo, is whether to play table tennis or gang chasey at recess. Life future, with all of its glittering excitement and inevitable pain, shouldn’t be interfering with the joy of childhood’s precious twilight. All this boy needs is the tools to face the uncertain future. He needs exposure to different things – art, music, drama, sport, humanities, science, language, information technology. Who knows which is the area that will become central to his life? Maybe it won’t be the one that he thinks?  He needs a safe and fun environment for making friends. He needs a learning habit that will last the rest of his life. He needs discipline, not in a ruler across the knuckles way, but in the sense of learning concentration, learning application. That is why Mr Cox won’t let him off report card. That is why Mr Cox wants him to do another week, to see if he can get all ‘excellents’ in the comments section. That is why Mr Mason doesn’t want him to pack up before the ophicleide hoots.

Camberwell Grammar delivered all that to me during those important Middle School years. Physically, the school has changed a lot since then, but I’m confident your boys, with their fancy performing arts centres, and their magic white boards, and their state of the gymnasiums and their astro-turfed fields and their classroom iPads and their new slimline solar system that only has eight planets instead of nine, I’m confident the one thing that hasn’t changed is that terrific educators are being employed, and that opportunity, fun, achievement and discipline remain coils in the Middle School springboard, aimed at launching boys into the more challenging realms of senior school, and life beyond.

Finally, I want to finish with a thank-you. I mentioned the difficulty of these last few years, and a few months ago, I wrote an article about Jack’s cerebral palsy that appeared in The Age. A few days later I received an email from Ian Mason, my year nine English teacher, complimenting me on the piece, requesting that I write on more serious issues, and asking for my address.

Last week, on our doorstep, we found three Peppa Pig books, picking up on Jack’s love of that show that I’d mentioned in the article. I think I used the phrase ‘you old honeydripper’ before in a way that could have been interpreted as insincere. This time I mean it.

Mase, you old honeydripper.

I think I just heard the ophicleide. If I didn’t, never mind, it’s time to pack up anyway. Thank you very much for having me back to talk tonight. Best of luck to all your boys, and may they enjoy happy and successful futures.