 My time at ANU was a pivotal moment in my life. All of a sudden you're exposed to people who you've not met before, ideas that you've not been presented with before, arguments that you've not heard before, and the educative experience is that you become more equipped to deal with both the challenges and vagaries of life. What an arts or humanities based study gave me at ANU was the ability to not take things at face value, to read and try and attain a degree of understanding, to challenge my own preconceptions as a result of that, to improve my understanding of the particular area that I was looking at, to perhaps formulate arguments or debates with others about those points and then to be informed in turn by those discussions and debates. I don't claim any specific knowledge about any specific issue, be it military or more general, but I do think as a result of what I started at ANU, my life has been enormously enriched by continually coming back to saying, well I wonder why that is and can I understand this more. I think I probably started what has now been a lifelong journey into exploring what literature and the study of history can give you during the passage of life, and I'm deeply grateful to the ANU for starting me on that journey.