 I came to the National University for the first time in a hot, dry summer of 1976, just after the Governor-General had dismissed the elected Prime Minister and the government had fallen. I came here with an early entry invitation, which actually proved lifesaving, arriving as it did in my final year of school, just immediately after my father had been involved in a life-threatening eight-car pile-up on his way home from work. I'm so grateful for that early invitation for entry and because it took a lot of pressure off the end of HSC and of my family. I arrived here with people from all over this great country with different lived experiences of what it is to be Australian. I arrived here to meet people and to share living at Bergman College with people of many different fields of fascination. I arrived to study with people from all over the world, a large proportion of whom at that time were doing post-doctoral research, master's research and had already found their field of fascination. I was 17 and a very young 17. But the admixture of backgrounds, cultures, fields of study, languages and beliefs made for a really rich ground of serendipitous learning outside what I was learning in the lecture theatre. And at Bergman College I met my life partner, Kevin, who is here today as is our youngest son, Marcus. I think we met on the second day of uni. He says the first. We've been out at a student-Christian movement meeting. So, you know, in a week you kind of go to everything. And he said, I think you live at Bergman College, don't you? Would you like to walk back together? He walked me back to Bergman. We talked about our life stories where we had grown up. He on a dairy farm in South East Queensland. I in a big city. We talked about our family history and where difficulties had struck in both of our family lives. We talked about what we were studying. I was then starting out on law and psychology, and I was thinking maybe I would go into mediation. Maybe there were different ways of solving things that ended up in court or maybe I would go into family law. And he told me he was going to do Chinese. Chinese, I said to him, why are you doing Chinese? And he said, well, he said that China is large. It's to our north. Nixon has opened relations with China. Australia has recognised China. We need people who understand the language and the culture and the outlook. And I think the next century will be the China century. He was 18. We talked about the politics of the day and there were a lot of politics. And I said at the end of our cup of tea, I think the Australian Parliament needs someone with your vision for the future and with your understanding. So I was 17 and he was just 18. We then argued and debated vociferously for the next 18 months. We disagreed about absolutely everything until one day he asked me out. I said, we've just been out. He said, I don't mean like that. And our lives together have been full of ideas and travel, China and debate, service, hope for a better world, full of our three wonderful children, our two wonderful children in law and our two beloved grandchildren. My study evolved away from the law to focus on psychology just in time for my honours year. We had a new professor arrive, a professor of clinical psychology at last, Professor Dawn Byrne. And I had become fascinated by depression as a crippling disease, despite the view of some who should know better. It was about the beginning of cognitive behaviour therapy and psychology, so it's a very long time ago. But I became intrigued with the work of Martin Seligman and particularly his model of learned helplessness as a model of depression and ways of reversing that. So I had a big last week here. I handed my thesis in on the Tuesday. I did my final exam on the Thursday. You've all just been through that. I packed my apartment on the Friday. I got married on the Saturday. And we left the country for five years on the Sunday. I always feel sorry for my mum. I had a plan for Sweden, which is where we went first. Of course, Kevin had studied Chinese. So my plan was either I was going to get a job as a psychologist when the ambassador organised the reciprocal working arrangements for diplomatic spouses, or I was going to study. I was going to do six months of Swedish and an 18-month masters, neither of which worked out. When I arrived in Sweden, the ambassador called me in and he said, well, Mrs Rudd, which is not my name. Well, Mrs Rudd, I believe women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. And I am stopping the negotiations for a working agreement. So I wasn't going to work as a psychologist, was I? So then I thought, OK, I'll go to Plan B and I'll do my Swedish for six months and I'll do my masters in 18 months. And by the time we leave here in two years' time, I'll be qualified. And in the intervening period between my researching that and arriving in Sweden, they changed the rules. It had to be a year of Swedish and two years of masters and it had to be in country and that didn't work. Sometimes in life, our plans don't work out. But a great education and personal resilience, I guess, flexibility, and particularly people around us who say, I think you can and love us and encourage us, that can really help. After five years, Kevin and I came back to Australia. Jess was two and a half and Nicholas was 12 days old. He was born in Hong Kong on the way home. I was looking for a part-time job and I saw an advertisement for a rehabilitation consultant and I rang them up and said, what is it? And they said, well, it's someone who works with people with injuries and I said, well, I've got a background in psychology. I'm not actually, you know, a registered psychologist because all the rules had also changed in the five years. Do you think I could help? And they said, well, maybe. And I read as much as I could about all of that and about what rehabilitation case management was and who paid and why and they gave me the job. One of my very first clients was a young man out in western New South Wales, in rural New South Wales. He had hurt his back. He was a boiler maker. He'd gone from $1,200 a week salary to $259.60. He had young children and he was married. He had loved riding his Harley-Davidson bike. He had loved playing rough house with his kids and all these things had suddenly changed in his life. And I thought, well, as I listened to him and I thought, well, of course, you know, this injury isn't just happening in one part of his life. It happens to all of him. It doesn't just happen to him, it's happening to his family. They are having fresh encounters with grief and they don't quite know where to start. I thought, well, I know about this. I know about this. I know that when you hit a brick wall, sometimes you have to get a ladder and climb over it or a shovel and dig under it or a pickaxe and blast your way through it or walk around it sometimes. I knew that because of my dad. Because my father at a very young age of about 19 had been flying with the RAAF in India, had been in a plane which had taken off and then crashed and had been medivaced back to Australia. As a young man, he looked around the spinal injuries unit where everyone was expected to die within six months. He looked around the, around the wood and he saw suffering and he saw people drinking, smoking, playing cards and feeling like there was no life ahead of them. My dad decided that he wanted to go to university. It was not common for people in wheelchairs to go to university in the 1940s. And in fact, all the medical professionals around him said, John, you can't. You won't get admission and even if you get admission, you won't be able to get up and down the steps of the lecture theatre, up and down the steps of the library. You won't be able to get to university and even if you do get through all of that, you'll probably be dead by the time you're 25. So what's the point? Luckily that was red rag to a bull for my dad and he solved a whole lot of problems. He worked on a car so he could drive it with a hand control. He found guys who lived close to him who were studying aeronautical engineering and in those ancient days, most engineers were blokes. He asked them if they would, if he could drive them to university, if they would carry them up and down the steps of the lecture theatres and the library. When he graduated in Sydney Town Hall, he graduated to a standing ovation because nobody thought that was possible for a man in a wheelchair to graduate. After that, dad wanted to work. Why? Because work at its best is challenging. It's part of community. You're learning, you're mastering, you're contributing, you're part of a team. It's part of dignity. And he wanted to work. Yes, it's about money, but it's about money last. He got knockback after knockback until some wonderful man in Adelaide said, why don't you come over for a work trial? And at the end of the week, he said to him, John, you've got the job. All the other aeronautical engineers are also sitting down and in those days using slide rules. Dad went on and he worked until he was 65. He became a Paralympian and carried the flag for Australia. He founded, he was one of the founders of Wheelchair Sport in South Australia. And his life inspired me. And what I knew was the role of my mum in supporting and urging and encouraging and challenging him and that together they had been able to achieve all sorts of things that no one thought was possible as they went on life's grand adventure. So when I was out with this boiler maker in western New South Wales, I thought, oh, I know about this. This is not a job for me. This is my life's work. We went on to having 6,000 colleagues in 12 countries, including women, helping women in Saudi Arabia into decent lasting work where in some cases, in 50% of the cases, they were the first women ever in their families to work. We went on as a great company of people to serve over 500,000 people at any one time in 12 countries. But it was my dad's story that I've just told you that inspired me and inspired my colleagues. What I wish for you today is that you find your life's work. Congratulations.