The ARCH Magazine Edition 33

Edition 33, 2023

INNOVATION

FEAST OF SUCCESS: Fast food pioneer Jack Cowin AM GROWN-UP STARTUP: Maryann Thexton CREATIVE OVERDRIVE: Audun Fiskerud SUPER-SUB: Maddy Stubbs

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Jack Cowin in his Sydney office. | 2 |

Hungry heart JACK COWIN AM SPEARHEADED A FAST-FOOD REVOLUTION IN AUSTRALIA WHILE SERVING UP SCHOLARSHIPS THAT NOURISH THE MINDS OF STUDENTS ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE PACIFIC

by Andrew Hamilton

30-minute post-party wait for a serving of sweet and sour pork and special fried rice can affect revellers in different ways.

Some get grumpy, others sleepy, while the happiest of the bunch are enjoying themselves so much they barely notice the passage of time. In the summer of 1968 a freshly tanned Canadian named Jack Cowin found himself in this very situation on a visit to Sydney. Wrestling a grumbling tummy and clutching ticket number 51, all Mr Cowin could see was opportunity.

The founder of Hungry Jack's was in Australia doing market research for Kentucky Fried Chicken which was looking to expand Down Under. The numbers had already been crunched - the prolonged wait for a meal simply confirmed what Mr Cowin already suspected. In those days Australian dining options were basically confined to Chinese restaurants - often attached to petrol stations - fish and chip shops, and in the bigger cities, sit down restaurants with white tablecloths.

“We did our research, spent a day at the beach and then there was a party one Sunday night and afterwards we went to a little Chinese restaurant and they give you a ticket and you wait for half an hour until your order is ready,” he says. “There weren’t that many options in those days so you didn't have to be Albert Einstein to see there was a demand if you can produce food fast.

Meanwhile in North America, the McDonald's and the Burger Kings and the KFCs, they were all mushrooming and growing like mad and I couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn't work here.’’

Fast forward 45 years and Mr Cowin has turned one KFC store in the Perth suburb of Alfred Cove into a fast food empire. In the King’s Birthday Honours this year he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to business, and to philanthropic support. His company Competitive Foods, which includes Hungry Jack's, is now worth about $4.5 billion with more than 440 outlets around Australia and 25,000 employees. Another business interest, Consolidated Foods, specialises in meat processing and he has also recently invested in plant-based meat producer v2food. He is also chairman and major shareholder in Domino’s Pizza. Mr Cowin’s varied corporate interests over the past five decades also include stints as a Network Ten director and shareholder, the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb business, Stanbroke Pastoral, Torbreck Vintners Wine and Fairfax Media.

He remains a major backer of sport.

Hungry Jack's’ sponsorship of the West Coast Eagles AFL club is one of the league’s longest and most successful partnerships.

He looks after their people too and there’s more than one club great who are now franchise holders. More recently Hungry Jack's’ support of the National Basketball League (NBL) has seen the sport return to its 1980s glory days.

It is all controlled from an office in Woolloomooloo with stunning views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, even though he confesses guilt at often being too busy to stop for a moment to admire the postcard panorama of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. For many

years Competitive Foods, then based just down the hall, was neighbour to the Hon. Robert James Lee Hawke. After Mr Hawke’s passing in 2019, Mr Cowin incorporated the prized corner office into Competitive Foods’ holdings. And you suspect Australia’s sports-loving former prime minister would approve of what he has done to the place. A hallway is adorned with framed Australian football and rugby league jumpers, cricket bats, hockey jerseys and boxing gloves, many with personal notes of gratitude from athletes to Mr Cowin for his support throughout their careers.

Mr Cowin’s links to Bond University also run deep. His daughter Jane met her husband Fergus McLachlan on campus and now his grandchild Finn is here studying architecture. For many Bondies Mr Cowin is best known as the benefactor behind the student exchange program between Bond University and his own alma mater, Western University in Ontario, Canada. In addition to his support for Bond, Mr Cowin’s other philanthropic interests include supporting Sydney Opera, Western Sydney Opera, St Vincent’s Hospital and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.

So, how did a guy who had never been on a plane until he graduated from Western University in 1964 and flew to Montreal for a job interview become a citizen of the world with a home base in Sydney and business interests in the US, Canada and across Asia?

In the early days he appeared destined to be a footballer. As a gridiron defensive end his sole job was to charge into the

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A Domino’s Pizza store in Tokyo, Japan. Mr Cowin’s Domino's Pizza Enterprises has more than 2800 stores in 10 countries.

opposition in a bid to try to tackle, or at the very least disrupt, the opposing quarterback before they could pass the ball to one of their attacking players. To succeed a defensive end must somehow get through, or past, a line of snarling monster-sized linemen whose sole purpose is to defend the quarterback.

The job requires a tenacious appetite to compete and ability to dust oneself off after a failed attempt and crack in again, traits Mr Cowin admits have served him well in business. The boundless energy and competitive drive were with him from birth, but the course of his career can be traced back to a handful of key events: advice from his father, his coach and a phone call from an old friend at the other end of the world.

Mr Cowin’s father Stanley worked his whole life for the Ford motor vehicle company and in 1960 spent six months in Australia as part of an executive team seconded to the engineering plant at Geelong. On his return he informed his wide-eyed and impressionable teenage son that if he were a younger man, he’d pack up and move there. “It is the land of the future, he said, and told me Asia was going to boom,” Mr Cowin recalls.

“So I was kind of predestined to want to go.’’

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The next sliding doors moment came when he was offered a football scholarship at the University of Michigan, the top tier of American college football.

The coach at the Western University Mustangs did not want to see the region’s most promising high school football star take his talents over the US-Canada border, so he weighed in with some wisdom of his own. He advised the young footballer that he’d keep the friends he made in university throughout his life and should therefore choose to study in a region where he would be happy to make his life. “I said, ‘I’m a Canadian, I don’t want to live in the US’. And that made sense, so it probably wasn’t the right football decision, but it was right for me and I really enjoyed my time there. And to this day, a lot of my friends and contacts are from my uni days.”

Football had one last attempt to lure Mr Cowin when, at the end of his college career, he was approached to turn professional. “I got drafted but I saw very quickly that it wasn’t what I wanted to do,” he said. “You see guys who are 35, and they get a job as a beer salesman and they spend all their money and they are broke. I thought look, I’ve got to get on with life.”

When you are 25 or 26 you’re prepared to take a risk.

If you don’t swing the bat, you never hit the ball. You’ve got to swing the bat

He took a job in the insurance industry, married his college sweetheart Sharon Maclean and began a family. It would be another four years before fate gave him the final nudge that set him on his path to the Harbour City. It came in the form of a phone call from an old classmate who had been sent to Australia by KFC to conduct a feasibility study. “I was the only guy in our group of friends who knew where Australia was on the map because my old man had been there, so he phoned me up and said, ‘Hey, you should come down’,” he says.

“So, boom, within moments I'm on a plane to Sydney.”

When he became convinced the Australian market was crying out for fast food, he paid $1000 for a 10-store franchise area in Perth with a deadline to open a store or forfeit

the money. “$1000 was a large part of my worldly net worth back then,” he says. “So I got on my bike and went out and got 30 people to lend me 10 grand each, moved to Perth and opened the first store. “My mother-in-law was very nervous as to what was happening with her daughter being taken halfway around the world. “She said, 'You know, the only place you go further away is the moon', which is probably true.’’

In those days the highway across the Nullarbor Plain which links the East Coast and Western Australia was still a dirt track, adding to Perth’s image as the world’s most isolated city. But the West Aussies did have an appetite for hamburgers, perhaps a legacy of the US submarine base in Fremantle during World War II. Across the city there was a scattering of roadside caravans that served burgers and fries - one of them The Hasty Tasty in Innaloo. It was on that site in 1971 where Australia’s first Hungry Jack's was opened. Then came stores at Dog Swamp, Cannington, Melville…

“And that was that,” Mr Cowin says. "When you are 25 or 26 you’re prepared to take a risk. If you don’t swing the bat, you never hit the ball. You’ve got to swing the bat."

Although he has now lived in Australia for more than two-thirds of his life, he always maintained his ties to Western University.

He was the major financial backer behind the development of the Mustangs’ football

ground, the Stanley J Cowin field, named in honour of his father. In 2000 he was awarded an honorary doctorate and served as the university’s 22nd Chancellor between 2015 and 2019. Mr Cowin is the central figure in the strong relationship between Western University and Bond. The Cowin Scholars Program has seen 24 Bondies head to Western University and a further 31 Canadians head south for a semester in the sun. “I never got on a plane until I graduated from university,” he says. “Until that point my life was confined to a 100-mile radius of where I lived. And then I moved here and developed an appreciation of the world and how interconnected things are. For me, the scholarship program that we back is about giving kids an opportunity to be able to see and experience new things because I reflect on how small my world was. I told you the story about my old man and I probably would never have ended up here if that hadn’t happened. And the enjoyment I get from that is seeing kids have an appreciation of the big world and the international aspect of things - although I think the Canadian kids get the best of the deal. The poor Bond kids go to Canada in the winter to see ice and snow.”

Jack Cowin at the coin toss for a Western University Mustangs game.

Top: One of the earliest Hungry Jack's outlets.

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HI STORY

Contents the ARC H - EDITION 33 , NO V E M BE R 2023

25

In Profile

Research

2

34 Ray of hope

Hungry heart

Around Campus 8

Bond Institute of Health and Sport expansion

13

Rankings success

14

Sweet victory for Rebecca

16

Surf course makes a splash

17

Students raise $200,000 for charity

Alumni in profile 20 Maryann Thexton 22 Warwick Parer

History 38 Modular marvels

Bondies on the Move 40 Class year updates 1990-2016

Sport 46 Rugby, netball 47 AFL 48 Games faces 50 Paris Olympics

25 Audun Fiskerud 28 Maddy Stubbs 30 Harsh Hada

Cover image: description.

Philanthropy 32 Derek Murphy

32

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A L UM NI C E N T R E Phone +61 7 5595 1450 Email alumni@bond.edu.au Website alumni.bond.edu.au Mail 14 University Drive, Robina 4226, QLD AUSTRALIA

Foreword PROFESSOR TIM BRAILSFORD, VICE CHANCELLOR AND PRESIDENT

I

am delighted to introduce this ‘innovation’ edition of The Arch.

While we often think about innovation through the lens of new products, new services, new systems and new ways of doing, we should never lose sight of how Bond University has been at the forefront of innovation in tertiary education.

Bond is a pioneer in the Australian higher education sector.

For instance, we introduced the accelerated academic calendar through offering three semesters of study within a year. We also introduced the concept of a Core curriculum that engages students across campus irrespective of their area of study. Within the last decade, we developed the Beyond Bond program to ensure a stream of highly competent and work-ready graduates. The fee-free entrepreneurship incubator for students, known as Transformer, is also an innovation from recent years.

The launch of the Transformation CoLab just a few years ago with its interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focus, embedded industry placements and a capstone experience like no other is producing graduates equipped for the future and ahead of their time. Innovation is a theme that embodies the spirit of Bond University, its students and alumni. Our endeavour has yielded remarkable results, as highlighted this year by the Australian Financial Review which recognised Bond for producing more business leaders as a proportion of its alumni than any other Australian university.

This year we have delivered another innovative project – the state-of-the-art major extension to the Bond Institute of Health and Sport at Robina (page 8). While the design and the visage by XL Architecture and constructed by ADCO is striking, it also seamlessly blends education and healthcare to complement what we believe is Australia’s most innovative and highest quality medical program.

Notably, this achievement was accomplished without a cent of government funding.

Projections indicate Australia is facing a significant shortage of healthcare workers in coming decades. We see it as our responsibility to respond to that challenge and grow the capacity and the capability of our health workforce, and the extension will help us do that.

The Institute of Health and Sport was already a thriving research, teaching and training precinct before this latest addition, attracting international sporting teams and athletes. It will come fully into focus in the lead-up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics but in the meantime several Bondies are already preparing for next year’s Paris Olympics (page 50).

In this edition we salute a good friend of the University, Jack Cowin AM (page 3). Mr Cowin is often referred to as the man who brought fast food to Australia but he also brought a philosophy of giving back. Jack is the benefactor of the Cowin Scholarship Program which allows Bond students to study at Western University (where Jack graduated), and vice versa.

Bond alumnus Harsh Hada (Class of 1995) (page 30) is taking a similar path. Mr Hada fostered an idea as a student at Bond and became a pivotal figure in bringing the internet to his home country of India. He now helps Indian students from underprivileged backgrounds to realise their potential by studying at university.

Also in this issue, Maryann Thexton (Class of 2018) (page 20) shows us that entrepreneurial flair is not just the domain of the young. Ranging in age from 54 to 80 years, the founders of her start-up company are shattering all manner of stereotypes.

As the year draws to a close, I wish all alumni and your families a happy and healthy new year and a most joyous festive season. I look forward to seeing many of you at the Homecoming Gala Ball at The Star Gold Coast next May to celebrate another five-year milestone of Australia’s most innovative educational startup.

15-18 MAY 2024 Journey back to Bond and relive the University spirit at Homecoming 2024.

Join us on campus to celebrate the incredible legacy of our institution.

Stay tuned for further details. We can't wait to see you there.

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Sandstone Pine

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Bond Institute of Health and Sport expands to meet growing care demand Bond University’s new health precinct is helping students prepare for the anticipated boom in Australia’s care sector.

Governor of Queensland, Her Excellency the Honourable Dr Jeannette Young AC PSM, officially opened the new multi-level building which provides 11,500m2 of education spaces, state-of-the-art training facilities, clinics and equipment.

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Vice Chancellor and President, Professor Tim Brailsford, Her Excellency the Honourable Dr Jeannette Young AC PSM, The Honourable Dr Annabelle Bennett AC SC and Executive Dean of Medicine Professor Nick Zwar.

Vice Chancellor and President Professor Tim Brailsford said the new facilities would enable Bond to train future generations of allied health workers and help alleviate workforce shortages.

“We know there’s a shortage of health workers at the moment and Queensland Health are predicting larger shortages in allied health,” he said.

“We see the additional training of students here being critical in solving some of the health crisis.”

Australia’s care industry continues to grow. The tripling of the population aged over 85, projected in the federal government’s Intergenerational Report, will drive demand for physiotherapists, exercise and sports scientists, dietitians and occupational therapists.

The project, built by ADCO Constructions, was self-funded by Bond University and created 200 jobs during construction and more than 50 highly-skilled, ongoing positions.

Dr Young praised the University’s investment in growing the nation’s health

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workforce and providing them with the best training.

“I'm sure all of you would agree with me that the value of a great education can never be underestimated. Nor can the importance of good health and the knowledge that accompanies it,” she said.

Executive Dean of Health Sciences and Medicine, Professor Nick Zwar said the new precinct would benefit not only students but the whole community.

It will host the Bond University Health and Wellness Clinic offering access initially to trainee psychologists, followed by occupational therapists, physios and a falls clinic.

“How we’re going to meet the needs of the community is front and centre of every discussion in healthcare,” he said.

“To have a facility like this for our allied health, sports and exercise science and psychology programs to all learn together is a fantastic thing for the University and the community more broadly.”

Chancellor The Hon. Dr Annabelle Bennett AC SC highlighted the University’s

longstanding partnership with ADCO and acknowledged the commitment of ADCO Chair Judy Brinsmead AM to the local community.

ADCO’s Managing Director Neil Harding said the company was thrilled to partner with Bond to deliver the project, continuing a long association with the University.

“We first worked with Bond University in 2004 completing the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine building. Since then, we have partnered to successfully build 24 facilities, establishing ADCO as the (University’s) builder of choice.”

Watch the opening here.

Official opening of Bond Institute of Health and Sport extension

A commercial-grade kitchen for nutrition and dietetic studies.

The 60m gait biomechanics laboratory equipped with 12 high-speed cameras.

Students learn the value of play and leisure in this flexible learning space.

The Activities of Daily Living Lab simulates a home for occupational therapy research.

The soaring atrium with indoor amphitheatre.

Inside the landmark curved facade.

The Work Play Lab can be used as a paediatric play laboratory.

Student spaces for collaborative learning and solo study.

A simulated hospital ward with 12 beds.

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Free law clinic trains students, serves community

Lady Sings the Maroons performers Marcus Corowa, Irena Lusiuk and Jess Hitchcock.

Raising the maroon curtain on Opera Queensland Bond University was the final stop on Opera Queensland’s Lady Sings the Maroons tour celebrating the best of the state’s diverse music. Like the rugby league team that inspired the name, it was a smash hit.

The ADCO Amphitheatre hosted the free show featuring renowned singers performing works by The Saints, Powderfinger, Gladys Moncrieff, Savage Garden, Joe Geia, Kate Miller-Heidke, and Harold Blair.

The performance was the grand finale to a tour that criss-crossed Queensland, appearing in 17 locations including Proserpine, Winton, Charleville and Roma.

Director Laura Hansford, Musical Director Luke Volker and vocalists Jess Hitchcock, Irena Lysiuk and Marcus Corowa all trace their roots to regional Queensland.

“My Queensland, your Queensland and the next person’s Queensland are vastly different things, and

that’s reflected in the music that’s come out of this state,” Ms Hansford said.

“Lady Sings the Maroons holds a mirror up to our extraordinary state with pride.”

The Opera Queensland performance was one of several cultural events on campus this year including performances by the Gold Coast Chamber Orchestra and movie screenings as part of the Latin American Film Festival.

The University has opened a free law clinic offering advice across issues including commercial, property and consumer law.

The Bond Law Clinic provides real-life work experience for Bond law students under the guidance of experienced legal practitioners, as well as delivering free legal advice.

It is headed by Principal Solicitor Sara Loughnan who spent 28 years working in her own legal practice in Mackay.

“The Bond Law Clinic will operate on a pro bono basis,” Ms Loughnan said.

“This is an important aspect because we’re here to help everyone, particularly those in the community that might otherwise not be able to afford legal advice.

“While the Bond Law Clinic does not provide ongoing or court representation, the legal advice service helps people understand their rights, responsibilities and options so that they can make informed decisions about what to do next.

“It’s also great to be able to provide students with the opportunity to practise their skills in a real environment where they can see how the legal knowledge they are acquiring in the classroom can be applied to the legal issues faced by our clients in everyday life.”

Solomon Islands Prime Minister tours elite sports base

Solomons Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare with Vice Chancellor and President Tim Brailsford. | 12 |

Bond University welcomed Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare as part of a recent Australian tour.

The Prime Minister was joined

by Bond alumnus and Solomon Islands Attorney General John Muria (Class of 2002) during a visit to the University’s High Performance Training Centre.

The HPTC was among several sporting facilities the pair visited on the tour of world-class venues for athlete preparation, training and performance.

The Prime Minister and Attorney General met with

Vice Chancellor and President Professor Tim Brailsford and the Dean of Health Sciences and Medicine Professor Nick Zwar.

They heard about the centre’s high-level capabilities in athlete testing and monitoring, saw the weight training and aquatic facilities in action, and discussed the benefits of investing in equipment and staff to support elite athletes at the 2023 Pacific Games.

Age is just a number: 43 on young unis list Bond has been named among world's top 50 young universities for the first time.

The University came in at No.43 in the 2023 Times Higher Education Young University Rankings.

Institutions 50 years old and younger are considered for the influential list.

N a nya n g Te c h n o l o g i ca l University in Singapore topped the international list.

In June Bond was named the top Australian university across a range of measures in a federal government survey of students’ educational experience.

The University is the leading Australian university for

learner engagement, learning resources, student support and skills development, and No.2 for teaching quality.

An overwhelming majority (86.3 percent) of Bond students who took part in the 2021-22 Student Experience Surveys rated their experience positively.

Surfing history hanging 10 in library

Student Kayla Jackson and the historic surfboard.

An almost 90-year-old surfboard linked to one of the most influential surfers of all time has been put on permanent display in the John & Alison Kearney Main Library.

The 4.2m board features the revolutionary hollow design of legendary American athlete, inventor and writer Tom Blake which was patented in 1932. Before then boards were made from solid timber and could weigh 100kg or more.

The board was donated to the University by Joe Riewoldt, father of AFL legend Nick Riewoldt, and was proudly displayed in Joe’s home for many years.

Bond University Vice Chancellor and President, Professor Tim Brailsford said the surfboard would serve as a visible reminder of the University's connections to the sport.

“I know a huge number of our students and staff surf,

and we’ve had a number of students compete at the highest international level including Rachael Tilly (Class of 2018) who was the women's longboard world champion,” Professor Brailsford said.

“We conduct research that is tangential to the world of surfing, all the way from health and biomechanics through to the business of the surf industry, film and media.

“A number of our alumni are working with

the World Surf League, and Bond University is the education partner of the World Surf League.”

A similar board representing Tom Blake’s design is in the collection of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

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Superannuation 'should start in your 30s' The Bond Business Leaders Forum has heard the argument that people should not have to contribute to superannuation until their 30s.

Panel member and Au st ra l i a n National U n i ve rs i ty E m e r i tu s Professor Ron Bird said the current super system was inequitable and deprived young people of income when it could be put to better use.

“They are forgoing income at a time when they probably need it most – having children and building lives, and probably earning less than they will later in their careers,” Professor Bird said.

“Reviews have shown that even at 9.5 percent compulsory super we are putting in too much.

“There was a proposal out of London that said no one should be paying anything into super until they were in their 30s and then (their contribution level) should go up exponentially after that.”

The forum featured a panel of superannuation experts including Jeremy Cooper, author of the Rudd government’s 2009 review into the nation’s super system, Future Fund Guardian and Monash University Professorial Fellow Professor Deborah Ralston, and Fund Manager at Investors Mutual and Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor at Bond University, Dr Michael O’Neill.

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Floorplan podcast's blueprint for better work

Dr Libby Sander, Bond’s MBA Director and Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, has launched a new podcast about the future of work. The Floorplan is a thorough and sometimes funny exploration of our attempts to navigate the modern workplace.

Co-hosted by Matt Webber from the Bond Newsroom, the podcast looks at current trends in organisational behaviour and the fascinating science that inspires them.

Borrowing from case studies and the latest research,

The Floorplan attempts to uncover what individuals and organisations can do to make the workplace experience better for everyone.

Dr Sander says the fact most employees feel underwhelmed by their workplace creates the perfect environment for a podcast.

Listen to the podcast here.

Victory is sweet for Rebecca

Rebecca Bennett’s treats are free from gluten, eggs, dairy, nuts, soy and refined sugar.

Rebecca Bennett’s motto is let them eat cake. And by them, she means absolutely everyone.

Ms Bennett is on her way to achieving her aim after winning the Bond University Tra n sfo r m e r L a u n c h pa d competition and a $2000 prize.

The self-taught baker has turned her considerable skills in the kitchen to creating cakes and bakes that can be eaten by those with even severe and numerous food allergies.

The Bond University Film and Television student’s cakes are not just gluten free, they are free from eggs, dairy, tree nuts, ground nuts, soy and even refined sugar. And they are in hot demand.

Ironically, Rebecca doesn’t really eat cake, but as an allergy sufferer herself, she couldn’t bear to see little kids missing out on one of the great joys of childhood.

“They always have the best reactions when they realise that yes, they can eat this,” she says.

“I used to cry a lot in the shop – parents would come in and ask what was safe and tell me what their child’s allergies were. Seeing their faces when I told them that everything in the shop would be fine for their kids was pretty emotional.”

ADCO Project Director Gold Coast Nicholas Herps (centre) with students Aakif Ansari and Jing Luan.

ADCO partnership lays foundation for student success Construction students will see the inner workings of one of the nation’s biggest building companies as part of a new partnership with ADCO. The ADCO Excellence Program offers students the opportunity to be mentored by senior ADCO staff as part of their studies in roles including construction managers, project managers, estimators, design managers, project engineers and contract administrators.

ADCO staff will also give guest lectures to students in a range of subjects as part of the partnership.

Construction Discipline Lead Dane Miller said the chance to get a real feel for the industry would give Bond students a leg-up in the education journey and potentially their career.

“You can’t buy the exposure and experience that this program will offer,” he said.

“ We want to provide transformational experiences to our students and let them be able to feel and see and touch how things happen in the industry, not just by learning in class.”

ADCO Queensland State Manager Michael Rinaudo said the company had a long association with the University and a strong commitment to education.

“We’re very excited about this partnership and the potential value of connecting students with mentors,” he said.

“Having a mentor, someone who can provide advice and guidance, is not just valuable in your university years but after you graduate and throughout your career.

“I’m still mentoring people now both inside and outside of the business and the opportunities that it can provide are endless.”

Paralympian’s bursary boost for students Paralympic swimming gold medallist Matthew Levy OAM will fund a Bursary to support Bond students who have a disability.

Mr Levy decided to back the scholarship after having fundraised to attend international competitions in his early swimming career. “(When you’re) living with disability it can be hard sometimes to get access to different things and to be able to take advantage of opportunities,” Mr Levy said.

“I thought there needed to be a way to help break that cycle, and hopefully giving someone a financial boost during this period of their life is helpful.

“Through my lived experience of disability and due to the longevity in terms of my athletic career, I just want to be able to give back to the community.

“I know what it really means to be able to be given the opportunity and I just want to be able to pay that forward.”

Born at 25 weeks with cerebral palsy and a vision impairment, Mr Levy found his way to the pool as part of his rehabilitation, but it soon became much more.

He first represented Australia at the 2004 Olympics, won his first medal in 2008 and continued the winning streak right through to the Tokyo Games.

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Kirby’s human rights message amidst war Former Justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby AC CMG has delivered a stirring lecture on the importance of human rights against the background of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Justice Kirby gave his annual address at the University on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the 10th anniversary of the Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in North Korea, which he led after being appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Unfortunately the North Korean people have never had selfdetermination since the Korean Peninsula was divided at the tail end of World War II,” the eminent jurist said.

“Today there is great power in the north with the Kim family who have built a regime that gives them ultimate power.

“A decade ago there were very alarming reports coming out of North Korea of huge oppression, great violence and multiple deaths, which led to the decision by the Human Rights Council to establish the Commission.”

Justice Kirby spoke of diplomatic efforts since to establish meaningful dialogue with North Korea and of the continuing obligation of the international community to protect countries against crimes of humanity.

Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG.

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Bond University students Hedda Bjorgen, Mariell Kleiven, Vebjoern Hansen, Alexis Hay and Deborah Bakare at Burleigh.

Surf's up for students as new course makes a splash There are few better ways to clear the mind for an intense day of study than nipping over to the beach for a surf.

Now students can incorporate surfing into their degrees with the launch of a new subject called Gold Coast Surf, Culture and Storytelling.

Course convenor Assistant Professor Rob Layton said the subject takes a duck-dive into the Gold Coast’s rich surfing history and capitalises on Bond University’s unique location near one of Australia’s best point breaks, Burleigh Heads.

Students learn to surf with former pro surfer Munga Barry’s school, and other field trips including to the World Surf League headquarters in Coolangatta and the Mt Woodgee surfboard factory at Currumbin.

Surf p h o t o g ra p h y and videography using smartphones is also part of the curriculum, and students practice this in the Bond pool.

“The Gold Coast has produced so many surfing champions, from Rabbit Batholomew to Peter Townend, Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, Cheyne Horan, Steph Gilmore - the list goes on,” Mr Layton said.

“That’s a deep pool of incredible talent that we have access to. It truly is a living history for students to experience first hand.”

The 1978 World Surfing Champion Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew joined a recent class on Burleigh Headland and spent two hours answering questions and explaining his part in the formation of modern professional surfing.

“ We wa tc h e d the d o c u m e n ta r y B u s t i n’ Down the Door', about the formation of pro surfing, and to then have Rabbit Bartholomew turn up the next week, the students were star-struck,” Mr Layton said.

Rabbit said he was thrilled to share his stories with the students.

“The Gold Coast has such a rich tapestry of surf history, it is really cool to see overseas students showing such interest in our culture,” he said.

Scan to see the video.

Students raise the bar with $200,000 for charities The Bond Business School’s Business Model Execution subject has marked a milestone, raising more than $200,000 for charities.

Since the subject started in 2016, 49 teams of students have spent two semesters designing commercial products and then taking them to market.

Semester Teaching Fellow Ben HaydenSmith said students needed to rely on their own resourcefulness and business smarts to get their ideas from the drawing board and into the hands of consumers.

“Last semester, the teams donated a total of $12,239 from jewellery and pet trinkets and shower steamers to the Animal Welfare League QLD, Beyond Blue and the Kid's Cancer Project,” Mr Hayden-Smith said.

“And as if to highlight the diversity of the business brains at Bond, this time around our students are powering a l o n g w i t h so c i a l conscience projects that tackle responsible alcohol consumption and a more environmentally friendly way - an eco-luxury way as they call it - to drink coffee.

“We’ll soon have our 50th and 51st teams through the program and we are all eager to see what they come up with.”

Two dux in a row is a first For what is believed to be the first time, two students have tied for the coveted Vice Chancellor’s Dux Award.

Srishti Parashar (Bachelor of Health Sciences) and Jay Lakhana (Bachelor of Biomedical Science) both recorded a perfect grade point average of 4 and cumulative average of 95 percent for semester 232.

The first-year students hope to go on to complete the Bond Medical Program and become doctors.

Mr Lakhana, of Sydney, said he had a natural love for science and continuous learning.

“You’ve got to enjoy it,” he said.

“But I also love an artistic style of note-taking.

I use a lot of colours and that helped me find the fun in studying and kept me motivated.”

Ms Parashar, of Brisbane, said she employed techniques to overcome anxiety.

“My top study tip is to prioritise relaxing,” she said.

“I can get really anxious around my studies.

Teaching myself to calm down and being able to do that both right before exams and long-term has allowed me to reach my potential.”

Ms Parashar and Mr Lakhana were also joint winners of the Executive Dean’s Award for Health Sciences & Medicine.

Srishti Parashar and Jay Lakhana.

Professor Hoffmann claims top research award Professor Tammy Hoffmann OAM has collected the Vice Chancellor's Research Excellence Award for her work at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare.

The awards are a highlight of Research Week which includes public forums and research showcases. Other winners were: • Vice Chancellor’s PhD Award - Dr Matthew Olsen (Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine).

• Vice Chancellor’s Award for Early Career Research Excellence - Assistant Professor of Public Health Mina Bakhit (Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine).

• Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Supervision - Professor Wayne Hing (Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine).

• Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Service - Assistant Professor Mark Bahr (Faculty of Society & Design), Chair of the Bond University Human Research Ethics Committee since 2007.

The research awards included a minute’s silence in memory of Professor Kevin Ashton who passed away in September following a short illness.

“I know that we all held Kevin in very high esteem,” Provost, Professor Keitha Dunstan said.

“As well as being an exceptional educator and academic he was a driver of change within the research portfolio. I know that he will be very much missed.”

Professor Tammy Hoffmann and Professor Keitha Dunstan.

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INNOVATION One launched a startup when many others her age are contemplating retirement.

Another turned a business heartbreak into a thriving new venture. Between them, these five Bondies are shaking up industries, reinventing their careers and driving positive change in society.

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GROWN-UP STARTUP MARYANN THEXTON WAS LATE TO THE BIOTECH SCENE BUT DRAWING FROM HER HORSERACING BACKGROUND, SHE’S A STAYER

by Jo Crompton

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t first glance, Gold Coast biotechnology company the Marl Group looks like most other startups – disruptive ideas, a hip office space, flexible working arrangements and a driven, energetic team. But Bond MBA graduate Maryann Thexton (Class of 2018) and her three co-founders, Lynette Rouse, Hub Regtop and Jeff Flood, don’t quite fit the stereotype – they range in age from 54 to 80 years old.

“I think we are probably the oldest startup crew in Australia,” Ms Thexton says. “It's really interesting. The perception of a startup business is pretty much a tech/IT type company and young, bright minds. And that's great – there are plenty of amazing ideas coming to commercial reality and people are doing wonderful things. But I think we did experience a little bit of ageism. There's definitely a little bit of invisibility around older startup companies like ours, but having said that, now we are actually out there in the marketplace, and we've got a physical presence, that’s no longer the case.”

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Ms Thexton’s journey to startup CEO didn’t follow a standard path either. She spent 20 years in the racing industry as a horse trainer, but a chance connection forged with the scientist who would later become one of her co-founders and the company's Chief Scientific Officer, Hub Regtop set her on the road to a new career.

“A friend of a friend of a friend's daughter sat next to someone at a wedding who knew someone who knew a scientist that had created a product that could be a synbiotic for horses,” she says. “I reached out to him, and he had some old stock in the factory that he had made, and no one really took it up or did anything with it, and he sent it to me. I was initially reluctant to try it out on my horses because you're very protective about what you feed racehorses particularly. But I did have one horse who was ready to go to the spelling paddock and I thought he'd be an interesting (case study) because he didn't eat very well and he was a bit picky and just not 100 percent right. So I gave him this product and within two days it turned his world around and I

was like, whoa, you've got my attention.”

The product was a combination of prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics extracted from all-natural ingredients and designed to support the health of the microbiome, or the gut. Faced with an opportunity to commercialise the product and take it to market, Ms Thexton and some other racing enthusiasts decided to take a leap of faith and set up a business selling it to trainers. With her connections in the industry, scientific backing and strong evidence of the product’s effectiveness, success came swiftly, with horse owners, cattle owners and pet owners soon clamouring for access. But, like all good startup founders, Ms Thexton saw the potential for more.

“I exited this business and decided to do my MBA at Bond. I could not let go of what I saw in animals, so I rang (my now co-founder) Hub and said, ‘I want to do this for people’.

The Marl Group CEO Maryann Thexton mapped out her company’s structure while completing an MBA.

I think we are probably the oldest startup crew in Australia. We did experience a little bit of ageism and there's definitely a little bit of invisibility around older startup companies like ours We knew how good it was for animals,” she says. “He gave me his views on what we would need to do to make that happen and said that he would join me in a company if we could work out how to do it.”

It was a long road – synbiotics contain living organisms and most of the processes used to make products safe for human consumption require the application of heat and other robust processes designed to kill unwanted bacteria, but they also kill the good bacteria that make the products so effective. But after two years of research and development they found a way.

“We started out as a beverage company.

We made this wonderful, healthy synbiotic gut health beverage for children that could go in the lunch box and didn't need refrigeration,” she says. “As soon as we did that we realised we could make toothpaste, we could make gummies, we could make chocolates or cakes or biscuits - anything that required a manufacturing process we could explore with our synbiotic ingredients.

I remember having a light-bulb moment.

I was walking down to the shops and I rang Hub and I said, ‘Hub, we're an R&D company, aren't we? We're not a beverage company’ and he said, ‘I thought you'd work that out soon’. So we sold that brand to another company who have since taken it to market … and we now focus on Business to Business (B2B) and share our science with other manufacturers.”

The synbiotics produced by the Marl Group’s company Bio-az can now be found in 19 different products either on retail shelves or on their way to market. Ms Thexton says studying an MBA at Bond was one of the keys to the company’s success.

“Every subject that I could apply to

that idea, I did. In managerial accounting and budgeting, I built out the financial structures, in the marketing and strategy subjects I documented how I was going to take this business and turn it into reality,” she says. “I kept all of those papers that I submitted as my assignments, and I've put them into a bound book and I've shared with our team so they could see where the ideas came from, what we were planning to do and then how it's pivoted. I already had a good direction of how we could take an idea and get it to market and become commercial so I very much used it as a road-map to step out and actually do it.”

Watch the interview with Maryann here.

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CAREER REHAB WARWICK PARER HAS A KNACK FOR TURNING SECOND CHANCES INTO SUCCESSES. NOW HE HELPS OTHERS MAKE THEIR OWN FRESH STARTS

by Riley Evans

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It would have been easy to go back and be a lawyer again or go back to retail but I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to move forward and do something else

Warwick Parer and his loyal companions at Gunnebah (left) in the Tweed Valley.

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s family Christmases go, this one was particularly awkward.

Warwick Parer (Class of 1990) had recently been kicked out of university, three years into a law degree.

Undiagnosed ADHD played a part but so had a lack of accountability at a large university where he was just another face in a lecture theatre. Retreating home to his family on the festive Gold Coast, Mr Parer wondered how such a promising start had deteriorated into his summer of discontent.

After finishing high school, his first career move had been into the Army Reserve to complete officer training, honouring a family tradition. His grandfather Kevin Parer had been a private pilot who was killed in Papua New Guinea evacuating civilians and moving freight for the Australian government, while his uncle Damien Parer won Australia's first Oscar in 1943 for a documentary he shot on the Battle of Kokoda. A keen triathlete, Mr Parer relished the physical aspect of Army training while he chased his dream of becoming a lawyer. “Even though it was the Army Reserve it was very demanding and I learned an awful lot, much of which I still use today,” he says.

But back to that Christmas do. Family friends mentioned how much their child was loving a new university that had recently opened on the Gold Coast. His parents shot him a look. “They looked sideways at me and said, ‘Alright, we’ll give you one more chance. We’ll give you one semester and if you pass, you can keep going to Bond,” he says. It was the lifeline he needed.

Mr Parer thrived at Bond University where the smaller classes and greater oversight from his lecturers suited his learning style. After graduating with a Bachelor of Laws he joined a mid-sized Gold Coast law firm that specialised in conveyancing and estate work. With the support of the firm, Mr Parer went on to start a mortgage finance company that was highly successful. He was made a partner at the ripe age of 28.

In February 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that job mobility in Australia was at the highest rate in a decade. Research suggests Australians will average five-to-seven career changes during their lifetime. Mr Parer was ahead of the curve. At the age of 35, he saw an opportunity to get into the retail industry, purchasing 12 Robins Kitchen stores - now one of Australia’s biggest cooking and

kitchen specialist companies.

“Once I became financially stable after all those years of being a lawyer I decided it was time to go and try something else,” he says. “It was probably my ADHD talking, but that’s when I made the jump into retail.”

Through hard work and investment over an 11-year period, he and his wife Jenny built Robins Kitchen to 56 stores across Australia. Then came a second devastating setback and another Christmas from hell.

Following a bruising legal battle and circumstances outside of his control, Mr Parer lost it all. “We won a Canstar award in August 2013 for being the best in Australia, we were making a good profit and everything was going really well,” he said.

“But by Christmas that year I was pretty much out of business. It was awful.”

Mr Parer dusted himself off again.

“I’m the type of person who likes to look forward, not backwards,” he says. “It would have been easy to go back and be a lawyer again or go back to retail, but I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to move forward and do something else. Between the military, law, retail and a few other things, I had a lot of experience in a lot of different areas.”

Dr Parer told her husband she wanted

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ALUMNI IN PROFIL E

Mr Parer tends to a member of his menagerie at Gunnebah and, top left, freshly grown produce for clients.

him to do something that made him happy, and that would lead him down a path he never would have imagined – a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. The idea was sparked by an episode of ABC’s Four Corners program which investigated the private rehab sector in Australia and what a mess it was in at the time. “I have six children and was upset that there were private rehabs that were exploiting families when they were at their most vulnerable,” Mr Parer says. “I thought we could do that in a better way. It was probably a bit naïve, like a lot of things I have done.”

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idyllic Tweed Valley, into arguably one of the best addiction rehabilitation services in Australia. He says the emotional toll of working in the industry can be heavy, with soaring highs and sometimes tragic lows.

“This job is very intense and it’s seven days a week, but it’s also insanely rewarding.”

Mr Parer doesn’t expect he will be the Managing Director of Gunnebah forever, which is very on-brand considering his career path to date. “I really enjoy what I am doing now and I don’t have any plans to leave but I also know from my life experience that you never know what’s down the track,” he says. “One of the best things I have learnt is that there are always

parts from one career or job that will help you in the next one. In running Gunnebah I am constantly using skills I learned in the military, law, retail and various other jobs.

All those different areas help to widen your skill base that you can draw upon when you least expect it. Who knows where my life may have led if my parents had not given me that one semester shot at Bond”.

CREATIVE OVERDRIVE AUDUN FISKERUD (CLASS OF 2002) IS INNOVATION LEAD AT CAR REPAIR BOOKING SITE AUTOGURU, REGULARLY VOTED ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES. WE POPPED THE BONNET TO SEE WHAT’S DRIVING HIS SUCCESS

CAN YOU WALK US THROUGH A TYPICAL DAY IN YOUR ROLE AT AUTOGURU?

My role as Innovation Lead at AutoGuru is project-based, meaning I’m engaged for various innovation projects throughout the year. One exciting thing about that format is that there are no typical days, they’re all different depending on whether we’re working on strategies for how we can leverage our technology into adjacent markets, whether we’re trying to figure out how to better foster creativity and innovation throughout the company, or whether we’re workshopping how we can better tell our innovation and growth story to investors.

I work closely with founder and CEO Eden Shirley and also CTO Barry Pryce and the tech team. When Eden and I work together we first spend some time figuring out what we’re trying to achieve with the project, which mountain to climb. Once that is established, we start riffing on what would be the best way of climbing that mountain. The key to these discussions is to leave your ego at home. Don’t be married to your own ideas, the best idea wins! What we want is to build on each other’s ideas to create something neither of us could’ve achieved on our own.

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HOW DOES YOUR WORK CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMPANY'S CULTURE OF INNOVATION?

We spend a lot of time exploring how we can best foster creativity and innovation throughout the company, and the approach we’ve arrived at is a combination of systemic enablers and cultural enablers. Systemic enablers deal with how we manage projects through the innovation funnel from idea to launch, how we decide to kill off projects that don’t meet our criteria at different stage-gates through the funnel, and also innovation portfolio management, in terms of ensuring a balance of different types of innovation projects with different risk profiles and different time horizons. You want to have a combination of product and process innovations happening at any one time, and you also want to have projects that span from chipping away at your core products, to adjacent opportunities where you leverage your tech into new markets, and also a few long-shots where you develop new tech for new markets: the risky long-term transformational projects that might not work out, but if they do, the payoff is big.

Those examples were all systems-related, but equally important is the culture piece, being deliberate about developing a culture of creativity.

You achieve that by developing a shared vision and language where all employees can see how their innovation efforts have the potential to move the needle and contribute to the future of the company. We also want to nurture a creative climate by giving people autonomy in their work, encouraging risk-taking, reframing failure as a way of starting again more intelligently, ensuring diversity in your teams, developing trust and psychological safety so everyone is excited to share their ideas regardless of how whacky they might sound at the time.

In a nutshell, you want to create a culture where everyone is proud to work at the company, where they are involved in decision-making, and where they have the freedom and resources to spend some of their time tinkering away on their own ideas that might benefit the company in the future.

IS THERE AN EXAMPLE OF A PROJECT YOU'VE BEEN PART OF THAT MADE YOU WONDER HOW IT WOULD EVER WORK?

We recently innovated on AutoGuru’s business model, moving away from the original commission model, where mechanics paid us a cut of the bookings we secured for them, to a SaaS (software as a service) model, where the mechanics instead pay a subscription fee to be featured on the AutoGuru online marketplace

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platform, but are not charged a percentage commission on the value of the booking.

Changing the business model and the revenue streams when you have thousands of mechanics using the platform is a major pivot, so there was a lot at stake. We spent time talking to our mechanics to understand their needs and pain points before initiating the pivot, but there’s always going to be uncertainty when you pivot such a major part of your business model. The transition went really well, and the new SaaS model is better for our mechanics and for us.

An important sidenote is that investors also really like B2B SaaS models. Because the software is sold on a subscription basis, once you have data on how many of your customers churn in any given period, the recurring revenue and future growth becomes predictable. The combo of recurring revenue and low churn is very likely to excite investors!

NEW IDEAS DON'T ALWAYS WORK, SO HOW DO YOU COPE WITH FAILURE AND GATHER THE COURAGE TO TRY AGAIN?

One of the cornerstones of innovation is to have a high tolerance of failure. If you want to innovate, you’re going to be failing a lot of the time. If you’re not failing, you’re not innovating enough.

You must develop a culture that encourages a certain level of risk-taking and treats failure as an opportunity to learn and start again more informed.

“The greatest teacher, failure is,” Yoda said in The Last Jedi.

If you have a culture that is risk averse and where failure is frowned upon or even punished, you’ll get all your best people drifting towards safe projects, which is the opposite of what you want. You want some of your very best to spend some of their time working on epic transformational moonshots.

Projects that could work out, but which could also fail.

You want to create a culture where everyone is proud to work at the company, where they are involved in decisionmaking, and where they have the freedom and resources to spend some of their time tinkering away on their own ideas

HOW DO YOU CULTIVATE A MINDSET THAT ENCOURAGES UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING WITHIN YOUR ROLE AND IN YOUR DAILY LIFE?

HAVE YOU HAD A MENTOR WHO INFLUENCED YOUR APPROACH TO INNOVATION AND, IF SO, HOW DID THEIR GUIDANCE IMPACT YOUR CAREER?

There’s no innovation without creativity, so you need to start there. Realising that creativity is not just to do with the arts is vital. Creativity is coming up with and acting on original ideas that have value, and that is relevant to all fields. Innovation is capturing financial or social value from implementing creative ideas, which can be in the form of new and improved products or services, or better ways of creating and delivering those products or services.

It’s important to realise that creativity is a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets. If you can get comfortable with failing by reframing it as a learning opportunity, be fine with looking stupid from time to time, and get over your fear of the unknown, your creative confidence and innovation output will be turbo-charged!

People that I’ve worked with over the years, who I’ve spent long hours exploring these topics with, include Eden Shirley from AutoGuru, Baden U'Ren (Class of 2000) and Justin Craig (Class of 1999) from Bond.

A few people I don’t know personally, but who have been great influences on how I approach creativity and innovation are the Dutch creatives Erik Kessels and Tom and David Kelley from IDEO and the Standford d.School.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU OFFER TO ASPIRING PROFESSIONALS AND ENTREPRENEURS WHO ARE EAGER TO MAKE THEIR MARK?

distractions; what you’re really into can become what sets you apart.

If you’re interested in the startup space, you should make it part of your week to listen to podcasts like This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis.

Get in the habit of identifying and thinking about problems your unique set of skills could potentially solve for people.

Spinning up an MVP (minimum viable product) is cheaper and quicker than ever with all the recent tech advances, so small teams can launch something quickly these days.

Be eternally curious, don’t worry about looking stupid, embrace failure along the way and use your creativity as a springboard!

Develop a unique combo of skills and then leverage those to stand out, whether that is working in a company or starting your own.

Don’t let anyone reframe your passions as

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SUPER-SUB HER PASSION IS BUSINESS BUT MADDY STUBBS ENDED UP CAPTAINING OPTUS SPORT’S PR BLITZ AT THE WOMEN’S WORLD CUP

by Riley Evans

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Working so closely with former Matildas was just so special.

To see how far the game has come, along with the change in Australian media and culture in just a few weeks, was amazing

W

the PR strategy. “It was a huge learning curve from agency to in-house,” she says.

Ms Stubbs believes the best part of the tournament was seeing how quickly the game captured the imagination of Australians. “Working closely with former Matildas was just so special,” she says. “The passion and love they have for the game and growing women’s football was incredible to be a part of. Some of our former Matildas used to have to play in their dirty kit from training the day before, and now our current Tillies are playing in front of packed-out stadiums. To see how far the game has now come along and the change in Australian media and culture in just a few weeks was amazing.”

While Ms Stubbs loved being a wheel in the football machine that is Optus Sports, it was now time to take that break she had been craving.“Taking some time off to reflect on the incredible few years that was the accidental start to my career was exactly what I needed to make sure my next move was purposeful for me and impactful for those who will be around me,” she says. It took only a short holiday for another opportunity to present itself and within a week of landing back on Australian soil, energised and ready to take on a new challenge, Ms Stubbs had secured herself a new role.

hen Maddy Stubbs first enrolled in her Bachelor of Business degree in 2018 she had big aspirations and the world at her feet. None of those dreams included working in public relations. She took just one PR class during her time at Bond University and that was only because she and a friend needed to lock in an elective for one of their last semesters. “PR wasn’t on my radar at all, not even in the slightest,” she says.

Ms Stubbs’ passion for business marketing and entrepreneurship had her dreaming of working alongside businesses in brand development and strategic marketing. She had also thought about perhaps one day establishing her own business or brand. She was clearly good at her craft, receiving the Waterhouse Award at graduation, which is handed to a student with the highest GPA in the program. But Covid had other plans. With conversations stalling on her business ambitions, it came as a nice surprise when friend and fellow Bondy Maisie Callcott (Class of 2018) asked if Ms Stubbs would like to join the new SOCIETY Marketing Communications PR branch in Sydney. While it wasn’t exactly what she planned, the opportunity to work with big brands like Woolworths and Kraft Heinz was too good to pass up. “I didn’t know what a media release was or how to even talk to journalists on the phone but my Bond business degree had definitely prepared me in other areas,” she says. “I knew how to be solutions-focused and innovative.”

Ms Stubbs jumped in the deep end and spent the next two and a half years at the Sydney agency, Maddy Stubbs in a souvenir Matildas jersey presented to her by mid-fielder Steph Catley. making her way up to a Senior Consultant role and in 2022 was awarded Mumbrella Best New PR Talent of the Year. The then 23-year-old loved her colleagues, “I’m now embarking on an exciting position as the first the career development and the incredible brands she was able corporate partnerships hire at Earlywork, where I will be helping to promote but again, PR was not her dream and she felt a Aussie tech companies hire better junior sales talent, faster,” calling back to her business roots. So she handed in her notice she says. Earlywork is Australia’s first educational program and planned to have some time off to deliberate on her next training the next generation of tech sales talent, with the likes of move. Ms Stubbs couldn’t have dreamed of the once-in-a-lifetime Docusign, Monday.com, SafetyCulture and Datadog all signing on gig that came knocking on her door just a week later – Optus graduates from the first-class program. “I have to commend the Sport PR Manager for the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023. important ingredient of serendipity for my career to date,” Ms “How on earth do you say no to that?” she says.

Stubbs says. “You never know what accidental opportunities you From there it was straight to work. It was April and the can attract, or impact you can bring to others just by showing tournament started in July, so there was no time to waste. a little bit of vulnerability, open mindedness and enthusiasm.”

“I hit the ground running. In my first week I met with the key leads on the tournament within Optus Sport and helped restructure

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NET WORTH HE DISCOVERED CYBERSPACE AT BOND AND TOOK WEBSITES TO INDIA. NOW HARSH HADA HELPS SOME OF HIS POOREST COMPATRIOTS INTO HIGHER EDUCATION

By Ken Robinson

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A market in Kolkata, India, in the early 2000s.

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wo things caught Harsh Hada’s attention when he first arrived at Bond University in 1995 - one in the digital realm, the other in the physical world. Hailing from Kolkata, a city known for its chaotic energy in a country of 1.4 billion people, the contrast was stark. “It was the basic human interaction, just simple cultural things that left such a huge impact on me,” he says. “While walking to uni, strangers would greet you, ‘Morning mate, evening mate’. India is a very populated country and sometimes you feel like just a number. When you come to Australia, you learn to value human beings.”

As a philanthropist who has helped almost 1000 of his compatriots achieve better lives through education, the intrinsic value of every person is very much central to Mr Hada’s life these days. And it has all been possible because of the other thing he discovered at Bond: the internet.

When I got back home you could just walk into any company, show them what a website was and sign them up

Mr Hada (Class of 1995) was fresh out of high school when he attended a career counselling session with one of Bond’s first Indian alumni, Ravi Lochan Singh (Class of 1990). The company Mr Singh founded in 1991, Global Reach, is now the largest overseas education consulting company in South Asia. “My family wanted me to be a bit more exposed to the world outside and that's how, just after class 12, I came to Australia and Bond,” he says. “I’m very glad I did.”

Mr Hada enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce but quickly became captivated by the emerging internet which in 1995 was used by less than 4 per cent of Australians.

It was the year Amazon went online and Windows 95 was launched. “The internet didn't even have a graphical user interface, but then we started seeing web pages being developed. We actually saw the birth of the internet here,” he says. One of Mr Hada’s

Payal and Harsh Hada at Bond University.

professors, Kuldeep Kumar, who is still teaching at the University, hoped Mr Hada would further his studies at Bond. “He was a very good student,” Professor Kumar says. “I wanted him to stay and do an MBA.” But Mr Hada had other ideas. “I went back to India and started an internet company.”

Mr Hada formed Web Development Company Limited (WDC) with two friends he met at Bond, Rahul Sharma (Class of 1992) and Rahul Todi (Class of 1995). "When I got back home you could just walk into any company, show them what a website was and sign them up," Mr Hada says. “Many of the top 500 companies of India had their first web presence thanks to our company.”

WDC expanded from webpage design to IT services and outsourcing in India. When the Fortune 500 multinational ManpowerGroup acquired WDC in 2012, the company had 3000 staff.

“I saw that among my employees, if they could do some basic programming, they could do anything,” Mr Hada says. “The middle class is now close to 300 million people, but you still have 900 million people who are poor.” Mr Hada got to thinking.

When he sold WDC he had made more money than he could ever have imagined. “(My wife) Payal and I had decided early on that we would not have children. Twenty years into marriage you start feeling that, we don't have children, but we still can make a difference to so many other kids,” Mr Hada says. “We wanted life to mean something beyond our consumption, beyond fancy holidays, cars and houses.

And that’s when we launched HPF.” The Harsh and Payal Hada Foundation began its work in 2010. Since then it has provided higher education scholarships to

950 students, many from families whose monthly income is less than $400. The scholarships are open to all regardless of caste or religion. “Australia taught me that too. I was welcomed here by so many Australian friends. Our trust does not discriminate. That’s not anything great that's basic humanity.”

Among the many success stories, a few stand out. One, the son of a subsistence farmer, is now studying his PhD at Purdue University in the US. Harsh and Payal also beam with pride at the success of another scholarship student, the Muslim daughter of a shoe salesman. “In India, to get into medicine, you have to sit something called a Joint Entrance Examination and every year a few million students will sit for it and 20,000 are admitted into government colleges. We sent her to a place where she could prepare for that entrance examination and sponsored her entire coaching. She got admitted into a good medical college. Although her education costs were negligible, she had to still pay for her boarding and lodging fee. We did that for four years for her. And now she's a gynaecologist.”

Mr Hada reunited with Professor Kumar at on a glorious day in early May, swapping stories about Bond University’s early days.

Professor Kumar still wishes his star student had done that MBA.

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P HI LANTHROPY

Law and legacy DEREK MURPHY LEAVES A LASTING IMPACT

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erek Murphy has enjoyed an extraordinarily successful and varied career. The barrister, banker and company director says an eightyear stretch as Chairman of Bond University’s Clem Jones Research Centre for Regenerative Medicine was particularly important.

“I received a call out of the blue from Emeritus Professor Rob Stable who was the Bond University Vice Chancellor at the time,” Mr Murphy says. “I was just a lawyer and a chairman but there were some highly credentialed ophthalmologists who understood the science and together we prospered. During my time the research developed and great progress was made. I was very proud of the fact that the researchers were getting on and undertaking valuable work. Alliances were built with other universities too.”

Mr Murphy says the experience was a significant insight into the value and importance of universities forming synergetic relationships with industry.

It also provided a significant insight into the power of learning and the importance of supporting education.

“You’re always learning. Learning

is for life. And I think if you’ve been successful in life, then the idea is to return the thanks to the institution that’s made it possible, and so I’ve been able to do that and that’s why I’ve been supportive of Bond and other institutions.”

One of the ways Mr Murphy has given back is through generous financial

Sharing business case studies as a teaching tool allows people to develop new skills and provides an interesting way of teaching.”

Mr Murphy’s connection to Bond University runs deep. His son Julian (Class of 2000) is a Bond University Master's graduate in Information Technology who was the Director of Apple’s App Store across 154 countries before cofounding the Moments of Space meditation app and movement. Mr Murphy’s brother Douglas Murphy KC (Class of 1989) - an internationally renowned barrister and mediator enrolled in a Master of Laws in Bond University Faculty of Law's inaugural year.

Mr Murphy has also enjoyed a long connection to Bond University’s hometown.

He received his secondary education at another iconic Gold Coast educational institution, The Southport School. His experience there offered an insight into the kind of philanthropic work he’d later become immersed in.

“I was quite a timid boy back then, but I had a good time at the school,” he says. “Today of course it’s a wonderful institution and one of the top schools in Australia. I was truly fortunate to be the first old boy to be invited to be chair of the school council.”

Closer alliances between industry, whether they be large or small businesses or start-ups, are critical

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support of the Ivey-Bond case studies collection which sees business case studies authored by Bond University academics published and distributed globally by Ivey Publishing at Canada’s Western University.

“Experience works both ways.

I think in business it’s very important to look into why companies prosper and why companies fail and what are the drivers to make success.

And this is where the experience became particularly formative.

“During my time there we introduced scholarships for Indigenous students,” he says.

“At present there is something like 25 Indigenous boys studying (at TSS) that wouldn't otherwise have enjoyed the benefit of a great education.

Secondly, we also recognised that we had developed as a school for the sons of graziers.

We introduced country boarder scholarships.

We know graziers have a tough time due to drought and floods and everything else. It was an opportunity to say to them, ‘We value your contribution to the nation’.”

Thankfully, Bond University remains firmly fixed on Mr Murphy’s radar. “Bond is a terrific institution and has a lot going for it,” he says.

“It's still young when you compare it with the great universities of the world like Oxford and Cambridge, of course. We have a few hundred years to make up there! But as they say, good and big things grow from little things. Bond University is a wonderful place. I believe in it, and I will continue to support it.”

Left: Derek Murphy.

ORANGE CHAIR INTERVIEW

Derek Murphy joins Catherine Marks Vice President Engagement in the Orange Chair.

Watch the Orange Chair interview here.

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RESEARCH

Ray of hope 3D SCANNERS MAP STUMBLING BLOCKS TO SAFER HOMECOMINGS

by Wayne Hickson

R

evolutionary room-scanning technology borrowed from the construction industry and the distant past is being explored to improve home safety for older people and others with mobility challenges.

Bond University researchers are testing Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanners which, combined with the latest smartphone camera technology, can map rooms and potential hazards in minutes.

It’s a job that is currently performed by occupational therapists who physically visit the household and use a tape measure to record everything from the height of toilets and stairs to the width of shower doors while assessing safety risks.

The Home Alone Study is a collaboration between Bond University’s Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine Professor Susan Brandis who worked for 35 years as an occupational therapist at the Gold Coast Hospital, and construction experts in the Faculty of Society and Design led by Dr Rosemarie Rusch.

Professor Brandis says her greatest frustration as a hospital therapist was having patients come back after preventable falls at home.

“This technology has potential in a range of suburban home settings as well as rural and remote areas to bolster the safety of patients returning home from

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hospital after undergoing procedures such as hip replacements,” Professor Brandis says.

“This is very much about people and anything that keeps people safely in their homes and out of hospitals and aged care facilities has to be a good thing for the nation’s burgeoning healthcare system.

“Various studies tell us there's an increase in mortality rates in people who have experienced a fall because of frailty, reduced muscle mass, neurological conditions and the ageing process.

“The same studies tell us the risk of a post-discharge fall also increases after the hospitalisation of older adults, which can lead to a myriad of other health consequences, and that’s exactly what we have set out to avoid.”

She says the biggest risks to older people losing independence are falls, incontinence and dementia.

“Incontinence and dementia are reasonably manageable, but many falls are preventable.

“And when you factor in the shrinking health workforce in proportion to the ageing population it makes sense to make the most of the nation’s housing stocks by keeping people in their homes.”

Professor Brandis says the current system sees an occupational therapist visiting a client’s home and using

a standardised checklist to assess the hazards and risks and make recommendations such as rails and safety aids.

“This includes looking at the bathroom, bedroom and toilet for example and assessing the person’s interactions with their environment.

“While face-to-face has many benefits, it’s time-consuming and reliant on the availability of the therapists and their ability to travel often long distances to their clients.”

Professor Brandis says the LiDAR system, which had its genesis in 1930s sonar technology, leans on sonar, radar, radio and light waves to produce a three-dimensional image in a series of points that coordinate length, height and depth.

The technology is currently used at Bond in construction, under the Business Information Modelling (BIM) program.

She says applying this technology to a health problem builds on a program of research that started in 2018.

That timeline and asking the question about how telehealth could make life easier in the home two years before the Covid pandemic shows what a visionary pursuit the researchers had embarked on.

“We looked at the question of whether the cameras in smartphones could reliably and accurately map what was needed to boost the in-home

Anything that keeps people safely in their homes and out of hospitals and aged care facilities has to be a good thing for the nation’s burgeoning healthcare system

safety and efficiency of the process, and our findings were all good, however the images did not provide a 3D perspective.”

Professor Brandis says a chance postCovid discussion with a colleague in real estate led her to the virtual open house.

“LiDAR captures things in such detail that you don't have to keep going back.

You can get as much detail as you want in the first instance and then eliminate those parts that you don't need later.”

The research was trialled in person and virtually by volunteer staff from the Faculty of Society and Design in 10

private homes of vastly different designs with volunteers simulating various health conditions.

Professor Brandis says the integrity of the research was always top of mind.

“We have full ethical overview of our research; the risk of using vulnerable people and a novel intervention has influenced our research design.

“Unlike Kevin’s house in Home Alone, we’re out to make sure everything is absolutely safe and there’s not a trap in sight,” she says.

Left: Professor Susan Brandis.

Below: Assessing homes for trip hazards is a time-consuming task that could be done in minutes using LiDAR.

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EV EN T

Topping up media minds at Think Tank INAUGURAL EVENT PEERS INTO EXCITING, UNCERTAIN FUTURE

by Matt Webber

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repare to watch your news on a TV painted on your wall as a stopgap measure before it’s beamed straight into your brain. This was the bold declaration from Professor Jeff Brand as he fired up his ‘futurescope’ to kick off the inaugural Bond University Future of Media Think Tank, immediately capturing the attention of more than 100 industry professionals gathered in the Princeton Room.

Professor Brand, an expert in communication and media, said smartphone capability would multiply exponentially in coming years, driving a revolution in the way we consume news, podcasts, TV series, movies and video games. He expects that by 2033, LED TVs will be painted on, and in 2045 we may have access to surgically implanted devices packing 64 times the computing capacity of today’s iPhone 15.

It could be a bumpy ride though, with a three-year ‘algorithmic war’ of misinformation, deep fakes and malicious news generation on the way, ending with the development of automated misinformation detection.

“In 2029, algorithmic provenance will come of age,” he said. “We’ll look at every stage of media production. It’s this photo taken on this device, at this location that was edited using this tool by this person. It was mashed up using this AI and changed in this way. We’ll have all that certification right on our phone.”

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Associate Professor James Birt then took the audience through a timeline of AI, urging caution and saying it should be a dutiful co-pilot rather than being entrusted with the keys to the jet.

In a panel discussion about the future of storytelling, Chair of the News Corp Australia Editorial Board, Mick Carroll, said the media should embrace new technologies but talked about the need to balance commercial interests with human needs in news reporting. Alongside him, screenwriter, author, pop culture expert and former John Burton Cadetship scholar, Maria Lewis (Class of 2006), spoke of the

importance of the recent screenwriters' dispute in the US. She said the strike over increased studio use of AI scriptwriting had now helped properly define the place and role of writers.

Bond University’s Head of Film, Screen and Creative Media Dr Darren Paul Fisher, also spoke about the strike resolution which

he said was a significant moral and legal victory for creatives. Even so, he thought AI could still be a useful tool if applied to the more mundane tasks attached to creative storytelling. He also urged the audience to exercise a degree of caution by inviting them to remember that ‘cinema was going to be destroyed’ by the introduction of technologies such as TV, VHS and DVD, but weathered all storms regardless.

Twenty-year ABC veteran and Bond University Master of Laws graduate Solua Middleton (Class of 2003) is currently embarking on the Deep Time Australia project, a multimedia telling of 60,000 years of Australian Indigenous history. She said the importance of personal and authentic listening when telling the story of First Nations people would be next to impossible to achieve with artificial intelligence.

Executive Dean of Law at Bond, Professor Nick James presented on Green Sky Thinking, including climate, AI and space litigation.

Drawing upon several contemporary examples, he said climate litigation was increasingly being brought about against corporations and governments by people affected by climate change. He also spoke about the importance of regulating the actions of countries in largely uncontrolled low earth orbit space. Professor James said if international conflicts on Earth extend to hostilities in space, internet, phone and other communications capabilities could be targeted.

Left: Mick Carroll and Maria Lewis.

Right: Alumni of the John Burton Cadetship Scholarship.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Cher McGillivray spoke about the importance of finding mindful purpose while Bond MBA Director and Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Libby Sander discussed the future of hybrid workspaces and their contribution to innovative workplace thinking.

The challenges new technology posed to truth in reporting were canvassed in the day’s second panel discussion comprising Bond’s Associate Professor of Psychology Oliver Baumann, Chief Writer at The Australian Christine Middap, Bond Law Professor William van Caenegem and ABC News Digital Commissioning Editor Danielle Cronin. Ms Middap said that the truth is something that is consistently and quickly open to contest these days and something that has been weaponised, so speaking directly to every single source is becoming increasingly important. “You keep trust by not abusing it,” she said. “Where you can, you explain how it is you came to a decision, and you stay very open about it. And you apologise when you get things wrong.”

The panel concluded that the journalist’s first principles of honesty, and fair and unbiased coverage can only be achieved by working transparently on whatever platform they are presenting their news. Presentations were rounded out

by Bond Assistant Professor of Journalism Rob Layton who shared insights into the world of ‘mojo’, or mobile smartphone journalism, which he says has moved beyond the niche to become an essential skill for any journalist who wants to create visual and audio content.

The occasion also served as an informal reunion for graduates of the John Burton Cadetship Scholarship in Journalism with Mr Burton’s wife, Liz, and daughter, Renae, meeting up with 10 former scholars who attended.

Watch the event wrap here.

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H I STORY

Modular marvels THE FORESTERS ARE A CONTEMPORARY TWIST ON THE HUMBLE BUNGALOWS

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he Bungs’ are back – in muchimproved form. The first students have moved into 68 new ensuite rooms nestled beside the pine forest to the south of the Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine.

The Foresters sit on the site of the former Bungalows which served as student accommodation from 2002 until 2011. The University went back to the future after many students were caught in the Gold Coast’s ongoing rental crisis which has driven demand for on-campus accommodation. A migration boom sparked by the pandemic sent vacancy rates on the Coast below 1 percent in 2023 and rents jumped by as much as 50 percent. With new on-campus accommodation options on the drawing board but years from completion, the University devised a solution: designer modular rooms that were constructed in 100 days by Volo Modular.

The Foresters are a far cry from the Bungalows. University brochures from the era boast of seven bungalows, each with four air-conditioned rooms and 28 beds in total. They might not have been gold medal-standard by the time they were removed but the Bungalows did have a sporting pedigree, having served as athlete accommodation at the 2000 Sydney Olympics before being relocated to the Gold Coast.

It seems the student residents of ‘the Bungs’ were lacking in both vitamin B and sleep. The 2004 Bond University Yearbook features an article titled ‘The Secret Life of Res’ by ‘an anonymous B Blocker’ who describes the residents as chronically late for breakfast:

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“It seems that the level of exhaustion or dependence on the Brasserie grows or wanes according to location on Res. We B Block people are prime offenders but you can't go past the Bungalows for the sleepy-eyed faces on a Saturday afternoon (say, around 5pm). Maybe it's the lack of sunlight over there or something. Or the fact that the walls are so thin anything can keep you up 'til the early hours.” That is no longer the case at The Foresters which is a mini-precinct with a large recreation room, laundry, communal spaces and bike storage.

In the longer term, the University has plans to construct permanent student accommodation on land it owns on Lake Street at Varsity Lakes, adjacent to the campus.

0 '0 s w o l a g n The Bu

s

The rooms that make up The Foresters were built in 100 days and trucked to campus.

Foresters '23

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BOND IES ON THE MOV E

Class of 1990

Class of 1994

Deanna Nott has won the communications category at the 2023 National Women in Defence Awards in Canberra. The award recognises the defence community’s most outstanding woman in the fields of communications, marketing and stakeholder engagement. Ms Nott is the Founder and Managing Director of Wings Public Relations and a RAAF Specialist Reserve Wing Commander. She introduced French robotics leaders Exail to Australia and spearheaded publicity for the Pacific Airshow Gold Coast.

Jennine Tax has been appointed Executive Director, Education for Experience Gold Coast, a new umbrella organisation driving education, tourism, events, arts and culture outcomes for the city. She maintains her role continuing the great work delivered

by Study Gold Coast, promoting the city as a premier education destination. With a background in management consulting at KPMG and senior roles at HSBC and ABN AMRO banks, Ms Tax was honoured as the 2021 Gold Coast Bulletin Woman of the Year in Education.

Class of 2007

Class of 2010

Jessica Mellor has been appointed Chief Executive Officer at The Star Gold Coast.

She previously served as Chief Operating Officer. She is the youngest and first woman to hold these positions at The Star.

In her new role Ms Mellor oversees one of Queensland’s top tourist destinations and a team of over 2500.She also serves as a Director of the Gold Coast Suns and Lifeline Canberra and as Chair of the Gold Coast Regional Advisory Committee for LifeFlight.

Sanchéz (Shay) Graham has been appointed Portfolio Director of Revenue at international hospitality group Accor.

Her new role encompasses four hotels in Accor’s Shakespeare Property Group portfolio. Ms Graham studied a Bachelor of International Hotel and Resort Management with a major in Revenue Management. She has held leadership roles within Accor both internationally and domestically across a range of brands from mid-scale to luxury.

Deanna Nott

Jessica Mellor

SHARE YOUR STORY Have you recently changed roles or want to share some exciting career news? Email your update to alumni@bond.edu.au.

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Jennine Tax

Sanchéz Graham

Class of 1999

Class of 2000

Class of 2004

Goodwill Projects, founded by Mark Power, has won the 2023 Telstra Business Awards in the Building Communities Queensland category. The group coordinates 14 weekend and farmers’ markets across South-East Queensland, including at HOTA on the Gold Coast and the Brisbane City Markets. Mr Power founded Goodwill Projects in 2006 and it has grown to become one of Australia’s largest vendor management companies with up to 1500 micro-businesses trading on any given week.

Justin Gabbani has been appointed Chairman for Lendlease Global Commercial Trust Management, which manages Lendlease Global Commercial REIT (LREIT), the Singapore real estate investment trust with global real estate assets in retail and office space. Mr Gabbani became Chief Executive Officer, Asia, Lendlease in June 2021. He was appointed as a Non-Executive Director of Lendlease Global Commercial Trust Management in October 2021, and Chairman in August 2023. He is based in Singapore.

Matt Pound has been appointed Managing Director of World Table Tennis (WTT) in Singapore. He has helped the International Table Tennis Federation overhaul its operations and create WTT which was launched in 2021 to run the professional global series of table tennis in an arm’s length, commercially-focused company.

The shift resulted in a doubling of revenue compared to the old model and a series of new global events.

Class of 2012

Class of 2016

Class of 2016

Matthew Rendely has been appointed Partner and Co-Lead of the Estate Litigation Practice Group at Canadian law firm Loopstra Nixon LLP. Mr Rendely has successfully represented clients at all levels of court including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was previously a partner at a leading law firm in Toronto.

Mr Rendely was recently ranked by his peers in Best Lawyers’ ‘ones to watch’ and

by Chambers and Partners High Net Worth Guide as an ‘up-and-coming’ lawyer.

Bryan Parsons has taken up a role as a lawyer at the Australian Energy Regulator.

The AER exists to ensure that energy consumers are better off now and in the future and Mr Parsons will be working in the in-house team providing legal support on a variety of matters. Born in South Africa, Mr Parsons has degrees in Law and Biomedical Science. He started his career with a graduate role at MinterEllison in Canberra.

Thomas Dunsmore has recently been appointed the CEO of Torres Strait Kaziw Meta an Indigenous boarding hostel located on Thursday Island catering for children from the outer islands.

Mr Dunsmore, who holds a Diploma of Business and Bachelor of Commerce, has worked as the General Manager of the Australian Boarding Schools Association for the past 12 years, working with schools across the globe.

Mark Power

Matthew Rendely

Justin Gabbani

Bryan Parsons

Matt Pound

Thomas Dunsmore

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GLOBA L NETWO RK

Once a Bondy, always a Bondy SNAPSHOTS FROM OUR ALUMNI CHAPTER EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD

Top left: Philippine Alumni Chapter.

Bottom left: Melbourne Alumni Chapter.

Top right: Japan Alumni Chapter.

Centre: Toronto Alumni Chapter.

Bottom: Brisbane Alumni Chapter.

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Top: New York Alumni Chapter.

Top centre: London Alumni Chapter.

Centre: Gold Coast Alumni Chapter.

Bottom: Sydney Alumni Chapter, City2Surf.

View upcoming alumni events.

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S P ORT

QAFLW - PREMIERS

QAFLW RESERVES - PREMIERS

Totally foursome | 44 |

QFA DIVISION 2 SOUTH RESERVES - PREMIERS

WOMEN'S PREMIER RUGBY - PREMIERS

RUGBY AND AFL CLUBS CLAIM QUARTET OF TITLES IN BREAKTHROUGH SEASON

Watch the full Bond sports wrap here.

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S P ORT

Rugby: Women go back-to-back The Bond University Premier women secured consecutive premierships by defeating the Sunnybank Dragons 15-12 in a nail-biting finish at Ballymore Stadium. Inspirational captain Elisha Godsiff was overjoyed with the fight the Bull Sharks showed in the win.

“That was something pretty special. It was such a hardfought game of pure physicality and speed,” she said. “We knew they were going to lift again and it was just on us to shut them down through the middle which we did well.”

Head coach Lawrence Faifua has been the backbone of the team and someone the squad loves playing for.

“He has had a massive impact on all of us and makes everyone feel like family in this group,” Godsiff said.

The Bull Sharks created history by becoming the first Bond University team to achieve back-to-back titles.

“It is such a massive achievement and something we are very proud of. We fight for each other on the field and we were able to deliver when it mattered most,” Godsiff said.

The men’s Premier team missed out on a Queensland Premier Rugby Grand Final berth after going down to a strong Brothers side 42-17 in the preliminary final.

Above: Tehya Hyssett.

Netball: Dawn of a bright future With one eye fixed firmly on the future, 2023 was a season of rejuvenation for Bond University netball.

Unsurprisingly, the Bull Sharks’ re-entry into the Hart Sapphire Series this year was challenging, but there were plenty of encouraging signs across a fierce year of elite-level competition. The arrival of 17-year-old goal-shooter Kaylin van Greunen as an emerging star was a season highlight. The Queensland and Australia U19 representative was an absolute standout for her team, and to see her win both Bull Shark of the Year and Queensland U19 Players’ Player came as no surprise.

Bond’s Ruby side was left to ponder what might have been when they finished just one win short of a finals spot.

The Bull Sharks Development side fell short of a grand final berth by a single goal in the Elite Premier League competition. The Bull Sharks’ effort at the U18 State Titles was outstanding. Although they finished runners-up in the Grand Final, their undefeated run over four days of hotly contested netball in the lead-up to the decider was a pleasure to witness and underlined Bond’s commitment to development of talented up-and-comers. Kaylin van Greunen, Tehya Hyssett, Ocean Karkare, Elka Macaulay and Dakota Newson were all selected in the Queensland U19 squad off the back of strong performances.

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Celebrations after the Bond women won back-to-back premierships.

AFL: Triple treat of premierships The Bull Sharks became the first club of the QAFLW era to claim seniors and reserves premierships in the same year after defeating Aspley and Coorparoo at Brighton Homes Arena in this year’s Grand Finals. Head coach and Bond Director of AFL Andy Lovell praised the club’s collective effort that took them to the pinnacle.

“There’s been a bit of a mantra around the club: teams win matches but clubs win premierships,” Lovell said.

The seniors emerged victorious 10.6 (66) to Aspley’s 2.5 (17) with the reserves defeating Coorparoo 9.7 (61) to 4.2 (26). The men’s reserves broke through for their maiden premiership and in the process filled the last empty column on the club’s honour board.

They had been the only side not to win a flag in the club’s 13-year history but after two years of heartbreak they lifted the premiership cup with a seven-point victory over minor premiers Coolangatta, with a final score of 7.5 (47) to Coolangatta’s 5.10 (40).

The Bull Sharks QFA seniors fell short of delivering the club a clean sweep of premierships when they went down by 40 points to the Burleigh Bombers.

The 15.6 (96) to 8.8 (56) result was only Bond's third defeat of the season, a bitter pill to swallow given the stakes. Lovell said all players and staff could take pride in the incredible gains made across the whole club in 2023.

The 2023 Club Champion Oliver Burrows-Cheng.

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S P ORT

Game faces It's been a big year for our Bull Sharks.

Scan the QR code below to read the best of Bond's sports coverage.

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Tongan sprinter Babe Antonio Vaitohi, a Bachelor of Sport Management student who hopes to qualify for the Paris Olympics.

Ella Spencer in action for the Bull Sharks in a Sapphire Series match.

Havana Harris in the contest for the ball for the Bull Sharks in a QAFLW match.

Georgia Gray, with ball, makes a break against Sunnybank in a Women’s Premier Rugby match.

Bond Bull Sharks player Zane Nonggorr, the club’s first Wallaby.

Bull Sharks AFL senior men’s captain Wyatt Bacon.

Dressage competitor Lucy Alati, a Bachelor of Sport Management student.

Golfer and Bachelor of International Relations student James Goffman.

Paris Olympics hopeful Flynn Southam.

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S P ORT

Gold Coast Suns to city of light Kerry O'Bryan has already ticked off roles with the Gold Coast Titans and the Gold Coast Suns Academy. Now he’s moving up to the Australian Olympic Team.

O'Bryan (Class of 2010) graduated with a Bachelor of Exercise and Sports Science before going on to work with the Gold Coast’s top sporting clubs as a strength and conditioning coach. It was there that his eyes were opened to a new avenue of work and he returned to Bond to gain a Master of Nutrition and Dietetic Practice in 2016.

“I’ve always had a keen interest in exercise and it was while working (with the Titans and the Suns) that I saw the value of nutrition and realised I wanted to go back to Bond and become a dietitian,” he said. O'Bryan is currently working with the Queensland Academy of Sport where he serves as a performance health practitioner. He was recently called up for the 2024 Paris Olympics where he will be the sports nutrition lead for Australian surfing and BMX freestyle athletes.

“My role will involve working with local food and catering options to provide food for our athletes to perform and recover at their best,” O’Bryan said.

“In the lead-up to Paris we’ll also be working with athletes and educating them on making the most appropriate choices during their time competing for Australia.”

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Aqua de triomphe SWIMMERS HONED FOR PARIS OLYMPICS

by Andrew Hamilton

Every medal draped around Flynn Southam’s neck over the past 12 months is testament that on that day, in that pool, he swam the fastest. He’s ending 2023 with quite a collection.

In early September at the World Aquatics Junior Championships in Israel, Southam collected gold in the 200m freestyle and the 4x100m mixed relay in a world record time, in a team that included Bull Sharks teammate Milla Jansen. He also added silver in the 50m freestyle and the 4x100m freestyle relay and bronze in the 4x200m freestyle relay.

What isn’t acknowledged by a medal but is valued almost as highly by the Bond University swimming coaches is that each race for the 18-year-old is survival of the fittest - both physically and mentally.

It would be difficult to find many swimmers anywhere in the world who have completed the race schedule the first-year Bachelor of Psychology student has undertaken over the past 18 months.

The Hancock Prospecting Swimming Excellence scholar has competed in both age and open division races domestically and on the global stage, claiming gold medals in the 4x100m freestyle relay and mixed 4x100m freestyle relay at the World Championships in Japan earlier this year, three golds at the Birmingham

Commonwealth Games and five medals overall at the World Short Course Championships.

It is all part of a master plan by Bond Swimming coach Chris Mooney to fast-track Southam’s development in an audacious bid for a crack at Olympic glory in Paris next year.

“It has been a tough schedule for Flynn.

He has done a lot of racing and a lot of travel and that is taxing both physically and mentally,” Mooney said.

“We have to be mindful of that and make sure we are constantly looking at ways to keep him fresh.

“But we are working with an athlete who is very driven and who understands that talent alone isn’t enough.”

Jansen is the baby of this team and the 16-year-old showed she could be a star of the future with silver in the 100m freestyle.

“Milla has enormous talent and she is already producing some amazing times, but what we see is a swimmer with a lot of upside,” Mooney said.

“There are skill areas that we have identified as focus points where she can really improve.

“She loves the sport, loves to compete and is such a sponge for information.’’

With breaststroker Gideon Burns also beginning to feature in international finals,

Steffani the secret sauce of success

his first national titles in the 50m butterfly and 50m backstroke.

Bond’s Director of Swimming Kyle Samuelson said Armbruster was eager to get back in the water after a rib injury which had sidelined him from the World Championship trials earlier this year.

“He was very ready to get back out there,” Samuelson said.

“I think two medals and a personal best really showed how ready he was and we couldn’t be prouder of the hard work that got him there.”

Armbruster's Olympic focus is the 100m butterfly and Bond’s swimming staff are determined to further refine his performance in the coming months.

Flynn Southam in the Bond pool.

Bond has a young team that can be a force in Australian swimming for years to come.

It’s also been a breakthrough year for Bachelor of Sport Management student Ben Armbruster.

The 21-year-old sensation reached new career highs on the first leg of the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup in October.

The two-day event held in Berlin featured top athletes from across the globe.

Armbruster claimed gold in the fiercely competitive 50m butterfly and silver in the 100m butterfly with a personal best time of 51.69 seconds, missing out on the gold by just 0.03 seconds.

Armbruster was dubbed a potential Olympian earlier this year after claiming

Steffani Ford will be the secret ingredient for Australian Olympic athletes when they compete in the culinary capital of the world next year.

Ford, a Master of Nutrition and Dietetic Practice graduate (Class of 2015), has been tapped by the Australian Olympic Committee to make sure athletes are healthy and well-prepared for the Paris Games.

“Athletes can be very particular in and around racing so it’s very important to get it just right with their diets,” Ford said.

“Particularly for the kayaking team who are staying in a sub-site, it’s critical that their menus are correctly prepared and kept to the same standard as those athletes staying in the Olympic village.”

Ford landed her dream job as a sports dietitian with the Queensland Academy of Sport after graduating from Bond, working with kayak and triathlon athletes.

She recently returned from a test event in Paris where she helped athletes prepare for the 2024 Olympics.

"My work involves anything from being out on a coaching boat in the mornings, watching the athletes and liaising with their coaches or discussing their needs for the week,” Ford said.

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