Beyond Grammar's Gates

BGS Old Boy Alan Wu ’01 has used his Speech Day address to encourage students to consider their good fortune and seek out ways in which they can make society fairer.

“Life isn’t fair, but we can work to make it fairer,” he said, adding that “blindness to our own advantages is often accompanied by a blindness to the disadvantages of others.”

BGS Speech Day, held on Wednesday 16 November 2022, attracted a capacity audience of students, parents and staff to the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC).

Wu, a lawyer and community sector board member, was one of several distinguished speakers which also included Chairman of the Board of Trustees John Humphrey, Headmaster Anthony Micallef and School Captain Hamish Moss.

“An education from this place means there’s virtually no limit to your journeys,” Wu said. “What a gift to look ahead and see almost boundless opportunity.”

In the two decades since he graduated from BGS, Wu – a gay man and son of Chinese immigrants – has been a tireless champion for inclusion.

After recently retiring as the longest-serving director of Oxfam Australia, Wu now serves as chair of Australia’s largest youthrun international development organisation, Oaktree. He is also a director of social justice organisations Democracy in Colour and the Victorian Pride Centre.

Rather than focus on his considerable achievements, Wu reflected on the people and circumstances that enabled him to succeed.

In a thought-provoking speech, he invited the boys to consider the “big and changing world beyond Grammar’s gates”.

“Over the years we spend at Grammar – figuratively and literally at the top of the hill – it is too easy to slip into thinking that we are entitled to the advantages an education here provides and reinforces,” he said.

“But we are not deserving, more than anyone else, of the strokes of good luck and circumstance that will allow us to learn and to work hard and to navigate the world in ways that others simply cannot.

“Instead, we should regard these advantages as bestowing an obligation on us, those most able to influence our society’s story.

“A duty to give life to the solidarity that arises when we reflect on the luck of parents and patronage. To further the successes and remedy the failures of those who’ve come before. To replenish the frontlines of progress in the struggles that define a generation.

“And to conceive of this responsibility not as one of charity but one of justice.”