12 November 1998, St Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne, Australia

Justice Cummins, Professor Crommelin, faculty staff, guests, graduating students and last but not least, people who just rooted up their Equity exam and will be back again next year.

Let me start by saying that as an alumni speaker, I feel I have an underlying obligation to be boring. After all, I am if nothing else a traditionalist, and figure that if it was good enough for my year to sit through a meandering fifteen minute anecdote about an amusing water cooler incident in 1963, it’s good enough for you guys.

The year was 1963. I was 9 years from being born. There was this water cooler. It contained water. The water was wet and cold. When applied to people nearby the water could make people wet and cold. People got wet … and cold.

That’s not quite word perfect in the sense that there are about eight and a half thousand of them missing, but you get the idea. What I’m trying to say is that except for some wonderful, inspiring exceptions, all of whom have shown up to the dinner tonight, old people are irrelevant and boring.

One of the things I wish people had told me when I finished my degree is that until I actually received my degree certificate, I was a graduand. Given the short period of life spent as a graduand, I think it’s important at least to know that you are one. If only to use the word graduand as often as possible in social situations.

‘Are you a student?’

‘No, I’m a graduand.’

‘A graduand?’

‘Yes, a graduand.’

If you haven’t been punched in the face by this point, go on to explain that graduand is the gerund adjective form of graduate, and means ‘about to graduate’. This should put the question of whether or not you get punched in the face beyond any doubt.

I won’t actually express an opinion as to whether you should invest 60-odd dollars in attending your graduation or whether you should wait for your days as a graduand to expire by post. What I will express an opinion on is whether or not you should buy the video on sale afterwards. Don’t buy the video. The video is seriously, seriously slow. It opens well with a wide shot which does a reasonable job of capturing Wilson Hall in all its vinyled glory, but then hits some problems, failing to move from that wide shot for two and half hours. The centrepiece of the film is undoubtedly the stairs up to the stage, as about three hundred people, thrown together because they’re names fall in the same half of the alphabet, trudge up and down these stairs.

I was actually tempted to grab a copy of the video, just for the sort of fun I could have with it should I ever have kids in future years:

‘Dad, can we get a video’

‘Yeah, no worries. Why don’t we watch Graduation 95 again.’

‘Awww Dad!’

Although it’s not my habit to tell the end of movies, I will say that in the tense last moments of ‘Graduation 95’, the Zeds do get to graduate.

I’ve decided to perform somewhat of a community service tonight, and share with you a story from my first week as an articled clerk at Minter Ellison. I’m doing so because if things are looking a bit desperate in those first few days in March next year, you might be able to look back at this and say to yourself ‘well at least I haven’t attempted to impersonate a statutory authority’.

It happened like this. I was about six days into articles when a solicitor asked me to find out whether two properties registered in identical names were in fact owned by the same person. I asked how I should do this, and she told me to ‘use my initiative’. This was her first big mistake.

I decided that I would call both residences and listen to the voices at the end of the phone. If the voices were the same, I figured that I could conclude the same person owned the properties. Stage one went well. I got an answering machine, and after ringing it seven times, figured I had a good handle on what voice number one sounded like.

Stage two went less well. Whereas many people might have pretended to be a radio disc jockey or a wrong number, I decided that the way to go would be to pretend to be from the Australian Electoral Commission, and conduct an impromptu survey on postal voting at the recent council elections.

‘Hi, I’m Tony Wilson,’ I said.

I’ve since learned from friends in the espionage game, that when involved in a covert operation, it is unusual for someone to give his or her real name.

‘Yeah’ he replied.

‘Sir I was wondering if you would mind answering a few questions in relation to postal voting at the recent council elections.’

‘OK, if it’s quick.’ he said.

‘Well sir, could you start by telling me what electorate you belong to’.

He paused for a moment or two.

‘Mate, if you were really from the Australian Electoral Commission wouldn’t you know that?

It was my turn to pause.

‘Yes, I suppose I would’

He then hung up, and I realised that amidst my bungling, I’d not even managed to work out if his voice was the same as the one on the answering machine. An hour or so later, the slow moving cogs of the Wilson brain had cranked over, and I decided to actually call the Australian Electoral Commission myself to work out whether the name in question was duplicated on the electoral roll. I made the call, and was on hold at the Commission when my secretary walked into my office,

‘The Australian Electoral Commission is on line 2,’ she said.

‘No, I have the Australian Electoral Commission on line 1, I replied.

Once we determined that the Australian Electoral Commission was on both line 2 and line 1, I realised I was in some significant trouble. I hung up from my hold music to face some music of a different kind.

‘Hello, are you Tony Wilson,’

I explained that I was.

‘Mr Wilson, we’ve received a complaint from a gentleman who says that you have recently attempted to impersonate an officer of the Australian Electoral Commission. Is that true?’

There was no point lying, just as there’d been no point in impersonating a statutory authority in the first place.

‘Nooo.’

Ten minutes later, on my sixth day of articles, I found myself choking back tears and telling the whole story to my supervising partner. I even suffered the embarrassment of having to write the whole everything down in a memo. Still a lesson was learned that day, and in the two years that followed, there was a tacit understanding between the partners that I was not under any circumstances to be called upon to use my initiative again.

By August of last year I knew that I wasn’t going to cope with a lifetime of being a solicitor in a big firm. To borrow an analogy from Forrest Gump’s mother, life was indeed turning out to be a box of chocolates, but the pricks had only remembered to include the Turkish Delights. I reflected upon my first eighteen months at Minters, and realised that the standout moment had been mobilising thirteen angry articled clerks to smash up a photocopier with a sledge-hammer for the annual mid-year video. I had to face facts. The law was not for me. My calling was elsewhere.

I initially thought it might have lain in smashing up other large inanimate objects, so I spent August and the early part of September walking around the streets at night with a sledge-hammer. But then I re-watched the mid-year video, and decided that what had made me happy was the process of making it. Selecting camera angles. Choosing music. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was a film-maker trapped in a Nino Cerruti suit, and that the sooner I found some tight black T-shirts and began experimenting with facial hair, the sooner I could start sitting around in cafés calling myself a film-maker.

By September 1997, I was calling myself a film-maker. By October, I decided that it was about time to borrow a camera and actually film something. Race Around the World applications were due around then, and Rita Zammit, a Minters colleague recommended I make a film about the coach of her son’s under-7 soccer team. The coach’s name was Paolo, he was Italian and couldn’t speak a word of English. He therefore coached his six-year-old charges through an interpreter, driving them with the zeal of a man with his sights set on a World Cup. Despite the fact many of the boys couldn’t read, they had to sit through blackboard sessions where Paolo explained tactics. The players’ diets were monitored, with Paolo adamant that the boys should have ‘tea and dry-biscuits at least two hours before the game and nothing else’. One boy was berated for staying up too late the night before watching TV.

Needless to say, the boys were hopeless, and got thumped week in, week out. It was pure gold.

As I watched all this unfold before me, Rita, who was translating, asked what I would do if I was selected as a racer on the back of her story. ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to Rome,’ I said. Rita and I are currently in discussion as to what I could have possibly meant by ‘I’ll buy you a ticket to Rome’. Rita is of the opinion that I meant that I would buy her a ticket to Rome, whereas I’m taking a less literal approach, and am arguing that although she may have thought I meant Rome, I did in fact mean Bayswater. The battle is pretty much ongoing, and the latest update is that Rita wants to know that if I did mean Bayswater, why the hell hasn’t she seen a ticket to Bayswater either. She may have a point.

Once my application video was submitted, I slipped into a state that can only be described as Race obsession. My files were given a well-deserved Christmas break, and I became the second least productive member of the legal profession in the world, behind only Ally McBeal.

It was announced on the radio that at exactly 5.30 on December 19th, the 36 people who were still in contention would be contacted and given an interview time. That day I left work early, because if the call didn’t come, I wanted to be able to peacefully pass away in my own bed. Once home, I passed a solid hour rubbing steel wool slowly over the surface of a griller, staring into the metal in the hope it might magically reveal my future, praying that the phone would ring. And then at 5.30, with the griller looking as clean as it has ever looked, it rang.

When I look back now I feel a bit sorry for Don - after all he was just asking about renting a room we’d advertised. Poor Lauren, who also rang about the room at 5.43 didn’t fare much better, and on hanging up from her I collapsed on the couch, opened a beer, and commenced watching my application film one last time. And then, barely before Paolo had uttered his first profanity, the phone was ringing again. This time it was Polly, beautiful Polly who I’ve never met before or since, who offered me an interview, and an eight in 36 chance to race around the world.

My interview went well, and on February 6th I was one of 13 selected for the four-week finalist course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. It was a harrowing four weeks - a bit like a summer clerkship on speed. The thirteen of us were pushed together 16 hours per day, and nobody wanted to be the one in the group ‘who couldn’t get along with the others’. So we all became best friends, but best friends with a twist, in the sense that we also wouldn’t have minded if a couple of the other 12 keeled over and died.

There were some sickening moments in those four weeks. The worst was perhaps when I realised that I was the only one of the thirteen who didn’t own a CD called ‘The Rebirth of Cool Volume 5’. The very fact there was a volume 5 meant that cool had probably been reborn for some time, but they just hadn’t published the birth notice in the Law Institute Journal. I spent the first week feeling like I was standing on the edge of a very happening dance-floor, quietly sipping a beer, waiting for the DJ to play something by Bonnie Tyler.

Still, it turned out that the selection panel (or the jury as they called themselves) were looking for diversity, and when they asked me in my final interview why they should pick me, I said they should pick me to represent footballers, young professionals and everyone who didn’t own ‘The Rebirth of Cool Volume 5’.

It must have worked, because on March 13, Friday the 13th, I was picked as a racer.

My brother asked me yesterday why law students would want to hear a speech at the valedictory dinner from somebody who is no longer a lawyer. I explained to him that they didn’t, that nobody ever wants to hear a speech, and that these functions work best if everyone just drinks beer and sleaze dances. But as I’m already up here, and have the opportunity to inflict further pain on those of you who have needed to go to the toilet for more than an hour, I do want to leave you with three pieces of advice:

The first relates to Lord Wilberforce’s ‘but for’ test. You should use it freely and enthusiastically. For with his deceptively simple ‘but for’ test, his worship gave us a special gift. After all, but for the ‘but for’ test, how would we ever be able to tell when stuff is causing stuff?

Secondly, you don’t owe it to anybody to be miserable. Many of you will love the law, some of you won’t. I was always worried that if I quit being a solicitor, I’d feel I’d wasted seven years of my life. The truth is that this is a fabulous degree, and when people find out you have one they think you can do all sorts of things. So if you wake up one morning feeling miserable about your job, do what I did, which was whinge for about 18 months, then spend 6 months talking very seriously about getting out and doing something, and then finally throw every ounce of energy into something that’s about as likely as winning Tattslotto.

The truth is that I was extraordinarily lucky, but the point still holds - don’t sit around waiting for things to get better, because sometimes they just don’t. To continue the box of chocolates analogy, whilst life doesn’t always have to serve up something off the top shelf at Haig’s, it’s time to act if you’ve let things slip below the quality of, say, a family-sized block of ‘Snack’.

My third piece of advice relates to leaving university. As graduands who are soon to be graduates, you now have an obligation to ram very long, very boring stories down the throats of anyone under eighteen. Repeat after me, these were ‘the best days of your lives’. And remember, the story should not have a beginning, a middle or an end, and should not be in any way relevant to your audience.

As a good case in point, I am going to go out tonight with a tribute to a lecturer from my university days, who I’d like to say helped change my life, but can’t, because he just didn’t. When we first encountered him in 1992, he always taught barefoot, but then in 1993 he fell in love with a psychiatrist and started wearing suits. He was also famous for making every law student in our year pay $50 cash for a case book, written by his good self, consisting of High Court decisions handed down before 1980. He was a legend. He is a legend. The man’s name is Mr Fred Ellinghaus, and the very mention of that name makes me want to sing.