Griffith University alumni speak about the uni’s impact on their lives
As Griffith University marks its 50th year, high profile former students share their personal journeys and the impact the university had on their life and careers.
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This article was produced in partnership with Griffith University for its 50th anniversary.
Megan Washington is lying on her daybed watching the palm trees sway in the breeze outside her Brisbane home. After a big weekend celebrating her win for best original song at the AACTA Awards and playing a live concert on the Gold Coast, the celebrated singer songwriter is taking time to put her feet up while figuring out what to do next.
With a musical feature film, a stage opera and a few television projects on the boil, there’s a lot cooking.
“We’ve got a pretty full dance card at the moment,” Washington, 39, says. By we, she means her and her filmmaker husband Nick Waterman, with whom she co-wrote the film adaptation of Paul Kelly’s classic hit, How to Make Gravy, featuring her award-winning song, Fine.
The couple co-produced the film through their production company, Speech and Drama Pictures. Adding yet another string to her bow, screenwriting is something Washington hopes to be doing a lot more of down the track.
“Going from song writing to screenwriting is not such a huge shift,” she says. “After 20 years of writing for myself as the voice saying the words that I’m saying, to be able to write for characters and to not have to embody those characters, it’s been very liberating for me creatively.”
Washington credits her time studying a Bachelor of Music at Griffith University’s Queensland Conservatorium for allowing her to build a diverse career in the arts.
“My time at Griffith developing my understanding of structure and form was so meaningful to me because the invisible beats of song writing are the exact same invisible beats of screenwriting… It really became the foundation for everything I’m doing now,” she says.
Over the course of her career, Washington has released five albums, won three ARIA awards and written the music for stage musical The Deb later adapted into a feature film by Rebel Wilson. Recently, she toured with the Tasmanian, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras. After facing her inner-fears and revealing she had a stutter during a TEDx talk in 2014, Washington also went on to voice the role of schoolteacher Calypso in the beloved children’s show Bluey, created by fellow Griffith alumni Joe Brumm.
“I’m immensely proud to be involved in that production… it’s so emotionally nourishing,” she says.
Born in Papua New Guinea, Washington moved to Brisbane with her family as a child. She loved the stage and dreamed of working in musical theatre, but after finishing high school she didn’t believe she was good enough to get into the Conservatorium. Instead, she enrolled in a creative industries degree elsewhere. After her piano teacher encouraged her to audition for “the Con” the following year, she soon found herself with a letter of offer to the prestigious institute.
“I found the world music classes, the really intensive music theory, and the culture and community in the jazz department really inspiring. By the second year I was locking myself in those womb-like practice rooms up on the jazz floor, and I would just stay in there for hours and hours and hours, just writing and writing and writing. I just remember how deeply immersed in the world of music I was, and also the amazing friendships and relationships that I made there,” she says.
To this day Washington still gets singing lessons from the institute’s esteemed vocal teacher, Irene Bartlett, who also taught her when she was enrolled as a student.
“I’m still very connected to Griffith and I see Irene as often as I can because I always sing 80 per cent better when I’ve seen her… I’m still enjoying the benefits of my time there,” she says.
KARA COOK
For Kara Cook, the secret to a happy and successful life isn’t wealth, status, power or fame.
It’s living a life pursuing your values.
For Cook, 39, integrity, trust and justice are at the top of that list.
“If I’m ticking those boxes, I feel really happy and content and comfortable with the decisions that I make,” she says.
In February, Cook was announced as the Labor candidate for the Federal seat of Bonner in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs.
Growing up in Yeppoon in Central Queensland, she had no intention of entering a career in politics. Instead, she dreamed of combining her two passions – for law and sailing – to become a lawyer in the navy. But studying law wasn’t an option at her local university, so she enrolled in a business degree instead.
It was only after meeting a young man at the local pub one night and a conversation about their shared passion to study law that Cook decided to apply for a law and business degree at Griffith University on the Gold Coast.
She got in, married that boy named Joshua Creamer, and although the navy thing never quite worked out, the rest certainly did.
“I always had it in my head that law was a pathway to a career where I felt like I would be able to help other people,” she says. “My time at Griffith was wonderful. Its really strong focus on social justice is what drew me to it and from the moment I started it was clear I made the right decision.”
After completing her degree, Cook went on to become principal solicitor of the Women’s Legal Service Queensland and vice president of the Queensland Law Society. She also opened Australia’s first law firm specialising in domestic violence, Cook Legal, to bridge the gap between legal aid and private practice by offering advice and representation at fixed prices.
Then, in 2018, she found a new calling in politics, becoming the Brisbane councillor for Morningside and later Labor deputy leader.
“I guess I always wondered if there was more power in the tent or outside the tent,” she says.
“You can advocate on issues from the outside, which I have done throughout my career on domestic violence and women’s issues,and I saw politics as kind of the next step … I guess I saw politics as a way of trying to help as many people as I could in a way that was on a much bigger scale than the individual advocacy that I had been doing. That was why I went in.”
During her time in council, Cook initiated the city’s first Domestic and Family Violence strategy. She considers it one of her greatest achievements and hopes to continue being a driving force for good whatever her future.
JOSHUA CREAMER
As a child, Joshua Creamer was more likely to be found reading a newspaper than comics, books or anything else.
“I had an interest in law, politics, social justice and Indigenous issues as a kid. I loved reading the paper and understanding what was going on in the world,” Creamer, 43, says.
Combining his interests and experiences growing up with the wisdom passed down from his mother, Sandra, that it only takes one person to make an important change in this world, Creamer decided to study law at Griffith University.
Today, he is Queensland’s leading native title and human rights barrister and one of a handful of First Nations barristers in the country.
“Particularly being Indigenous, I knew there were important issues out there where I could affect change, and a law degree was really important in that,” he says.
As a young Indigenous boy growing up in Mount Isa, Creamer didn’t know any lawyers or barristers. Members of his family worked in the mines and he figured eventually, he would too. But after his mum moved their family to Yeppoon to escape the domestic violence they experienced at the hands of his stepfather, Creamer put his head in the books hoping to one day help others.
Creamer treasures his university days studying law at Griffith on the Gold Coast.
“I enjoyed university because of the independence and because of the focus Griffith Law School has on being a changemaker in the world and being aware of rights issues and social justice. I really found a home at Griffith,” he says.
Creamer’s most high-profile cases include Australia’s largest class action settlement involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders over stolen wages and a payout and apology to Palm Island residents from Queensland Police Service and the state of Queensland.
Most recently he was chair of the Truth Telling and Healing Inquiry, which was abruptly shut down by the new Crisafulli government.
Having had time to process the shock, Creamer is philosophical about the turn of events and remains hopeful for the future.
“Aboriginal people have a real resilience. We have our ups and downs and our challenges but there will always be an effort and there will always be an importance in capturing our history … Whether it’s through that inquiry or something different,it will come up again. And whether it’s my generation or my kids’ generation, they’ll do the work to bring that to the surface,” he says.
Helping the next generation is something Creamer is passionate about. Together with his wife and fellow Griffith alumni Kara Cook, with whom he has three children, he established the Excellence in Law scholarship at Griffith to encourage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to study law and increase the number of First Nations barristers practising at the Queensland Bar. Creamer is also on the Griffith Council and chair of its Elders and First Peoples Knowledge Holders Advisory Board.
“I’m still highly engaged with the university and bringing that Indigenous perspective to some of those leadership roles has been really important,” he says.
ANDREW FRASER
Andrew Fraser can still remember scraping the “$1500 or nearest offer” sticker off the windscreen of his first car. He didn’t care that the 1982 red Ford Cortina was a bomb.
All that mattered was that it would take him wherever he needed to go.
As he drove the 1000km from his country home town of Proserpine to Brisbane to start the next chapter of his life as a university student, he couldn’t imagine what the future might hold.
“Like nearly every other 17-year-old in the world, did I really know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life? No,” Fraser, 48, says.
It was only after nabbing one of three hardback copies of The Good Universities Guide at his local newsagent that Fraser decided to study commerce and law at Griffith.
Now he’s the head honcho, the Chancellor himself, and the first alumnus to hold the position.
“More than anyone or anything, it was Griffith that determined the arc of my adult life. For me, the experience of studying was not just what I learnt, but who I met and how I learnt was really determinative to everything that happened to me from there,” he says.
After graduating with first class honours and winning the University Medal, Fraser soon entered politics. He was treasurer of Queensland for Labor from 2007 to 2012 and became one of the state’s youngest deputy premiers the day after he turned 35. Along with his chancellor role, which he began in 2022, he is now also chair of the Australian Retirement Trust, Orange Sky Australia and Motorsport Australia and a director with the Brisbane Broncos.
Thinking back to when Griffith University first opened its doors at its small campus tucked away in the Toohey Forest at Nathan 50 years ago to where it is now, with additional campuses at the Gold Coast, Logan and South Bank, Fraser can hardly believe how far it has come.
When Griffith’s new city campus opens at the heritage-listed Treasury Building in 2027, housing Griffith’s business, information technology and law schools, Fraser says its central location will help bring people together for real-world interactions and learning.
“The purchase of the Treasury Building is not only an awesome outcome for a really important building in our city,” he says.The interiors will be designed to suit the modern university experience where students learn both on campus and online.
“The physical way of teaching and learning has changed over time,” Fraser says. “That’s always been true and it’s especially true in this era, but the value of group work and the value of face-to-face interaction and of human communication is important.’’
Fraser has one big piece of advice for today’s university students.
“Go to the campus. It’s the place to meet people, it’s the place to work. It’s the place where the action of a university happens. As someone who met lifelong friends as a university student, there are so many benefits of being there. You don’t have to go to everything, but make sure you take the opportunity to be at the campus.”
After all, a first car is a lot more fun when you’ve got friends along for the ride.
This article was produced in partnership with Griffith University for its 50th anniversary.
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