Padua College boasts famous names and quiet achievers among its alumni. The school has dozens of accomplished alumni and many more yet to make their mark on the world.
Here we celebrate some of the most notable men who have graced the school and given back.
The list features some of Queensland’s best rugby league and Australian rules players, actors and dancers, medical pioneers as well as successful and controversial businessmen.
See who made the full list here:
OTHER SCHOOL ALUMNI LISTS
CHURCHIE (ANGLICAN CHURCH GRAMMAR SCHOOL)
Paul Vautin
Paul Vautin has been a fixture on Australian televisions for 40 years. Whether as a hard running back rower for Brisbane Wests or the Manly Sea Eagles in the 1979s and 80s, through to his NRL commentary on Channel 9 from the 90s to today.
‘Fatty’, as he is affectionately known, burst onto the rugby league scene in 1977 as an 18-year-old playing for Wests Brisbane before he was signed to play for Manly in the NSW Rugby League. He went on to play more than 200 games for the Sea Eagles, 22 State of Origin games for Queensland and 13 for Australia.
After his playing retirement in 1991, Vautin signed as a commentator with Channel 9 before becoming one of the first hosts of the Footy Show, a role he kept until 2017.
Vautin famously coached the 1995 Queensland State of Origin team to victory, despite the team being without most of their star players who had signed to play for the rebel Super League competition.
John Willsteed
There aren’t too many musicians who can say they have played on one of Australia’s most iconic albums, won multiple Australian Film Institute Awards and work as a university lecturer. But John Willsteed can.
Between 1987 and 1989 John Willsteed played bass for Brisbane band The Go-Betweens, most notably on their iconic album 16 Lovers Lane. He toured with the band when they supported REM but separated from the band at the end of the tour.
After The Go-Betweens, Willsteed played for other bands including working with fellow Brisbane legend, The Saints’s Ed Kuepper.
Willsteed studied Sound at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School before working on films, TV and documentaries. He won AFI sound design awards for his work on Vietnam Nurses, The Beat Manifesto and Rare Chicken Rescue.
In 2000 Willsteed began teaching at Griffith University and then Bond University. He now teaches Music Discipline at the Queensland University of Technology and wrote his PhD on Brisbane’s punk and post-punk scenes.
Daniel Gaudiello
For 12 years Daniel Gaudiello was one of Australia’s top ballet dancers. Between 2004 and 2016 Gaudiello danced for The Australian Ballet.
Gaudiello started dance lessons at the age of six and studied at the Johnny Young Talent School and Promenade Dance Studio. He attended the Australian Ballet School and studied on exchange at the National Ballet School of Canada and School of American Ballet.
From 2007 he danced as a soloist for the prestigious ballet company. The same year he won the Telstra Ballet Dancer Award and was a guest artist with the English National Ballet.
From 2010 Gaudiello was the principal artist for The Australian Ballet until he retired as a in March 2016 and has danced as a guest artist for the Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2016 and 2017.
Eddy Groves
For a time the company Eddy Groves founded and ran was one of the biggest childcare providers in the world.
Groves was born in Durban, South Africa in 1966, his family lived in Canada until they settled in Australia in 1970. After leaving Padua College, Groves studied business but quit deciding he wanted to work in business rather than learn about it.
He worked as a bank clerk and as a milkman. He eventually loaned money from his father-in-law and began a milk distribution company, Quantum Food Service, which would go on to become Queensland’s biggest milk distributor.
In 1988, Groves and his then-wife Le Neve founded ABC Learning with the first location in Ashgrove. By 2005 there were 697 ABC Learning centres throughout Australia and New Zealand with plans to grow to nearly 1000 centres.
ABC Learning would buy the third biggest American childcare operator, Learning Care Group in 2005 and then the second biggest, La Petite Academy in 2006. At the same time the company purchased one of the UK’s biggest providers, Busy Bees Group.
The company ran the Australia Department of Defence childcare facilities, and for a time owned the Brisbane Bullet’s basketball team.
But in 2008 the company was placed into voluntary liquidation and eventually into receivership as it was unable to service its debts. The company was wound up in 2010 and 570 centres were taken over by Goodstart.
Craig Steven Wright
Craig Wright has been declared either the genius who invented bitcoin, or a “brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did”.
A computer scientist who graduated Padua College in 1987, Wright worked as an adjunct academic and researcher at Charles Sturt University where he worked on his PhD.
He worked in IT for various companies including Malcolm Turnbull’s OzEmail and the Australian Secutiries Exchange. He has claimed he designed the architecture for the first ever online casino – Lasseter’s Online, based out of Alice Sprince.
In 2015 investigations from Gizmodo and Wired claimed Wright may have been the man who invented bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Hours after Wired published their investigation the Australian Federal Police raided two of Wright’s properties in Sydney as part of an Australian Tax Office investigation.
Wright came forward to claim he was bitcoin’s creator but cryptocurrency investigations have maintained Wright’s claim was part of elaborate hoax. Wright has since publicly said bitcoin’s creator was a group effort but maintained he was involved.
Gerry Mapstone
After studying at Padua College, Gerry Mapstone was one of a number of students who served in the Vietnam War. A helicopter gunner and crewman, he flew on Iroquois helicopters during the war.
But it was when he got home that his real achievements were made working with other veterans, especially those in the ACT.
He became a member of Veterans Line, an inaugural member of the ACT Chief Minister’s Veterans’ Advisory Council, a representative on the National Ex-Service Round Table on Aged Care and a member of the Dark and Stormie veterans support group at the Canberra Hospital.
He served many roles for the Vietnam Veterans and Veterans Federation Australia ACT branch, including president, vice-president, senior vice-president and volunteer pension officer and advocate.
He was awarded an Order of Australia in 2017 for his services to veterans and their families.
Dane Carlaw
Dane Carlaw’s success in rugby league began with his days at Padua College. In 1997, while at the school he played for the Australian Schoolboys team. Carlaw played 181 games for the Brisbane Broncos and was named their rookie of the year in 2000.
In his second year he played for Queensland and went on the 2001 Kangaroo tour of Great Britain. In 2002 Carlaw scored a key try for Queensland in State of Origin, crossing with just 42 seconds left in the game to tie the match at 18-18 and level the series. As Queensland had won the previous year, they retained the trophy.
Carlaw won premierships with the Broncos in 2000, his rookie year, and 2006. After the 2007 season he moved to France to play for the Catalans Dragons. He went on to play 81 games for the Super League club. He returned to the Broncos in 2011 for a final season. He played a key role in Wynnum Manly’s back-to-back Queensland Cup premierships in 2011 and 2012.
After football Carlaw joined the Queensland Fire Service.
Frank DePasquale
In the 1980s Frank DePasquale’s Quality Foods Services sold food to school tuckshops. Over the next three decades the company, which he ran with Glen Bound, expanded into one of Queensland’s biggest food and drink distributors.
Starting in 1988 Quality Food Services began selling “Dinkum Dog Hot Dogs” before expanding into chicken burgers and lasagne to tuck shops. But 1998 the company had expanded to about 20 products, and merged with Tuckshop Warehouse. The merged company sold about 2000 food lines to 400 schools. In 2004 they bought Arquilla Imports, an importer they had previously leased freezer space from.
By 2017 Quality Food Services had acquired or merged with other food services and expanded away from just schools. The company is now key to the distribution of food and drinks across south east Queensland.
David Shillington
At his peak David Shillington was one of the best forwards playing in the NRL. After being schooled at Padua College and playing junior league for Brisbane Brothers he moved to NSW in 2005 to play for the Sydney Roosters.
Between 2005 and 2008 he played 73 games for the Roosters before he signed a four-year deal to move to the Canberra Raiders. While playing in Canberra he debuted for Queensland in State of Origin and was selected as part of the 2009 Australian squad for the Four Nations tournament.
In 2010 Shillington was awarded the Mal Meninga Medal and the Raiders’s best player of the year.
Shillington moved back to Queensland in 2016, signing with the Gold Coast Titans. He retired in 2017 due to ongoing injuries.
Chris Mitchell
For many, turning down a dentistry scholarship to work in journalism would be a mistake. But Chris Mitchell was destined to be a newspaper man. Mitchell started as a 17-year-old cadet at the now defunct Brisbane paper The Telegraph in 1973. He worked at the Townsville Bulletin, the Daily Telegraph and Australian Financial Review before joining the Australian in 1984.
In 1992 Mitchell was appointed an editor of The Australian before he become the editor-in-chief of Queensland Newspapers, including the Courier Mail, in 1995.
He returned to The Australian in 2002 as the editor-in-chief, a position he held until he retired in December 2015.
Mitchell continues to write opinion columns for The Australian to this day.
Oskar Baker
Melbourne Demons midfielder Oscar Baker’s viral moment did not come from a great goal or a controversy, but from a speech before his debut. Baker debut during the 2019 AFL season against West Coast and it was his dad who handed him his guernsey. It came just two years after Baker’s mother Trudie passed away from cancer.
Baker wears a black arm band every game as a reminder of his mum, who he promised he would play AFL football.
He also overcame significant injury to play for Melbourne, injuring his hamstring in 2018 and then injuring it again during rehab. He went on to play nine games for Melbourne in 2019.
Damien Garvey
Damien Garvey is one of Australian TV’s most recognisable faces.
He was a regular face on McLeod’s Daughters and Sea Patrol as well as appearing in episodes of Water Rats and Medivac. Between 2008 and 2010 appeared in East of Everything and Underbelly: The Golden Mile, a role for which he won the AACTA Award for Best Guest or Supporting Actor.
Before working as an actor Garvey he was the lead singer for the band The Tellers who released two albums.
He’s also starred in a number of Australian movies including Daybreakers and Bleeding Steel with Jackie Chan.
Darren Walters
Darren Walters is one of Australia’s leading heart surgeons. The director of cardiology at The Prince Charles Hospital, he has been a pioneer using structural interventions during heart surgery in Australia.
He has been pivotal in bringing new procedures to Australian hospitals. He worked as a clinical and research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Prof Walters has previously been The Prince Charles and the Royal Brisbane Hospital executive director.
Prof Walters was erroneously suspended from the Prince Charles Hospital after allegations of corrupt conduct were made against him. He was suspended after a report claimed he engaged in corrupt conduct, a claim the report author’s admitted “involved an error of law and a denial of procedural fairness”.
Professor Walters is also senior lecturer in medicine at the University of Queensland medical school.
Harris Andrews
In a sport still dominated by players from the southern states, it isn’t often that a Brisbane boy gets to hold a leadership position in the Brisbane team.
Harris Andrews was schools at Padua College and played junior football and Aspley Football Club from the age of five. He was a standout player from a young age, being placed in the Brisbane Lions development academy as a teenager.
In 2013 he was the leading U18 NEAFL goal kicker, with 80 goals in just 17 games. In 2014 the Lions selected Andrews with the 61st pick in the draft. In May 2018 Andrews was appointed Lions vice-captain.
Jamie Young
Padua has a long history of producing elite sportsman, but not many who play for England instead of Australia.
Jamie Young played goalkeeper for the Padua First XI before moving to England in 2002 to play professional football for Reading. Although he was not able to break into the first team he played 20 games on, loan for Rushden and Diamands before signing with Wycombe Wanderers in 2006.
While in England he played eight games for the English U18, U19 and U20 teams.
In 2010 he was signed as goalkeeper cover for Aldershot Town and established himself as the first choice keeper. He ended up playing 124 games for Aldershot Town. In 2014 Young returned to Brisbane and signed to play with the Roar. In 2017-18 he was named the A-League Goalkeeper of the Year. He was named the Roar’s player of the year in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
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