Presentation of the 2024 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship Awards

Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Selection Committee Chair, Associate Professor Richard Roylance and CEO, Dr Rachael Coghlan; Churchill Fellows Association Queensland, Chair, Mrs Maura Solley; Original 1966 Fellow, Mr Edmund Burke; distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen.

I begin by acknowledging the Original Custodians of the lands around Brisbane; the Turrbal and Jagera people, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and to all First Nations people here today.

It is a great pleasure for Graeme and I to welcome you all here to Government House this afternoon to congratulate and honour the 2024 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship Awardees.

This select group is being honoured for their ongoing achievements with the opportunity to go abroad in the name of research, to then share their findings with the Australian community.

I thank you, the 2024 Fellows, for your willingness to make this contribution. You follow a long and proud tradition stretching back to 1966 and exemplified by the presence here today of Mr Edmund Burke, a Churchill Fellow from that very first cohort.

I would also like to pay particular tribute to the Churchill Fellows Association of Queensland and the selection committee for your promotion of the values of the Trust and upholding the vision of this great travelling fellowship.

The moment the name Winston Churchill is mentioned, there is an almost uncontrollable urge to deepen the voice and quote one of his many very quotable lines. I’m not sure I can pull that off – so today I will restrict myself to just two of Churchill’s words delivered in his famous ‘Finest Hour’ speech in the House of Commons in 1940.

In that most famous of speeches, he used the phrase ‘sunlit uplands’ a mildly poetic expression perhaps channelling his undoubted talent as a painter in water colours of such scenes.

This image of a serene and tranquil meadow in happier times was his imagining; his visualisation, of peace and the future. While his poetic self, pictured those ‘sunlit uplands’, his deeply pragmatic self, pictured a future in the hands of those who would seek to create much better times for all.

The Churchill Fellowship Awards exemplify all that Churchill himself believed and strived for.

As I read each of the eight citations, I could not help but reflect on those ‘sunlit uplands’ – a mix of the poetic and pragmatic. He would be proud indeed; to think almost 60 years after his death, his name is still linked with a commitment to a better future. And he would be just as proud of the eight we have come to congratulate today.

And so to the 2024 Fellows, I know I am joined by members of the Trust, your friends, family and supporters in wishing you every success in the journey that lies ahead. Thank you.