The Australian Story feature which recently aired showed many people who have contributed to the Inspire story. There were two other individuals in particular whose contributions have been absolutely critical but whose role was not touched upon – Daniel Petre and Jono Nicholas. Without either of them ReachOut, and for that matter Inspire, would simply not exist today and they need to be accorded due credit for the critical roles they have both played.
Back in 1994, when I was working for Prime Minister Keating on the Creative Nation Multimedia Policy piece, we called in Michael Rennie and David Harrington who were both working at McKinsey and Daniel Petre who was then head of Microsoft Australia. Michael and David I had known for a couple of years but I hadn’t meant Daniel before. A former boss of mine Stephen Martin, who was to become Speaker of the House, had met Daniel in the United States and urged me to link up with him when he got to Australia.
So with Michael, David, Daniel and the PM we set about crafting a set of initiatives that put the internet and its social possibilities well and truly on the public policy agenda. My contribution to the policy outcomes was to bring these guys into the meeting – together with the PM they formulated the policies. Following this meeting Daniel arranged for Bill Gates to meet with the PM when Gates visited in early 1995. I also met Gates briefly at a breakfast Daniel had arranged and I was surprised and struck by the warmth Gates exuded. Daniel predicted that Gates would give away most of his money – a long time before he in fact did.
That was the beginning of my friendship with Daniel. Then later in August that year I found myself in my bedroom in Canberra joining with 30 other people from around the world on the newly established Microsoft Network. As a way of garnering interest in this new medium they had involved well known people and on this day it happened to be Deepak Chopra. So when I posted my question along the lines of “shouldn’t we be thinking about the Internet in terms of its social potential?” I was blown away when it drew an immediate affirmative response from Deepak Chopra. It was this that led me to call Daniel and express my amazement at the power of the technology. By this point in time Daniel had become familiar with the story of my cousin’s suicide back in 1992 and we shared a concern about the escalating youth suicide rates which were being given prominent coverage in the media. It was Daniel who then suggested that I should use the Internet to do something about youth suicide in Australia and asked that I write to him in his role as head of Microsoft requesting assistance. I did and from that I received a grant of $10,000 which set us on our way. So I set about the work, got some additional grants from Microsoft and was introduced by Daniel to Lintas Online the team who built our first prototype.
Not too long after that on one of my stays with Michael Rennie down in Kangaroo Valley Michael had given me a copy of Steve Biddulph’s book Manhood. I was so taken by Steve’s book that I bought many copies and gave it away to friends including Daniel not knowing he would become one of my biggest personal backers and Inspire’s most generous supporters.
Around this time it also became clear that I couldn’t continue working on the ReachOut project as a sole operator and in a conversation with Michael Rennie and Paul Gilding again at Michael’s place in Kangaroo Valley Michael suggested we establish a charitable foundation. I subsequently approached a school mate and former Foreign Affairs colleague John Denton who had just started working at the law firm Corrs (he is now their CEO) and he arranged for Corrs to provide their legal services to establish Inspire and have been amazing supporters ever since. John also very kindly arranged for Inspire to receive extensive pro bono legal services from Latham & Watkins in the US and A&L Goodbody in Ireland.
In early 1996 I got an email from Daniel asking whether I would consider working with him Graeme Galt, Rob Olver, and Steve Biddulph and become the Founding Editor for an internet site on men’s issues – Manhood Online. As it turned out, my wife Catherine had been offered a position to establish the Sydney office of IDP Education Australia whom she had been working with in Thailand and then in Canberra. So in Easter 1996 we picked up sticks with Lucy 20 months old and headed to Sydney.
I continued to work away at Manhood Online and wrote a piece dealing with the abuse I had encountered at boarding school but my real passion was around ReachOut. In November 1996 we had formally established the foundation (initially as “the New Australia Foundation” but that’s another story) and shortly thereafter Alexandra Yuille joined Michael, Paul and me as the founding directors – all of whom were to make very significant financial contributions. We had started pursuing government funding but without much luck. Fortunately another good friend and fellow Melb Uni law grad Nicole Feeley had become Chief of Staff to the new Prime Minister John Howard and it was through Nicole’s early support that we got a meeting with Health Minister Michael Wooldridge and in July 1997 our first government grant. I then stopped working on the Manhood Online project and devoted myself fulltime to getting ReachOut established.
From the back office of our house in Leichhardt, with government funding coming our way we set about building the ReachOut service and had the good fortune to be recipients of the 1997 Triple J Real Appeal which enabled us to develop the young people’s component of the website – something the Government didn’t feel comfortable supporting at the time. One of the very first people we employed on the team was Jono Nicholas who had been recommended to me by Dr John Howard – one of our first mental health advisers and another great supporter of Inspire.
Jono was just finishing up a thesis on suicide among gay youth for his psychology degree. He wore his hair in a pony tail and barely looked twenty years old. Shortly thereafter we rented a dingy apartment/office 100 metres from our home and above a real estate agent in Parramatta Rd – when we left it became a brothel. Both my home and our office were directly under the flight path - karmic pay back for writing the speech for the Prime Minister opening the Third Runway at Sydney Airport.
In the early stages, ReachOut was very much a grief project on my part. I had these ideas about what we needed to do for young people but it was Jono who stressed the need for us to build it with young people. It was by deferring to him and a number of others who understood this critical distinction that we launched a prototype of ReachOut.com in late 1997 followed by an official launch by The Hon Warwick Smith – another great Inspire supporter – in March 1998. Jono led the way in developing our youth engagement program which I believe is the secret sauce to ReachOut’s success. In his quiet unassuming way he built the bedrock for how we were to deliver our service in the years to come.
A couple of years later I was about to head off on an extended retreat and the issue came up of who should be in charge in my absence. Our Directors of what thankfully by then had become the “inspire Foundation” – goodbye NAF – urged me to put in place the person I felt most capable of becoming the next CEO and I chose Jono much to the shock and consternation of staff. Jono did the job and did it well. Over the many years we have been operating in the midst of the ups and downs Jono has been a constant. He’s called me on things when no one else would and provided the driving force behind our work. He was instrumental in bringing on board Dr Jane Burns who has been another key leader at Inspire.
And as I was off having meetings with Rupert Murdoch and others in the US Jono was following up on Irish interest in establishing ReachOut over there. From 1995 to 1999 Ireland and Australia had pretty well the same suicide rates but from 2000 onwards Australia’s continued to decline strongly whereas in Ireland the rate flattened out. I was largely intent on pursuing the American expansion and felt Ireland, while important, was not our first priority but things continued to fall into place on the Irish front. Jono was the one who worked away developing the business plan and bringing me in to do as he calls it “the honcho thing” – securing our first tranche of funding and getting the Inspire Ireland Foundation established. Jono then generously moved his young family to Ireland for the second half of 2009 to get the Irish team up and running which he did incredibly well and I flew in for the launch of ReachOut Ireland at the end of that year.
In May this year, when Kerry Graham stepped down as CEO of Inspire in Australia after three years of dedicated service, Jono became our CEO and was voted in unanimously by the Inspire Australia board. His appointment as CEO is due recognition of the central role he has played all along and I know that he is better equipped to lead Inspire Australia going forward than I would be.
There are many others who have been key players in the Inspire story be it Marie Bashir and Vicki Forbes with us from the beginning, to Carolyn Sullivan who made the Irish introduction and scored a husband along the way, to our esteemed Chairman Mark Mentha and his fellow directors, to Geoff Handbury, to Julie White, to Brian Wilson, to Suzi Carp, to Mark Willcocks, to Mark Carnegie, to Ian Darling, to Julian Tertini and our other major donors, to the fabulous Sophie Gemmell, to the extraordinary and highly talented Youth Ambassadors to the many other great people who have worked for Inspire over the years and those who make up Inspire today. And to our many corporate partners from Microsoft at the start to Macquarie Group who enable our foray into the United States.
So for any generous comments that might come my way or the way of those featured in the Australian Story piece they should apply equally to Daniel and Jono and to them both I say a heart-felt thank you. And thank you to everyone else who is part of the big Inspire story.
