Jack Fuller
2010 Victorian Rhodes Scholar
Science/Arts/Environments graduate Jack Fuller, 24, is the receipient of the Victorian Rhodes Scholarship for further study at Oxford University in 2010.
Rhodes Scholarships are awarded annually by competetive application to young people between the age of 18 and 25 who show high intellectual and academic ability as well as an interest and involvement in the community. Recipients also demonstrate leadership qualities and sporting achievement. There are nine scholarships given annually, one for each of the six states and three national scholaships.
Mr Fuller, who is currently a Project Leader with the progressive public-policy think tank Per Capita, is hoping to study a Master of Philosophy degree in International Relations at Oxford.
Mr Fuller’s particular interest is the intersection between environmental politics and international relations. Having majored in Neuroscience, he is also fascinated by the way in which institutions shape cultures of behaviour, as part of understanding their role in governing human-environment interactions.
“My interest in environmental politics grew out of my love of nature, which I owe to my parents,” he says. “I spent most of my childhood outdoors in Brisbane, camping and sailing, and visiting forests in Malaysia.”
After his mother also taught him to garden, his interest developed into a passion for biology and evolution. “My later studies in neuroscience were partly motivated by developing a worldview in which humans were part of the natural environment.”
Motivated by an interest in German politics and the Greens movement, Mr Fuller spent a year on exchange in Germany in 2003, where he became fluent in German. He also lived in East Timor during 2006, where he worked with a local NGO building sustainable gardens, and becoming fluent in Tetum.
“I lived in the districts, without newspapers, where politics occupied people on a very different scale.”
Mr Fuller joined a local soccer team, which was a uniting force in the community, playing in the rain dodging chickens and buffalo. By mid year however, East Timor was in crisis. Mr Fuller was initially caught up in the fighting but was saved by the Australian Defence Force.
“This gave me a new respect for the military and after a month I returned to Timor where I helped kids in an orphanage building a community garden.”
Mr Fuller says his experiences in East Timor gave him an “acute appreciation of the value of our inheritance in Australia and a sense of custodianship of our legal, political and military institutions, as well as our natural systems.”
“I would hope to bring back from Oxford an improved political judgement, a familiarity with the axes of debate in international politics, and an understanding of environmental politics connected with more established concerns in International Relations like security, economics, and justice."
Congratulating the new Rhodes Scholars on their awards, Victorian Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee Professor James Angus, who is Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, says both are outstanding young Australians who are sure to make their mark on the nation and the world.
“All the applicants the Committee interviewed had a wonderful sense of the privileged life we lead here in Australia and the responsibility to make a contribution locally, nationally and globally,” he said. “It is really encouraging to see young people with such a balanced, mature attitude to work, scholarship, the arts, community and their own physical well-being."
Jack Fuller’s interests and ambitions are certainly appropriate to the times, and the challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation in the future will need the attention of our best young minds. I wish him well as he travels to Oxford next year."
More information
More information about the Rhodes Trust, Scholarships and notable Scholars is at: www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk