Early Years and Background
Stanhope was born in Gundagai, New South Wales. One of nine children of schoolteacher parents, much of his junior education was spent at one-teacher schools in country NSW. He attended Mullumbimby Public School and Bega High School before coming to Canberra to undertake studies at the Australian National University, graduating as a Bachelor of Laws.
Between 1979 and 1987, Stanhope held a range of community roles including:
- President ACT Council for Civil Liberties
- Original co-convener of Racial Respect in the ACT
- President ACT Hospice and Palliative Care Society
- ACT convener of the National Coalition for Gun Control
Between 1987 and 1991, Stanhope was Secretary of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs; and between 1991 and 1993, Deputy administrator and official secretary of Norfolk Island. From 1993 to 1996, Stanhope worked as Senior Adviser and Chief of Staff for the Federal Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, and between 1996 and 1998, advised the then Federal Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley on native title.
Read more about this topic: Jon Stanhope
Famous quotes containing the words early, years and/or background:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)