Early Life
Beazley was born in Perth, Western Australia. His father, Kim Beazley Snr, was the Labor MP for Fremantle from 1945 to 1977 and education minister in the Whitlam Government (1972–75). His mother, Betty Judge, is a former Australian athletics champion and record-holder.
Beazley contracted polio as a child, at the age of six.
Beazley was educated at Hollywood Senior High School and later at the University of Western Australia and Balliol College, Oxford (having been a 1973 Rhodes Scholar), where he gained a Master of Philosophy degree. At Oxford, he befriended Tony Blair, who would become a British prime minister, and Geoff Gallop, later to be a premier of Western Australia. After he returned to Australia, he tutored and lectured in politics at Perth's Murdoch University, recruited to Labor's right-wing faction by Graham Richardson and John Ducker, before being elected MP for the seat of Swan at the 1980 election.
Read more about this topic: Kim Beazley
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)