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:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)