POSTCARDS

Kieran Jairath OS (2009)

Indigenous Protected Area Coordinator,
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, Central Australia

Following school, I moved to Melbourne to study politics and international relations which led me to working on environmental campaigns – important work, but mostly office-based. After a few years, I realised it wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted.

My love for wild environments, geography and ecology took me down different paths – working on permaculture farms, conducting citizen-science surveys in old-growth forests, and eventually completing postgraduate studies in ecology. Those experiences led me to central Australia.

I now work as an Indigenous Protected Area Coordinator on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands – 100,000 square kilometres of indigenous freehold land rich in culture and biodiversity. Based in the remote community of Kalka, near the tri-state border of SA, WA and the NT, the nearest town of Alice Springs is a nine-hour drive away. I work alongside Anangu rangers, combining western science with traditional ecological knowledge – a reciprocal partnership, ngapartji-ngapartji, where everyone benefits from working together.

People often ask what an average day looks like – there isn’t one! Some weeks we’re camping in the mountains conducting endangered-species translocations or flying by helicopter to remote cultural sites; others we’re tracking rare frogs, controlling feral predators, carrying out prescribed burns or contributing to research papers.

Sydney Grammar School taught me the value of curiosity and deep, critical thought. Out here, those foundational skills help me navigate different knowledge and cultural systems whilst building on the common ground in our shared goal of environmental stewardship.

Rob Lesnie (OS 1970)

Mechanical Engineer,
Vancouver, Canada

I was a solid “C” pupil at Grammar, enjoying maths, physics and history. If that doesn’t scream Mechanical Engineering, I don’t know what does. I applied to both University of Sydney and University of New South Wales and got into the latter. Upon graduation, I headed off to Europe to travel. After a year I landed a job with Firestone Tyre & Rubber Co in London. A year working in the Engineering department showed no rewarding path ahead, this being pre-Thatcher Britain, so I decided on Canada. I got work in the oilpatch with Schlumberger, an oil services multinational, as a field engineer for six years and then Sperry Sun Well Services in their Directional Drilling department. I was a field technical specialist, heading up a crew at drill rigs steering the wellbore as required, directional or horizontal.

I have spent my entire career in the oil sector and have thoroughly enjoyed it, both in Canada and the United States. Wearing a hardhat and overalls suited me perfectly, and I enjoyed the hands-on in spite of the cold Canadian winters.

One of Grammar’s strengths is that it is not a one-size-fits-all education. It encourages the less academically gifted to try and find a niche.

I’m married, retired and live in Vancouver, BC with a cruising sailboat that requires all my engineering skills to maintain.

Itsi Weinstock with Justin Cheung (OS 2011) and Sholto Douglas (OS 2013) in San Francisco

Itsi Weinstock (OS 2013)

Machine Learning Engineer,
San Francisco, USA

Life took me down a technical and scientific path, and I look back at my time at Grammar with appreciation for its humanistic emphasis. I feel lucky to have been exposed to so much: languages, history, Air Force cadets, and especially the School’s wonderful Music department.

After Grammar, I pursued undergraduate and masters degrees in mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne. I had a fantastic time and became highly involved in student life – running several student societies, leading a student political organisation, and participating in various arts and music groups.

I graduated just as the world shut down with the coronavirus pandemic, but things have been interesting. I spent time in high-frequency trading, started a nonprofit social network for free travel and hosting, and moved to the US to work in computer vision for bushfire detection. Now I’m a technical leader applying machine learning to plant-based food research – work I hope will one day help us remove factory farming from our food systems.

I live in San Francisco, where technology and the world move incredibly fast. I try to see old friends whenever I come back home and invariably meet other Grammar boys wherever I live. I still play the violin in orchestras and small groups whenever I can. There’s so much to be gained in life from being exposed to many ideas and experiences, and I’m glad that started so early for me at school.

Kunal Dhawan (OS 2004)

SEO/GEO and AI Specialist,
London, United Kingdom

After graduating from Grammar in 2004, I took a couple of years to explore what path I wanted to pursue. I had opportunities to join graduate programs at large firms but that route never quite resonated with me. During that time, I discovered Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – then a relatively new field – and decided to explore that properly. I spent my twenties working in Sydney including roles at News Corp Australia and Qantas before deciding to broaden my horizons overseas.

In 2016, I moved to London on a Youth Mobility Visa intending to stay only a few months to ‘test the waters’. Nine years later, I’m still here. What began as a short experiment has turned into a life I hadn’t imagined at 18. London has offered both professional growth – leading SEO strategy at Tes Global, Times Higher Education and most recently, Workday – and a gateway to Europe. Travelling to places like the Dolomites, Trolltunga and the Soča Valley has been one of the great perks of living abroad.

Looking back, the soft skills shaped during my Grammar years – curiosity, resilience and thoroughness (helped along by those half-yearly and yearly examinations) – have been a constant anchor. They’ve guided me through moving countries, building a career in a fast-changing industry and navigating life far from home.

Grammar gave me the mindset, discipline and ambition to build a meaningful and interesting life throughout my twenties and thirties – far beyond anything I could have imagined as a pupil.

Andrew Smith (OS 1970)

Teacher,
Gold Coast, Queensland

I arrived at College Street amid the smog and grime of 1960s inner-city Sydney after a semi-feral childhood roaming the paddocks and bush at Dural and enduring occasional civilising visits to my grandparents’ home at Vaucluse. Paterson’s “Clancy” comes to mind.

Sydney Grammar School opened new worlds to me and expanded the ones I already inhabited. The Grammar secular doctrine of “all faiths and none” allowed me, in the bustle of that amazing marketplace of ideas, to discover my Christian faith.

At Bathurst I trained as a primary school teacher and met my wife, Wendy. Our first placements were in the western suburbs of Sydney. There, and in other sometimes grim schools where we later taught, many children did not share the advantages we had known. Opening doors to new rooms of life for such children has been an extraordinary privilege.

After Sydney, our journey took us to small schools mainly in regional Australia. Blackheath was followed by Launceston in Tasmania where I taught a class of six children, who had long lost contact with the peloton: their prospects were bleak. A colleague and I taught all these children to read. We then moved to Toowoomba and later to Orange where Wendy’s family farm was located.

Along my journey, I also worked as a welder and a gardener and for a time inhabited the same places as some of the families I taught, learning the realities which shaped their lives.

In the second half of my career, I became a teacher-librarian here on the Gold Coast. These were halcyon years. In two schools I had the privilege of building libraries where “library” was a verb, not a noun. My older brother’s act of marching me up to the Grammar Library decades earlier had opened an extraordinary new world of learning. Inspiring and equipping children to learn has been my lifelong calling.

Stewart Lammin (OS 1979)

CEO for Flinders Port Holdings,
Adelaide, South Australia

I believe I was one of the few boys in a year of 180 pupils not to apply for university, this leading me straight into the workplace and a career in transport and logistics. Taking pity on me, my first job was working for my father as a shipbroker. The early 70s and early 80s was a time of significant investment in mining, so I found myself specialising in the coal and iron ore sector, establishing a fascination for shipping.

This fascination led me to a career with Hamburg-Sud, a German shipowner, moving between our Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane offices managing commercial operations, heading up the various business units. I then headed to Adelaide and joined Flinders Ports, and what was intended to be a 4-year stint has turned into a 20-year career. I am now the CEO of Flinders Port Holdings, one of the largest companies in South Australia. We operate businesses across supply chains where we own and operate seven shipping ports, the Adelaide Container Terminal, warehousing and distribution, property and land development and a hydrographic survey business. Beyond this we also invest across other sectors impacting our business, including carbon farming and holding an equity stake in an AI software business. I am extremely fortunate to be part of a growing diversified organisation.

My years at Grammar, from St Ives through to College Street, remain some of my fondest memories, and importantly I continue to cherish the connections that I have with my Grammar friends.