It was only after Julia Gillard invited him to review the funding of Australia’s schools in 2010 that David Gonski realised how much education had transformed his own life. “I remember sitting with Ken Boston and, I suspect, Kathryn Greiner, in a subcommittee we were planning. And it suddenly hit me – it was like a bolt out of the blue – that my father was educationally disadvantaged,” Gonski recalls almost a decade later. “I hadn’t thought that through before because my dad was a brain surgeon. And so I started to talk to my mother – my father was already dead – and it all came to me so clearly.”
David Gonski’s grandparents were dirt-poor migrants from eastern Europe, who arrived in South Africa with little money and even less English. Their son, Gonski’s father, was an extremely bright child, but it was only the assistance of philanthropic scholarships that enabled him to continue studies beyond school, eventually completing a degree in medicine. When David was still a boy, his parents left South Africa for Australia, where he would rise to become one of the country’s leading businessmen, a famed networker among Sydney’s rich and powerful, and a noted patron of the arts and philanthropist in his own right.
