“There is very little that any of us achieve by ourselves, almost everything is about the team.”
Whether in his personal or professional life, this is the focus of Professor Peter Coaldrake AO.
Professor Coaldrake ended 2025 on a particularly high note, receiving the University of Queensland’s highest honour, an honorary doctorate.
Receiving this was not only a lovely honour for him, but showed just how achieving the future you want never needs to be held back if you live in a regional area, considering he came from Aramac and went to boarding school in Charters Towers.
Peter said it was fair to say that the early portents for an academic career were not obvious, because he got accepted to university with the minimum score required for entry and had a pedestrian undergraduate record.
“It was while working full-time at the meatworks in Townsville, while also ostensibly studying fulltime at James Cook University that things changed,” he said.
“While I had meandered a bit as a young man, I still had a need to have a job and this was the perfect option.
“One day my foreman at the meatworks offered me a better job on the wire machine, one that was simpler yet paid better, on the basis he understood that I could read and write and help my fellow workers.
“That for me, was when the penny dropped, I suddenly realised that education could open doors and my outlook changed overnight.
“Over my time in education, I have had many connections and friends with UQ vice chancellors and senior colleagues over the years, finding that QUT, Griffith University and UQ may have been competitors for local students, but in so many ways we worked really well together, particularly when lobbying federal and state ministers.
Since then, Peter has realised the power of education and the doors it can open, receiving two prestigious Fulbright Awards that allowed him to study further overseas.
Peter has also been the vice-chancellor of QUT from 2003-2017, where he and the team around him led the transformation of QUT into a more confident and impactful institution.
In 2022, Professor Coaldrake released Let the Sunshine In, the landmark Review of Culture and Accountability in the Queensland Public Sector, also known as the ‘Coaldrake Review’.
He was also appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2011 for distinguished service to higher education and was named as a Queensland Great in 2017.
During his career, Peter has found during his time at universities that it is about team work, treating people well and building alliances, while also supporting those around you.
Although he said that as a young senior manager in government for Wayne Goss, he also learnt very quickly about what real teamwork involved.
“In this role, I learnt a lot of openness and transparency as Wayne Goss lead a very disciplined government, but I still learnt the key benefits of a university degree and the importance of having that base of knowledge.
“I tried to apply those lessons when I returned to the university sector where I was fortunate enough later to lead QUT.
“Those lessons were about seeking to build on the foundation left by a great predecessor, developing ambitious plans and working to build an open team environment.
“The experience in government certainly taught me to accept that mistakes are made along the way, and the important thing is to learn from them.
“More generally, to be relaxed about criticism.
“At QUT we did everything we could to build a sense of team at all levels and dissolve the artificial boundary lines between the academic and professional staff particularly in the way we provided support for students and their learning.
“Hopefully all these things have helped in other roles I have undertaken over the years.
“It also has been a real privilege to work outside higher education over recent years, for example, chairing the Board of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre for eight years.
“Again, everything was about teamwork and partnerships, including the excitement of being part of developing a major new theatre, the Glasshouse Theatre, which will be opened next year, and the opportunity to work with and gain the confidence of inspirational philanthropists, most notably Tim Fairfax.
“Others can judge this, but hopefully my legacy will be around building the performance of organisations by motivating people and encouraging openness of culture.
“We seem presently to live in a period in which encouraging openness is on the wane in too many places.
“Yet that is the very thing the community wants from our governments and, indeed, our universities.”
As he received his doctorate, Peter was reminded of the transformational impact a university degree can have on a person’s life, because he has seen it first hand.
“We are lucky in our modern world to have these places of knowledge providing an opportunity and seeking to help provide for their students future.
“We are seeing knowledge shared that allows students to discriminate between factually based information and the somewhat chaos of some of the information in the outside world.
“We are definitely already seeing a great need in our workforce in the area of education and health and thankfully we are also appreciating that both education and training is valuable and the variety of educational institutions including TAFE can provide a complimentary role to each other.”
