Above:St Thomas Aquinas CollegeBy Sarah Schwager
BUDDING writer Jack Fox has not looked back since winning his first major writing competition five years ago.
The year 11 Garfield student won the national grand final of the Nestle Write Around Australia competition in 2000 for his story ‘At the Back of Burke and Wills’.
The prize included a computer and a flight to Brisbane.
Jack attends St Thomas Aquinas College, a small school in Tynong with only three boys and seven girls in his year 11 class.
While his hectic VCE schedule this year has not left him much time to pursue his hobby, he has still managed to enter a few competitions.
“I like writing fiction but I don’t get much time because of my curriculum. It’s mostly essays,” he said.
His father, Francis, is an English teacher at St Thomas, and was Jack’s teacher from year 7 to 10.
Jack said he thinks his writing skills were passed down from his father.
“I think I inherited it from my dad. He used to be a bit of a writer,” he said.
Earlier this year, Jack wrote a short story called ‘Examination Day’ where a boy was taken in by the government because he was too intelligent.
“I also entered an essay competition about Australian identity in the country. I wrote about Woolworths using overseas products and big farms to process fruit and vegetables,” he said.
Jack has also scooped up prizes in the Greater Dandenong writing competition, in which he won $25 for coming equal first, and won the regional final in a Mitre 10 national competition, and was flown to Sydney for a week.
Jack said he was not quite sure why he had had so much writing success.
“Maybe I’m just a bit lucky. I like fiction writing. I find it really enjoyable and I’m pretty good at English.”
But Jack said he is focusing most of his energy now on getting into university.
“I’d like to do law at Melbourne University but you need something like a 99.95,” he said. “I’d have to work really hard.”
He is hoping he may be able to get a scholarship, as his school is underrepresented at the university, which means he may be able to get in with a lower score.
Jack said he was keen on practising criminal law after doing work experience with a lawyer in Melbourne last year.
But he said he wouldn’t let his creative writing fall to the side.
He is thinking of entering a short story competition in which writers must write about sporting heroes or special moments.
“I want to write a story about a blind man climbing Mount Everest but not reveal he is blind or climbing the mountain until the end,” he said.
Jack will also use his other language skills to get him through VCE.
He used to be in the school’s successful debating team and his French skills landed him a spot as one of five children who went to France at the end of 2003 with the school principal.
Jack said he was also thinking of submitting his story ‘At the Back of Burke and Wills’ to publishers.
