When Nathan Wright (left) and Geoff Heard met in their first year in Queen’s they didn’t really overlap. It wasn’t until they were Treasurer and President, respectively, of the GC that the fun and games really began.

Geoff

When we turned up at Queen’s, Nathan had gone to school in Phuket and he came in to College with a buzz cut. He was from a very different background from most of us who were from country Victoria. He was exotic in some ways, an unknown entity.

After we’d both been elected on to GC, one of my first memories was poring over Australian Bureau of Statistics numbers in his room in West Wing, trying to dismantle the inflation figures to justify our argument against a fee rise for the following year. That was a strange thing to bond over, ABS statistics, but it grew from there.

He’s a very driven, detail-oriented individual, intelligent, loyal, always up for something. You have a crazy idea and he’s always very encouraging and enthusiastic. That’s been the bedrock of a lot of things that we’ve done in the time since Queen’s.

We jelled because we both have a common interest in trivial things; games, puzzles and so on. One of the key things that solidified the friendship is what we call, ‘Mystery Trip’, which we do with a group of a dozen Wyverns. The concept is everyone contributes a certain amount of money to the organiser, you go to the airport at a certain time, not knowing where you are going, jump on a plane, and spend a week or two wherever.

In 2010, when we were poor uni students, it was a $500 budget and ended up being a road trip around Tassie. Since then it has become a trip to Taiwan or two weeks sailing around the Greek Islands on a hired yacht. It grew and grew. It’s actually had remarkable longevity even as people have partnered up and had kids. That’s a good example of an idea that might sound hair-brained but Nathan is one of those people who is happy to jump on it and embrace it.

In 2012, Nathan organised Mystery Trip to Brunei. He had spent some time growing up on Borneo. One of the things he wanted to do was climb Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in Malaysia and Borneo, which is 4,000+ metres. Of course, we didn’t know where we were going nor the agenda. The way you normally climb Kinabalu is you get to about 3,500 metres above sea level, stay the night in a hut so you can acclimatise to the altitude, then ascend to watch the sun rise the next morning. It’s a long, arduous hike so you do it over two days. Nathan didn’t have time to fit a two-day hike into the agenda so he decided we were going to do it in a single day. But when he went to book it, the national park wouldn’t let him. So, he started calling individual tour guides and wouldn’t stop until he managed to convince one to take us up to the summit in a single day. We in-advisedly stayed at sea level the night before then drove up to the 2,000-metre starting point and walked the rest of the way up the 2,000-metre ascent in a single day. When we were the first hour in, there were guides carrying a body bag down the mountain with a guy who’d passed away the day before. Nonetheless, Nathan was undeterred and off we went, up. We did it, we managed to summit and descend in that one day. There were so many points at which most people would have failed to push on with the plan. It’s only because he’s so tenacious and competitive that we made it – and have the story to tell.

He is an absolute tragic for all the worst ‘90s boy bands you’ve ever heard. We definitely have a departure on this point. Because he grew up in Brunei and the Sultan would only bring in crowd pleasers like Michael Jackson and Backstreet Boys, he grew up listening to all that stuff. Whenever Backstreet Boys are in town, you know where to find him.

Shortly after we left College, I suggested to Nathan we should watch the films that had won the Oscar for best picture since 1990, because undoubtedly there’d be some good films we had never seen. He said, ‘Why stop there? Why don’t we watch them all?’ I said, ‘You know it goes back to the 1920s? There are a lot of films, we might be biting off more than we can chew’. I still remember Nathan’s one liner response to that; he said, ‘I have strong jaws.’ So, over the course of about five years, once a week we sat down and watched all the 90 something best picture movies, all the black and white stuff, terrible movies some of them. Even to this day, we catch up in black tie for Oscars evening with a small group of Wyverns.

In 2012, when I came out, Nathan was one of the first people I told. That was a challenging time and Nathan’s support in that moment really was invaluable. When I asked to catch up after work, he probably thought we were hatching a plan for some kind of new adventure, or game, so the reality was quite different. It was less about what he said, and more about his capacity to listen because for me, it was very much about unbottling things I’d never told anyone, that I’d had inside me for years, and never said anything to anyone about. It was an emotional period but I was very pleased to have him there at the time.

It also helps that my husband, Joe, and his wife, Amy, get along really well, and always have. Nathan was married in 2018 and I was married in 2022 and we spoke at each other’s weddings, so there’s a nice reciprocity to that.

Nathan has a busy life with two children. He founded NW Computing while at Queen’s and is now Chief Technology Officer for Cloud with Orro Group. We go back to Queen’s to host the JCR Trivia Night once a year. We got a call up in about 2014, and thought, ‘This is a great opportunity, what an opening,’ and we slowly revolutionised the trivia night to now be an inter-corridor, Eakins bonanza that we absolutely love getting back to host. This year the freshers pointed out that some of them had only been born after Nathan and I were doing O-Week in 2006, so that was a bit of a reality check.

There are a lot of things I really enjoy doing that I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do if I hadn’t had someone as supportive of them as Nathan. He has in some ways been an enabler, or at least a comrade in arms. There’ve been a lot of good times over a long period of time. He is still quite exotic in some ways; then again, perhaps we all are. 

Nathan

I’ve always greatly respected Geoff’s values and convictions, that’s something that hasn’t changed through time. That dedication, commitment to his friends, is unique. Geoff and I have always been really into trivia, our minds are alarmingly similar. I am very happy to go deep into puzzles and get stuck for hours and hours. Our friendship is definitely a competitive one. On silly things that don’t matter, we will have a chuckle because the only people who realise we are in a competition are us.

During Queen’s life we had plenty of time and little money so Geoff would organise elaborate treasure hunts, puzzles, quizzes or adventures and put an enormous amount of time into them, purely for the joy of his friends. They were so much fun. When I say puzzles they’re not word searches, they’re very elaborate, detailed and clever, because he’s so bright. You will be racking your brain and finally it will come to you and it’s cleverly mixed up in a reference to colours or something. It’s a great feeling when you solve it.

After we moved out of Queen’s, there was one where we all got a couple of jigsaw puzzle pieces in the mailbox. There was 20 of us and we eventually got together and laid the pieces of the puzzle over a grid someone was sent. People were from all over the state and even some interstate so we had to co-ordinate all this. It said the clue was on SBS TV 7pm on a particular date. We went, ‘What?’ A couple of weeks later we turned on the TV and there’s a quiz show and Geoff is on it. It was ‘Letters and Numbers’, and any answers he gave to questions, gave us more clues. It’s one of those things, when you start talking about Geoff, people make that face and say, ‘He does what?’ Then they all say, ‘Why can’t I have a friend like him, he’s incredible.’ That’s Geoff.

I got married six years ago. We haven’t been able to open our wedding present from Geoff yet. It’s a cryptex, like in The Da Vinci Code, a puzzle with rings you open and something is inside. Every year on our anniversary Geoff gives us another clue so now six years later…I don’t know do we solve it at 10 years? Is this a 20-year gig? We don’t know. That is the gel, someone who will go to that amount of effort to give his friends something they will enjoy, that’s so special.

Coming out was a huge thing for him and something I was glad to be a part of. We didn’t have any idea he was gay. We just thought he wasn’t particularly good with the ladies. Then he sat down with me and another friend and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, I’m gay’. It was in the middle of the year and he said if he hadn’t told everyone by the end of the year, then we needed to. He was going to force himself to do it. He said something lovely afterwards. One of the reasons he had for coming out was he saw how happy I was with my now wife, Amy, and he wanted that too. That was pretty nice, and he has that, which is lovely. He is now a Director at Rothschild & Co, providing strategic advice in the natural resources sector but a while ago he moved to Chicago for a year and met Joe, his husband, over there.

Without Geoff, my life would be a lot more boring. We would do fewer fun things, and fun things can be superficially fun but are also such great ways to bond. I have absolute confidence that it’s a friendship for life, there’s no doubt in my mind. I have a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old and I really hope that Geoff and Joe are able to join us on that journey soon. They have been going through surrogacy in Canada and it’s been interesting how difficult that process is for a fantastic couple who are full of love, and will be amazing parents. It’s bloody hard, time consuming and expensive. I wish that he did not have to face that challenge. Geoff copes with it all very rationally. Geoff and I are both similar in that we are very logical, rational people, sometimes to the frustration of our spouses. We don’t give very emotional reactions.

When we were students we talked to the guy who was doing the trivia nights at Queen’s and asked him how long he had been doing it and when he said 15 years we were, ‘Wow, imagine doing it for that long.’ Then a couple of years later we had the opportunity to present the trivia nights and we thought, ‘This is our in’. Now we are getting up to something like that. It’s lovely to come back and do something at Queen’s.

We started the JW Whyte Scholarship (named after the first student club president) quite early on, just after entering the workforce, because Queen’s was so formative for us. We got so much out of College we wanted to give a scholarship that recognised that. It acknowledges leadership and contribution to student life, and the recipient is chosen by the GC. Geoff had the idea more than 10 years ago and I just helped him fund it. It has been a nice thing to have each year. I remember him barely having enough money to cover the scholarship at first. It shows Geoff’s generosity.

It’s great reminiscing about all the adventures. Once we got a puzzle in the mailbox saying we had to meet under the clocks at Flinders Street in black tie at 8am on a Saturday, then a bicycle messenger came up to us and handed us all Metcards and we had to run to catch a train that was leaving in one minute. We were solving a puzzle on the train and had to get off at a stop in wherever and there was a limo sitting there and we guessed it was probably for us. We get there and the limo driver asks if we are such and such, yes, so in we get and there’s bottles of champagne and all these clues to solve so we could tell the limo driver where to go. He took us to different places and we found packages and we were thinking it was great but we didn’t know who had organised it because Geoff had received the invitation as well. He was so excited to come but he had a family thing. Even his mum had said how disappointed Geoff was that he couldn’t go. Why would he make that up? The whole time we are saying, ‘Geoff would love this. This is so sad, we are having such a good time’. It eventually took us to Crown where we were dropped off at the entrance and at the bottom of the staircase was Geoff. He had been chasing the limo around on his push bike the whole way, hiding in the bushes watching to make sure we solved the things we needed to.

That’s why everyone says, ‘I wish I had a friend like Geoff, he’s wonderful, where do I find one of those?’ There’s only one, the world cannot handle more than one.