OLD GUILDFORDIANS
Paul Murray
Journalist and Media Personality
Old Guildfordian
of the Year 2015
With a long and outstanding career in
broadcasting and journalism, Paul Murray
(St 1963-1967) has built an impressive
reputation for intriguing articles and
hard-hitting interviews, including those of
former Prime Minister John Howard and
movie star John Travolta. Paul’s outstanding
achievements were acknowledged at the Old
Guildfordians’ Annual Dinner, on 10 October
2015, when he was recognised as the 2015
Old Guildfordian of the Year.
Paul, a second generation Old Guildfordian,
feels tremendous gratitude for the family
sacrifices that made his connection with
Guildford Grammar School possible. His
maternal grandmother, Dorothy, met his
grandfather, Keith, in 1913 while she
was working as a graduate teacher in a
one-teacher school at Lake Hinds, 20-odd
kilometres west of Wongan Hills. Later
Keith, a farmer training to become an
Anglican Priest at St John’s College in Perth,
and Dorothy would travel on the train
together from Wongan Hills to Perth, and
on one journey they noticed the Chapel
of St Mary and St George being built at
Guildford Grammar School. In 1914, with
war clouds hanging over the world, Dorothy
remembered Keith saying, “I’d like our son
to attend that school, it has all the right
ingredients to mould boys into men”.
Paul Murray in his application photograph
for the School.
50
Working in the realms of both journalism and radio, Paul Murray has built a reputation
for intriguing articles and hard-hitting interviews.
“I’d like our son to
attend that school,
it has all the right
ingredients to mould
boys into men”.
In 1915 Dorothy was posted to East Perth
Primary School and Keith was still studying
for the ministry and working in an Anglican
church in Gosnells. By February the world
was at war and their lives were suddenly
turned upside down. Keith and two
other students at St John’s College were
anonymously sent white feathers, known as
a wartime accusation of cowardice, ironically
a cowardly way to make such an accusation,
and all three students enlisted in the Army
within days. By August Keith and Dorothy
were married and early the next year Dorothy
was pregnant with Paul’s father. By June
1916, after less than a year of marriage,
Keith sailed with the 11th Battalion to fight
the Germans in France. Just 54 days before
the Armistice, on 18 September 1918 at
5.30am, Keith went over the top of the
trench in the first attack by General Sir John
Monash’s Australian troops on the famous
Hindenburg line. Not only was this a major
turning point in the war, but it changed
Paul’s family forever as none of the three
young trainee priests would return home.
A shell landed next to Keith and tragically
robbed him of the chance to meet his son,
Keith Owen, born in November the year
before.
Having never remarried, grief-stricken
Dorothy remained res