Shay Johnston has never shied away from the big challenges.
“When I was a kid, I was always asking ‘why?’ (laughs) which is a pretty broad question to tackle,” he says.
“I think that’s what draws me to history. I think that’s what compelled me in 2020 to say ‘I’m not going to go get another executive role at another bank’ and study it instead.
“If you understand the history of things, and the patterns and rhythm of how they unfold – it gives you a sense of that ‘why’.”
Shay’s fascination with that question has served him well. He’s just graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (majoring in History) from the University of the Sunshine Coast, was awarded a University Medal for Academic Excellence, and is now undertaking an honours project with a view to study a PhD afterwards.
But for a long time, that path wasn’t so clear.
“I tried uni straight out of school, but I couldn’t balance it with working in the mailroom at Allianz Insurance. That’s where my career in financial services started,” he says.
“I moved on to Suncorp, where I spent 16 years, eventually working my way up to become an executive specialising in risk and compliance.
“I liked the work, but there’s nothing like doing something that doesn’t inspire you to make you think about what does inspire you.”
The upheaval of COVID presented Shay with the opportunity to act on that thought.
“There was a voluntary redundancy available, I had young kids I wanted to spend more time with, and I realised this chance might not come along again,” he says.
“Coming in as a mature-age student and having lived this whole other life, it has this weird effect where you're not as afraid of things.
“Having UniSC’s Moreton Bay campus just down the road at Petrie made the choice easy.”
Added life experience isn’t the only advantage Shay brings from his former career.
He says working in big business has profoundly affected his approach to thinking about history and how it’s studied.
“I was working in the industry when the Financial Services Royal Commission occurred and we were asked to unearth enormous quantities of data from our records. But even with our resources, it became apparent some things either weren’t recoverable or they weren’t archived properly.
“The same thing applies to historical archives. You can put in the right search terms, but if it’s not tagged, it won’t show up. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
“Certain things will never make it into that system and that’s going to affect our understanding of it in the future.
“So is what you’re reading actually history? Or is it story based on power dynamics and incomplete information?”
Shay says there are many examples of this, the history of Australia’s colonisation being one, where many First Nations perspectives were either lost to time or deliberately left out.
It begs the question: what information is being left out now that will shape future generations’ views of our world and time?
“That’s the fascinating thing – you realise there’s no ‘true’ history. It’s a question of who gets to decide what story is being told. What will the story of today be in the future?" he says.
“I’m transgender, and I often wonder what someone looking through the archives in 200 years’ time would find about the trans history of Queensland.
“Certainly there would be media articles about trans people – debating the validity of our identities, whether we should be entitled to healthcare and radical gender ideology think pieces. But will it include the voices of transgender people too?
“I can’t change the fact there’s basically no written record of transgender Queenslanders before 1940. Back then, they would have risked being thrown in jail or a mental institution. But what I can change is how people understand that context, and why there might not be a record.”
Shay is quick to point out this phenomenon isn’t limited to gender or sexuality. The narratives of history can neglect thousands of years of other cultures, different ways of living, societal structures and environmental perspectives.
The trick to staying open to those perspectives? Keep asking ‘why’.
“I already had an MBA and now I’ve got an arts degree. The more I look at it, the more I think people who come from the arts and humanities are crucial to solving many of the problems facing the world today,” he says.
“After decades of climate debate in Australia, we’ve seen that it’s actually less about the science now, and more about the will of the public to listen to it.
“There is a head and a heart in all things and, in my view, the heart is contained in the arts. That’s where the stories get told that change minds.”
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