When I find my way through Melbourne University’s labyrinth of laneways to the Arts West building at the heart of the campus, I am shepherded up to a moodily lit, objects-based learning lab, where chancellor Jane Hansen is waiting.
“The students put their gloves on and they talk and touch and feel. It could be an ancient Greek Amphora. Over there is a Chinese pot from 4500 BC.”cohort of senior female business leaders sitting atop Australian universities Hansen attended a government high school in Melbourne and became the first in her family, and the only one in her year level, to attend university.
“I was always the only woman in the room and in investment banking it’s highly competitive, even among your peers, so I had to be demonstrably better than my male peers and competitors.” “That was Paul [Little] and Toll Holdings,” she says of meeting her husband, with whom she has one son, James. “That was in 1993, and they floated for $30 million. By the time Paul stood down, I think the market cap was around $6.5 billion.”It wasn’t long before Hansen was ready for another change and to renew her lifelong affair with education.Rather than take up a non-executive director career, Hansen went into the not-for-profit sector and undertook an arts degree at Melbourne University.