Lawrie Willett
Australian public servant and university Chancellor
Lawrence John "Lawrie" Willett (born 1938) is a former senior Australian public servant and university Chancellor.
Life and career
Willett was born in Brisbane in 1938.
He joined the Commonwealth Public Service, in the Department of Customs and Excise, in 1957, after completing his secondary schooling at Brisbane State High School. Willett's early public service positions were in Queensland, before he transferred to Canberra in 1963.
Willett worked as a senior Customs representative in Tokyo between 1971 and 1974.
Willett was Director-General of the Department of Health between 1983 and 1984. He was the first person with a non-medical background to be appointed to that role.
In October 1984, he was appointed Chairman of the Superannuation Fund Investment Trust, handling the compulsory superannuation contributions of Commonwealth public servants.
Willett was appointed Charles Sturt University Chancellor in 2002. He served in the role for 12 years, welcoming Michele Allan as his successor in 2014.
“Lawrie Willett” enters the record as australian public servant and university Chancellor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lawrie, Willett and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20738245. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1957, 1963 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lawrie Willett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.