The 2014 recipient of Kelso High School's Decade Award is Tom Wilson.
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The award publicly recognises students who have completed their secondary education at Kelso High School and gone on to achieve outstanding success or excelled in their chosen field.
This marks the 18th year since the school council inaugurated the Decade Award as a means of recognising students who graduated from the school ten or more years ago.
While at Kelso High, Mr Wilson developed an interest in languages in general, and Japanese in particular.
This was sparked by the Ohkuma sister city relationship.
He participated in adult education classes to learn Japanese, went on a four-week exchange trip to Japan, and then in 1996 won a Tokyo Metropolitan Scholarship that allowed him to go to school and live in Tokyo for a year. He continued to study Japanese to the HSC level.
Mr Wilson commenced a Bachelor of Arts/Law degree at Macquarie University in 1998.
As part of his Arts degree, he continued his study of Japanese, and started to study Russian.
He was successful in winning a University Award for his studies in Russian in 1999.
Mr Wilson was also awarded an internship at Nifco, a Japanese manufacturing company in Tokyo in 2001. He graduated with Honours in 2003.
In 2004 Mr Wilson was selected to join the Graduate Program of the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT). In 2005 he studied Arabic in Canberra, and then at the University of Jordan in Amman to prepare him for his posting as Second Secretary to the Australian Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He worked in the Australian Embassy until 2009, when he returned to Australia to work in DFAT's Legal and Human Resources Department.
Since 2013 Mr Wilson has been the Australian representative to the Palestine Authority in Ramallah, Palestine.
He is still in this role, and the recent activities in Gaza have seen Mr Wilson at the centre of much activity, including being summoned by the Palestine Foreign Ministry to receive an official diplomatic protest about the Australian Attorney General's "judgemental language".
He also has had a major role in the evacuation of Australian citizens from Gaza in July this year.