Tom Mosby, research manager and TV star

Tom Mosby Photo: Craig Ratcliffe

Tom Mosby carries the responsibility of spreading Indigenous culture throughout the State Library of Queensland — and he’s loving it.

He’s trodden a serpentine path to get here — art restorer, lawyer and television celebrity via MasterChef Australia. Who knows what’s around the next bend?

Constant career change and reinvention fits with Tom’s outlook in life. His advice to Indigenous people is “don’t always take the easy option”.

“Go outside your comfort zone and try something else,” he said. “Just because you’re Indigenous doesn’t mean you have to be pigeon-holed as Indigenous. Explore different things.”

This is the advice of experience. Tom grew up in the Torres Strait and went to high school in Cairns. His first job was as an art restorer at the National Gallery of Victoria. He changed his career to lawyer and, during a legal career of 10 years, was appointed as senior associate with Clayton Utz, Melbourne.

“In law, I made a conscious decision not to be pigeon-holed into Indigenous-related law simply because I was Indigenous,” he said. “It could have been so easy as an Indigenous lawyer to go, for example, into native title.” Instead, Tom practised administrative and public law, and eventually moved his practice to Queensland where he specialised in insurance law.

Then came his gig as a contestant on MasterChef. Tom says it was a break from the grind which allowed him to consider what he wanted from life.

“It was a chance to re-evaluate,” he said. “With 40 looming, I felt I had nothing to prove to other people any more and I could do something I felt passionate about.”

That something turned out to be his latest job at the State Library, which neatly combines his two great passions — Indigenous advancement and culture.

Tom is the library’s executive manager of Indigenous research and projects. The role allows him to influence the library’s strategic Indigenous objective. “It’s ensuring that Indigenous is owned by everybody in the library; that it is not siloed,” he said.

He is also in charge of developing the digital agenda of the kuril dhagun Indigenous Knowledge Centre, both for the library’s Indigenous visitors and for associated Indigenous knowledge centres throughout the state.

That’s Tom’s story so far. Even he doesn’t know what’s in the next chapter.