Travers began his career as a cadet journalist at
Fairfax Media in 1988. He left in 1998, to become Chief of Staff to the South Australian Liberal Deputy Premier Hon
Graham Ingerson. After Ingerson resigned for misleading Parliament, Travers won a job in the State's public service. When Labor Party leader
Mike Rann became Premier, following the 2002 state election, he tasked Travers with establishing
Carnegie Mellon University, Australia. Travers moved to London in 2006 as Deputy
Agent-General for
South Australia working under Agents General
Maurice de Rohan OBE and then
Bill Muirhead. After meeting
University College London Provost
Malcolm Grant in early 2007, he convinced UCL to join CMU in establishing an overseas campus in Adelaide. In 2010, Sir Malcolm appointed Travers as both CEO of its new
UCL Australia and a governor of its UCL's Qatar board in
Doha. He quit UCL in early 2015 after the new Provost
Michael Arthur (physician) unexpectedly announced plans to close the international campus program. He is currently the chairman of Scope Global. He was the founding chairman of
Sundrop Farms, which brought private equity firm
KKR into Australian horticulture in 2014. Travers is a pioneer in the sector of
agricultural technology, combining technology and skills from the defence sector, fourth-generation
distributed ledger technology, and
IoT to provide a system of geolocated, time-stamped and immutable records that allows manufacturers and consumers to verify the authenticity of
wine before making a purchase. == Political views ==