stoush.net

Wed, 15/11/2006 - 5:33pm — arleeshar

I was reflecting, following the rejection of the WorkChoices appeal, that I don’t really know much about the High Court as it stands today. This is a fault of my own, as I certainly didn’t start life in such ignorance. I was actually given a flying start, propelled into a long-lasting fascination with Sir Garfield Barwick, Chief Justice of the High Court, Attorney General, Minister for External Affairs, finger in every pie, whose legacy lives on as his 18 years of seminal judgement continues to affect decisions like Electrolux and, more recently, the WorkChoices case.

Barwick was a great figure in my childhood. I was nourished on a concise and secular theology of duality, of Whitlam and Barwick, spending my earliest years listening to my politically avid father rant about Barwick’s role in The Dismissal and his stoushes with Lionel Murphy. While I would never meet the man, I felt a fondness for him as an anathema maranatha, a cartoon figure as reviled as a South Park Devil. In my later youth, he seemed to embody a class-powered, gender-biased Australia of the past and a standard around which the Young Liberals probably rallied as they smoked their pipes, sounded the foxhunt on their trumpets, and generally celebrated their tweedy privilege.

During my final year at university, in a period of deep thesis malaise, I picked up a copy of Barwick’s autobiography A Radical Tory: Garfield Barwick’s Reflections and Recollections from Gould’s in the hope that his dry Tory entitlement prose would compel me back to the computer. Of course what I didn’t realise was that, being already pretty stressed, Barwick’s autobiography would probably propel me right off the cliff-face of sanity, and I ended up spending two whole weeks highlighting, annotating and discussing the various facets of Barwick’s personality, quoting him verbatim to bemused friends in the middle of casual conversation, which usually resulted in my being patted carefully on the arm and given cups of tea.

I recently happened across my Barwick file as I was moving house. It is huge. I had colour coded speeches, sayings and events that I wanted to further research, and cross-referenced the material according to themes of sexism, individualism, political, judiciary and personal life. I had written pages and pages on him, and the autobiography was covered in post-its. I was a freak. But, of course, it means that I can now give you with a minimum of effort: Outrageous Quotes and Observations of the man himself, as written and published by him in 1995, two years before his elderly death. Sir Gar was a man of his times, and his memoirs reflect this.

On the Australian welfare system:

I remember asking the British agent in Singapore during [a] visit what was the level of unemployment in Singapore. He said there was none.
“Surely”, I said, “that’s nonsense”.
“Not at all. If a Chinese loses his job, next morning he will sit on the kerb with a banana leaf and a couple of bananas – he is in business. He will do something for himself straight away.”
I remember thinking to myself, the day Australia adopts that attitude, we will really take off. [p171]

On the role of women in the judiciary, and how to quash those feminists in discussion:

By the by Miss Smith bore down on me like a galleon in full sail. She immediately targeted me with “Why don’t you have women on the High Court?”. Well, I was not looking for an argument on this social occasion and I parried her by saying, “Well, we don’t get very many women offering their services or available for appointment”. This did not satisfy the lady, and she persisted. She kept on, no matter how I parried her assaults. Eventually I felt I should counter-attack. I said, “Well, if you must know, Miss Smith, the reason we don’t have women on the High Court bench is because a woman can’t bear to be wrong, certainly to acknowledge a mistake. She’s got always to be right and you know, none of us ever are.”[p192]

Keep in mind again, that this was written in 1995, although of course the encounter itself took place sometime in 1960 or thereabouts. “Miss Smith”, a “bulky woman” and “great feminist”, was apparently a trailblazer who worked for the United Nations. No-one could accuse Sir Gar of being a revisionist.

A description of his commando campaigning strategies as Federal Member for Parramatta, which tickled me as I almost remember this sort of thing. Apparently he was acting on the advice of none other than the recently assassinated JFK:

I took no chances. I organised an intensive coverage of the electorate. I equipped three station wagons with up-to-date cassette-playing gear with speakers capable of being heard from a distance of half a mile. I recorded a number of three-minute speeches on self-rewinding tapes. With my son’s assistance, three positions in the electorate were fixed for each week night for each of the three wagons. Friendly members of the Bar and party supporters manned the wagons, each taking up the planned three separate locations successively each night, remaining at each one only long enough to play my speech and to give the voting prescription before moving on. Thus no inconvenience was caused in neighbourhoods which valued their privacy.[p202]

I can just picture entire neighbourhoods pausing for three minutes over their meat and two veg, as the stentorian tones of Corona Barwick address the surrounds in a mile-wide diameter, then rushing out to object only to be commandeered by a portly supreme court justice into helping to dismantle the speaker system or something.

A description of the content of his speeches during the same campaign. The politics of fear has a great history in Australia, and Barwick was proud of his successful deployment:

I held a number of public meetings where I ridiculed the unilateral declaration of a nuclear-free zone in our hemisphere then a plank of Opposition policy, pointing out its danger to the nation. As geography is not a common strength in Australians, I had a slide made which I projected at the meetings to alert the audience to the position of the equator – that invisible line which marks out our hemisphere from that of much of Asia. When I emphasised the realities of a nuclear-free zone in our hemisphere, while in the hemisphere to our north nations were free to deploy nuclear weapons, one could hear some part of the audience gasp, the proposition was so obviously dangerous.

I did not think that my more politically experienced colleagues thought at the outset that the proposal of showing a map to electors was such a good idea. But before the campaign ended I had requests to borrow the slides and the projection gear.[p202]

On indigenous Australians and assimilation – and Barwick’s personal response to events when he represented Australia at the UN General Assembly in 1960:

South Africa’s representative was its Foreign Minister. He made a very challenging and wide-ranging speech, accusing those who criticised apartheid of hypocrisy, forcefully describing the manner in which they segregated the indigenous people in their own countries…Towards the end of this speech Krishna Menon, Foreign Minister in Nehru’s Government, moved from his place in the Assembly, cam over to me and said, “You know, you are the worst of them all, the way you treat your Aboriginals, and the speaker hasn’t mentioned you”. I dismissed this, defending the Australian position, but of course I had no chance of convincing him. But the incident reinforced my own view that we ought to move at least to integrate the less than full-blood Aborigines into our community.[p162]

On Soekarno, then in charge of our near neighbour, who he encountered as Minister for External Affairs:

I doubt if he paid much attention to Australian attitudes, though by pressing them on him in personal conversation I felt I had made a mark…I thought him devious and unpredictable, perhaps because he did not have a sufficiently confident grasp of economics…He was vain and perhaps unduly appreciative of the physical advantages which his position provided him. I met Hartini in his presence. She was undoubtedly an outstandingly beautiful woman. He was evidently a willing victim of such beauty. [p172]

And finally on being made a knight of the realm and on the Australian egalitarianism:

Somehow, I think as Australians we unnecessarily consider ourselves demeaned by looking up to somebody. We do it readily enough in sporting activities but not in public service, sometimes I think even in family life. We too readily dub due deference as a mere cringe or describe it as pulling the forelock. The possibility of the improvement of standards of behaviour by example is reduced by this attitude. As the national immaturity which has created such attitudes passes and a more nationally adult society develops – a society which does not have any semblance a sense of inferiority – the regime of a rough and, to a degree, coarse egalitarianism may disappear.[p84]