Cigarette smoking, champagne swigging Mary Gaudron brought much needed gusto and bluntness to the phlegmatic males who inhabited the High Court ... Sir Anthony Mason was one of those males and this week he launched a biography of Gaudron by the Canberra lawyer Pamela Burton - From Moree to Mabo ... Theodora reports
Former CJ Sir Anthony Mason was at his wryest, driest and wittiest for the launch of the unauthorised Mary Gaudron biography - From Moree to Mabo.You can soak up the full compliment of japes and jabs in his speech here.
Mason said he shared two reassuring things in common with Mary Gaudron.
"The first is that, like her, I am an old convent girl. I attended primary schoool at Kincoppal Convent, Elizabeth Bay, before it merged with Rose Bay Convent.The second characteristic is that we emerged from a convent education, hers much longer than mine, without a profound belief in religion."
What specially caught my eye was the former CJ's well calibrated swipe at the NSW Court of Appeal of old.
Biographer Pamela Burton refered to the court's reputation at the bar as being that of a "torture chamber".
"Grown men would faint at the withering cruelty dished out by [certain judges]."
Dennis Mahoney, an appeal court judge at a later time, thought that the court had believed that judges procured, "more help from the bar by the whip rather than a kind word. Perhaps that was right".
Mason told the gathering on Tuesday night (Nov. 9):
"It was not right. The function of a court, particularly a court of appeal, is to encourage a calm atmosphere for rational debate in which the 'give and take' of argument takes place in a milieu where there is respect on one side, matched by courtesy on the other. Such an atmosphere is more likely to lead to calm and dispassionate examination of the legal issues than a climate of antagonism or hostility.I was going to say that there are infrequent occasions when a judge, like a good jockey, needs to give his sluggish steed a show, or even a flick, of the whip.But I recalled one racing authority banned the use of whips on racehorses. If horses need to be protected from whipping, so do barristers."
Mason: Does Gummow serve the scones and cucumber sandwiches?Anthony Mason had the misfortune, when he was on the NSW CA, to be overturned by the High Court in the defamation case O'Shaughnessy v Mirror Newspapers Ltd.Mary Gaudron appeared for the actor Peter O'Shaugnessy, whose performance and direction of Othello was monstered by The Australian's theatre critic Katherine Brisbane.
She said he'd wasted the talents of the cast and the production was devoted to enhancing himself.
The plaintiff lost at trial and before the CA. Gaurdon appeared as a junior barrister herself before the High Court and won on the "comment" point.
Mason remembered ...
"Some time after the case I congratulated Mary on her success in the High Court.Her response - a typical one - was simply to say, 'I was surprised by your judgment. I thought you were a much better lawyer than that'."
Of course, years later Mason and Gaurdon sat together on the High Court. On one particular occasion they sat in Perth on a special leave application relating to the Rugby League salary cap.
During the argument, Gaudron "whispered" to Mason: "This is just a slave market, isn't it?"
Mason told the gathering at the book launch:
"A whisper is a form of communication that Mary has never been able to master and so it was on this occasion.The remark was clearly audible in court. Had the hearing been in Sydney there would be have been repurcussions. The panjandrums of the Rugby League would have been excited into public protestation..."
The former CJ pondered what the High Court would be like today, without Mary Gaudron.
"We shall have to wait for a future biographer to tell us whether it is a world of cigarettes and champagne or a tea house where Chief Justice Robert French pours out the tea and asks Justice Gummow, a very old friend and colleague of Mary, to hand out the scones, the cucumber sandwiches and the cakes, a task which I am sure, he would discharge with self-effacing aplomb."