The latest fiction from Ian Callinan … The latest facts on Timbo Carmody … Belvedere Woman – a tragic story about snobs in Brisneyland … Three academics tear the thin silk from Tim Carmody’s alabaster shoulder in a bodice ripper about his tortured tenure as chief justice  

IAN (Tubby) Callinan has not let his quill sleep idly by his side. The mountain of arbitration work, investigations into equine influenza and Sydney’s late night alcohol lock-out laws, plus celebrity appearances at the Samuel Griffith Society have not interrupted the steady flow literary works from the former High Court judge.  

The latest is Belvedere Woman, a peek behind the curtain of class-conscious Brisbane. Who would have believed it? It’s to be published later this month by the Arcadia imprint of Melbourne based Australian Scholarly Publishing (RRP $24.95).  

Instead, she married the socially acceptable but “serially unfaithful” Jack. It was a loveless union, and here she is stuck in Belvedere with an unfulfilled life. The blurb continues …    

“She had come only slowly to realise that Belvedere’s colonial self-certainty had long been little more than a delusion. Her only confidante, her spirited friend Lucy, had asserted her independence. Sandra knew that she too could still do so; she had been promised a new beginning, if only she had the resolve to seek it …”  

Callinan spoke to The Bowen Hill Bugle about his latest work:   

“I think Belvedere’s geography might put it close to Ascot. I try to describe Brisbane the way it is. It is set in Brisbane between the 1950s and 2000 and is a story about how snobbery ruined a young woman’s life … 

I live at Kenmore in the western suburbs and I can tell you it is definitely not Kenmore …”    

The Tub examines the role played by clubs and school ties in defining class and status. He reassured the Bugle that snobbery is not just a local problem, adding that his characters are inventions.  

“After one of my plays a woman came up to me at interval and said ‘You have no right to depict me like that’. She was mistaken of course. It’s just egotism.”  

Bill is involved with “dubious legal manoeuvrings and questionable summary justice”, while struggling to resolve his relationship with Irene, his fiancée in Brisbane.  

The former judge’s earlier works include The Missing Masterpiece, After the Monsoon, The Coroner’s Conscience, Appointment at Amalfi, The Lawyer and the Libertine, The Russian Master, and Betrayals.  

In 2005 Justinian managed to get hold of Ian Callinan’s secret project – The Cannelloni Conspiracy. It is a murder thriller set around the hunt for a ancient, priceless receipt for cannelloni, stolen from a noble Italian family.  

We ran it alongside extracts from his private diary that had fallen off the back of a truck. Sadly he never completed the The Cannelloni Conspiracy, but you can read the extracts, along with his diary entries, here.    

Also scheduled for release this month is The Tim Carmody Affair, a look under the skirts of one of the most harrowing judicial appointments in Australian history.  

It’s written by academics Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Gabrielle Appleby and Andrew Lynch and explores the decision of the Campbell Newman government to appoint Carmody as CJ of Queensland, a man of limited judicial background, but seen as ideologically friendly to the law and order brigade in the Liberal National Party. 

The Supreme Court soon imploded under Carmody’s “leadership”. There was his meddling in the appointment to the court of disputed returns, Alan Wilson’s criticism at his valedictory ceremony, the CJ’s slow and incompetent delivery of judgments, the expletive laden spray delivered at Justice John Byrne, the Brett Peter Cowan appeal, apprehended bias as a result of an association with Hetty Johnston of Bravehearts, the emerging divisions within the Queensland bar, ill-conceived dalliances with the media, misleading the president of the Court of Appeal in the Moxon matter, and his agonising exit from the court.  

It was as though Queenslanders were back in the scandal plagued Joh era. In fact, just about everything Carmody touched during his brief tenure as chief justice turned to merde. 

The authors also suggest ways the system of judicial appointments should be reformed to avoid the damage and divisiveness of future Carmodys.  

The Tim Carmody Affair makes a fine bedside companion to the works of that other great Queenslander, I.D.F. Callinan.