Law Dinner to celebrate the 120th anniversary of SULS

Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM 

Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, and also to acknowledge any Indigenous guests attending today.  

I am sorry that as a nation we did not accept the invitation offered in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. There is much healing needed and we must open our ears and listen. 

Given our proximity to Barangaroo, I would also like to remember the woman after whom this part of Sydney is now named. Barangaroo was the second wife of Bennelong, and acted as an intermediary between the Aboriginal people and the early British colonists in New South Wales. She was a member of the Cammeraygal clan of the Eora Nation from across the harbour. Although not her traditional land, Barangaroo is named in her honour.  

Thanks, Naz Sharifi, SULS President, for inviting me. 

I love student law societies! I sought to honour them at Macquarie University where I was Dean for over 7 years by creating a special ‘Dean’s Award for Service’. I also established an Honour Board to record all the Presidents.  

The intensity, the passion, the commitment is incredible. I wish I had had the chance to be part of one.  Why not? Well I guess that’s part of my own story. More of that later. 

Reflecting on what I might say tonight, and remembering the challenges of dinner speeches… 

I pulled out the Jubilee Book of the Law School, commemorating its first 50 years, from 1890–1940. It was written during the second world war. It was also marking the retirement of the Dean, Professor Sir John B Peden, after 30 years in the role. He was only the second of the Deans in that entire 50 year period. 

The Prime Minister, the Rt Hon RG Menzies PC, wrote  

The British peoples hold few things more dear than the rule of law. 

To the lawyers of the past who helped to lay the foundations of stability we give our thanks. To the lawyers of the present and the future we give our encouragement. In a changing and often turbulent world let them stand for the law! 

All graduates were listed, including the 13 women. 

One chapter was titled ‘Sisters in Law, by two of them’. It tells the story of women’s entry and challenges to get into the legal profession. And that in the social life of the law school women took ‘a certain part’. And while they were involved in organising the annual Law Ball, women did not attend the Law School’s annual dinner.  

I am glad that that is no longer the case. 

There is a chapter on SULS, noting its inauguration in 1902 and that, like other university societies, its objects were ‘to promote social and intellectual intercourse between its members, and to further generally the interests of students’.  

SULS was granted two rooms in Selborne Chambers, which the first Dean, Professor Pitt Cobbett, ‘generously furnished, one as a smoking room and the other as a reading room containing law periodicals and other journals of general interest’. 

They were very keen on moots. [I am so impressed with how the range of competitions has grown and become a highlight of intervarsity challenges through ALSA. I have judged both the negotiation comp (Brisbane 2022) and paper presentation this year. 

Next year your Journal, Blackacre, will have its centenary.  

Your President, Naz Sharifi, invited me to speak to you about my journey through the law after law school. I will acquit my brief and leave you a few morsels as messages to conclude. 

Two confessions upfront. 

• I was not a very good law student 
• My ‘journey’ has been very accidental 

When you combine both of these confessions, I will offer one piece of wisdom for you to take away: career paths only make sense backwards. 

I wanted to be a barrister, like my father, the Hon Dr Frank McGrath AM OBE. He went to law school after the war, having completed an MA in history during it.  

I never did get to practise at the Bar. 

After first year in Arts/Law at ANU, I completed my BA(Hons) in History at the University of Sydney, got diverted into music for a couple of years, then finished my LLB, completed my PLT and was admitted as a lawyer in NSW (actually three times – twice as a solicitor, once as a barrister). 

The music bit: I was an oboist and cor anglais player with the Australian Youth Orchestra, the ABC National Training Orchestra, and the Opera and Ballet Orchestra at the Opera House for a couple of years.  

But Tchaikovsky did that in. While the opera season is run in repertory, with several operas on at once, the ballet season is unrelenting. Sleeping Beauty was a killer. Over three hours and two intervals long. Deadly dull. Poor Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky must have been desperate for a few rubles. (He had also trained as a lawyer). 

I found much more satisfying the 7 years with the early music group, the Renaissance Players, based at the University of Sydney, with singing and playing and much theatricality.   

At the time of this first big change of tracks in my career path, I was also finishing my History Honours degree. I just adored history. I had the possibility of doing a master’s degree at Melbourne University—I was offered a scholarship to undertake a thesis on the history of treason under the Tudors. (The Tudor period is of endless fascination to me. The appeal of Game of Thrones I realised was that it is just like the Tudors—with dragons). 

That research degree would have been fun, but … I had other ties in Sydney so it was not something that I could decide on my own. So, I finished my law as part of a minority at law school—I was married.  

When I was admitted, I was six months pregnant. Although I had worked two years part-time with a firm of solicitors, the demands of motherhood came as a real shock. I was utterly clueless. They were incompatible for me at that time. So, I held a practising certificate for all of one year in my entire career. 

When my daughter was nearly a year old, I applied for a position in teaching at Macquarie University that I had spotted in the Saturday papers.  

I got the job.  

What a piece of luck!  

I had an Honours degree in History which evidenced research ability, but not a higher degree—yet. What I did have was teaching experience—in music.  

I had taught a residential summer school in early music, to a group aged from 17 to 70 years. This particular experience evidently demonstrated a capacity for teaching distance students in their residential teaching blocks. The subject was different, but the ‘capacity’ was there.  

I took to the classroom like the proverbial duck to water. I have loved it from that moment to this, being faced with a sea of faces of law students. 

Some of them are now progressing through stellar careers – like Elizabeth Peden, the great-granddaughter of the Dean honoured in that Jubilee Book. Her father was also the Dean at Macquarie who had the wisdom to appoint me! 

But it was tough learning the ropes of the academic world. The early realisation that I only needed to be five minutes ahead of the students helped me as I found my way.  

And I loved the way that Macquarie approached legal education.  

My own undergraduate legal education had been a limited, conventional one. The new law schools of the 1970s sought to differentiate themselves from ‘traditional’ law teaching—looking at the function of law rather than the long-established textbook categories, and placing a high value on teaching. It was an exciting time for me, and indeed for everyone. 

The richness of study for me had really come through my study of history. It was my later doctoral study in legal history that joined the dots in my intellectual education. It has also made be a good law reformer. 

And as I said, I was not a very good law student. I found it really hard—cracking the code of how to read, understand and use law. I did really well in some subjects—usually the ones that were incomprehensible without the hard slog of study! And I was heading off to the Opera House for a good deal of it. 

25 years after starting at Macquarie, and having lapped through UNSW, Sydney and back to Macquarie, with stints as Dean at Sydney then at Macquarie, I went into the government world, for ten years in law reform then the past six at the AHRC. 

[As Dean at Sydney, still in the building in Philip St, I found many fun facts – including that the lecture theatres were all below the sewer line!] 

I am still not a practising barrister, nor will I ever be. But each chapter of my career has been rewarding, in one way or another. And these days I feel like I am using every aspect of my skill-sets—and indeed that, in my present role, I am enhancing them.  

What about music? Well, it’s back! I put my oboe into the proverbial cupboard for a number of years (decades). I diverted myself in choral singing once my first child was at school. That was a wonderful team sport! I sang for a decade with the chamber choir of the Sydney Philharmonia, including singing at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympics. Then with the encouragement of lawyer friends in another choir—the Bar Choir—I took my instruments out of the cupboard and embarked on the journey of recovering my playing abilities.  

Now I play weekly with a barrister friend who is a fine flautist. She and I have a rich repertoire of Baroque trio sonatas—anything after the late 18th century is far too modern. And I play in two lawyers’ orchestras.  

[I am recruiting, so speak to me later if you would like to join—we need lots of extras!] 

There are many messages I could end on—one collects lots over a lifetime. As your dinner awaits, I’ve chosen a handful, both practical and appropriately uplifting. 

The first is one about family and it is quite simple: you cannot plan your family around your career. If you try to drive both your choice about, and the timing of, having children around your career, then: 

• it may never happen—the fertility of women absolutely plummets after the age of 35; and  
• if you don’t start until you are 40, you will be going to parent-teacher meetings until you are near retirement age, even well into your 60s! 

The second message is more a reflection, that life just turns up different opportunities and you need to be open to them—and to change direction. The logic comes in looking backwards: careers only make sense in retrospect. The problem is, if you lock your thinking too much into a fixed idea of where you want to end up, then you miss seeing the opportunities for diversions that may redefine your life and career. I’ve seen too many law students of a ‘traintracks’ mentality — there is no queue to lose a place in.  

You should never regret things you do; only the things that you don’t. 

So, you need to keep your eyes open—and also to be patient. There will be many doors that will close while you explore possibilities. I have a list of doors that didn’t open for me—and not one of them was I unhappy about, afterwards. And the thing with such ‘doors’ is that once they close, you then find another, much better, one.   

The third message is you can’t do everything—at least not all at once. We are an aging population. My father lived to 100 years and 105 days (till 14 April last year). My mother just missed her 98th birthday. Longevity gives you opportunities to revive old skills and learn new ones. The law gives you many career possibilities and, as I see in this room, wonderful friendships. 

In the meantime, you can only ‘do each day well’.  

How? ‘Stand for the law’ as Prime Minister Menzies urged. But more than that, be honourable, be respectful, do not be quick to judge or to jump onto the bandwagon of the tagline of the day. In terms of what it means to ‘stand for the law’, I want to finish with the story of William Cooper.¹ It feels especially right, right now: with what is going on in Israel, with this being the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, borne out of the horrors of war, and with the failed referendum of the weekend.  

The holocaust was a primary catalyst for the Universal Declaration, and it had a deep impact on Cooper. Horrified at the lack of international condemnation of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938 and its aftermath in the attacks on Jews in Germany, Cooper led his own protest. On 6 December that year, he led a delegation to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the ‘cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany’. It was the only private protest against such action. Cooper was 77, a Yorta Yorta man, and the delegation was of Aboriginal people. Cooper was a leading activist with respect to the treatment of his own people and a founding member of the Australian Aborigines League. In March, he had presented a petition to the King, with 1800 signatures gathered over four years, to be sent by the Australian Government, demanding action on First Australian affairs. They did not listen. ¹

I urge you to listen and find the place in your hearts to honour other people’s stories, and especially the history and foundational place of our First Nations people to our national identity. 

Thank you for inviting me back into the ‘classroom’, so to speak. and enjoy your dinner! 

Endnotes

^[1]Diane Barwick, ‘Cooper, William (1861–1941)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cooper-william-5773 (accessed 10 September 2018).

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