Juliette Brodsky
John Batt, how did all this contrast with Sir Ninian Stephen with whom you read?
John Batt
Well, I was with him for over six months, I think it was approaching nine months, during which time he went away three times. Once to the Privy Council on a tax case. Once to Canada on the newsprint, I think it was, a newsprint arbitration, and once to the United States for an oil company case, which might have been a tax case. I don’t think he would claim to have been an extremely learned person, but he had the ability to get the court on his side by his manner. He was a very busy junior, junior often to Young and Aickin, who deferred taking silk for a while, I think. I enjoyed my time with him and learned much from him, and before I moved out, somebody else moved in, so there were two – I think it was John Monahan - so we overlapped.
Juliette Brodsky
Did his style influence yours?
John Batt
I doubt it, I think I’ve got my own style for what it’s worth.
JD Phillips
By the time you were with him, wasn’t he pretty well a permanent junior?
John Batt
Yes, well very often.
JD Phillips
As I recall, he rarely appeared on his own, so when you talk about style, he was sitting there quietly next door to the silk.
John Batt:
But he’d come in in the morning with a lot of advisory work … a number of things for Miss Davis to type.
JD Phillips
But he was a junior, pretty well a permanent junior.
Bill Ormiston
And the combination of Aickin and Stephen was well known for many years wasn’t it? Big cases, constitutional, companies.
JD Phillips
Oil companies, yes.
Bill Ormiston
Heavy commercial.
James Merralls
He didn’t do too much constitutional work, it was mainly commercial work. When we came to the Bar, people tended to divide the Bar into two categories, common law or equity. He didn’t fall into either. He was what would now be known as a commercial lawyer. I think the QC at that time who would have fallen into that category was George Lush whom we haven’t mentioned. He was neither a common lawyer who did jury work nor a regular wills and trusts, settlement type equity lawyer. But he did company law and contract law, commercial cases.
Clive Tadgell
He did all sorts of things, George (Lush) did. He once led me in a Health Act prosecution. We were briefed for Coca Cola, prosecuted for having a mouse in a bottle of Coca Cola which was sold to a tram conductor, and we lost it.
Juliette Brodsky
How did you lose it - on what basis?
Clive Tadgell
We were for Coca Cola, but the mouse was said to be in the bottle when the tram conductor opened it up and saw these bright eyes beaming into his face, which was a whole lot of nonsense because Coca Cola is so corrosive. To think that the mouse had bright eyes shining up at the tram conductor was so much hogwash, but the magistrate swallowed it, as it were.
John Batt
There used to be a lot of …
Juliette Brodsky
Sorry, may I ask this; did the case ever acquire the same folklore status as the snail in the bottle?
Clive Tadgell
Well it deserved it. It actually happened though, whereas the snail in the bottle might not have happened.
Juliette Brodsky
Sorry, John?
John Batt
I was going to say there were a lot of Health Act prosecutions in those days over meat pies and you had to divide - the sample had to be divided into three parts and that led to a lot of complicated submissions, and principally by Garth Buckner in the Magistrates’ Court.
James Merralls
We had a good friend, Garth Buckner, who specialised in these things.
John Batt
Yes, he was Stephen’s second reader after Shaw.
James Merralls
And he was well known for devising technical defences to Health Act prosecutions.
John Batt
Could I speak of some of the other leaders of the Bar?
Juliette Brodsky
Oh yes, absolutely.
JD Phillips
I learned a very good lesson from George Lush. Whenever I worked with George, I was in awe of him, a great admirer of his but he was a lot my senior and I was surprised to hear him say one day as we crossed William Street as we walked towards the court, he said, “I hope you know what this case is all about because I haven’t got the faintest idea”, and it taught me the lesson that the nerves do get to you no matter how senior you are and as you approach the court, they get stronger. It was good learning early on.
Juliette Brodsky
Actually, just on that point before we move on to some of the other leaders that you would like to discuss, I did speak to a judge recently who said that many of her colleagues suffer from nerves, this adrenalin rush she speaks of, and that some people actually – and I don’t want to get too graphic – do actually get quite sick on the morning of cases and things. Just out of interest, were any of you particularly susceptible to those sort of nerves?
Bill Ormiston
Yes.
John Batt
I think always just before 10.30 you got stirred up, particularly if there were negotiations going on, you’re trying to concentrate on the case and discussing figures at the same time.
JD Phillips
Don’t they say the man who’s never frightened has no imagination?
Juliette Brodsky
Have you ever encountered any who weren’t frightened?
JD Phillips
We all had lots of imagination.
James Merralls
Sir Douglas Menzies told me he used to get into a lather of sweat before he addressed the court.
JD Phillips
When he came off the court after being sworn in, I was told by his staff that his clothes were just all soaked, and that was to be sworn in as a High Court judge.
John Batt
Others may disagree, but the one person I wouldn’t say this of was Ninian Stephen, I thought he looked very relaxed at approaching …
James Merralls
Relaxed and urbane.
Bill Ormiston
But he did have a capacity for picking things up extraordinarily quickly. I had a brief when I was junior to him – must have been the early 70s because he went on the Supreme Court first in ’71 or ’72 first, didn’t he? But it was a landlord and tenant matter, quite a complex one. I’d spent the day looking at these papers and Ninian said, “Well, I can’t look at these papers until tonight and I’ve got a conference at home from 6 to half past 7”, and he said, “You’d better give me three quarters of an hour and we’ll start at…” – yes, it was going to be a quarter past 9 because he was going to have dinner in between. He had grasped all this material far better than I had in that three quarters of an hour that he had available to read the papers and I was staggered, you know.
Juliette Brodsky
A photographic memory, do you think?
Bill Ormiston
Well he probably had a photographic memory, but he had this capacity to read and absorb things so quickly, which I certainly didn’t.
James Merralls
Yes, he was a very intelligent man. I didn’t think he knew very much, but he was a very intelligent man.
|
