Charles FRANCIS AM RFD QC interview 4/11/2003

You were describing before how you have been very busy in retirement, you’ve had plenty to do. You’ve been writing, you’ve been speaking a great deal. Do you have any regrets over the course of a very active fifty-year practice at the bar?

I think if you’ve got a proper appraisal of yourself, and what you’ve done, inevitably you have regrets. You think about things you could have done better, or done in a different way, but I’ve certainly got no regrets about having been a barrister. It’s been an enormously interesting life, and when I compare it to people who perhaps go into the public service and just work in the same job for forty years, there’s no doubt about it, our job is better, it’s much more interesting, and in my case, there’s been a huge amount of variety which has always kept life interesting.

Well, conversely what achievements are you most proud of?

I think the achievement, of which I am most proud, is being a commanding officer in the Air Force when I was twenty.

Really?

And that’s something I look back on with pride. I was an acting commanding officer for a short period, I was only twenty years of age and it was an Air Force unit on which there was about a hundred men and I had to give them leadership and control the unit.

So probably as a result of that, that’s when you first developed your thoughts about the importance of leadership?

No, I thought about leadership even when I was at school. When I was sixteen I wrote an article on leadership, which was published, and I’ve thought a lot about leadership and what makes a leader, and we’ve had great leaders that have set examples - Sir Edmund Herring, who was Chief Justice of Victoria, who was also a Lieutenant General during the 39-45 War and a Major in the 14-18 War. He was a man who gave great leadership. Sir William Stawell equally gave great leadership.

It’s been said when you chaired the Bar Council, you gave good leadership?

I hope so.

So summing up then, how would you most like to be remembered?

I think I’d like to be remembered as a barrister who fought hard on behalf of his clients and fought skilfully.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in the Neil McPhee Room, Owen Dixon Chambers and filmed by Stewart Carter (People Pictures)