SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

Well, SEK Hulme, thank you very much for your time. I should probably start with the most obvious question of all. You were christened Samuel Edward Keith Hulme, but how did you acquire the name SEK?

I got it when there were two Hulmes in the same football team when I was at school. I always played in the back line and someone at the under 15s saw a team on the board and said, “What’s Hulme doing on the forward line” and someone said, “No, no, that’s D. F. Hulme. S.E.K Hulme is down at the other end”, where he expected to find me. The name stuck and there are very very few people left in the world now who call me Keith. My aunts used to call me Keith, but they’re all basically dead. So that’s where SEK came from.

And you yourself are happy with the name? You don’t mind that people don’t call you Samuel or Keith?

No. In the days when I used to think about politics, I thought it was a pretty good trademark. I was pleased with it.

Your family first arrived in Australia during the mid 1800s. Was it to here in Melbourne?

There’s some connection with Brisbane, but I think only a landing. The ship came on to Melbourne. I don’t understand quite now what they were doing in Brisbane, but (they came) basically straight to Melbourne. My great grandfather came. He first came, then he went back. He’d been to Africa, then he came here, then he went back to England and then he came back here in about 1857, I think, and we’ve been in Melbourne. There are Hulmes, who pronounce it my way (as “Hume”), in Brisbane still. Sir Alan Hulme, I think, was a cabinet minister about 20 years ago, Postmaster-General probably, but I’ve never worked out a connection with him.

And what sort of line of trade were your family in in those days?

Look, I’m not quite sure what my paternal great grandfather did. My grandfather was in mining and inventing. He tried to, in the days when they first invented putting tin onto metal to make jam tins and things of that sort, he tried to get the tin off for the use, recycling I suppose we’d call it these days. He was never able to succeed in that. My father’s mother’s family were in the steel industry. They had a business called Melbourne Iron and Steel, which was later taken over by BHP. All to do with engineering of one kind and another, basically.

So I guess it’s no surprise that one of your areas of practice is in energy and resources!

Well, some of the things I’ve done would surprise some of my grandparents, but some might have expected them.

So you didn’t have lawyers then as predecessors?

I didn’t have lawyers, though my - I don't know that I knew of it when I was growing up, but my mother’s cousin was Arthur Deane, who was later a judge on the Supreme Court over there in later years and Chancellor of Melbourne University. I don’t think that I knew of him when I was a young boy and I certainly had no awareness of a link with the law. Why I decided I wanted to be a lawyer and, indeed, a barrister, I don't know. It came quite young - when I was in the third grade at school, which is about when one’s eight, because I can remember telling the school inspectors. These were fearsome figures who came around, we thought, inspecting us. Really they were inspecting the teachers. We didn’t know that and he asked me what I was going to do when I grow up and I told him I was going to be a barrister. Now where I got that from, I do not know, but I know I said it to him because he said, “Well, perhaps one day you’ll be Lord Chancellor”, and I knew he was talking nonsense because that was England and you didn’t become Lord Chancellor in Australia, so I knew enough about it. I used to read a lot as a child. Perhaps I’d been reading beyond my years, but I was going to be a barrister at the age of eight.

Was he impressed?

Yes, I think he was. I suppose it was a change from people wanting to be policemen and firemen, but I was never very impressed with school inspectors after that. He’d made such a boo-boo about the Lord Chancellor that I realised that they couldn’t be the fearsome figures that we had been led to believe.

You mentioned that you were quite a reader as a little boy. What subjects at school did you like doing? What were your preferred pursuits?

Histories and English and things like that. I was very good at mental arithmetic and arithmetic. I was hopeless at other mathematics. Once I reached trigonometry, I was struggling very very badly. It was a purely arithmetical ability, not a general mathematical ability. Algebra and trigonometry found and left me sadly, very sadly, deficient, so mainly the cultural subjects, the arty subjects (were my preference).

Were your parents very encouraging of you at school? Did they talk to you about their ambitions for you?

My mother did, but my father died when I was quite - he died when I was nine, so it hadn’t arisen much. My mother was - her father, my maternal grandfather, he’d been an engine driver and he was a great believer in education. He had six children, all of whom went through high school and one thing or another. No, my mother didn’t because she was the eldest and had to leave to help bring up the other five, but there was a very strong family belief in education and my mother was always supportive and, I suppose, ambitious for me and in fact from that point of view, I think, that kind of family background is about as good as one can have for doing well at school, a good working class kind of family, who really believed in education. So there was family support throughout, yes.

One of the interesting traits that I noticed in reading your CV was that, while you were obviously pretty academically inclined, you had an aptitude for sport as well.

I don’t think aptitude is quite the right word. In the words of the Rhodes Trust, I had a fondness for manly outdoor sports, not a great deal of “excellence”. I enjoyed them. I liked football in particular and used to play tennis and things, but not all that well.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in Owen Dixon Chambers West and filmed by Rocco Fasano