SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

Your own aspirations - did you ever aspire to be a judge?

I could have been. I was never offered the High Court, which is the only one that really interested me. I was offered the Supreme Court a couple of times. I didn’t want that and that was partly the deafness thing. The High Court is different. You’re not dealing with people. You’re only dealing with barristers and you can have your own arrangements made because it’s Commonwealth money and if you want loudspeaker things, you can do any of it. If we’ve got a young bloke up for murder or something and his mother is giving evidence, she’s entitled to think the judge can hear her without trouble and you can’t ask to be protected from that kind of situation if you’re on the Supreme Court. The Court of Appeal these days might have been different, but there wasn’t a separate Court of Appeal then. I think I go back to when Daryl Dawson was Solicitor-General. That was when the first offer was and then Hartog Berkeley made another one later when he was Solicitor-General. So you do sometimes wonder, but here I am. I’ve still been at the Bar and I’ve still been enjoying myself at the age of 77 and they all had to turn it in when they were 70 or something now and some of them earlier. Most of them don’t enjoy it. I’ve loved the Bar and the sad fact is, I think, these days that most of the judges are not happy.

So how would you change things if you could?

I can’t believe that cases ought to take as long as they do these days. I can remember in my early years at the Bar there was a case that had gone for six weeks and people were going up to look at it because no one had ever seen a case take as long as this. It was between Noel Bergere and John Lurie in front of Reg Sholl. Now that’s a recipe for slowness. Sholl was a very clever man, but he like to pursue every rabbit down every hole, whether relevant or not. And Bergere, who was later a Master, and John Lurie, neither had much of a practice and they were both perfectly happy to be in court for as long as this case would take and it was only over a piece of farm machinery, I think, but now there’s any number of cases that take more than six weeks. At that time, it was unheard of for any case to take that long. Various things have happened, one of which has been the photostatting machine. Everybody’s got copies of everything. The first thing that happened when a document enters the solicitor’s office, they make 28 copies of it and someone has to pay for the making of it and they all get distributed. Briefs get bigger and bigger. The ordinary brief used to come up wrapped in - looking like an old fashioned brief, tied up in pink tape. You carried 20 of them home in your suitcase at the weekend. Now it’s all folders, heavyweight. You see people dragging suitcases with wheels on them, all of which stuff gets fed to the court and cases take longer and longer. I think the judges are at fault in not having done enough about that.

I can’t believe that we need as many more judges than we did when the country was half the size. You’d think if the country was twice the size you’d need double the number of judges. I would think we’ve got five times the number of judges. When I came to the Bar, the Family Court didn’t exist. The Federal Court didn’t exist. The Supreme Court had about 10, 12 perhaps, people on it. The County Court perhaps a bit more, but not much and there were no Federal magistrates. Look at it now. That’s one of the reasons why the age on appointment has gone down and down and why, I think, the standard of ability has gone down and down, and the standard of experience certainly. So I wait to see what’s going to happen about that.

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