SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

You mentioned before about a brief period at Wesley College when it was turned over to the military.

Yeah.

This is, of course, during the (second world) war. You in 1943 were at the Royal Australian Naval College. Did you see any active service?

We were where we could have seen active service. I mean this was the old 13 year old entry, the only way in which one could become an officer in the Royal Australian Navy. I said before, that I had always wanted to be a lawyer. During the war, I think it was because of the war, I suddenly pushed that aside and decided briefly that I should be in the navy. We did go to sea on a training ship and we were out in Bass Strait. Now it was only later on we found that ships were being sunk by mines in Bass Strait. We in fact were hugging the coastline pretty much. We did a bit of a turn around Bass Strait because, of course, the naval depot was in Western Port and we were coming up to Melbourne, so we had to go out into Bass Strait and we went out some distance. I was only 14 and a half when I came out of the Naval College. So we saw no active service. My year graduated just after hostilities had ceased, but that was as close to action as we ever got and we didn’t know Bass Strait was dangerous at the time. Later on one read that ships were sunk there.

Did you nevertheless find the (military) experience, to use that rather clichéd expression, character building?

Yes, it was character building. I don’t think it was necessarily the right way to go about character building.

Why was that?

Around the place - and I say around the place because I do not mean in the class rooms - the class rooms had civilian teachers, and good ones. No punishments were necessary or were inflicted. Around the place, one was beaten for virtually any mistake. If you had a spot on your clothes at morning parade, you’d get beaten. I don’t think that’s the best way - certainly it does encourage you not to have spots on your lapel at morning inspection, but there are other ways of doing that. I think there was much more beating than there needed to be and I think there was a bit too much of the old English public school and the old English naval tradition. I remember Churchill said the traditions of the Royal Navy were rum, sodomy and the lash. We didn’t get any rum and I never came across sodomy, but we certainly had a bit much lash.

So you look back on it with very mixed feelings then?

With mixed feelings. I think they were doing it the wrong way. I still have friends from there and they, very kindly, although I was only there for a year, they invite me to their various anniversaries, like their 40 years’ anniversary of going there and things of that sort and they’re good friends and some of them would agree with my criticisms; some mightn’t. So it’s a mixed bag, but was it a character builder? Yes, it was character building.

Among your areas of practice is the admiralty and maritime areas of specialisation.

Yeah.

So perhaps in some ways it did trigger an interest in those areas or the experience in the...

Yes, I’ve been made interested in ships and I did appear in a number of shipping cases. Well, I doubt if this list is concerning you that I had ever been at the Naval College, but I also did the last two big air inquiries that we had out here, but I was never in the air force.

In 1948, you attended the University of Melbourne.

Yeah.

Queen’s College. Can you tell us a little bit about your studies during that time?

Look, your actual studies are really no different to being in college as opposed to not being in college. That’s not quite true. We did have a college tutor. I was very lucky. We had David Derham, who was our college tutor, although I didn’t get that much of David because you only had one legal subject in first year, which was Introduction to Legal Method and by the end of that year David had been appointed as a Professor in the Law School and had to give up college tutoring, so he remained as a friend, but I didn’t get as much benefit from his tutoring, which would’ve been nice. The good thing about being in college is simply is that the day is so much longer. There are so many more things that you can do each day because you’re not travelling. You walk out of a lecture at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and really there’s nothing. You’ve got no commitments until you go to bed, so that there is a lot more time for sport and various other activities of that kind. That’s one of the reasons, I think, why so many of the Rhodes scholars come out of the colleges. It’s simply because they have more opportunity to - I mean had I not been in college, I wouldn’t have been in the college football team, etcetera, and building up something of a sporting performance. Geoffrey Blainey and Jim Morrissey, among others, came up from school - no, Jim was a year ahead of us. He was already there. Geoffrey and I went up together and Alan Dixon, who was later a judge on the County Court here. We had a Master who on the whole was happy to have a quiet life. He didn’t interfere much. I suppose he might have had we been doing bad things, but we weren’t, so four more very happy years.

And do you recall much about the topics, the courses you were studying at the time?

Look, you think you do, but I suppose if someone asked me now to write an essay on Platonic forms (I did philosophy), I’m sure I could have written such an essay then. I don’t think I could without a little bit of work now. Obviously the legal part of it one remembers or it’s grown into what one knows now, but it was a good university and a very enthusiastic law school. Zelman Cowen had just come back and taken over as dean and he talked David Derham into joining him. David was at the Bar and was prevailed upon. They had been at school together. They had been at Scotch together before the war and he was prevailed upon by Cowen to give up his career at the Bar and become an academic. He was a very remarkable fellow, Derham. I liked Derham very much. I think had he stayed at the Bar, he ought certainly to have finished on the High Court. You can never say that he would’ve because High Court appointments are so unpredictable, but he ought to have finished on the High Court. A very good mind indeed.

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