SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

You were a taxi that jumped the rank!

And the Bar Council, I don't know what they would do today, but the then Bar Council said, that was what it had said and they would stand by it, but they altered the rules so that it could not happen again. They wouldn’t let people sign the Bar Roll until they were about to actually start practice. Ashkanasy had much done the same thing himself. When he was about to go off to World War II in 1940, he took silk. When he came back five years later, there he was, he was still alive and a silk with five years’ seniority. So that doubtless was where he got the idea that (that) was what I should do some years later. There was a tremendous shortage of accommodation then. Most of the Bar was (housed in) Selborne Chambers, down there in Bourke Street, running through to Little Collins Street, behind Menzies Hotel. I say running through to Little Collins Street. It was actually called Chancery Lane. That part of Little Collins Street was known as Chancery Lane in honour of the legal profession. One outcrop had gone to Equity Chambers. Ashkanasy, as Chairman, organised two more, one building just down the street in Chancery Lane called Saxon House and another one just down the street in Bourke Street in Eagle Star Chambers, the Eagle Star Insurance building. They took a floor in there. I read with Keith Aickin in Eagle Star Chambers and I was then, when I finished reading, my three year magic hadn’t quite worked. I was on the loose for about six weeks and I camped in Percy Joske’s room. Percy Joske was a barrister, who was then in Federal Parliament. I think he later went onto the Industrial Court. He never came back to the Bar. His son, Rod Joske, was on the Family Court for a number of years. So Percy Joske let me use his room and then I got a small room, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, but a nice broom cupboard in Eagle Star Chambers myself and stayed there until we came across to Owen Dixon Chambers.

I believe there was a time when a French engineer visited Selborne Chambers and made some very uncomplimentary remarks about the building.

I always thought they were complimentary.

Would you like to tell us what he said?

Yeah, well, you’ve got to remember that Selborne Chambers was on a split level arrangement. You come into Bourke Street and about the middle, half way down to Chancery Lane you went down some steps and the thing widened out and there were rooms on both sides, ground floor and first floor, and around the first floor there was a balcony. So here were all these separate rooms and the balcony is up there, all rather shabby and this French engineer, he was out for an arbitration. He took one look at this and he said, “This is so nostalgique. This is just like a Middle Eastern brothel”.

Was he referring to the building or the inhabitants?!

I mean I could understand it on the building when you think there are all the rooms filled with individuals practising on their own account, there to make the clients happy. There are a number of similarities between a well kept brothel, I imagine, and the Bar and certainly in that building one could see - but he meant it well and he wasn’t being rude. I’ve got no doubt that he knew what Middle Eastern brothels looked like with their balconies, etcetera, but they did look like it.

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