SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

Yes. You were also describing a few minutes ago Keith Aickin, with whom you read here at the Bar.

Yeah.

And in a speech you made to the Bar in 1993 you described Keith Aickin as having a beautiful mind. Obviously he was a highly influential person for you.

Yes, very much so. When I was reading with him he was one of those - most of us when we come out of court at the end of the day seem to flop around for about an hour and a half, relaxing, having a cup of tea or something. Keith Aickin would come back and get straight on to his (work) - he had an enormous practice. He got straight on to his paper work. He used to dictate into a little machine that he had there and sometimes when he was doing interrogatories, and interrogatories take quite a lot of working out in order to get the sentence exactly right, and Keith would do this entirely in his head and I’d be sitting there thinking, you’ve got yourself into a fix on this one. You aren’t going to find a way out and suddenly there’d be a prepositional clause and an adverb or something and the whole thing would make grammatical sense. It was a very impressive intellectual performance. He was a curious fellow, Keith. He was very very reserved, but occasionally sometimes interstate, if the case had finished or something, but we were still there, they might get him playing cards or something and he was a completely different person. Keith the gambler, quite different to his ordinary behaviour, but always precise. I remember talking one day, having lunch up at the club and it was a hot day and I said, “Really, a day like this - I can’t help wishing I had a swimming pool”. Keith said carefully and thoughtfully, “I think that even (on) a day like this, it’s preferable to live next door to one.” Swimming pools were a lot of work. Whether it was a hot day or not, they were still a lot of work. It was much better to live next door to one where you didn’t have the work. That’s what I mean about not getting carried away. The rest of us were all there nodding, but Keith (was) venturing a dissent, or at least a caution.

There was lots of stuff being said at that time about a fair share of the work. People were complaining that some people were favourites of the clerks. There really were only two clerks at that time. Nicholls and Dever were a partnership and Jim Foley. Dave Calnin was over in Equity, but he looked after only the Equity people. The rest of the Bar, there was simply the clerks who had great power in the distribution of briefs. People used to talk in terms of a “fair” share of the work and I remember one of the few times I saw Keith really speaking angrily (was) at a meeting of the Bar that was held about this. He was saying, “I thought this is a competitive profession. There is no such thing as a fair share of the work. There’s what you can get, whatever that is”. The idea of kind of rationing work around among everybody was anathema to him. When he came to the Bar, he had very little work. He came rather late. He was (Owen) Dixon’s associate just leading into the war and stayed with Dixon when Dixon went as minister to Washington. I should say there was never any question of Keith’s joining the army. He was full of allergies. He couldn’t eat eggs. There were a lot of things. His life was a fight against ill health. He stayed with Dixon while he was at Washington and then had about five years with the United Nations.

I don’t think he came to the Bar until about 1949, by which time all his contemporaries were that much further down the track. When he came, he read with Alistair Adam, who complained more than once. He said, “Look, I’ve got the cleverest young man in Melbourne reading with me and no one will give him a brief”. That was the position and Keith never complained. He sat through that until the profession fairly quickly learned better because the minute he got some work, it was all done very well, very quickly and more work came and he was - I looked up the figures at one time. The normal length of time for taking silk in those days was between about 12 to 15 years and the two quickest that I found, other than Keith, were myself and Dick McGarvie, who took 11 years. Keith took eight. Now statistically - all the rest of us were on the nice parabola and there’s Keith standing to one side like Bradman. There’s no relationship to the parabola formed by all other batsmen. So he was not without work for very long.

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