SEK Hulme interview 17 November 2006

SEK, you commenced practising at the Bar in 1957 and your main area of practice in those days was probate.

Wider than just probate. It was really what was called equity. That included probate. It included interpreting wills. There was a group of people at the Bar whose practices were really based on what was called the Miscellaneous Causes List and that group, when I came to the Bar, was Aickin, Newton, Young, Fullagar, Bill Harris. Arthur Adams did some. I was lucky enough to get into that group almost straight away. So, you were likely to be doing anything which involved interpretation of legal points, as opposed to trying to find out what the facts were and that kind of thing included probate duty, which was very important, as was Commonwealth and State duty. There was estate duty, there was gift duty, there was stamp duty, there was probate duty, as well as income tax. Now, it was very difficult for planners to keep all those balls in the air at once. That was the area that I was predominantly engaged in, though I did have side by side with it quite a large practice in what may be called disasters.

How did that come about? How did the disaster aspect to your career emerge?

I think because probably at the start, which was probably the King Street Bridge inquiry, my client had John Starke leading and there was a lot of reading kind of work and everyone knew that the equity fellows were the ones who did the reading, so one very often got briefed as junior and I was briefed as junior to John Starke in the King Street Bridge inquiry. Then came the West Gate Bridge (disaster). Well, because I’d been in the King Street Bridge, it was thought that I would know something about bridges and so I was junior to Bill Kaye in the King Street Bridge inquiry. Round about the same time, there were the last two big aircraft crashes that Australia had. A Fokker Friendship went in at Mackay and a Viscount went in at Botany Bay and I think both of those - I did a lot of work for TAA at that time and Tony Murray and I appeared for TAA in both the air inquiries and then various ships. There was a ship - it might’ve been called Time. I’m not sure. I forget its name - that went ashore on Corsair Rock, just inside Port Phillip Heads. A big dredge was brought out here and sank on the voyage. I was involved in that. Then the New Holland ran down a tug in Melbourne and there was a Court of Marine Inquiry about that and I was in that one and I was leading by that time.

So really most of that work had very little to do with the equity practice, but they were very long. I mean some of the bridge inquiries were about six months, so it’s a large part of your practice for that year, but they were all very enjoyable. Sir Owen Dixon used to not much approve of people being in these inquiries and he said, “I think it’s better to stick to the legitimate drama”, by which he meant the law courts. He was not a great believer in inquiries.

Why was that?

I don't know. He never explained it, but he did make that remark once. I think he thought that people who were good at courtroom stuff ought to stick to courts and the High Court were not very keen on inquiries, I think. They never did them themselves. That’s not quite true either because during the war I think Eddie McTiernan did one of some kind, but it was very unusual and I don’t think when Dixon was in charge, there was ever anyone on the High Court doing an inquiry.

During those years do you feel you contributed in any way to legal precedent?

Not often. Look, most cases, I think, as long as you’ve got reasonable competence, win or lose themselves. Occasionally you think, yes, it made a difference that I was there that day. I think if one’s honest, it’s quite a rare feeling. I can, I think, claim a good deal of credit in a fairly esoteric area involving the merger of companies when it used to be thought the court would not let you do something by scheme of arrangement if it could be done by takeover, which had a higher shareholding voter requirement. The court wouldn’t let you skip out of that and I invented the argument that what the court was really doing there was trying to protect the people and, as long as you got the vote that would have let you get a takeover home, the 90 per cent, as long as you got that vote, the court shouldn’t interfere with you having done that in respect of a scheme of arrangement, which was in many ways easier to handle. I think I first did it with a tractor company, Massey Ferguson, and then a couple of banks were done. I think I was the first to do that. The view had been taken that it was just impossible. No use trying, the court won’t do it and I said, “Look, I think the court might do it” and, of course, it’s a fairly esoteric area. I mean it’s fairly rare to feel that you made a difference in winning the case. It’s another thing again to think that you’ve altered the way the law goes about this for all future cases and I think that one with the scheme of arrangement was about the only time that I would claim certainly to have approached that kind of situation.

You were mentioning looking at your old fee book and you said there were so many cases, you were beginning to forget a few of them now.

Yeah.

Do any in your memory, however, stand out - any one or two cases in particular during those years before you took silk?

Yes.

The sad fact is that there probably are, but when I looked this morning, I couldn’t find my first fee book. I found the later ones. Some will dawn on me later. Most of those inquiry cases, of course, took place when I was a junior, but I don’t think I’ve got any other specific ones that I have in mind from that time.

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