Peter O’Callaghan interview 22 July 2009

Peter O’Callaghan QC, thank you for your time. You are at the time of this interview, July 2009, the Victorian Bar’s oldest practising QC, with arguably one of its widest practices. I’d like to start with your early years. You were born in 1931 in Horsham to an Irish father, who’d left I believe in 1916, left Ireland?

He emigrated to Australia in 1916, but I add that Tom Hughes would dispute whether I’m the oldest, because while he’s gone off the Roll in this reciprocity situation, Tom Hughes signed the Bar Roll as a QC in 1965 I think, and if he’s got a brief, he’ll come down here, but leave that to one side. Yes, my father was, as I’ve said, and he was instrumental in his early times in introducing tractors, Delco lights and other things, into the Wimmera as a manager of that department from John Langlands and Sons, which were a very large store, and the pioneers of merchandising in Horsham. However, he foresaw the Depression, recommended to Langlands, and I add that I’m in the process of compiling some sort of history with Peter Langlands, who was a descendent of the Langlands, as to his roles. But from the time that I would have known him, that is from 1931, we lived in a home from which was conducted a, could be called, a backyard mechanics. He was a repairer of farm machinery, municipal machinery, sewerage works, and automotive cars. So that’s what I grew up watching. It was in the Depression, and he was apparently as I now surmise, though a somewhat unreliable historian, able to support the family quite adequately, and indeed the extended family; my grandparents lived with us from time to time, and so on. And one of my recollections, if I can interpolate this, was the number of occasions that swaggies would come to the back door, and as I stress we were by no means an affluent family, but they would ask missus for something, and they were given a sandwich or something and away they went. And that was a lasting impression I have had of the ‘30s.

An edited version of an interview conducted for the Victorian Bar oral history project by Juliette Brodsky, filmed by Stewart Carter at Owen Dixon Chambers and edited by David Broder.