Peter O’Callaghan interview 22 July 2009

In 1953 I was in the Whiteheart Hotel on Christmas Day in the blue room, and I was tapped on the shoulder and Dr Mark O’Brien said, pithily, ‘you’re a bloody fool’, and I naturally sought particulars, and he said ‘you should do law’. And I had not the slightest conception of how you could do law, but he explained it, or sought to explain it, such that in 1954 I did a special test in English, which was able to be done so as to qualify you for an adult matriculation if you’d left school for ten years. And I then took up a correspondence course with Taylor’s, and I got my adult matriculation. But in that year, 1954 in October, my mother had died and I had been intending to visit Taylor’s as was required, to have tuition in public exams. I wrote a letter to Taylor’s explaining the position, and they replied back saying that ‘you had a contract, the contract was that you would receive and return assignments which you have done, however that’s it’. So I did the exams, and then after I had done the exams I did reasonably well, and they wrote me a letter saying that ‘we congratulate you and we propose to publish your name in our newsletter’. And I said that ‘I had a contract, which was to receive assignments and to return them, and if you publish my name, I will sue you’. So then there it was, that I then for the first year I went to Melbourne University, and I stayed at the Shakespeare Hotel in North Melbourne, there regularly, and would go back to Horsham and continue to work on the cars. I then again through the agency of Mark O’Brien, received assistance in admittance to Newman College, and I was there in 1956 and 1957. In 1957 I had been pitching woo to my late darling wife, Jennifer as she then was, and she always remained that, and in the middle of 1957 we agreed to be married. And that required however, the fact that we were going to be married six months later, the provision of a job. So I first spoke to the rector, Philip Gleeson, and he had Michael Chamberlain as he then probably was before he’d become Sir Michael Chamberlain, the Chairman of the National Trustees, meet with me, and who very kindly offered me a job with National Trustees, after the completion of my course, and those tentative arrangements were made, and he invited me down to National Trustees, having made that offer, and there told me that he thought he would withdraw the offer, because he thought I should go to the bar. And coincidentally, he introduced me to a person who had walked into the room and that was Eugene Gorman, the legendary Pat Gorman, and he was introduced to me and Michael Chamberlain said something to the effect ‘he’s thinking of going to the Bar’, and Gorman said ‘have you read The Lives of the Chancellors?’ And I sort of nodded. And he swept out, and as Michael Chamberlain said, and so many other people have said ‘well, that’s Pat’. However, I then needed a job, and I went around to a number of solicitors and they were all enthusiastic about my ideas, but as I can remember Oswald Burt saying, ‘it’s a great thing you are doing, but however we don’t pay clerks, they pay us’, or ‘articled clerks pay us’. But I finally went to Brendan McGuiness, and I explained to him my position, and he said ‘yes, I’ll employ you. Can you start on the 3rd of January?’ And I said ‘yes I can’. And I asked ‘what will the salary be?’ And he responded, ‘it will be adequate’, looking down his aquiline nose. And I think that was one of the more prudent failures, failures to ask a question because I thought ‘well okay, he said that’. So I naturally reported this to Jennifer, and she also naturally said ‘what is the salary?’ And I said ‘I’m told it will be adequate’. Anyway, on January the 3rd or more accurately on January the 10th, when I received my first pay-packet it was £20 a week, which was such that I rang Mark O’Brien and said ‘I can save money on this’, and he said ‘like hell you can’.

[Q] A very good piece of luck?

[A] A piece of luck it was indeed.

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.