Peter O’Callaghan interview July 2009

I went there on the 3rd of January and a great man, God rest him, Leo Scullion, who was a solicitor at McGuinness’s, and Eira McGuinness who was Brendan’s sister, handed me over to Leo, and Leo handed me the file of Douglas George Elliott, and James Warming Hayes, which was a fight about the Douta Galla Hotel in Moonee Ponds. And this great massive file was a cesspool of litigation, and Leo said ‘read that’. And I can recall going upstairs to the little closet on the 18th floor of 118 Queen Street, or the 12th floor I think it was at 118 Queen Street, and I walked into this very, very small office, and there was a fellow there with his feet on the table and reading The Age, and who said to me ‘who are you?’ And I said ‘well actually I’m Peter O’Callaghan and I’m a third year law student and I’m working here as a clerk’. And he said ‘well, I’m William Norton Burchell, and I’m a solicitor of the High Court of England’. And from then on for about three years, I called him a Pommy bastard and he called me other sorts of things, but we became the closest of friends and he became a very prominent solicitor in Melbourne.

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.