Peter O’Callaghan interview 22 July 2009

I had, at my time with McGuinness’s, a great deal to do with Kevin Anderson, and I thought that I should read with him if he would have me, and I tee’d that up. But I’d also had a great admiration for Jim Foley, who was the paradigm of clerks. And so I arranged that whilst I would read with Kevin, my clerk would be Foley. And Foley was absolutely fabulous. I can recall when I was taking this decision to go to the bar, and by then we had three children, and whilst I never deviated much, it required a bit of support, and support which I sought from going to the Commonwealth Bank, and I won’t mention his name, and seeing the manager to obtain £200, by way of overdraft, and he said ‘come back in seven days and I will tell you’. And I did. But when I went there, it was the assistant manager, and he looked at the file and said that ‘Mr X said that you shouldn’t go to the Bar’. So I told him that I hadn’t come here for that advice, I’d come here for money. And I went back to Jim and told him about that, and he rang up and in no time at all, the loan was available, and it was very valuable. And Jim was like that, he was; Jim Foley had been the person whom a group of barristers chaired by Eugene Gorman in 1931, had established Equity Chambers, at a time when there was as always, a great accommodation crisis. And Equity Chambers was established by this group of barristers of which Gorman was the leader, and Jim Foley was their clerk. He’d gone from Moules where he had been a managing clerk.

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.