THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF QUEENSLAND
Previous Issue
Issue 98: December 2024
About Us

Brings Laughter and Raises Funds for a Good Cause.

The Queensland Law Revue has once again dazzled audiences with its latest production, “Les Billablés”.

Presented by Queensland Young Lawyers, this annual comedic stage show has been captivating audiences since 2015. Written and performed by barristers and solicitors, the show combines sketch comedy, musical parodies and videos. The aim is to foster collegiality and to promote positive perceptions of legal professionals through creative expression and humour.

This year’s show graced the stage for two nights in August at the Queensland Multicultural Centre at Kangaroo Point. After nine months of planning and preparation, the show came to life with the help of over 40 volunteers, including the cast, band, videographers, graphic designers and behind-the-scenes support.

The cast of “Les Billablés” featured barristers Peter Sams (Director), Philip Diaz, Stephanie Forward-Smith and Thea Hadok-Quadrio together with solicitors Dimity Sams (Convenor), Damien Quick, Dana Heriot, Genevieve Moore, James Taylor, Jessie Raynor, Lisa Cotton, Matthew Hendry, Beej Tracey and Victoria Lopez Vaquero.

The talented band included barrister Michael May and solicitors Ciara Furling, Daniel Trigger, Hannah Hewitt, Keenan Lee, Mark North, Nicholas Waight, Rory Brown, Scott Thompson, Vivian Zhang and Maddie Foster.

The show featured a diverse array of song parodies. Highlights included:

Perhaps the most relatable song for barristers was a witty rendition of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” re-titled “Barrister”, with lyrics including:

“He says, “Sir can you draft me a proceeding?My client could use one of thoseCause he’s mad as all hell, with a story to tellAnd you wear a barrister’s robes”La, la-la, di-di-daLa-la di-di-da da-dumTell me my case, you’re the barristerTell me that it is his rightCause we’ve promised the client a remedyAnd you’ve got the rest of the night”.

The sketches were equally witty, featuring:

The pièce de resistance was a music video of “One Day More” from Les Misérables, reimagined as “One Case More”. You can watch the video on YouTube here.

All in all, the event was filled with laughter and camaraderie, showcasing the lighter side of the legal profession. In addition to the entertainment, the event also supported a worthy cause, raising over $1,700 for the Minds Count Foundation.

If you’re interested in getting involved next year, feel free to contact qldlawrevue@gmail.com

Left to right: Damien Quick, Thea Hadok-Quadrio, Beej Tracey, Stephanie Forward-Smith, Dimity Sams, Jessie Raynor, Matthew Hendry, Genevieve Moore and Lisa Cotton
Left to right: Genevieve Moore, Philip Diaz and Stephanie Forward-Smith
Left to right: Jessie Raynor and Peter Sams
Left to right: Matthew Hendry, Damien Quick and Thea Hadok-Quadrio

Author: Jeff FitzgeraldPublisher: The Federation PressReviewer: Brian Morgan

Hard Cover 505 pages.

What an honour I have been given to review this book. What an insight it provides to one of our greatest lawyers of the last fifty years. The author’s note at its commencement is, in itself, revealing as it paints a picture of what Sir Gerard wanted and didn’t want, including his reluctance to have a biography written about him and a desire that his personal life remain private.

Fortunately for the reader, it soon became evident that the book could not be written without referring to Sir Gerard’s family and understanding his relationship with them. In particular, his wife, Pat, like so many lawyers’ wives, basically, ran the family during the frequent and prolonged absences of her husband caused, inter alia, by the requirement that he spend substantial periods of time away from Queensland, where his home was at that time. But as is evident from the book, Pat’s contribution to Sir Gerard and their family went far beyond that. Pat was truly Sir Gerard’s partner in life. They became, if anything, closer, as Pat’s health deteriorated leading to Sir Gerard assuming many of the domestic tasks that she had previously done.

I want to digress from the text for a moment and make a plea to all young people who are at the Bar or considering life at the Bar to read this book as a means of opening their eyes to what a barrister’s life really entails. I well remember interviewing prospective candidates to be my reader. On one occasion, a young man entered my Chambers and handed me a list of his requirements, which included working hours of 9.30am until no later than 5.30, no night work, no weekend work, six weeks vacation, each year, and an income well beyond that which a young barrister might expect to earn during his training. I stood up and offered him my seat explaining that terms such as this suggested he should be the master and I the underling. He never completed his training for the bar and, as far as I can determine, never entered practice. And, did I mention that he demanded one afternoon off per week to play sport?

The book being reviewed shines a light on the only way, of which I am aware, to succeed at the bar, namely, to work long hours, be prepared to be overworked, be respectful to the Courts and your colleagues and fully prepare your work.

I did not know that Sir Gerard’s father had been a Supreme Court Justice in Queensland. Nor did I know that Sir Gerard was, initially, refused Admission to the Bar by the Chief Justice due to a technicality on which no one wished to rely, except the Chief Justice. Another counsel at the bar table removed his wig and spoke loudly enough to be heard, suggesting that Sir Gerard was being punished for the “sins of the father” who had not been overly popular with the bar or, for that matter, with some of the Judges in Queensland. The decision to refuse his admission was quickly reversed due to the intervention of one of the other judges sitting on the Admissions Applications.

Sir Gerard was a highly intelligent and a lateral thinker and, as one sees many times throughout the book, he had the uncanny ability to re-consider older and long accepted cases, to dismantle them into fundamentals and replace them with a conclusion that has since stood the test of time.

But, although the book purports to focus on Sir Gerard, it presents far more than that. The relationship between Sir Gerard and various High Court justices over the years matured to permit genuine friendships to develop even while frequent deep disagreements concerning legal principles arose in their judicial work. It is to the credit of each person involved that such differences on principle did not interfere with the mutual respect of the justices for each other.

Sir Gerard was, whether on the Bench or in his private life, a down to earth person. He valued his family, his Church (he was a Catholic), First Nations people, the practice of the law and the importance of getting things right.

He found time to be a volunteer for the St. Vincent de Paul Society and, with his wife, would distribute fruit and vegetables to the needy on a Sunday night, introducing himself as “Gerry from St. Vincent de Paul”. It may have been a sign of the times that eyebrows were raised when Sir Gerard was observed sitting talking to First Nations people. The reality of Sir Gerard Brennan, however, was that he treated all people equally.

I particularly enjoyed the short outlines of the personalities of other justices who sat with Brennan as I knew some of them sufficiently well to have one pull up at a red light in a car bearing an L plate, one Sunday morning and, from the passenger seat, give me a very obvious greeting and another who told me that they could always tell when pleadings had been settled by me, from the first page, as they were too voluminous!  I also managed to have a heated but not unfriendly discussion on a legal topic with Michael Kirby during a legal convention in Adelaide in the mid 70’s.

Sir Gerard emerges from the pages of the book as remaining a humble man, to his final days.

This book makes for riveting reading by anyone, lawyer or otherwise, who seeks to better understand the workings of the High Court of Australia.

I will conclude this review by quoting the comment of another great Queensland lawyer, now former Chief Justice of the High Court, Susan Kiefel, who said that Brennan regarded:

“The absence of unjustified discrimination, the peaceful possession of one’s property, the benefit of natural justice, and immunity from retrospective and unreasonable operation of laws” as of critical importance … he saw them as values which served to explicate and illuminate the common law, tempered by the need for the law to develop incrementally and in accordance with precedent, the judicial method and the separation of powers. Unprincipled judicial discretion was anathema to him. What was necessary was consistency and predictability”. [2022] HCATrans 135, cited at page 483 of the text.

Publisher: Federation PressAuthors: Lucy Geddes and Hamish McLachlanReviewer: Robert Quirk

As a staunch advocate for an Australian bill of rights, I eagerly grabbed this book, hoping to uncover evidence of 50 influential human rights cases that have shaped the nation. However, I was sceptical that it would truly fulfill my expectations. To my delight, I was proven wrong.

The book acknowledges that human rights are not adequately protected in Australia. I could not agree more. That doesn’t mean that there are not decisions that have changed Australia for the better, as the foreword by the Honourable Michael Kirby AC CMG, pithily, observes on the book’s merit:

“… That may be the greatest value of this book. It illustrates the potential of our legal system to safeguard and advance individual human rights, invoking often very limited tools and rejecting over-narrow legal outcomes.” 

This book is reader-friendly and organized into sections covering a variety of rights, including those pertaining to first nations, women, the LGBTIQA+ community, individuals with disabilities, children, asylum seekers, refugees, prisoners, protection against racial discrimination, liberty, criminal justice, freedom of expression and political communication, democracy, a sustainable environment, and the rule of law.

Each case is also in an easy-to-read format with the title, a paragraph summarising the case and what the court found, the relevant human right(s), facts, issues, decision, key quotes, how the learned authors consider the case changed Australia, and the number of LawCite citations. Three examples demonstrate how easy the book is to read and understand.

For Love v Commonwealth; Thoms v Commonwealth [2020] HCA 3; 270 CLR 152 the summary is:

“Two First Nations men, one a Gunggari man born in New Zealand, and the other a Kamilaroi man born in Papua New Guinea, established that First Nations people cannot be regarded as aliens.”

In the discussion of Re Kelvin [2017] FamCAFC 258; 327 FLR 15, the relevant humans rights, in the context of a transgender young person, were: 

Rowe v Electoral Commissioner [2010] HCA 46; 243 CLR 1 involved a law which prevented the registration of voters after electoral writs had been issued. The authors said of how this case changed Australia:

“The case was a significant victory for voting rights in Australia. Practically speaking the judgment made an immediate difference to the quality of democracy in Australia as it enabled 100,000 people to vote in the 2010 election who would have otherwise been disqualified from doing so. … While the right to vote has historically been viewed as a statutory right, the High Court rules that it is an essential part of our constitutionally prescribed system of representative government. …”

It will be intriguing to observe if the next edition expands to include more cases, such as NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs or whether some are removed to maintain a limit of 50. I predict that with the rise of human rights laws across the nation, there will likely be a need for an increase in the number of cases included. 

It is a good read but probably more for students and general interest. I consider it to be good value.

(Recommended retail price: $69.95)

Author: Jeff SparrowPublisher: ScribeReviewer: Stephen Keim

Melbourne writer, Jeff Sparrow’s 2021 monograph, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating (“Crimes”) sorts through well-forgotten histories of marketing and technology to refute the proposition that global heating and other impending environmental catastrophes are the fault of us as opposed to the minority of extremely wealthy people who possess and have access to the vast majority of the world’s resources and exercise inordinate amounts of power and influence.

Most people who care that we are on course to destroy our ability to live safely on this planet are frequently told, by those who are promoting the course to ruin, that global heating is our own fault because we own a car and we buy things at the supermarket that have been produced using fossil fuels. If we fully absorb the message, we find ourselves waiting at a bus stop in the outer suburbs for hours while those who have blamed us drive past us in their latest petrol powered SUV.

The thesis of Crimes is that most of our choices as consumers are pre-ordained for us. We might once have been content to buy most of our products at the corner store or local butcher neither of which continue to exist. We might once have been content to take our own containers to the shop to be refilled but, now, all our goods come with endless wrapping and packaging. As our local stores shut down, we are told by ubiquitous advertising that we love driving to huge shopping centres and that we love walking soulless shopping aisles collecting the goods from the shelf and acting as our own cashiers on the way out. And when we hearken back to the days that we loved shopping local, we are told that all those local shops shut down because we exercised our choice by looking for bargains at Shopping Town Central.

Crimes argues that, from the first adoption of fossil fuels to the ineffectual negotiations on reducing emissions levels, climate change has been driven not by the many but by the few. A tiny coterie has used every weapon at its disposal to coerce or persuade us to accept practices we never wanted. Whether we recycled or rode bikes or switched off unnecessary lights never made any difference. Sparrow quotes Bernie-like figures to the effect that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who comprise the poorest half of the earth’s population. The narratives that we are all guilty and all responsible for global heating are rejected by Crimes. Rather, argues Sparrow, responsibility lies with a set of social and political structures that did not exist in the past and need not exist in the future.

Three of Sparrow’s ventures into history stand out for me. The first involves the origins of the internal combustion engine driven automobile. An interesting sidelight of this narrative is that, as gas guzzlers were being born and becoming popular, they received stiff competition from electric cars. The leading electric car manufacturer experienced a financial collapse and the way was clear for petrol driven vehicles to dominate. This titbit adds a certain contingency to life as we know it, today.

Automobiles, during their emergence were owned by the rich and were unpopular with the many since they were noisy, smelly and dangerous. They disrupted the streets of towns and cities which were then multi-user centres where people walked and gossiped and children played games. All this could be shared, more or less safely, with the horse drawn vehicles that provided transport. Cars, however, were dangerous and killed and injured many people such that laws were promoted restricting the speed of self-driven vehicles for the safety of the populace and the liveability of their neighbourhoods.

  This was when the advertising industry, at the behest of the automobile and gasoline industry, showed their creative talents. The concept of the jay walker, familiar to us, today, though we may be unaware of its origins was invented. “Jay” means unsophisticated, in the nature of a country bumpkin, too unsophisticated to appreciate the beauty and the dangers of automobiles. (Surprisingly, to me, it was never some strange geometrical term describing crossing a road in an arc resembling the letter, ”J”.)

Advertising money meant that pedestrians were slandered in every available medium and blamed for their own deaths and injuries at the hands of automobile drivers. And the laws followed, no longer restricting the rights of drivers to drive at dangerous speeds but penalising pedestrians for using the streets as a communal space as had traditionally been their right.

The second historical anecdote also involves the advertising industry earning big money by flooding the airwaves and other media with a new concept aimed at shifting blame from industry to the ordinary citizen. Before the Second World War, consumers and retailers acted on the basis that drink containers were expected to be re-usable. After the war, both manufacturers of drinks and the packaging industry realised that money was to be made by making containers disposable. The only problem was that the accumulation of rubbish on roadsides, in farmlands and public places was so distressing that legislators were turning to laws that imposed an obligation to make containers re-usable, again.

Manufacturing and packaging capital came together to head off the new laws at the pass. More than twenty organisations came together to create a new organisation called “Keep America Beautiful”, thereby, disguising and separating the purveyors of the message (who stood only to make profits) from the message which was designed to blame all of us as individuals for the accumulating rubbish in our public places. Not only did the genius advertisers manage to disguise the profit-making objectives of their paymasters behind the philanthropic concept of keeping the countryside beautiful but they also created the concept of the litter-bug to transfer moral perfidy upon all of those individuals being sold product in disposable containers. No matter that these same litter-bugs had, dutifully and contentedly, retuned the re-usable containers for generations. The laws requiring re-usability disappeared and laws aimed at individuals, the so-called litterbugs, have been the order of the day, ever since.

The tobacco industry’s scurrilous use of advertising to increase its profits at the expense of public health and the subsequent use of advertising and public relations by the fossil fuel industry to green wash its contribution to global heating are the subject of later chapters.

The third piece of historical learning from Crimes dates back to the industrial revolution. It turns out, looking back, that water wheels were as industrially efficient and much less destructive to humans and their environment than steam power derived from burning coal. But the enclosure movement had driven ordinary people off the commons land they had enjoyed for centuries and a desperately poor workforce had accumulated in the cities. So, to utilise and exploit the desperately poor, manufacturing industry turned their collective back on water power and started burning coal. The industrial revolution which resulted was, thereby, much more profitable to the industrial barons; much worse for the environment; and came at a much greater cost to the lives and well-being of ordinary workers.

The theme from each of these examples is that what is made to appear inevitable and unavoidable was, in fact, manipulated into existence by decisions of the few made for their own profits and benefit and at the expense of the many.    

Sparrow’s analysis touches upon many subjects.

A particularly interesting chapter concerns the way in which Indigenous societies in Australia and the Americas cared for their environment and existed without making destructive demands upon it. Similar observations are made of the poorer agricultural classes in European countries who preserved the commons on which they depended and led lives that were materially poor but punctuated by feasts and religious celebrations and festivals. Settler colonialism, and, in Europe, itself, enclosure, disrupted these simpler modes of living and not only wrought havoc upon the lives of the poor but also on the environments which had been previously been carefully preserved as the demands of capitalism required exploitation of the land in every possible profitable way.

A later chapter discusses the way in which the national parks movement, while indeed driven by concern at the loss of wilderness areas, was driven by the desire to preserve natural areas for big game hunters. Ironically, areas such as that which became Yellowstone National Park were still being used and looked after by Indigenous Americans living their traditional lifestyles. The “conservationists” could not tolerate this and, so, laws were passed to exclude Indigenous Americans from using their traditional country, now national park, for their traditional purposes.

Crimes is a peeling the scales from one’s eyes experience. Not surprisingly, even very recent history is buried and forgotten because it is not convenient to those who have benefitted from the events involved.

It is important that historians like Sparrow continue to remind us of crimes that we have forgotten and of some that we had never dreamed to have occurred.

Crimes is an interesting and important book, well worth the read. 

Author: Matt HaigPublisher: CanongateReviewer: Stephen Keim

Matt Haig is a purveyor of speculative fiction and The Midnight Library (“Library”) is a workof speculative fiction.

Haig was born in 1975. He has written both fiction and non-fiction and works for adults and children. A lot of Haig’s work touches on issues of mental health and this interest is acknowledged to have been inspired by a mental breakdown he, himself, experienced when he was 24 years old. Haig has published nearly 30 books, including eight novels since his first novel in 2004.

Nora Seed is 35 years of age. Conveniently for the book’s thesis, she is absurdly talented. In her mid-teens, she had the potential to compete and be successful in competitive swimming at world championship and Olympic Games levels. As a musician, she was an accomplished, self-taught piano player with an ability to perform in both modern and classical genres. She also wrote songs and performed as a vocalist in an emerging rock band.

Nora was also academically talented with a passion for philosophy including the works of Henry David Thoreau and Aristotle. She had strong humanitarian values and wanted to contribute to preventing climate change from destroying the planet’s ability to support human life.

By the time she was 35, however, at the opening of Library, Nora felt that all of this talent had been wasted; she had let the most important people in her life down; and that she was a waste of a carbon footprint on the earth. She had not even managed to escape the town of Bedford, the county seat of Bedfordshire, a matter most young people in that town might regard as sufficient reason for deep depressive episodes.

And, so, she overdosed.

Rather than running into Lucifer or Saint Peter, Nora finds herself in a Tardis-like library where time is frozen at midnight and the infinite array of shelves contain books all bearing covers of different shades of green. The one other person who shares the library with Nora is her old school librarian, Mrs Elms, who had, during Nora’s schooling, been kind to Nora, especially, in moments of tragedy and grief.

Mrs Elms explains that Nora is in a unique state of inbetweenness, between life and death, akin to a modern-day Schrodinger’s Cat. Each of the infinity of books (apart from a heavy tome documenting each and every regret that Nora had experienced during her life) represents a possible life that Nora might have lived had she made a different decision to the one she had made at a particular point in time.

Better still, Nora can choose any of those books such that, by doing so, Nora can be parachuted into a particular life at a precise moment and find out how her life might have been had she not made the decisions that led to the sorry state that led her to take an excessive and unhealthy number of sedatives but moments before. There are complications from the circumstance that Nora has no memory when she arrives from this alternative life. Her new close friends and partners and even mere workmates and acquaintances think she is a bit odd since she asks about things with which this Nora was intimately acquainted from the days or years before her parachuting in. But, in most of these lives, this is the least of her troubles.  

And, so, Nora finds out what would have happened had she not backed out of her wedding just days from that event; what her life would have been like had she not abandoned her father’s dream of her becoming a swimming champion; and what success would have been achieved had she not abandoned the rock band in which her only sibling, Joe, and his best mate, Ravi, and she were the would be stars of the future.

The terms and conditions of this arrangement were pretty favourable to Nora. If she did not like these alternative lives, she could come back to the library and try another one. If she were content, she could stay in that life and live it to the end. There was even a possibility of going back to her own life if she changed her mind and chose to go back.

As in most speculative fiction, the improbable imaginings which make up the plot in Library are justified by reference to scientific theory. Library draws on quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel universes to add internal plausibility to the plot and maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

But Library, properly understood, as with many of Haig’s works, is about psychological not scientific truths. Most of the alternative lives experienced by Nora turn out to be unliveable such that she returns to the library, quick smart. It turned out to be a good decision to back out of her wedding and not such a bad decision to give up competitive swimming or the dream of rock stardom.

This experience could have led to a negative conclusion. If giving up on my most deeply held dream were a blessing, it might just be the case that I was destined for a terrible life no matter what I chose to do. So, giving up on the prospect of happiness is the only sensible choice. But abandoning regrets might have its own positives and its own unexpected consequences.

So, Nora continues to explore her alternative lives. She learns valuable lessons on the way. Eventually, she must apply those learnings and make a definitive choice.

I read Library in two days, a rarity for me. For much of the first half of the book, with a degree of detachment, I admired its clever construction and its fine use of geographical, scientific and philosophical learning. But, as the crisis was reached and the denouement unfolded, my eyelashes were wet and it became difficult to see the words on the page without repeated blinking.

My test of a good novel was met.  

Author: M. Margaret McKeownPublisher: University of Nebraska Press (2022)Reviewer: Greg Barns SC

In an era where the United States Supreme Court’s legitimacy is such that calling it a politically corrupted court is not far fetched, it is worth remembering that one of the most important benches in the world has had sit on it socially progressive and liberal judges who have seen justice as a force for making a better society.

William O Douglas, the longest serving justice of the Court (1939-1975), is one of those judges. Not only was Douglas responsible for the expansion of rights, such as the right to privacy in the famous case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (a decision that paved the way for Roe v Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973)) but he was a committed environmentalist who, off the bench, worked assiduously to protect wilderness and other natural heritage and was also well ahead of his time in arguing for legal standing for environmental groups, rivers and trees.

In CITIZEN JUSTICE: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas, M Margaret McKeown, a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, chronicles, through a brilliant use of source material, Douglas’s extra-curial work and his jurisprudential thinking on environmental issues.

As she observes, however, Douglas’s lobbying of Congressmen and women, senators, Cabinet members and Presidents, including Kennedy and Johnson, would not be tolerated today (although it is nothing on the revelations about current Justice Clarence Thomas accepting trips and not declaring them).  Further, she notes, even for the times, Douglas’s activities breached the judicial ethical norms.

However, there is no doubting Douglas’s critical role in saving the American landscape from the ravages of extractive industries, industrialisation and expansion of cities.

The latter was famously demonstrated when Douglas embarked on a campaign that, in 1954, included a trek of 304 kilometres to save the historical Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal which was to be obliterated by a highway in Washington DC.

Douglas’s love of the wilderness came from a childhood spent in the north west – Oregon and Washington State.  Even when he went into academia at Columbia and Yale and then to Washington (he was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1937 until his appointment by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court in 1939), Douglas returned to that wilderness, every year.  His summer residence was a cottage at Goose Prairie in Washington State where he would continue court work.

Douglas was a supporter of, and involved with the campaigns of the high profile, emerging NGOs of the time, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society.

The extent of Douglas’s lobbying for environmental causes is masterfully laid out by McKeown.  The breadth of it is extraordinary.  However, it is important to note that Douglas had already picked up skills in this space because he had been close to Roosevelt, part of the latter’s famous martini and card playing set. 

Key allies for Douglas included senators from Washington and Oregon, including the famous Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, who was an earlier environmental legislation advocate in Congress.  He also formed a close alliance with Stewart Udall who served as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969 under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

McKeown illustrates Douglas’s feat in triangulating politics, activism and judicial office in his 1960s campaign to save the Red River Gorge in Kentucky from a dam proposal.  Douglas and his fourth wife Cathy Heffernan joined the protest march in 1967.  At its conclusion, Douglas, having returned to his chambers at the Court, immediately, wrote to President Johnson, whom he knew, urging Johnson’s intervention to stop the proposed damming of the Gorge.  It worked.  The project’s momentum slowed down and it was abandoned in the early 1990s.

On the bench, Douglas was the first to recognise that trees and other inanimate objects like rivers could have standing.  Douglas had been influenced by a seminal article by Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? – Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects”, published in the Southern California Law Review in 1972.[1]

Douglas had the chance to apply Stone’s thesis in a 1972 landmark environmental case concerning standing, Sierra Club v Morton.[2]  In his dissent, Douglas reasoned: “Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a “person” for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes.”

Therefore, Douglas wrote: “… it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

Douglas died in 1980.  He was and is, still, much admired by progressives and those who believe that the law must be applied in the context of the times in which it operates.  Former High Court Justice, Lionel Murphy, was an admirer of Douglas for that reason.

This is a fascinating book about a ‘big man’.  Unorthodox, iconoclastic and flawed, Douglas however is an environmental movement icon because he used his elevated position in society to enhance the earth.[3]

[1]  Christopher D Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? – Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” (1972) 45 Southern California Law Review 450.

[2] Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972)

[3] Ibid 742-743

Author: Bonnie GarmusPublisher: Penguin Books[1]Reviewer: Stephen Keim

I had read the blurb of Lessons in Chemistry (“Lessons”). The opening pages start in 1961. Elizabeth Zott has already resigned from her research institute and her five year old daughter, Madeline, is attending school. Elizabeth appears to be a single mother. Elizabeth is already hosting Supper at Six, the television show that purports to be about cooking but which, at the same time, delivers to its viewers the eponymous “lessons in chemistry”.

I was a little disappointed. No matter how popular Supper at Six might have been and no matter how brilliant the concept of teaching chemistry and cooking at the same time might be, a novel based on following a TV show from episode to episode was going to be a little boring. I was hoping to hear much more about the lead up that brought Elizabeth Zott and the reader to this point in time.

I need not have worried.

Because, from that point, Lessons sweeps backwards and forward in time. Much of the action dates from around 1954. One version of the start of the narrative is Elizabeth barging into the laboratory of the Hastings Research Institute’s undoubted star chemist, the arrogant Calvin Evans, to requisition beakers unneeded by Evans but essential for Eizabeth’s important but massively under resourced work and laboratory. This incident and a subsequent inconvenient bout of vomiting has unforeseen consequences, including romance.

As a romantic comedy, however, Lessons fails miserably since most of the romance occurs in the early parts of the narrative. And the romance is not without a degree of related tragedy.

Garmus was born in 1957. Lessons is her debut novel. She is, however, a proficient and practised purveyor of words, having been a copy-writer for much of her working life.

Lessons weighs in at 382 pages (without the acknowledgements). Not an extraordinarily long novel. But Lessons is, undoubtedly, a big novel. It contains big characters who will make the unlikely occur. Elizabeth Zott is on the spectrum, fearless, unfiltered and unstoppable. Madeline is created and encouraged in her own unfiltered precocity by Elizabeth. Lessons features a dog mistakenly named 6.30 who, nonetheless, manages a human vocabulary of over 900 words and possesses dog knowledge that far surpasses that minor achievement; a reverend minister who confesses to not believing in God; a scientist nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize notwithstanding that he lost his parents and then his aunt through tragedy and was then raised in an oppressive Catholic Boys Home in Iowa; a well-meaning and talented but spineless television producer; and more than one sexual predator who, eventually, misjudge and choose the wrong victim. Lessons, also, manages to introduce the sport of rowing to a whole new and previously indifferent audience.

The theme of Lessons is society’s inability to judge and treat women on their merits such that women are never taken seriously and they do not receive the opportunities that men of the same and much less talent and ability do receive, on a daily basis. In Lessons, these events are taking place in the 1950s and 60s but both the novel and Garmus’s own experience indicate that these problems are timeless.

The lessons are, ultimately, neither of chemistry nor cooking. There is an internal lesson to reject the assumptions that society seeks to impose on you as a woman. The external lesson is, notwithstanding the acknowledged difficulties and loading of the dice against you, to resist and to assert your own worth.

Thirty years ago, I read every book by John Irving on which I could lay my hands starting, of course, with The World According to Garp and working my way through The Cider House Rules, Setting Free the Bears, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany.  

Lessons reminds me strongly of Irving’s work. It manages a similarly complexly interwoven plot weaving its way back and forth in time with apparently incidental incidents and references receiving their full significance in the denouement. Lessons introduces the reader to characters who are thought to be both rare and unlikely in real life. We grow to understand and love these unusual people in ways that we might have considered impossible in our own lives. And Lessons, also, as in an Irving novel, through its intriguing plot and its cast of unlikely characters, deals with moral issues of great importance.

For all of these reasons, Lessons is up there with the best of Irving’s works.

Lessons has been adapted to television, starring Brie Larsen, and is available on Apple TV.

I read Lessons in about a day. That is a tribute as much to the engaging nature of the characters as to the allurement of the cleverly unfolding plot.

Lessons comes highly recommended by this reviewer.

[1] Lessons in Chemistry was first published in April 2022 by Doubleday.

Author: David FinkelPublisher: Scribe PublicationsReviewer: Dan O’Gorman

This publication is a work of non-fiction journalism by David Finkel, a Pulitzer prize-winning author. It discusses America today – an angry, violent and divided society – and it comments upon the very deep divisions that have opened in that society. It is largely based upon Finkel’s own personal observations of the key people reported upon in the book, all of whom knew he was a journalist and agreed to participate with the understanding that whatever he saw or heard was on the record.

Finkel spent some 14 years closely observing one of the book’s central characters, Brent Cummings including his family, community, and his work and thoughts. Cummings was one of the characters in Finkel’s earlier publication, The Good Soldiers.Cummings had spent 28 years in the U.S. Armyand was a veteran of the Iraq War. He had also spent 3 ½ years deployed away from his family training the Palestinian Authority Security Forces.

Cummings was raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty and respect but he was becoming increasingly surprised by the behaviour and belief of others and he became engulfed by the fear, anger and confusion that was sweeping his country as he attempted to hold onto his values and his hope for America’s future.

The US had a President who was tweeting about “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Hillary” and “the Lamestream Media” and “Democrat Witch Hunt!”. Cummings was in 2016 attempting to deal with the fact that the country he loves was fracturing and, by 2020, he had concluded the US was fractured and was reminiscent of the 1960s (a period which saw the arrival of division and tribalism resulting in the commencement of culture wars marked by race, religion and class) and that it might be heading towards something as bad as the events of 1968, the year he was born and about which he had heard much from his mother – there’d been the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy Jr, race riots in a hundred cities, violence against antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention, the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the deaths of some 17,000 American troops (nearly 50 per day), the deadliest year of that war.

Cummings worried about the 2020 versions of “the Tim McVeigh folks” (a reference to a soldier who, after leaving the Army, one day, loaded a rented truck with explosives, parked it outside a federal office in Oklahoma City and detonated it, killing 168 people, 19 of them children). The 2020 versions are enraged, grievance-filled, white supremist and domestic terrorist. At the same time, Cummings wondered if Trump understood he was encouraging violence of a kind that changes the soul of a person and of a country.

Another person written about is Cummings’ next door neighbour, Michael Owens, who had been in a wheelchair for 28 years, half his life, after being left paralysed with quadriplegia because of a fall of 60 feet from a tree. He was a self-declared “hard-core conservative and far right” who believes in the Bible and the US Constitution because “they were written” whose level enthusiasm for Trump was matched by his disdain for the Democratic Party; he had voted for the Republicans since 1984 when he first voted for President; and he planned to vote for President Trump in 2020.

Finkel writes about the unfolding stories of people such as Cummings and Owens, attempting to find answers to their own questions about what was happening in American society, today. He states that it was his wish to write a book about being an American in a country becoming ever more divided and combative, and believed the best way to do that would be to focus on the lives of a small group of interconnected people who span the political, racial and economic spectrums of America and were divided, in many ways, but were united in the belief that their beloved country was fracturing. To do so, he observed and documented them, particularly, in Georgia, from Election Day 2016 through to Election Day 2020.

This became the basis for An American Dreamer. He found that change can sometimes begin if those with fundamental differences can attempt to find common ground. An American Dreamer graphically illuminates the lives and feeling of many people in America, today, an America that is a truly divided country. Finkel has cleverly outlined Cummings’ experiences of confusion, frustration and optimism – and Cummings’ reminders how nice people could be, especially, if he did not think of them in political terms.

This publication is timely as the elections loom in America in early November 2024, particularly, the Presidential election which has the potential to be one of the most decisive in American history. Finkel outlines scenarios that provide examples of how some healing can be achieved where there is division but where there is also a willingness to attempt to genuinely understand how and why people with contrary views have arrived at those views.

Author: Iain McCalmanPublisher: NewSouth PublishingReviewer: Franklin Richards

Flying from Townsville to Cairns, recently, I was reminded of the uniqueness of the coastal land and sea below. Nowhere else in the country, does tropical rainforest tumble down from the mountains to the coastal plain and, in few places on earth, do such rainforest shade beaches fringed with coral.

Growing up in North Queensland, barefoot and brown, it never occurred to my siblings and me that things could have been different. We felt lucky to have the pristine forests and reefs to explore. And that was it.

I have since learned that the preservation of these environments has little to do with luck and everything to do with the passion, persistence and hard work of a few. John Bússt, along with Judith Wright and Len Webb, deserve much of the credit for saving North Queensland rainforest and reef. Of these three, the latter two university educated activists have tended to get most of the credit. Award-winning historian. Iain McCalman, admitted that he too, initially, thought Bússt, ‘the cheeky Bingil Bay Bastard seemed a less serious figure.’ McCalman’s book, John Bússt. Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest, is his effort to redress that error.

The biography tells the story of how Bússt abandoned formal education and privileged family in Victoria and became an artist and activist in North Queensland. Like all such transitions, it was not strictly linear and included false starts and curious asides.

Whatever the wayward path to ‘saviour of reef and rainforest’, it began definitively enough. McCalman writes: ‘In the summer of 1929-30, John Bússt, aged twenty, and his sister, Phyllis Victoria May Bússt, aged twenty-eight, suddenly, and without consulting their parents, abandoned their Melbourne University degrees.’

What followed were several years of bohemian life, in and around Melbourne. The Bússts took up painting and, for a time, fell under the spell of Colin Colahan, a rebellious but successful artist. The association led them to join with Justin (Jorgey) Jorgensen to help build Montsalvat, an artists’ village in Eltham, in the hills outside Melbourne. The experience helped to make Bússt a tough, resourceful and resilient man. He learned how to grow food crops, tend farm animals and build in stone and timber. These skills he would put to good use when living a beachcomber lifestyle on Bedarra Island and later at Bingil Bay in North Queensland.

It was a visitor to Montsalvat who inspired the Bússt’s move northward. An invitation from Noel Wood, a flamboyant and talented painter of the tropics, was hard for John Bússt to ignore. It wasn’t long after the visit, that Bússt, now the beneficiary of an inheritance, joined Wood on Bedarra Island. He lived on the island for some years. In 1957, now married to Alison Shaw Fitchett, Bússt moved with his wife to the mainland, buying a substantial rainforest block at Bingil Bay.

During his time in the north, Bússt developed a deep appreciation of the place. He recognised the uniqueness of the rainforest, the coastal islands and reef. He also developed a deep affinity for the Djiru, the First Peoples, who were initially rounded up at Mission Beach and later transported to Palm Island. He recognised that these First Peoples had managed to live in the environment, protecting it: rather than living precariously upon it as settler populations tended to do. He tried to emulate their example. By 1965, Bússt had become a knowledgeable citizen-scientist and enthusiastic environmentalist and so began his battles against those who would exploit or destroy the forest and reef he loved.

During the next six years, Bússt fought to save the forests and reef. He helped to stop or minimise exploitation of and damage to the environment. He used intellect and persuasion and recruited the support of new and old friends, including Harold Holt. He fought many, including an army who wanted to test defoliants in the forest, graziers who wanted to mine a reef for fertiliser and AMPOL who wanted to drill for oil.

John Bússt is remembered and celebrated by many North Queensland artists and environmentalists. McCalman writes that, at the beginning of his research for this book, he was introduced to something amongst the granite rocks below where John Bússt built his mainland house. He writes: “Attached to one of these was a metal plaque weathered by sun, wind, rain and sea-spray. A fine grey-green patina of algae blended with adjacent bushes and mosses, making it easy to miss. I knew the plaque’s contents because of its mention in Judith Wright’s classic book, The Coral Battleground. Even so, her heartfelt words viewed in these wild surrounds moved me once again.

IN MEMORY OF JOHN H BÚSST DIED 5-4-1971. ARTIST AND LOVER OF BEAUTY WHO FOUGHT THAT MAN AND NATURE MIGHT SURVIVE.

This book is a lovely tribute to John Bússt and to all those who have fought to save what is left of the natural world.

Author: Simon ClearyPublisher: UQPReviewer: Stephen Keim

Everything is Water (“Water”) is Simon Cleary’s fourth published book. His earlier three books, The Comfort of Figs, Closer to Stone and The War Artist are novels. Water is non-fiction and documents Cleary’s 27 day journey from, arguably, the source of the Brisbane River to its mouth. Mainly slogging it on foot, broken only by a pleasant and speedy canoe ride, with a boat trip from the city to Moreton Bay at the end, Cleary endured a harrowing month achieving his ambition of exploring the unexpected complexity that lies beneath what is lifelong familiar.

Cleary, whose father was the Cleary of the extremely respected Toowoomba law firm, Cleary and Lee, grew up in Toowoomba; spent lost childhood hours and days playing in the creeks that cascaded eastwards off the escarpment of the Toowoomba Range; and ventured, for various reasons, into neighbouring townships such as Helidon. Each of his novels have drawn upon Cleary’s childhood environs while also venturing far afield including, in the case of Closer to Stone, to the civil war torn Western Sahara.

Water falls into that pattern, involving a journey from a creek just like his childhood play haunts and whose waters form part of the same catchment and, guided by gravity and the fates, empty into the same waters of Moreton Bay. Familiarity is also found in the urban reaches of the river in that Cleary has lived, studied and worked in Brisbane for most of his life since starting university in the eighties.

Water, then, is a travel book. Travel books are a wonderful genre of non-fiction. The problem for the travel writer, however, is that the act of travelling, no matter how exciting the concept and the act of travelling, itself, is difficult to translate, in an interesting way, into three hundred pages or so of printed words.

Eric Hansen’s A Stranger in the Forest involved Hansen’s attempt to be the first person with a European heritage to walk across the mountainous island of Borneo. His journey involved thousands of kilometres on foot and seven months in sunless rainforest. An account of seven months of such struggle has a great capacity to be even less enjoyable to read than the journey, itself. The travel writer must, therefore, find ways to make the endlessly repetitious interesting. Hansen travelled with local Indigenous Penan people as his guides. One way in which Hansen entertained his readers was to tell the story of his shyness in joining his guides in their river shitting practices.

Every morning, the guides would undergo their daily personal hygiene by standing in the river, doing what was required, chatting as they did so. Hansen was torn between respecting his guides’ local custom and his own western shyness in sharing these daily moments. Hansen’s solution was found in gradualism. He started about two hundred metres upstream of his colleagues and, day by day, moved closer so that, eventually, he felt comfortable sharing a chat while he and his colleagues made themselves more comfortable for facing whatever challenges the forthcoming day brought. What reader could not enjoy travel adventure writing when such interesting anecdotes dilute the author’s description of his otherwise unremitting struggle?

Cleary was assisted in making Water fascinating by his misfortune in conducting his journey during the May flood rains which produced the second flood event for 2022. What had been planned as mainly a relatively easy walk on the edge of a relatively narrow running stream with ample dry ground on either side and an easy ability to rock hop from one side to the other to choose the best terrain turned into a logistical nightmare.      

Cleary and his walking companions were forced by the rising waters to the high banks of the stream where they found, variously, private property, head high weeds, dense lantana, continuous mud and, on one occasion close to impenetrable scrub as day by day challenges. What might have been the challenge of consistently walking 15-20 kilometres per day in passably good walking conditions gave way to a series of true mystery stories focussed upon whether Cleary would even make it to his planned bivouac location for that day. Sometimes, the mystery involved whether it was even worth setting out, that day, in the light of the barriers presented by the downstream flooding. Some days it was not worth setting out.

One of the most discouraging barriers to progress were the junctions of flooded tributaries with the main stream. In non-flooding conditions, the encounter with a tributary would be solved merely by crossing to the opposite bank. On a number of occasions, Cleary had to backtrack up the river to cross over at the last viable fording place. On other occasions, the only solution was to follow the creek upstream until it narrowed sufficiently to avail of a crossing. On one such occasion, the crossing was successful but not without a real risk of being swept away by the waters through which the walkers waded.

Even life threatening adventures, however, are insufficient, on their own, to maintain the reader’s interest in non-fiction writing. Cleary is aware that a tale of a journey needs more than the journey, itself. Cleary, to which his three novels attest, is a meticulous researcher. Water is as much the story of the Brisbane River and the country through which it flows as it is of Cleary’s journey along its course. Cleary’s research involved many hours in the library. It also involved many hours contacting and communicating with landowners whose properties adjoin the river.

The in-person research produced permission to cross private property. It also created friendships and offers of camping spots and accommodation for the journey. It also yielded folklore and yarns including, notably, a local Brisbane Valley variation on the tales that bushranger, Dan Kelly, survived the fire and escaped to live out his days, quietly, in anonymity and freedom.   

The scholarly research finds its way into Water in many different ways. The full title, Everything is Water is taken from Thales of Miletus and recalls a phase in Western philosophy in which answers to the nature of the universe question were being expressed in terms of underlying realities from which all matter was formed. Cleary, also, links his vision and finding of meaning of his river and other great rivers to the inspiration of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Cleary recognises with specificity the Indigenous owners of the land through which he walks and the river flows as well as recognising the colonial settler pioneers whose labour forged a means of living for the generations who followed them. Cleary notes the dispossession and dispersion of those same Indigenous owners by the colonial settler process and the massacres which were part and parcel of this process although, necessarily, Cleary’s treatment is less detailed than that found in David Marr’s Killing for Country, a text covering much of the same land traversed by Cleary’s journey.

Cleary also manages to relate the connections between John Clements Wickham (whose name is memorialised in a number of Brisbane Streets), Charles Darwin (whose name is memorialised in a northern Australian city) and the Galapagos tortoise who finally lived out its days at Australia Zoo. Wickham and Darwin were shipmates on the Beagle and it was Wickham who, as captain of that famous ship, on a later voyage in September, 1839, named Port Darwin for his former companion. The tortoise featured in a later interaction between the two men when Wickham had retired from the British Navy and had been appointed Police Magistrate of the Moreton Bay District.

As well as the struggles of getting from one spot to another, the many rich gems of the history of the land and people and Cleary’s observations of birds and mammals and plants, Water contains many of Cleary’s thoughts and speculations of the kind that four weeks of physical demands and limited human company are wont to produce. These are flagged early in a short statement by Cleary’s older son, Dominic, one of his early walking companions. Dominic said words to the effect that his father knew stuff and he should not be loath to share it with wider audiences. This was a bit unkind to a father who had already shared three well-researched and beautifully written novels with the wider world but family will always be family.

As if on cue, Cleary shares many of such stuff in Water, putatively, at least, in the form of his thoughts along the journey. What emerges in bits and pieces across the 320 pages is a philosophy of sorts. Cleary expresses wonderment at the workings of nature and the distances of space and time. He ponders the massive changes wrought by natural forces against a background of apparent unchanging fixity. Cleary admires the human capacity to love and be kind while, at the same time, he is saddened by humankind’s capacity for cruelty, rapine, murder and plunder. The despoliation of nature is an equal source of sadness revealed as it is in the evidence observed by Cleary at every point on the journey.

Cleary resists, however, a holier than thou stance of casting blame on others, recognising that many of the drastic changes to the river have been the source of benefits to him and his family as they live their suburban lives.

One lesson of Water is that we need journeys and time to ponder because finding a viable philosophy for life is neither an easy task nor ever a completed project.