I am old enough and fortunate enough to have known the first Western Australian to have become member of the High Court, Sir Ronald Wilson.
He was appointed in 1979 and retired in 1989. Saturday, 23 August will be the 103rd anniversary of his birth, which is reason enough for me to use this occasion to say something by way of short tribute to him.
After Sir Ronald died in 2005, his friend and fellow Western Australian Robert Nicholson published an appreciation, which described him as short in stature and long in energy. That fits my recollection of him.
I first met Sir Ronald in 1983 in the High Court building which had recently opened in Canberra. I was a skinny, bearded, slightly long-haired young associate straight out of law school.
The day I met Sir Ronald, he had flown in on the red eye from Perth. He had flown, as always, economy class: explaining to anyone who ever asked that he did not need more legroom and did not eat the meal.
After getting off the plane, he had gone for his customary early morning run around Lake Burley Griffin. He was then about to start a day’s work in his chambers.
Before he got started, he invited me in for a cup of tea poured from a pot he had made himself. He reminisced about his early life growing up in financial hardship in Geraldton. He told me about needing to leave school to get a job at the age of 14. He was open. He was engaging. He was encouraging. He also had a memorably methodical way of brewing tea.
In the half hour or so that we spent together that morning, Sir Ronald made no mention of having been a fighter pilot in England in World War II. He made no mention of his outstanding academic achievements, first as a mature age student at the University of Western Australia and then as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He made no mention of having been the youngest Queen’s Counsel to have been appointed in WA.
All of those things, I only learned much later. He told no stories from the decade he had spent as Crown Prosecutor for Western Australia or from the further decade he had spent as Solicitor-General for Western Australia.
I was struck then, and I became even more appreciative as I reflected on the encounter in subsequent years, by his generosity, humility and compassion. All of those qualities were evident in the relationships he formed while on the High Court and even more so in the work he did over a period of seven years as President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission after his retirement from the High Court, including as co-author of the Bringing them Home report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.
Thirty years after that cup of tea with Sir Ronald, when I was first appointed to the High Court, I ended up moving into Sir Ronald Wilson’s old chambers. I happily occupied them for more than a decade. They were, as you might expect, fitted out in Western Australian timbers. And they were, as you might expect, the only chambers in the building to face West.
Seeing his name daily on a brass plate on the back of the door remained for me a source of inspiration. He was a great Australian who never stopped being a Western Australian.
