Some interest has arisen concerning the provenance of an item donated to the Old Court House Law Museum, namely, the June 1928 edition of The Black Swan literary journal. I will do what I can to cast light on the matter. I do so as the son of the donor and as a member of the local legal profession for many years. It will be useful, before returning to the item in question, to set the scene.
The University of Western Australia was established in the early years of the 20th century. The UWA Law School was set up with support from the local profession in 1928. It was housed initially, like the university itself, in a cluster of weatherboard and corrugated iron buildings in Irwin Street, Perth, known facetiously as ‘Tin Pot Alley’. In 1932 the university as a whole moved to a new campus on the riverfront at Crawley, some distance from the city.
From 1917 to 1949 the student body brought out a literary journal called The Black Swan containing essays, stories, poems, book reviews, profiles of staff and student leaders and reports of various of activities, many of these written in a light-hearted tone. In the year before the Law School got under way the journal ‘welcomed to our midst’ Professor Frank Beasley, from the University of Sydney and Wadham College, Oxford, recently appointed to the ‘new Chair of Law’. It emerges from other issues of the magazine that it wasn’t long before a law students’ society was constituted known as The Blackstone Society.
This brings me to the June 1928 edition of The Black Swan, an item given to the Law Museum many years later. According to an editorial in that issue: This year some substantial progress has been made with the institution of the Diploma in Journalism course and the Faculty of Law. In addition to the editorial, there were various articles in the June issue that were bound to be of interest to law students in this, the first year of the new Law School, pieces that seem likely to be of interest to later generations as they dwell upon the nature of the local profession in other days.
One of these pieces is headed A Roar for Law, a satirical glimpse of ‘the new faculty at home’. It purports to provide an account of behaviour at a typical law lecture, although, according to the anonymous author of the review, ‘the scene as first presented to the spectator’s eye does not impress.’ The lecturer’s voice is said to be mingling with ‘the gently modulated snores of one student’, while another ‘moves quickly to the vacant chair beside Miss K.’
Many of the names mentioned in this and other issues of The Black Swan became well-known personalities in the local profession: Dunphy, Downing, Cullen, Ainslie, Bryant, Hartrey, Leake, Virtue, Nevile – names destined to appear on the letterheads of law firms or in law reports as counsel or judges. There were 21 students in 1928, but most never graduated. They were clerks, taking law classes, who continued to qualify for admission in the old way by serving 5 years in articles.
The first woman graduated in 1931. She was followed by others such as Molly Kingston and Sheila McClemans, two friends who formed the first all-female law firm. In July 1933 a piece in The Western Mail described how Sheila McClemans ‘made legal history when she became the first woman in the State to appear wigged and gowned as counsel before a Judge.’
In a small city such as Perth most of those mentioned above were known to my father, Paul Hasluck from his time at Perth Modern School. In the mid-1920s, while working as a journalist, he enrolled for the new Diploma of Journalism, which led to involvement in the University Dramatic Society and contributions to The Black Swan.
It was with these personal connections in mind no doubt, and knowing also that my wife, Sally Anne Hasluck, was a founding member of the inaugural Law Society Museum Committee, that my father was minded to donate a copy of the June 1928 issue of The Black Swan to the Law Museum. It was a way of commemorating the underlying links between the legal profession and the UWA Law School by drawing attention to the first year of the Law School’s existence.
Professor Beasley retired as Professor of Law in 1963. His links to colleagues abroad had led to a number of his former students going on to Wadham College, Oxford, to obtain higher degrees in law including Geoffrey Kennedy, who later served as Chancellor of the University for a number of years, David Malcolm, who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, and whose name was then used for the David Malcolm Justice Centre, Daryl Williams, who served as Attorney General of the Commonwealth in the Howard government, another Rhodes Scholar, David Newby, and myself, Nicholas Hasluck, the author of this essay. This group was followed some years later by Carmel McLure, who went on to become President of the Court of Appeal on the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
Five UWA law school graduates, widely-respected within the local profession, went on to serve as Justices of the High Court of Australia: Ronald Wilson, John Toohey, Robert French (the first law school graduate to serve as Chief Justice), then Michelle Gordon and James Edelman. Other notable graduates include a Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke, a Leader of the Federal Opposition, and a number of Federal Attorneys General.
It strikes me, in rounding off these notes, that I should return to the June 1928 issue of The Black Swan, and take a last look at A Roar for Law, presented as a review of a typical law lecture at that time. For myself, I can’t help wondering whether my father may have played a part in composing or editing the anonymous review. He was in a debating team with Frank Downing and Roy ‘Spud’ Nevile, as appears from the August 1928 issue of The Black Swan. He was also a frequent contributor to the magazine and in the 1930s he went on to serve as a theatre critic for The West Australian newspaper, before going into politics.
The anonymous review ends like this: The lecture is brought to a triumphant conclusion by a community rendering of ‘The Red Flag.’ Mr Leake’s fine tenor leading the way, to be followed a few notes later, by Miss Hartrey’s clear soprano. Then, all business being evidently concluded, a general move is made for the door, but the elder Dunphy has already passed out and occasions much confusion by hanging on to the handle from outside. Mr Downing’s voice is heard discussing with Spud whether or not an injunction could be sought to restrain the malefactor …. All obstacles now removed, the students pass out … leaving the curtain to fall upon the same scene as it rose upon, but with the addition of six sunflowers, two pansies and a cabbage leaf, which have fallen from the insecure detention of Lionel’s buttonhole.
This article originates from the latest book from the author, Ruminations, which includes some acute recollections of people he met or wrote about in the course of his career as a lawyer and the author of over thirty works of fiction and non-fiction.
