So much has already been written about  my father venerating his career.     Just google his name and there are endless articles.   Recently a book    was published , Ian Barker QC, Prince of Barristers' by  Stephen L Walmsley.  Its   available from   https://scholarly.info/book/ian-barker-qc-prince-of-barristers/ 

Speaking frankly, while his career was stellar, his  fatherhood and  marriage to our mother fell well short of stellar.  I am completing a memoir which tries to reconcile these two aspects of our father - the public and the private.

This is something  Dad wrote  before he died.  He called it a Bibliography but I  think he meant    a Memoir of sorts.    Dad was already suffering some confusion and memory loss when he write this in 2018. .  There was no book written by him.  I have not edited this  at all.

​
BIBLIOGRAPHY – Final as at 10.05.2018
 
TRAFALGAR DAY - (Heading?) 
 
I first came into view on 21 October 1935 at a nursing home at Epping, run by nurse Packham.  We were not a militant family, but an approaching war was menacing the world, and 21 October was Trafalgar Day, the anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar when the Royal Navy defeated the navies of France and Spain.  So far as I can remember those were not matters of great consequence to me at the time; nor, probably, to my elder sister, Lynette.  My other sibling, Rosemary, was then only in contemplation.
 
My children have all been more or less successful.  Michael does things with computers in Cebu.  Nick is a franchise builder in Victoria.  Jill lectures in South Australia in textiles, makes clothes with Eleanor, and runs a tourist shop at Leura.  Louise has a masters degree in sociology and attends to schizophrenic people in South Australia.  Bridget is a solicitor with the NSW Legal Aid Commission at Lismore.
 
They are the children of Nelle (now deceased) from whom I was divorced in 1980.
 
Lynette, died last year, a general practitioner and mother of five.  She was an adornment to the medical profession.
 
What follows are very brief extracts from a complex narrative compiled by Lynette who drew on the International Genealogical Index, records of births, marriages and deaths, shipping documents, church records and other historical records.  It is far from complete.
 
Religion came and went in various forms in my tutelage, ranging from vigorous Wesleyan Methodism through Moral Re-Armament, thence Catholicism, to what I think was atheism.
 
But to us perhaps it started in earnest for the Barkers with my grandfather Charles McClelland Barker who was a Methodist minister ordained in 1900 but who died at Young, aged 37.  He died from pneumonia as a consequence of preaching in the rain.  He died before his son Charles, (my father) was born. 
 
It might be of some peripheral relevance to record that my great grandfather John Charles Barker was on 31 March 1862 appointed Parramatta’s first town clerk.
 
On my mother’s maternal side, I understand my 22nd great grandfather was King Edward 111.  I am uncertain whether the genealogical succession gives me some claim to the throne of England, but I doubt it.  The probabilities are loyalists need not be worried.
 
Another ancestor of some interest was Ensign Richard Peard, from Devonshire, who accompanied Cromwell to Ireland, who died on 28 February 1683, aged 88.  His tomb is not far from Fermoy.
 
The first recorded Barker came to New South Wales voluntarily with his wife Margaret McClellan in 1828.  He was Arthur Barker, a tailor.
 
My grandmother was a Bax.  Stephen Bax came here in 1812 pursuant to a pressing invitation from King George, arising from his conviction and death sentence for burglary.  The sentence was swapped for transportation.  Great, great grandfather Stephen obtained a ticket of leave from Governor Macquarie in 1816 and worked as a pastry cook at a shop in George Street, Sydney.  He was granted an absolute pardon in 1871.   One of his later vocations was a tavern keeper in George Street in Sydney.
 
I don’t know that lawyers were conspicuous amongst the Barkers but in about 1852 William Barker joined the legal firm of Norton, Son and Barker, in Sydney.  He was offered a District Court appointment but declined to accept it.
 
I don’t think my great grandfather William and I had much else in common; it is said William “interested himself considerably in affairs connected with the Church of England” and a Methodist Conference in 1855 noted, rather gleefully  that “while the Romanists had increased 76%, the Presbyterians 64, the Anglicans 40, the Wesleyans had multiplied at the rate of 278%”!  William died in 1807.
 
My great, great grandfather Rev Hugh Barker (brother of Arthur) sounds a bit frightening.  In 1870 he refused to attend the laying of the foundation stone of Kiama Public School “because he did not approve of secular education”.
 
I cannot forebear a mention of an unusual ancestor, the Rev John Gare Butler, an ordained minister in the Anglican Church and a missionary in the Church Missionary Society.
 
He was also the first clergyman in New Zealand.  He was guaranteed protection by the Maori Chief Honge Hika in the Bay of Islands.  He offended people by his erratic and tempestuous behaviour.  It is said he traded muskets with the Maoris and accused Samuel Marsden of similar activities.  In 1822 he was dismissed by Marsden for drinking.  On 5 December 1836 his son Samuel Butler was drowned in the Hokianga River whilst getting timber.   It is said he was intoxicated at the time.
 
Who is a Barker?
 
The record “Surnames of Ireland” says that “Barker” is mainly of Cromwellian origin in Ireland and was in Dublin as early as mid -sixteenth century.  Meanings of the name include bark strippers for tanning.
 
McClelland
Burke’s History of Irish Families states that Irish families called McClelland, McClellan or McLelland, were almost all of Scottish origin, who settled in Northern Ireland from 1610 to 1620.   It is family lore the McClellands were covenanters.
 
Barkers and Butlers were a restive lot, no doubt so rendered by close association with Samual Marsden, the flogging parson.
 
Five of my forebears arrived in Sydney Cove as convicts.  If criminality is an inherent trait my father resisted it.  He was for a time chairman of the Epping Branch of the Liberal Party but he developed a healthy mistrust for politicians.
 
My grandmother Bax never re-married.  She led a frugal life, supported by an insurance policy, a Methodist Minister’s pension and rent from part of her house.  My father started his serious education as a boarder at Newington College, paid for in large measure by the Methodist Church.  He left when aged 14, unhappily conscious of the gulf between his circumstances and those of boys not so impoverished.
 
When I went there, Newington was a pleasant enough school but more interested in rugby and rowing than educating school boys.  Apart from   being awarded prizes in English and Economics I don’t think I learned much.  Somehow I managed to matriculate.  I am afraid I was neither an athlete nor a scholar.  I was not very big either, unlike the youths from the Tongan Mission.  I did enjoy the study of English.  I am not sure I ever really understood Economics.  My introduction to firearms as a Lance Corporal in the Newington Cadet Corp permitted me to play with the school’s Vickers medium machine gun.
 
My father commenced work as a clerk at the New South Wales Fire Brigade and then as an office boy with the Dairy Farmers Milk Co-op.  He stayed with Dairy Farmers for 50 years, becoming Secretary and then General Manager.  I think he was disappointed in my aversion to milk.
 
Speaking generally, I enjoyed a happy childhood, being occupied from time to time with catching eels in Terrys creek and stealing citrus fruit from a nearby orchard.  In those days Epping was a pleasant rural community, free from the blight of apartments, where kids could find plenty of bushland.  But dad decided we should take more interest in the environment, and become bush walkers.  I still have some of his Blue Mountains maps, documenting walks from Katoomba to Picton, walks in the Grose valley, and a walk from Glen Davis to the Putty Road.  They took us to the Cox’s River, the Kowmung, the Wollondilly, the Colo Rivers and the Burragorang valley, and along the Oberon stock route, to Oberon.
 
The Wollondilly flowed into the Burragorang valley and joined the Natai and thence the Warragamba River not far from Mittagong.  The valley was a magnificent part of the landscape.  When it was flooded, (along with the two little villages of Burragorang and Bimlow), I thought it was cruelly subjected to a gross and unnecessary act of official vandalism.  People born later never knew what they were missing.  I still think that. 
 
Bushwalking and canoeing were enthusiastically pursued by my  children, particularly in excursions to the Macdonell Ranges in Central Australia and in the dry season to Arnhem Land, to the Roper and Wilton Rivers, the Katherine and Daly Rivers and their tributaries.
 
In the north we learned to respect crocodiles (that is to say we were frightened of them).  I was joking when I said (as I apparently often did) that I always sent one of my kids in first, to ensure the water was safe.  In fact the crocs were the ones most at risk, becoming dangerously close to extinction until Professor Harry Messel convinced Gough Whitlam to ban the export of skins.
 
Returning to religion, we somehow drifted from Methodism to the curious Moral Rearmament organisation, which taught divine intervention at every stage of a day’s living.  I don’t now know whether my parents really believed in its teachings but Moral Rearmament (the Oxford Group) certainly helped fill the day.  My sisters and I went along dutifully but we eventually shed its embrace.  As part of that process dad bought the 13 volumes of Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion”.  I still have it, sitting alongside an “Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology”.
 
I confess I regard with equal scepticism religion, magic and witchcraft, being all human inventions.  I flirted for a while with Catholicism but our relationship was less than permanent.  My father once said in his later years he found it difficult to believe in a personal God in a world with so much suffering.  I agreed.  We didn’t always agree, but my sisters and I owed him a great legacy of love.  And also my mother Norma, a person entirely selfless, who was a remedial kindergarten teacher undeterred by the torture of years of rheumatoid arthritis.
 
My first ever job was delivering telegrams for the PMG, followed by picking beans in a market garden.   My father talked me into starting a career in law.  I became articled to the Dairy Farmers’ solicitor and bound to him as an articled law clerk for 5 years.  I have heard it said that it might have been better for me to have sought a university degree, although 5 years assisting solicitors was clearly educative.  Some said the system was designed to give solicitors a source of cheap labour.  Whether or not that was the design, it does seem to have been the result.
 
I signed up in 1952, being paid a weekly wage of thirty shillings which, in due course leaped to two pounds.  My academic object was to obtain a diploma from the Solicitors’ Admission Board which would then entitle me to admission as a solicitor.  The Board then did very little to assist aspiring law clerks.  There were no lectures or tutorials  (At least none to which I was invited).  One advantage in the system was you could sit for examinations an indefinite number of times, which was just as well for me because it took me 8 years instead of the usual 5.  The activities of the Solicitors’ Admission Board seemed to be largely distributing university lecture notes and providing a small rather arid man in a black Alpaca jacket who told me from time to time why I had failed.  Of necessity, one had to find a tutor who had more than a passing knowledge of law.
 
But I did make some friends at the bar in those years, which enured to my advantage in later years.  My memory is a bit fuzzy around the edges but as I recall life as an articled clerk I was permanently overdrawn in the petty cash and drank quite a deal of beer.  So did a few others.  A well-known Sydney solicitor fixed a notice to the front of the Supreme Court in King Street, stating something like this:
          “wanted, articled law clerk
           ability to pass licensed premises an advantage”
and licensed premises were many, and less elegant than the present abode of investment bankers and stock brokers.  Gone are the Australia, the Metropole, the Carlton, the Surry and Claude Fays, to name a few.
 
In about 1953 I moved to Muswellbrook where I received a liveable weekly wage of twenty pounds from a local solicitor; my articles followed. Unfortunately it was not a successful union and after four months we parted with mutual relief.
 
My articles and I then went to Katoomba to a more convivial firm.  I had to work harder, having married and produced a son.  Eventually I managed to pass the necessary examinations.  My technique in absorbing the material necessary for a pass was to buy Dexedrine by the handful, over the pharmacy counter.  I then moved into the flat of another hopeful, 48 hours before the exam, and stayed awake.  We went through as many past exam results as we could find.  In the end it worked.  Dexedrine is now available only on prescription; it is something of a miracle that article clerks survived the rigours of the Solicitors’ Admission Board examinations.  I do not advise the use of Dexedrine.
 
I deal with this as a separate subject un the book, but in 1954 I was called up for National service and spent 90 days at Holsworthy then 2 years part time in the CMF.  I think I was the only national serviceman earning more in the army than in civilian life.  In 1956 the commonwealth formed the First Commando Company which I joined.  It led me to new pursuits such as practise leaps from a 30 foot fan tower, 75 foot leaps from a Polish tower, 9 parachute jumps from an old Douglas DC 3, and clambouring around the cliffs at Georges Heights.  I don’t think the CMF harmed me.  One way and another I enjoyed National Service.
 
It was while I worked as a solicitor in Katoomba that I applied for a job in Alice Springs, I am not sure why.   But within a few months I was installed in an Alice Springs practice in an entirely new environment.  Alice Springs at the time had a population of about 3,000.  There was one other firm of two practitioners, known as we all were as barristers and solicitors.  Fortunately we all got on (more or less).
 
In due course I entered a partnership with the solicitor who employed me.  In further course he went to live in Adelaide and professionally I was on my own.  For some periods I was the only lawyer between Port Augusta and Darwin.
 
My work was decidedly mixed, consisting of routine conveyancing, stock mortgages, wills and estates, motor car litigation, violent  mayhem and homicide.  It was a curiosity of the time that the death penalty still obtained, until abolished by the Whitlam Government in 1973.  Also, until September 1964 the law permitted the public hanging of convicted Aboriginals.  No one was hanged whilst I lived in the Territory, but the law stayed around as a grisly possibility until 1964.  Criminal laws regarding Aboriginals were hugely discriminately, such as the Welfare Ordinance and Licensing Ordinance, which captured Albert Namatjira.    Much has been written and published about all this.  Another curious law in the NT provided for trial by jury, except in capital cases.
 
All this has gone, but the judgment of Kriewaldt J in the Namatjira case remains as a caution against discriminatory laws.  A feature of jury trials in Alice Springs was the jury remained sequestered for the whole trial.  The practice was to confine the 12 good men and true to the Riverside Hotel, when they were not in court.  This was not a hardship.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed to me that the jury members thought they were in Arcadia, having been compulsorily confined to licensed premises.  They often came into court with eyes like beagles.
 
Being young and ambitious lawyers, my partner Brian Martin (subsequently NT Solicitor General and Chief Justice) and I decided one day we should expand the practice.  The only practicable way we could do that was to establish a practice in Tennant Creek, then a rather desperate collection of ironclad buildings with two hotels.  A room became available with the assistance of diminutive Alfie Chittock (AKA  “Alf the ant” or the “Singapore ant”.   Alf was an affable soul who became the first mayor of Tennant Creek.   He was a local butcher and bookmaker, two vocations which tend to complement each other.  So we opened up in Alfie’s betting shop, a three hour drive from Alice Springs with scarcely a curve in the road, and we traversed it about once a month, one at a time.  It is said that Tennant Creek is where it is because a truck carrying beer broke down at that very place and the cargo needed careful husbandry.  I don't think we made much money, but it added humour to our lives.
 
Eventually my family and I moved to Darwin where I joined a firm which operated reasonably well until that bloody cyclone, which made a normal existence difficult.  Much is already written about it.  I took silk in 1974 and concluded an agreement with my partners about the use of a room, following which our office building blew over, making our negotiations irrelevant.  It was all a splendid example of a frustrated contract.  After Cyclone Tracey, Nelle and the children joined thousands of others in evacuation to Sydney, returning some months later.
 
Self Government lurched along in 1975 and a great deal of energy was expended by the NT Government and the Commonwealth in dealing with the multiple problems presented by Aboriginal lands, uranium mining and national parks and reserves, to say nothing of learning how to run a government.
 
Somehow I joined in as the first Solicitor General, responding to an invitation by Paul Everingham between drinks at the Darwin Sailing Club.  Apart from being the Government’s legal adviser and advocate, the work was endless and varied.  I remember being supplied with a tropical suit allowance to attend Jakarta as an observer at negotiations between Australia and East Timor about the maritime boundary between the NT and East Timor.  I don’t know why anyone in Darwin needed an allowance to buy and wear such apparel but it was a nice silk suit.  As to more serious constitutional issues I am indebted to the late Professors Sawer and Lumb, and Pat Brazil (then with the Commonwealth Attorney General’s department).
 
  I confess to spending some considerable time in Arnhem Land and elsewhere in the convivial company of George Chaloupka and his amazing knowledge of Arnhem Land Aboriginal art, and Colin Jack Hinton, a marine archaeologist who gave life to the Northern Territory museum and art gallery.
 
Both my friends are dead.  It seems to be happening a lot lately.
 
I returned to Sydney in 1980, for reasons as obscure as my first trip to Alice Springs.  I retired in 2017.  The years in between were pretty busy, including my marriage in Canada to dear Penny.
 
In the book I have dealt with my forensic adventures at more length.  I do not think further repetition here would improve the narrative.
 
 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY – Final as at 10.05.2018
 
TRAFALGAR DAY
 
I first came into view on 21 October 1935 at a nursing home at Epping, run by nurse Packham.  We were not a militant family, but an approaching war was menacing the world, and 21 October was Trafalgar Day, the anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar when the Royal Navy defeated the navies of France and Spain.  So far as I can remember those were not matters of great consequence to me at the time; nor, probably, to my elder sister, Lynette.  My other sibling, Rosemary, was then only in contemplation.
 
My children have all been more or less successful.  Michael does things with computers in Cebu.  Nick is a franchise builder in Victoria.  Jill lectures in South Australia in textiles, makes clothes with Eleanor, and runs a tourist shop at Leura.  Louise has a masters degree in sociology and attends to schizophrenic people in South Australia.  Bridget is a solicitor with the NSW Legal Aid Commission at Lismore.
 
They are the children of Nelle (now deceased) from whom I was divorced in 1980.
 
Lynette, died last year, a general practitioner and mother of five.  She was an adornment to the medical profession.
 
What follows are very brief extracts from a complex narrative compiled by Lynette who drew on the International Genealogical Index, records of births, marriages and deaths, shipping documents, church records and other historical records.  It is far from complete.
 
Religion came and went in various forms in my tutelage, ranging from vigorous Wesleyan Methodism through Moral Re-Armament, thence Catholicism, to what I think was atheism.
 
But to us perhaps it started in earnest for the Barkers with my grandfather Charles McClelland Barker who was a Methodist minister ordained in 1900 but who died at Young, aged 37.  He died from pneumonia as a consequence of preaching in the rain.  He died before his son Charles, (my father) was born. 
 
It might be of some peripheral relevance to record that my great grandfather John Charles Barker was on 31 March 1862 appointed Parramatta’s first town clerk.
 
On my mother’s maternal side, I understand my 22nd great grandfather was King Edward 111.  I am uncertain whether the genealogical succession gives me some claim to the throne of England, but I doubt it.  The probabilities are loyalists need not be worried.
 
Another ancestor of some interest was Ensign Richard Peard, from Devonshire, who accompanied Cromwell to Ireland, who died on 28 February 1683, aged 88.  His tomb is not far from Fermoy.
 
The first recorded Barker came to New South Wales voluntarily with his wife Margaret McClellan in 1828.  He was Arthur Barker, a tailor.
 
My grandmother was a Bax.  Stephen Bax came here in 1812 pursuant to a pressing invitation from King George, arising from his conviction and death sentence for burglary.  The sentence was swapped for transportation.  Great, great grandfather Stephen obtained a ticket of leave from Governor Macquarie in 1816 and worked as a pastry cook at a shop in George Street, Sydney.  He was granted an absolute pardon in 1871.   One of his later vocations was a tavern keeper in George Street in Sydney.
 
I don’t know that lawyers were conspicuous amongst the Barkers but in about 1852 William Barker joined the legal firm of Norton, Son and Barker, in Sydney.  He was offered a District Court appointment but declined to accept it.
 
I don’t think my great grandfather William and I had much else in common; it is said William “interested himself considerably in affairs connected with the Church of England” and a Methodist Conference in 1855 noted, rather gleefully  that “while the Romanists had increased 76%, the Presbyterians 64, the Anglicans 40, the Wesleyans had multiplied at the rate of 278%”!  William died in 1807.
 
My great, great grandfather Rev Hugh Barker (brother of Arthur) sounds a bit frightening.  In 1870 he refused to attend the laying of the foundation stone of Kiama Public School “because he did not approve of secular education”.
 
I cannot forebear a mention of an unusual ancestor, the Rev John Gare Butler, an ordained minister in the Anglican Church and a missionary in the Church Missionary Society.
 
He was also the first clergyman in New Zealand.  He was guaranteed protection by the Maori Chief Honge Hika in the Bay of Islands.  He offended people by his erratic and tempestuous behaviour.  It is said he traded muskets with the Maoris and accused Samuel Marsden of similar activities.  In 1822 he was dismissed by Marsden for drinking.  On 5 December 1836 his son Samuel Butler was drowned in the Hokianga River whilst getting timber.   It is said he was intoxicated at the time.
 
Who is a Barker?
 
The record “Surnames of Ireland” says that “Barker” is mainly of Cromwellian origin in Ireland and was in Dublin as early as mid -sixteenth century.  Meanings of the name include bark strippers for tanning.
 
McClelland
Burke’s History of Irish Families states that Irish families called McClelland, McClellan or McLelland, were almost all of Scottish origin, who settled in Northern Ireland from 1610 to 1620.   It is family lore the McClellands were covenanters.
 
Barkers and Butlers were a restive lot, no doubt so rendered by close association with Samual Marsden, the flogging parson.
 
Five of my forebears arrived in Sydney Cove as convicts.  If criminality is an inherent trait my father resisted it.  He was for a time chairman of the Epping Branch of the Liberal Party but he developed a healthy mistrust for politicians.
 
My grandmother Bax never re-married.  She led a frugal life, supported by an insurance policy, a Methodist Minister’s pension and rent from part of her house.  My father started his serious education as a boarder at Newington College, paid for in large measure by the Methodist Church.  He left when aged 14, unhappily conscious of the gulf between his circumstances and those of boys not so impoverished.
 
When I went there, Newington was a pleasant enough school but more interested in rugby and rowing than educating school boys.  Apart from   being awarded prizes in English and Economics I don’t think I learned much.  Somehow I managed to matriculate.  I am afraid I was neither an athlete nor a scholar.  I was not very big either, unlike the youths from the Tongan Mission.  I did enjoy the study of English.  I am not sure I ever really understood Economics.  My introduction to firearms as a Lance Corporal in the Newington Cadet Corp permitted me to play with the school’s Vickers medium machine gun.
 
My father commenced work as a clerk at the New South Wales Fire Brigade and then as an office boy with the Dairy Farmers Milk Co-op.  He stayed with Dairy Farmers for 50 years, becoming Secretary and then General Manager.  I think he was disappointed in my aversion to milk.
 
Speaking generally, I enjoyed a happy childhood, being occupied from time to time with catching eels in Terrys creek and stealing citrus fruit from a nearby orchard.  In those days Epping was a pleasant rural community, free from the blight of apartments, where kids could find plenty of bushland.  But dad decided we should take more interest in the environment, and become bush walkers.  I still have some of his Blue Mountains maps, documenting walks from Katoomba to Picton, walks in the Grose valley, and a walk from Glen Davis to the Putty Road.  They took us to the Cox’s River, the Kowmung, the Wollondilly, the Colo Rivers and the Burragorang valley, and along the Oberon stock route, to Oberon.
 
The Wollondilly flowed into the Burragorang valley and joined the Natai and thence the Warragamba River not far from Mittagong.  The valley was a magnificent part of the landscape.  When it was flooded, (along with the two little villages of Burragorang and Bimlow), I thought it was cruelly subjected to a gross and unnecessary act of official vandalism.  People born later never knew what they were missing.  I still think that. 
 
Bushwalking and canoeing were enthusiastically pursued by my  children, particularly in excursions to the Macdonell Ranges in Central Australia and in the dry season to Arnhem Land, to the Roper and Wilton Rivers, the Katherine and Daly Rivers and their tributaries.
 
In the north we learned to respect crocodiles (that is to say we were frightened of them).  I was joking when I said (as I apparently often did) that I always sent one of my kids in first, to ensure the water was safe.  In fact the crocs were the ones most at risk, becoming dangerously close to extinction until Professor Harry Messel convinced Gough Whitlam to ban the export of skins.
 
Returning to religion, we somehow drifted from Methodism to the curious Moral Rearmament organisation, which taught divine intervention at every stage of a day’s living.  I don’t now know whether my parents really believed in its teachings but Moral Rearmament (the Oxford Group) certainly helped fill the day.  My sisters and I went along dutifully but we eventually shed its embrace.  As part of that process dad bought the 13 volumes of Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion”.  I still have it, sitting alongside an “Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology”.
 
I confess I regard with equal scepticism religion, magic and witchcraft, being all human inventions.  I flirted for a while with Catholicism but our relationship was less than permanent.  My father once said in his later years he found it difficult to believe in a personal God in a world with so much suffering.  I agreed.  We didn’t always agree, but my sisters and I owed him a great legacy of love.  And also my mother Norma, a person entirely selfless, who was a remedial kindergarten teacher undeterred by the torture of years of rheumatoid arthritis.
 
My first ever job was delivering telegrams for the PMG, followed by picking beans in a market garden.   My father talked me into starting a career in law.  I became articled to the Dairy Farmers’ solicitor and bound to him as an articled law clerk for 5 years.  I have heard it said that it might have been better for me to have sought a university degree, although 5 years assisting solicitors was clearly educative.  Some said the system was designed to give solicitors a source of cheap labour.  Whether or not that was the design, it does seem to have been the result.
 
I signed up in 1952, being paid a weekly wage of thirty shillings which, in due course leaped to two pounds.  My academic object was to obtain a diploma from the Solicitors’ Admission Board which would then entitle me to admission as a solicitor.  The Board then did very little to assist aspiring law clerks.  There were no lectures or tutorials  (At least none to which I was invited).  One advantage in the system was you could sit for examinations an indefinite number of times, which was just as well for me because it took me 8 years instead of the usual 5.  The activities of the Solicitors’ Admission Board seemed to be largely distributing university lecture notes and providing a small rather arid man in a black Alpaca jacket who told me from time to time why I had failed.  Of necessity, one had to find a tutor who had more than a passing knowledge of law.
 
But I did make some friends at the bar in those years, which enured to my advantage in later years.  My memory is a bit fuzzy around the edges but as I recall life as an articled clerk I was permanently overdrawn in the petty cash and drank quite a deal of beer.  So did a few others.  A well-known Sydney solicitor fixed a notice to the front of the Supreme Court in King Street, stating something like this:
          “wanted, articled law clerk
           ability to pass licensed premises an advantage”
and licensed premises were many, and less elegant than the present abode of investment bankers and stock brokers.  Gone are the Australia, the Metropole, the Carlton, the Surry and Claude Fays, to name a few.
 
In about 1953 I moved to Muswellbrook where I received a liveable weekly wage of twenty pounds from a local solicitor; my articles followed. Unfortunately it was not a successful union and after four months we parted with mutual relief.
 
My articles and I then went to Katoomba to a more convivial firm.  I had to work harder, having married and produced a son.  Eventually I managed to pass the necessary examinations.  My technique in absorbing the material necessary for a pass was to buy Dexedrine by the handful, over the pharmacy counter.  I then moved into the flat of another hopeful, 48 hours before the exam, and stayed awake.  We went through as many past exam results as we could find.  In the end it worked.  Dexedrine is now available only on prescription; it is something of a miracle that article clerks survived the rigours of the Solicitors’ Admission Board examinations.  I do not advise the use of Dexedrine.
 
I deal with this as a separate subject un the book, but in 1954 I was called up for National service and spent 90 days at Holsworthy then 2 years part time in the CMF.  I think I was the only national serviceman earning more in the army than in civilian life.  In 1956 the commonwealth formed the First Commando Company which I joined.  It led me to new pursuits such as practise leaps from a 30 foot fan tower, 75 foot leaps from a Polish tower, 9 parachute jumps from an old Douglas DC 3, and clambouring around the cliffs at Georges Heights.  I don’t think the CMF harmed me.  One way and another I enjoyed National Service.
 
It was while I worked as a solicitor in Katoomba that I applied for a job in Alice Springs, I am not sure why.   But within a few months I was installed in an Alice Springs practice in an entirely new environment.  Alice Springs at the time had a population of about 3,000.  There was one other firm of two practitioners, known as we all were as barristers and solicitors.  Fortunately we all got on (more or less).
 
In due course I entered a partnership with the solicitor who employed me.  In further course he went to live in Adelaide and professionally I was on my own.  For some periods I was the only lawyer between Port Augusta and Darwin.
 
My work was decidedly mixed, consisting of routine conveyancing, stock mortgages, wills and estates, motor car litigation, violent  mayhem and homicide.  It was a curiosity of the time that the death penalty still obtained, until abolished by the Whitlam Government in 1973.  Also, until September 1964 the law permitted the public hanging of convicted Aboriginals.  No one was hanged whilst I lived in the Territory, but the law stayed around as a grisly possibility until 1964.  Criminal laws regarding Aboriginals were hugely discriminately, such as the Welfare Ordinance and Licensing Ordinance, which captured Albert Namatjira.    Much has been written and published about all this.  Another curious law in the NT provided for trial by jury, except in capital cases.
 
All this has gone, but the judgment of Kriewaldt J in the Namatjira case remains as a caution against discriminatory laws.  A feature of jury trials in Alice Springs was the jury remained sequestered for the whole trial.  The practice was to confine the 12 good men and true to the Riverside Hotel, when they were not in court.  This was not a hardship.  Indeed, it sometimes seemed to me that the jury members thought they were in Arcadia, having been compulsorily confined to licensed premises.  They often came into court with eyes like beagles.
 
Being young and ambitious lawyers, my partner Brian Martin (subsequently NT Solicitor General and Chief Justice) and I decided one day we should expand the practice.  The only practicable way we could do that was to establish a practice in Tennant Creek, then a rather desperate collection of ironclad buildings with two hotels.  A room became available with the assistance of diminutive Alfie Chittock (AKA  “Alf the ant” or the “Singapore ant”.   Alf was an affable soul who became the first mayor of Tennant Creek.   He was a local butcher and bookmaker, two vocations which tend to complement each other.  So we opened up in Alfie’s betting shop, a three hour drive from Alice Springs with scarcely a curve in the road, and we traversed it about once a month, one at a time.  It is said that Tennant Creek is where it is because a truck carrying beer broke down at that very place and the cargo needed careful husbandry.  I don't think we made much money, but it added humour to our lives.
 
Eventually my family and I moved to Darwin where I joined a firm which operated reasonably well until that bloody cyclone, which made a normal existence difficult.  Much is already written about it.  I took silk in 1974 and concluded an agreement with my partners about the use of a room, following which our office building blew over, making our negotiations irrelevant.  It was all a splendid example of a frustrated contract.  After Cyclone Tracey, Nelle and the children joined thousands of others in evacuation to Sydney, returning some months later.
 
Self Government lurched along in 1975 and a great deal of energy was expended by the NT Government and the Commonwealth in dealing with the multiple problems presented by Aboriginal lands, uranium mining and national parks and reserves, to say nothing of learning how to run a government.
 
Somehow I joined in as the first Solicitor General, responding to an invitation by Paul Everingham between drinks at the Darwin Sailing Club.  Apart from being the Government’s legal adviser and advocate, the work was endless and varied.  I remember being supplied with a tropical suit allowance to attend Jakarta as an observer at negotiations between Australia and East Timor about the maritime boundary between the NT and East Timor.  I don’t know why anyone in Darwin needed an allowance to buy and wear such apparel but it was a nice silk suit.  As to more serious constitutional issues I am indebted to the late Professors Sawer and Lumb, and Pat Brazil (then with the Commonwealth Attorney General’s department).
 
  I confess to spending some considerable time in Arnhem Land and elsewhere in the convivial company of George Chaloupka and his amazing knowledge of Arnhem Land Aboriginal art, and Colin Jack Hinton, a marine archaeologist who gave life to the Northern Territory museum and art gallery.
 
Both my friends are dead.  It seems to be happening a lot lately.
 
I returned to Sydney in 1980, for reasons as obscure as my first trip to Alice Springs.  I retired in 2017.  The years in between were pretty busy, including my marriage in Canada to dear Penny.
 
In the book I have dealt with my forensic adventures at more length.  I do not think further repetition here would improve the narrative.