The War against Humanity
Good night, sweet think tanks
The life and death of Ayn Rand prompts as an aside the reflection that in the eyes of most people whom they call the ‘elites,’ our think tanks died years ago. Who are those ‘elites’? People who have real jobs and who know how to do them. People who do something – and leave it to the comfortably salaried bystanders to comment upon them (when they are not reading Ayn Rand in the closet.)
(Who, after all, would want to live and try to breathe in a think tank? You may never get out – and some don’t.)
They have backed so many dud horses, and bent the knee so dutifully to that rich lady with all the coal, that they can totter their way to intellectual and social extinction entirely untroubled by the curses to be laid on their heads by their children and grandchildren for the damage done to the planet by their sterile and amateur theorising on matters that they did not understand.
They are, very sadly, a reflection of the degradation of the word ‘conservative’ and our complete failure to live up to the leadership of Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli.
Instead, these latter-day dreamers take up their lances and tilt at windmills. They might remind us of the remark of a real philosopher, not a self-taught amateur, the Scot called David Hume.
The knights–errant, who wandered about to clear the world of dragons and giants, never entertained the least doubt with regard to the existence of these monsters.
Neither did my absolute hero, Don Quixote – although he was by then as mad as a cut snake. Some do find odd ways to justify their existence.
So, Australians don’t need or trust intellectuals or ideologues. We’ve got a lot of things wrong here. This isn’t one of them.
The emptiness of parties
But there is something more than our distrust of intellectuals involved in the seeping irrelevance of the two major parties. If you take the trouble to look at the platform of the Liberal Party and the Labor Party, can you spot anything in one that would look out of place in the other? If you hear someone speaking of ‘Liberal values’, or, worse, ‘core Liberal values’, are they speaking of an attitude not shared by Labor? In the last federal election, was there any issue that derived from a policy that arose from a plank in the platform of either of the major parties?
For whatever reason, neither party in Australia is now keen to formulate a scheme or policy that appears novel. We are used to ‘small targets’. The reason for that can be seen in the electoral punishment meted out to anyone brave enough to rock the boat. And the reason for that is that we are timid because we fear change and are mortally dependent on government. We are in truth the victims of our own political immaturity.
That may in a way suit the national character, but there are consequences. One is that we are victims of the short-sightedness that bedevils corporate business, and we are hopeless in fields that call for long planning and investment – like defence, technical education, and care for the aged.
Another risk is intellectual dishonesty and then corruption. The two-party system developed in England through the eighteenth century. There were groups of people named ‘Tories’ and ‘Whigs’. But the political machine was oiled by patronage. Sir Lewis Namier, the great English historian of his time, observed that ‘parties at all times rest on types and on connexions rather than on intellectual tenets’.
As it happens, Sir Ronald Syme said much the same about politics in the Roman Republic at about the time of its death:
In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade. … The political life of the Roman Republic was stamped and swayed, not by parties and programs of a modern parliamentary character, not by the opposition between Senate and people… but by the strife for power, wealth and glory … Though concealed by craft or convention, the arcana imperii [secrets of power] of the nobilitas cannot evade detection. Three weapons the nobiles held and wielded, the family, money, and the political alliance (amicitia or factio, as it was variously labelled) … The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham … The ramifications of this oligarchy were pervasive, its most weighty decisions taken in secret, known or inferred by politicians of the time, but often evading historical record and baffling posterity … Persons not programmes came before the People for their judgment and approbation.
Of the politics at about the time the English opened their jail here, Sir Lewis Namier said:
There was a Whig and a Tory mentality; each was expressed in certain conceptions of State and Church, had its own ideology and idealism. And responded to certain sentimental appeals and traditional watchwords; the same types are with us even now … Moreover, the disturbing element of personal connexion is always present in politics; the game is played by groups, and human ties continually cross and confound the logic of social and political alinements.
That reads true for us here now – personal connexion means more in our politics than intellectual tenets. In truth, politics in England then ran on corruption, what historians call ‘the spoils system’. (We will see an alarming recent case of this kind of corruption in Australia in chapter 9.) Back in the eighteenth century, another English historian remarked that the ‘main presupposition of the art was this: that no leader of a coalition could ever hope to find, as Lord Chesterfield said, “enough pasture for the beast he had to feed”.’
The repeat of this history here and now in Australia is revolting. But the democracies of the West look to be living beyond their means. They must either cut services on offer or lift taxes or borrowing. Too many elected to govern are not up to it. As one said – ‘We all know the answer, but we all want to be re-elected.’
The queer conservatives
Some people approach government with respect for the past and with apprehension about trying to reform it. Others are more sceptical about what we have done before and they want to try to reform government. Macaulay surveyed the whole course of history from Magna Carta on and found: ‘under some name or other, two sets of men, those who were before their age, and those who were behind it, those who were the wisest among their contemporaries, and those who gloried in being no wiser than their great grand-fathers.’ Well, that left no doubt which team he played for, and his is described as the Whig view of history.
There are of course shades on each side, since no one outside of Candide is wholly optimistic – or pessimistic. One side might be labelled ‘conservative’ and the other ‘liberal’ – or that frightfully plastic term ‘progressive’. Words such as Left and Right are useless; Fascist and Socialist are merely fatuous.
It would be idle to seek to apply any of those sorts of labels to either of the traditionally major political parties in Australia now, since neither looks to stand for anything, and each looks to have no underlying rationale. Our Liberal Party and our Labor Party are full of inconsistencies, but since our present inquiry looks at failures in capitalism and democracy, I will focus on the Liberal Party, which from time to time claims to be the party of business. (Although that relationship has soured recently as the failure of the Liberal-led federal government to come to terms with reality has induced business to take the lead on issues like same-sex marriage and the environment after the government offered its version of an abdication – it could have reminded some of James II shooting through and tossing the royal seals into the Thames. Business people in a time of ESG do not smile upon those in power having a Neanderthal attitude to evidence and the conclusions to be drawn from it.)
(I put the National Party to one side – they look to have deserted the farmers for coal and Tammany Hall, and they regularly present us with candidates we would cross the road to avoid.)
A hundred years or so ago in England, the Conservative and Liberal Parties were thought to be very different. (Winston Chuchill breezed between the two of them, but he was on any view exceptional.) Our Liberal Party wants to be both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. That has led to tension –which is unresolved. That is not surprising.
The Adversarial Trial
The decision
A judge once concluded a judgment saying ‘I hope that I haven’t said anything new’. That kind of shyness is less in vogue now. But it might lead you to ask the question. Will deciding this case require me to say something new? Unless you are on the High Court, the answer will almost certainly be no. In that case you can dispose of the matter as crisply as you can, while doing as little damage as possible to the people involved or to the fabric of the law.
But in the rare case where you may have to say something new, why should not those same considerations apply? If you are going to add to the body of our law, then unless you are some kind of juristic superstar, which you almost certainly are not, the chances are that your efforts will leave us worse off. Why should not you still seek to get rid of the matter saying as little as decently possible? Did anything – anything – good at all come out of the gallons of ink spilled by nine judges arguing about whether Twiggy had told a fib?
So, I would suggest that the first thing is to keep the decision as short as the law and evidence permits.
The next and related tip is to start as soon as possible doing them on the spot. It will depend to some extent on jurisdiction, and on temperament. The late Bill Crockett told me that he enjoyed the Practice Court – ‘it gives you a chance to chance your arm.’ He was on any view a pre-eminent judge – the most imposing judge I have appeared before – but you need to confront something like that sentiment, and the sooner you do so, the better – otherwise you may never get around to it. And the most gripping disease that can cripple a judge is getting behind in reserved judgments. We see it so often, and it is a very sad failure of character and the system.
On disciplinary tribunals, I think that the decision should be given on the spot, and face to face with the punter. You should do it to their face, but you can reserve the right to add to and vary those reasons later. You may want to do that on some tribunals because people may look to you for guidance on some issues.
I never felt up to giving a decision on the spot in complex cases like charity cases, preferential securities cases, group pay-roll, or tax evasion cases – for one thing, I had no idea what the endgame might be, and it may not be a good idea to think out loud in those cases. Nor did I think those cases were ones where I should chance my arm, since there were tricky issues of law or fact. But where the issue was just one of credit or penalty, or whether a contract had been concluded by a certain date, there was no problem about doing it on the spot. (It is not my area of practice, but I wonder why most appeals on sentence are not dealt with on the spot. Do we really suppose that the science of punishment is that precise?)
We tend to forget now that from its creation, the English Court of Appeal tried to get through most of its load on the spot. Oliver Wendell Holmes loved this idea – he would doubtless have been up for it. Our High Court used to do it occasionally.
I referred earlier to the rule that if you called for a document, you could be compelled to tender it. The authority is Walker v Walker. That was a matrimonial case – presumably of a very wealthy couple since this maintenance case started before Magistrate. The Court gave its judgment on the spot. Latham, CJ and Dixon, J offered brief observations. Here is the judgment of Justice Starke:
I agree that the appeal should be dismissed, but I do not agree that the letter which has been referred to was admissible in evidence of the husband’s means. It is, of course, an old rule that if a party calls for a document in the course of the trial, he is bound to put it in if so required, but it does not follow that every statement in such a document, hearsay and otherwise, is evidence. It is for the court to consider the matter in each case, and in this particular case all that happened was that the letter was put in to confirm the wife’s statement that her knowledge of her husband’s means was based on hearsay and nothing else. I should not have thought that the letter could in these circumstances be used affirmatively, or that it had any probative value whatever. However, I think there was other evidence which was given of the husband’s position in life and positions that he had occupied which were sufficient to support the decision of the magistrate.
The parties like judges who are short and to the point. Instead, we are lost on a sea of cut-and-paste agglutination of the style so deplored by good judges.
On the length and depth, or scholarship, of the judgments, I think that the problem has got worse over the last generation or so with footnotes. They should have no place in the courts. The taxpayers fund the judiciary to resolve disputes, not to compile and compound juristic theories and theses.
The actual litigants are much more aware of this distinction than judges think. They just want to be put out of their misery and not to be used as a source of ammunition for the next bunch of guinea pigs – the problem is that empire building does not just hold up the litigants who are the parties in the exercise, but it helps to make it worse for the next lot. And who wants to be put down by a footnote?
May I take it to be common ground that we have too much law already? If so, how confident is any would-be law-maker that their next new law will leave us net better off? So, to the wunderkind or appeal court who wants to unload the next few hundred-page bible, I put the Latin question: cui bono? Just who is the audience? Certainly not those who paid for it in flesh and cash – the parties.
Two of the tablets of our law of negligence were given by two masters of the law, Justice Cardozo in Macpherson v Buick Co. and Lord Atkin in Donoghue v Stevenson. Elsewhere I said this:
One footnote may be permitted to these judgments. That of Cardozo J is about ten pages in the reports; that of Atkin is about twenty-one pages. Atkin in his judgment refers to the ‘illuminating judgment’ of Cardozo, and apologises for his own ‘long judgment’. Heaven only knows what either of these great judges would have thought of the effusive fulminations of the doom-thunderers of nowadays.
The movie Casablanca takes ninety-four minutes. Any director who makes a film longer than that is at risk of being seen to flirt with Destiny. So is any judge who takes longer than Justice Cardozo or Lord Atkin. As in devoting a few hundred footnoted pages to a libel action.
Finally, if you are going to reserve, get it done quickly. Don’t let it or others turn into a cancer. If the case has run for more than a day, you can have the introduction and summary of the evidence and argument made up as you go. The instincts developed over twenty-five years fighting cases will lead you to review the evidence and the law, and then make findings on the evidence and draw the conclusions of law – and so you come to decide the issues. It is about a five-phase process.
It has been a very long tradition in Anglo-American courts to expose the reasoning in this structured manner. Nowadays we use that ghastly word ‘transparency’. This is not the way they do it in Europe. They think we are odd. Major law firms and sensible silks now tend to follow the advice that Sir Ernest Gowers (in The Complete Plain Words) gave to the English Civil Service: ‘Begin by answering his question.’ I doubt whether that mode will take on here, because the judiciary is not the civil service, or the retailer of advice to paying customers, but you could well remember how Sir Ernest summarised his rules: ‘Be short, be simple, be human.’ And judges should be encouraged to give a summary of any reserved judgment.
All this has to be done when the case is fresh in your mind – especially if issues of credit are involved. It is not fair to the parties to allow a lapse of time to flirt with your powers of recall and analysis. Such a course is unjust.
I have always tried to give a decision on the day of hearing or the next. I don’t think I ever sat on one for longer than a week. If anyone wants to say that I confronted less pressure of work than they do, I will be interested to hear from them. We are talking about professional duty and discipline. For myself, I cannot understand how any judge at first instance could in good conscience sit on one for more than a month. You are then likely to cause real pain to real people, and you are not doing the right thing by the rest of us either. If a practice of real expedition were adopted, and it had the effect of reducing attempts to match War and Peace, very few in the profession would dress themselves in mourning.
The problem with delay in giving reserved judgments has now reached epidemic proportions, and not just in superior courts. It infects lower courts, too – including courts of ‘summary’ procedures. This can be very wounding for the parties, and as time goes by, the presumption of a fair trial just evaporates.
In England, it is said that three months should be the limit for reserved judgments. We have judges sitting on judgments for more than twelve months. This is appalling. The position in the English courts is clear.
We might question why Sir Geoffrey Vos MR singled out commercial litigation. That involves money and face. What about delays in judgment that ruin people’s lives – as was the case of the family who had to wait two years for a judgment in the tax case I referred to earlier? As the poet said, ‘the private wound is deepest.’
Our judges have no excuse for not dealing with this issue until the cancer has become life threatening. In order to start to regain public confidence, they may have to start the way other addicts do with a public acknowledgment – ‘We have a problem, and we have to fix it.’
13
Appeals
About thirty years ago, I was at an ABA Conference in New York. I attended a very affable breakfast for appellate counsel. Late in the session, I asked if there was an agenda. ‘Not really, Counsellor. There is only so much you can say about appellate advocacy, and it has all been said before. We just fix the agenda for the next meeting.’ That sounded most agreeable to me.
It was there that I heard for the first time the U S description of appeals’ judges – they hide out in the hills while the real action is going on, and when it is over, they come down and shoot the wounded. That observation has an American ring to it – a ring of the West. It also has a ring of truth.
My own view is that the pain is far less if those doing the shooting are drawn from those who might be shot – and it was a mistake to have a separate Court of Appeal. The ordinary punter gets nervous with splits in the higher reaches of government. There is no point in adding to the hierarchy for the sake of it. It is inevitable that a separate Court of Appeal will develop a sort of aloofness that will lead to estrangement from those still in the trenches. The more rungs there are on a ladder, the more rickety it becomes, and the easier it is for some to look down on others, and for those others to feel passed over or looked down on. The principal differences between trial judges and intermediate appeals judges lie in their apparent self-esteem and capacity to make law; the two are related.
The position looks very bad in Victoria with County Court judges all the time being spoken down to by faceless judges who have little part to play with the bar or the profession at large. This is very unhealthy because the Court of Appeal and the County Court appear to operate on different juristic levels. There is a kind of intellectual apartheid. It is worse than the public service in Canberra.
Then comes the coup de grace. Some of those appeal judges have never fought a criminal case, never fought a case before a jury, and have never directed a jury. And yet those whose bread and butter has been to appear in front of or to direct juries have to be lectured by some who have never done it. In the Heydon Royal Commission, the whole nation could see the problems that arise when you ask someone to do the work of a trial judge and they have had no training for that purpose.
There is another cause of disaffection. Our appeal judges have not got their act together in stating their view of the law in crisp simple terms that can be applied by your everyday trial judge. There are too many judgments with too much said. We have abandoned the wisdom of our ancestors that held that dissent on high is unhealthy, and on the High Court in particular, we have had to put up with prima donnas whose conception of their own egos has not allowed them to be just one of the team, but requires them to flaunt their own wares – to the benefit of no one except those idle people who have the time to read that kind of stuff.
But you should not be troubled by appeals. I say that although my sense is that County Court judges are delivering a lot more reserved judgments than they used to because appeals are a lot more prevalent than before. I have never understood why judges get so scratchy about appeals. Unless you have said that 1+1=3 or that Donoghue v Stevenson is a leading case on the tort of homicide, the fact that another lawyer comes to a different view to yours appears to me to be an utterly inconsequential result of the fact that litigation is a lottery. On more than one occasion in tax cases, I have told the punter that a win from me might be their worst result along a winding and rough road. I also often told counsel that many parts of the law are beyond my comprehension.
I have been talking of the sensitivities of judges. Far more important are the interests of the parties. There was an old Latin maxim to the effect that it is in the public interest that there be an end to litigation. Most litigation is hurtful. Appeals are forms of litigation that extend the hurt. Some appeal courts compound it by ordering a retrial. That happens when some judges say that one or others got it wrong, and the parties have to suffer the consequences.
My own view is that we have far too many appeals, and that if the bloke next door found out how many criminal trials had to be repeated, to the unspeakable misery of those involved, he would be outraged – and I do mean outraged.
Even in my jurisdiction, there were bad accidents. Some brothers named Christian on the land in Gippsland had to turn up before me on a dispute with the revenue authority about stamp duty on a partition of their farming property. That was a subject on which I was anything but confident. These farming brothers had not, like Twiggy, sought to bring government down on them, but they were taken by government, for its own purposes, to a single judge of the Supreme Court, from there to the Full Court, and from there to the High Court. The stamp duty in question was under $9000. I think that special leave was refused – otherwise I might just have been the first of five layers of appeal – as happened, I think, to two other cases of mine.
You might say that that is Dickensian or Pythonesque. In truth, it is a mix of madness and cruelty that can ruin lives. Our appeals procedures badly need reform.
The Pursuit of Happiness
The philosophy of slow cooking
Slow cooking has a lot going for it. The end results are normally good, without looking flash, and there is generally some room for error. We are talking of what is called comfort food – what you get a craving for after a week or so abroad. You can prepare it in advance, which takes the strain out of presentation, and you can save portions for the future. This is important for those who just cook for themselves and for their version of the Wolf (my last dog). Above all, the times involved are such as to preclude your making a fool of yourself by turning up the opera and getting on the sauce so that you are past it before the meal is ready. That is a consummation devoutly to be avoided.
Here then are a few meals that the Wolf and I enjoyed.
Aficionados of cooking writing will see a heavy influence of Elizabeth David in the absence of detail. That way, I get to blame you if you bugger it up. (Elizabeth David made it to the first volume of A Curated Library. Dante had to wait until the end.)
OXTAIL
Trim oxtail and boil for a few minutes, and dry. Brown thoroughly in olive oil and butter in casserole pot. (Sometimes I add some Kaiserfleisch for effect, and for the juices, and to cause a frisson in the heart surgeon and the rabbi.) If you are a real hot shot, you can flambé the meat in cognac. Thoroughly dust the meat in flour – you can do this by tossing it and the flour in a plastic bag – and put to one side. Lightly brown in oil and butter sliced leeks or onion, celery, and carrot, and add chopped garlic, bay leaves, parsley, rosemary and thyme, and a pinch of nutmeg. Return the oxtail and mix. Add a tin of peeled tomatoes and some tomato paste. Add some goodish red – say Koonunga Hill Shiraz – to deglaze. Cover with stock and mushrooms. Season. Some add a spoon of brown sugar. (My old man used to add a spoon of Vegemite, the shy old patriot! You could put in a dab of Bonox – just a dab.) Cover the pot, and cook on very low diffused heat for four hours or so. (You can use the crock-pot, but allow at least four hours on high, and say two on low.) Keep overnight. Reheat and cook for about another hour. You know it is cooked when the meat falls off the bone, and the meniscus has a pleasing tobacco colour on a white dish. The leavings make a fine ragout for pasta or a pie.
VEAL SHANKS
Take large, full veal shanks, and dust with flour and salt. Brown in olive oil in roasting pan, and remove. Cover the pan with finely chopped fennel, leek and garlic. Add loose cloves of garlic, with parsley, rosemary and thyme, a squeeze of lemon, and season. Cover generously with white wine (say a pinot gris). Return shanks to the pan and cook in low (160 degree) oven (preheated) for about four hours, checking for liquidity from time to time. This meal cannot be stored.
BEEF STEW
Cut chuck steak in bite size pieces. Fry in batches in sizzling olive oil in casserole pot. Remove and rinse pot and on lower flame, softly fry two thinly sliced onions until soft and golden. Salt onions while frying. Add one clove of garlic sliced. Add cup of red wine and reduce. Add tin diced tomatoes and cup of chicken stock. Add two bay leaves and rosemary. Salt the beef and return. Cook on about 170 degrees covered for about 100 minutes. Reduce liquid on stove top if necessary. Serve with mashed potatoes or in a pie.
LAMB SHOULDER
Ask the butcher to dice lamb shoulder into chunks. Brown lamb in casserole base with olive oil and butter, and set aside. Cook onion and garlic for a few minutes until coloured. Add chopped carrot, sliced leeks with more butter, and bay leaves, rosemary, and thyme. Then add peeled and sliced waxy potatoes (less than HB pencil width), and a cup or two of pearl barley. Add lamb and mix. Cover with vegetable or chicken stock. Bring to boil. Preheat oven to about 170 (fan forced), and cook under lid for about two hours. The potato should have broken down. Serve with flat-leaved parsley.
CASSOULET
This dish can be a mess, and you may want to try some dummy runs before going public. Some quantities will be offered (after renderings of Larousse, Elizabeth David, and Mireille Johnston). In essence, you separately cook four different kinds of meat, and beans, and then stew them all in three layers.
Soak about 700 gm. of haricot beans overnight, and drain.
Apply salt and thyme to three duck legs; roast for about one hour at 180, and reserve fat.
Brown about half a Lyonnais sausage, and a Polish sausage, with about 300 gm Kaiserfleisch, and two pork spare ribs, and remove, and reserve fats.
Sauté about half a kilo of diced lamb.
Add one sliced onion, leek, garlic, and two storks of celery (very finely chopped), one tin of tomatoes with white wine and vegetable stock and simmer for about an hour.
Cover beans with water, bring to a boil, and remove froth. Add a similar quantity onion, leek, celery, and tomatoes, with Kaiserfleisch and spare ribs. Cook for about one and a half hours, adding sausage for last 15 minutes.
Drain off meats and beans, reserving juices, and cut all meats into serving sized pieces.
Line the bottom and the lower part of the sides of the casserole pot with bacon with rind on. You assemble the stew as follows: half the bean mix; then the chopped meats; and then the rest of the beans. Season and sprinkle each phase with rosemary and thyme, and pour over reserved juices, removing some tomato, onion and celery for appearances. Cover with breadcrumbs, and pour over reserved fats.
Bake at about 200 (less for fan forced) for an hour and a half, with top off for the last twenty minutes. The French say that you should break into the crust about six times to see that it is not drying out.
Keep overnight, reheat, and serve directly from the pot.
It is not as hard as all that may sound, but you would not want this recipe to fall out of your pocket while you were seeing the heart surgeon.
On my last two visits to Paris, I found it very hard to find a cassoulet on the Left Bank – I doubt whether your chances would improve on the Right Bank. Perhaps I was there in the wrong season.
LAMB SHANKS
Dust shanks in seasoned flour. Brown in olive oil, and remove. Brown leeks, carrot, chopped zucchini and garlic in different oil. Add white wine, chicken stock, passata and herbs and bay leaves. Cook in covered casserole in oven for two hours. Further reduce sauce if necessary. Add cooked peas for colour just before serving with mashed potato and flat leaf parsley.
CORNED BEEF
Smear the top of the cut with ginger – say ginger paste and powder, with some garlic – having seasoned the beef. Cook for eight hours on low in crockpot in ginger beer, with bay leaves, peppercorns, and cloves. Serve with white parsley sauce, potatoes mashed with cream, and German sauerkraut cooked in Riesling. (You can adapt this process to beef ribs, slow cooked in beer, and served on the sauerkraut with mashed potato on the side.)
MINESTRONE
Lightly fry thinly sliced onions in olive oil. Then add over a low gas, in order, and at intervals of time allowed for preparation, finely chopped garlic, carrots, celery, potato, French beans, zucchini and cabbage. Add diced tomatoes, herbs, and a small glass of red and let bubble for a while. Pour in stock, and add cannellini and kidney beans, and crust of Parmesan. Cook for about three hours on low simmer. Next day, reheat and cook a little longer. Remove Parmesan. Add precooked small pasta just before serving. Serve with Parmesan and parsley, and lightly toasted sourdough with olive oil. (Just to confound purists, I like to add some Kaiserfleisch through the initial frying, and a ham bone for the cooking. You might also try some bone marrow in the bottom of the pot.)
THE PIE
Take diced gravy beef and osso bucco in equal portions, with at least three pieces of marrow bone. Sprinkle with onion salt and garlic salt, and pepper. Soak in Guinness overnight. Thoroughly brown the meats, and then dust with flour well. Transfer to crockpot with three or four sections of marrow bone. Cover with stout and beef stock. Add crushed garlic, a tub or so of tomato paste or passata, a dash of Worcester sauce, and, if you wish, two or three sliced mushrooms of the dissolving kind. Stir well. Cook for 8 hours on low in crock-pot, checking liquidity from time to time (without removing lid). You can reduce liquids by taking the lid off at the end. Remove bones after ensuring marrow has gone into the mix. Transfer to pie dishes. Cover with pastry or mashed potato, and cook until the cover is ready. If using frozen puff pastry, lightly smear the pastry with spreadable butter, and put on a high level of oven on 230 degrees fan forced for 10 or 15 minutes, down to 210 for final 10 minutes. This should give the pastry the right colour. (Those settings should also be right for frozen potato chips.) If serving with pastry, I sometimes prefer to decant the contents, with the pastry on one side, and asparagus spears on the other. Otherwise, you might serve with chips and spinach. If topping with mash, I prefer to leave the pie as it is, and have, say, some Brussels sprouts and bacon on the side. The preparation is best spread over three days. There you have a meal fit for Billy and the boys on Grand Final eve (except that they will have to put on hold any resulting friskiness).
Careful readers may have picked up two things. There is an element of blokiness about this food. That is because I am a bloke, and I make no apology for that. Secondly, there is no philosophy. That is because, to adapt a remark by the great American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the life of slow cooking has not been logic, it has been experience.
Bon appétit, mes braves.
Art and décor
The style of London clubs may be exportable. It has certainly affected the way I live now here in Yarraville.
When I went back to the Bar, I had a five-year annuity from Blakes (my firm) to help with the transition. They were sensibly generous. I could afford to set up chambers as I wished. In my first manifestation, I had been consumed by the need to build what for me would be the best library possible – especially on legal history, which was and is a large part of my intellectual life. I spent a fortune on law reports – all made next to useless by computers. I was determined to abandon the old-style partner’s desk and bookshelves. I bought a wooden roll-top little desk to go against one wall. It went with two dining chairs in bright lined fabric, one for me, and one for a client. There were three wing chairs in floral fabric and one low armchair in a fine fabric with the badge of Florence. There was a sofa in mahogany leather, two lamps, two coffee tables and a small bookshelf with a CD player. The walls were festooned with seriously good aboriginal paintings, framed photographs and contemporary and pop art. It was a very comfortable place to work and talk in.
A lot of that is now at home. I call the décor of the main rooms ‘1948 Paris Dambusters.’ There are the winged chairs in floral fabric, and the Florentine armchair; a small oak drop-side table with two dining chairs with ridiculously expensive fabric with Chinese motifs (of a set of four); a sofa in striped fabric; a wooden cabinet with hand-painted doors to hide the small TV; about five little lamps each with its own style and memories; a large stylish white Ikea bookshelf with the best books described in the four books I have written about above; two coffee tables; a Chinese style cocktail cabinet, and two smaller wooden cabinets, both with painted figures; one standing sculpture; various ornaments from all over the world; a display of the operas and jazz musicians I live on; seriously loud and colourful paintings of aboriginal and pop art – the latter may well be my favourite; a Marantz player with two English speakers in white on the Ikea shelf; and works on paper by Blackman, Boyd, Nolan, Perceval, Smart, Storrier and Williams –with a small framed original cartoon of Keats; and a mask from India and one from Venice.
The idea is to surround and secure myself with what I live for. It works. A living room is, after all, an important part of your life – especially as you wind down. You can be cocooned with writers, artists, musicians and minds you admire. And the trend now in a small apartment in Yarraville is to light up the flat with aboriginal and pop art and replace works on paper with paintings of my landscapes and photographs – and a couple of my drawings.
I think I may say that I have curated the collection of our Australian art for Yarraville, just as I had curated the art collection of an international law firm in a landmark building in Collins Street. I did the former with help from two of Melbourne’s leading art dealers because I knew some selections would attract a reaction, and I wanted some cover.
The works now at home, and the books about their creators, are as essential to the home as the library and music. Two books that have come out recently – Nolan’s Africa and The Fred Williams Diaries – have changed the way I see each of those artists, and I am fortunate to have books about many other artists in my collection. In the result, I will be able to leave to my grandchildren work signed by each of the following and a book written about the work of each: Blackman, Boyd, Coburn, Drendel, Emily, MacFarlane, Nolan, Perceval, Smart, Storrier, Thompson, Whitely and Williams. (There is even one on the Japanese artist Yuta Okuda.) Leafing through one or other of those is now routine when I sit down at evening with a glass of red and the music of the moment.
Too few us realise just how well served we are by our artists in Australia. I commonly leaf through an art book while listening to music. How does Sonny Rollins go down with Nolan? Fred Williams or Ann Thompson with Janacek? Emily or Freddie Timms with a Beethoven quartet? People like Emily, Boyd, Nolan, Smart and Storrier changed the way I see Australia and the world. Our first Nations painters changed the way I see art. These immensely gifted people give us a lyrical reflection of the human condition. That is what I understand art to be about. And you can turn it all on as you like it.
A wine cellar
At a wine-tasting course in Richmond (in Melbourne), the tutor asked us to taste wines and then take the mask off the bottle, and pass it round so that we idiots could compare notes. One night we got a rare highlight. ‘Did you say that this was a distinctive Hunter Valley Semillon?’ ‘Yes. It is something they do so very well up there.’ ‘That’s curious.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘Because the wine-maker thought it was a chardonnay.’ That left us idiots to grin at each other. Another tutor sported what looked to be an expensively rouged nose. ‘What would you choose to eat with this wine?’ ‘Why do you have to eat anything with it?’ ‘Madam – a woman after my own heart.’ I
We did some tastings at Oxford – for a fee that could not be characterised as inconsequential. Two undergraduate types gave a spiel and made the awful mistake of making assumptions about the experience of the group. My class included a gorgeous (female) psychiatrist from Paris, a London partner in a leading international accounting firm, and a Californian wine maker. When we expressed a lack of enthusiasm for their samples, one of them told me I was looking for ‘new world’ wines. ‘I could not give a bloody hoot where it comes from, Mate, as long as I can feel its strength on my palate.’ Or grumpy words to that effect. I suspect that that response was regarded as very new world too.
Roger Scruton was an English philosopher who enjoyed fox hunting and wine. He was conservative – more than that, he was a sane and articulate conservative who could speak in terms that the rest of us can follow. That makes him a rarity among philosophers, if not conservatives. (When Australians who regard themselves as conservatives – often falsely in my view – invoke Scruton, they conveniently forget that he was firmly committed to conserving the planet. He wrote a book about how to be a green conservative.)
Scruton wrote a book about wine. It begins as follows.
This book is not a guide to drinking wine, but a guide to thinking it. It is a tribute to pleasure, by a devotee of happiness, and a defence of virtue by an escapee from vice. Its argument is addressed to theists and atheists, to Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims, to every thinking person to whom the joy of meditation has not extinguished the pleasures of embodiment. I have harsh words to say about the health fanatics, about the mad mullahs, who prefer taking offence to seeing another’s viewpoint. But my purpose is to defend the opinion once attributed to Plato that ‘nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by the gods to man’, and I am confident that all those who are offended by this innocent endeavour thereby give proof of their irrelevance.
Scruton quotes Jefferson as saying ‘wine is the only antidote to whiskey.’ He is an old-fashioned purist: ‘To assign points to a claret is like assigning points to symphonies – as though Beethoven’s 7th, Tchaikovsky’s 6th, Mozart’s 39th and Bruckner’s 8th all hovered between 90 and 95’. Robert Parker did us no favour with this system – it reminds me of judging divers – but Australian critics have loyally gone along with it.
Scruton has trouble with our selling wine by reference to grape variety rather than place. He says that the Wirra Wirra, in McLaren Vale, is one of ‘the oldest and most beautiful wineries in Australia and that its Grenache and Shiraz is a wine that tastes of Australia – so strong that it resembles a fortified wine, combining the guilty excesses of port with the playfulness of the Australian outback.’ ‘Playful’ is not a term I would use for the outback. It is a gorgeous killer. But I am very familiar with the reaction of Europeans to the strength of Australian wines.
We are blessed here with wines of all varieties. Wine is, for better or worse, a part of my life. And now I have survived to an age where it no longer matters so much that the science of modern medicine has taken a lot of the fun out of lying.
With Compliments 