Reflections on the law and other things by a lawyer in autumn

(Serial form)

After reading another biography of the English statesman and jurist, Lord Haldane, and being reminded that he was trained at Edinburgh and Gottingen in philosophy, I bought a volume that he wrote on the subject.  It is called The Pathway to Reality, and it contains the Gifford Lectures he gave at St Andrews in 1902-1903.  This was a time when English philosophy was heavily influenced by German idealism.  Haldane was right into the metaphysics of Hegel.  Very few read Hegel now, and even fewer could understand it if they did.  But this book now comes not just from a different time, but a completely different world.  Here is an example – picked at random (from the third lecture):

The problem of Philosophy may be defined to be to find the highest categories under which to think individual actuality, and to get the most adequate and complete conception of it.  So alone, by this method and by no other, does it seem as though we could reach a view of God.  At the plane of experience of our everyday lives, we do not use the highest categories, because we are not in search of ultimate truth.  Our necessities, our purposes, our standpoints, are provisional and finite only, and we have no need to go beyond them in the organisation of our view of experience.

How would it be if you got on a plane for London and as you take the first sip of Scotch and soda, the guy in the seat next to you leans across and inquires eagerly: ‘Could we start, perhaps, with your conception of individual actuality?’  The whole lot is just about meaningless to us now.  We know that David Hume exploded metaphysics, and I now have a better understanding of his famous peroration.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask,  Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

This is just another case of philosophy winding up in a cold dead end.  But I am old fashioned enough to think that training in it helps train the mind – and God knows we could use as much of that as we can get.  It certainly did not hurt Haldane.  He was a first rate jurist and statesman.

*

Shakespeare presents no such problem for me.  I have all the plays on video and audio cassette.  At the start of the lock-down, I bought the full set of 38 plays on CD put out by Arkangel.  It’s ridiculous.  You get the plays performed in front of you by the best Shakespearian actors in the world – by far the best – and all with perfect sound – for about $10 a play.  I am going through them – at random.  The last three I finished were Titus Andronicus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Pericles (with an ageing Gielgud as Gower).  None of those is in his top shelf, but there is something that gets me in each one, and in spite of its wanton brutality, I have had a morbid fascination with Titus ever since I saw that marvellous film of it by Julie Taymor (1999).  Otherwise, you can just sit there and let the sound wash over you – as you might with the Goldberg Variations of Bach – even if I sit there with my mutilated Everyman volume of the text – with pencil in hand, like a conductor.  I am always struck again with the wonder of it, and I now find the musical accompaniment surprisingly important and engaging.  Last night I played the first half of Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I saw the famous 1970 RSC production in Melbourne, and I have seen it in our Botanical Gardens and in the gardens of at least two Oxford Colleges.  And I enjoyed the Hollywood version.  This is not easy to put on film, but I thought Kevin Kline was very good as a mysteriously tragic Bottom – backed by some of the big hits of Italian opera.  And I and my older daughter nearly died laughing when we saw the mechanicals, as the yokels are called, in the AO production of the Britten opera in rehearsal about thirty years ago.  The Arkangel version sounds flawless to me.  The range of the voices over four different levels of characters is something of wonder.  They speak the lines as they breathe the air.  For example, Hermia is played by Amanda Root.  (I used to wonder how she may have suffered under that name until Joe Root was made captain of England.  When I arrived at the courtyard of my college at Oxford on one occasion, a cheery English guy I had met on previous occasions told me and the rest of the motley that ‘Joe Root is not out on 180.’  I said: ‘With a bloody name like that, God might owe him one.’)  Amanda is perfect for this part; she reminded me a lot of the young lady who played Natasha in the BBC War and Peace – the gushing exuberance of a girl becoming a woman.  And apart from the mechanicals, the comedy is ultra-ripe.  There is that wonderful moment when Lysander’s blood goes up too fast in his pants and the chaste Hermia banishes him to the bushes for the night.  As it happens, that turns out to have been a serious tactical error, but you wonder how many times that scene gets played out on a park bench, or a back seat at the Moorabbin Drive-In.  Almost immediately, the now drug crazed Lysander repudiates Hermia and pants his newly found lust at Helena, and she gets the line of the night:

Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?

When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?

We do not know if Chaplain, or the Marx Brothers, or the Goons saw this great comedy, but we do know that it was and is part of their and our heritage.  It is another example of the remark by someone – perhaps Olivier – that being with Shakespeare is like touching the face of God.  In a way that is far beyond the dreams of Hegel or Haldane.

*

Lawyers tend to specialise, but they should try to stay as general as they can for as long as they can.  In addition to specialising, some also confine themselves to one kind of client.  This can be very damaging.  Some people act only for insurers.  In the U S, some first amendment lawyers act only for the press. In Australia, some criminal lawyers act only for the accused – and risk getting bitter and twisted about the coppers or becoming indifferent to conduct that does serious harm to people; like psychiatrists, they risk being adversely affected by what they encounter on the job.  The worst kinds of one-sidedness that I see is in industrial relations where many operate only for employers or employees – and trade unions.  These people can end up terribly blinkered – biased or prejudiced, or politically committed.  And all those conditions are the precise opposite of being professional.  It is fundamental to our legal process that you hear both sides before forming a judgment.  In my view, lawyers should seek to apply that principle to their practice.  It is to my mind obvious that lawyers who are used to seeing both sides because they act on either side are much better equipped to look after their clients than those who only get to see issues from one perspective.  In my twelve or so years running a statutory tribunal that dealt with disciplinary issues, I frequently encountered lawyers who showed problems in dealing with either of those issues.  Because the statutory body ran an essential government service, the fire brigade, whose members belonged to a fiercely protective trade union, there were often ‘industrial’ issues which would lead to a Labor oriented firm being instructed on behalf of the union.  Then I might have an industrial law barrister in front of me.  But if the charge alleged conduct that constituted a criminal offence, I might have a lawyer from the criminal bar before me.  One day I could get some crusading union lawyer playing to the gallery and singing the union anthem – when the punter’s best interests would be served by a quiet ‘Sorry, but I promise it will not happen again.’  The conflict of interest was palpable – embarrassingly so.   Then I could get some bull-nosed crusader from the criminal bar who would decide to savage the investigating officer for old times’ sake, and then you would get a novice who would take the fifth – which is a form of suicide before such a tribunal.  These were difficult and frustrating times for me.  Because some counsel were unable to do their job professionally, the tribunal can be put in the difficult position of trying to remain neutral while juggling with the rights of the accused.  It got even worse when industrial advocates appeared.  They may have had some rough training in industrial advocacy, but that was far from being enough in that kind of tribunal.  After I had made sure that word got to the union to that effect, that practice stopped.  Something similar happened when I was told that the Crown would not brief counsel to appear before me in tax cases if they had appeared for the taxpayer.  That practice looked pernicious on more than one ground, and the Crown on advice cut it out.

Reflections on the law and other things by a lawyer in autumn

(Serial form)

There’s more to history than ‘accidental judgments and casual slaughters.’  It is the story of life and my life at least would be useless without it.  There are two things to remember.  First, history is a collection of biographies.  Secondly, the better the story is told, the better we can follow it.  Let me give examples from two new biographies that I am currently (October, 2020) reading – Haldane, by John Campbell, and Hitler, Downfall by Volker Ullrich.  When in second year law, I decided to concentrate on French and Russian biographies and legal history, I think the first book I read was a biography of Lord Haldane – who was a lot more than a lawyer and Lord Chancellor.  He was – wait for it – a philosopher.  He had studied in Gottingen as well as Edinburgh.  He claimed to understand Hegel – and very few people – let alone an English lawyer – have tried that one on.  (Kant must have seemed a breeze after that.)  In The Philosophy of Humanism, he said ‘It is in the quality of the struggle to attain it, and not in any finality we suppose ourselves to have reached and to be entitled to rest on, that truth consists for human beings.’  English lawyers don’t talk like that – neither do English philosophers.  Haldane said about Adam Smith that he ‘had a perception that abstract propositions, however carefully stated, can express only one aspect or side of things, and are therefore wanting in truth, a quality that belongs to what is concrete alone.’  That statement might be said to represent the upshot of English philosophy for that century.  The author refers to Haldane’s ‘ability to hold a range of opinions in harmony’ – the hoped for benefit of a liberal education.  Haldane was in government with giants – Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill – that now leave us feeling glumly small.  He was of course on first name terms with Einstein, Keynes, Laski, and Russell.  And Natty.  Nathaniel Rothschild.  Disraeli may have advised him that if you want to run an empire, it helps to have an in with the Rothschilds.  You never know when the Crown might need fast cash in steep amounts.  Like when the Empress of India picked up the Suez Canal.  Haldane was instrumental in arming England for the Great War and he laid foundation stones for MI5, MI6, the LSE, Imperial College, and the ‘redbrick’ universities.  And with Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill, he launched the Welfare State in England.

*

Now, from the second book comes hubris touching on madness.

‘It will be a mass attack in the grandest style,’ Hitler and Goebbels agreed.  ‘No doubt the most enormous that history has ever seen.  The example of Napoleon will not be repeated.’  The dictator and his propaganda minister did not find it at all ominous that the start of Operation Barbarossa fell on the same day that the French emperor had crossed the river Neman with the Grande Armée 129 years earlier.

That was on 24 June 1941.

‘Our situation bears a horrible resemblance to that of Napoleon in 1812’, the tank group commander Colonel-General wrote on 12 December.  ‘The Russians were right that the winter put a halt to us.’

Hitler was infatuated with Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, The Twilight of the Gods, but he was the sole author of his own demise.  The Russian resistance was demonic because the master race was engaged in a war of annihilation.  Then after Pearl Harbour, Hitler declared war on the United States.  He told Goebbels the U S posed ‘no acute threat.’

They cannot change anything about the situation on the Continent.  We are sitting secure in Europe, and we are not going to let the reins be taken from our hands.

For the second time in history, the Russian peasant soaked up the evil coming from Europe with their blood.  This whole chapter is almost unbearably brutal.  About twenty million Russians would die in the conflict – about seven million of them were civilians.  Slavs were as disposable as Jews.  ‘This gigantic expanse must of course be pacified as quickly as possible, and this can best be achieved by shooting everyone who even looks at us the wrong way.’  The Nazis subjugation of the Russians would make the Spartans treatment of the helots look benevolent.  Only God could assess the degrees of evil.  The next chapter is ‘The Road to the Holocaust.’  In my view, anyone claiming to be civilised needs to come to terms with evil.  To understand humanity, you need to try to understand inhumanity.

*

In 1985, the Victorian government briefed me to draw up a bill for an act of parliament.  It was, I think, the first time that the government had gone outside for the work ordinarily done by parliamentary counsel.  The subject might fairly be said to have been tricky.  This was a Labor government led by a prominent Labor lawyer, John Cain, that was proposing to legislate to bring under the control of government all fees charged by lawyers.  For obvious reasons, some care would need to be taken in framing this law.  People had to be free to contract out of the law – as you would expect – and it would be scrutinised by some of the best legal minds to see how the law might be complied with – or avoided.  This was at the time when ‘plain English’ drafting was in vogue – and gender neutrality was politically mandatory.  It was not easy trying to comply with the various wishes of government.  On one occasion I told them that they might have a choice – did they want something that might look pretty – or something that didn’t look so good but had a sporting chance of working?  I found the whole exercise to be very enlightening.  It meant that I had to be very careful that any preconceptions I had – and it would be odd if I had had none – did not interfere with my work.  I was there to give effect to the wishes of the client – no matter what I personally thought of those wishes.  In other words, I had to be intellectually honest.  This was a good experience to have for drafting generally.  The work was a bit harder then – before computers made drafts so malleable – and it taxed my then secretary mightily.  I was just about to sign off when the government lost interest and called the project off.  I gather that what was called ‘the big end of town’ – quite possibly in the form of Alan Cornell, the man about to be become the senior partner of Blake & Riggall – had persuaded Mr Cain and others that this kind of government imposition might be bad for business – and not just the business of lawyers.

*

In 1985, the year I turned forty, some kind of mid-point, I suppose, I took two decisions that changed the whole shape of my career and life.  One was to accept appointment on a sessional basis to run the division of the tribunal that the Victorian government was setting up to hear and determine state tax cases.  The other decision was to leave the bar and go back to Blake & Riggall, which I was aware was likely to merge with Dawson Waldron in Sydney.  Things change.  Before I went back to Blakes, I insisted on meeting all the partners – then about eighteen, I think.  When I left the merged firm of Blake Dawson in 2002, it had about four hundred lawyers all round Australia and in England.  That was about the number of lawyers at the Victorian bar when I first signed on in 1971.  Now (October, 2020) there are about 2400 at the bar – subject to the ravaging by the Covid virus.  The two moves were related, and I have been very fortunate with that relation.  I had decided that I did not want to go the bench – which at that time was the ultimate object of most barristers of merit.  (That is no longer the case.)  But being appointed to a tribunal, to hear and determine cases that involve seriously fine legal issues, meant that I could in my own time, more or less, experience just how that kind of forensic inquiry works.  It throws great light not just on how advocacy from the bar table leads to adjudication from the bench, but on your whole understanding of the law.  And going back to the other side of the profession also completely alters your outlook on the legal world.  From spending so much of your time resolving conflict, you can use your knowledge of the law and people to help them come together – with a view to avoiding conflict.  It’s like going from negative to positive.  And the two changes blended so well to change my outlook and life.  I was very fortunate.  Each move led to a change of aspect that any trial lawyer would derive great learning from.  If travel broadens the mind, so does a simple change of course – especially a change of hemisphere.

*

The new Tax Division of the AAT inherited a back-log from its predecessor in 1985.  It took about six months to clean that up.  From then on, I could manage the list as I wished.  State tax cases are not like federal cases- which often involve shockingly complex legislation and equally complex schemes to get around it.  State tax cases often involve easy looking questions that can be very hard.  What is a debenture?  What is a covenant?  What is a charity? What is a contract of employment?  When does a contract for the sale of land become binding?  What kind of breach of contract enables the other side to walk away?  There were two issues in getting the new tribunal working in this area.  One was that the legislation setting up this new role for the AAT was part of a whole new package of reform of administrative law that greatly improved the rights of people in dealing with their government.  But there were old cases, some in the High Court, that gave revenue officers the chance to argue that the new dispensation did not apply to tax.  The results appalled a common lawyer like me, but it took three or four years of very hard grind to pull them around.  On some occasions, the atmosphere got very tense.  More than one tax commissioner sent a heavyweight silk down to say that I had not understood their practices and that I had said things that had sadly offended them.  On one occasion I had to get the Solicitor-General, Hartog Berkeley, QC, to tell them to pull their heads in.  They gradually came around, and this was I think a reform that worked.  The other problem came from the prevailing attitude to the conduct of litigation.  This was in the era (1985 plus) where the new regime of the court control of litigation was coming to new heights.  I thought this practice was making the process a lot more complicated and expensive, and using up so much time of both judges and lawyers.  Instead of judges doing so much to orchestrate a process, I thought they should get the parties into the ring for trial as soon as possible, and then control the hearing very firmly.  After a year or two we got the following model.  The Crown would refer its disallowance of an objection to an assessment to us.  I would say that we would resolve it within six weeks.  I would fix a hearing date in about four weeks’ time.  There would be no prior hearing or directions or witness statements.  We would usually finish the hearing before lunch.  If necessary, I would fix times for the examination of witnesses and submissions.  I would try to give my decision on the next working day.  We applied that model to most cases for about fifteen years.  A lot of lawyers grizzled, groaned, protested, and appealed.  I never heard a complaint from a litigant.  The Crown appealed as of course and as of right almost every case they lost.  They had a legitimate interest in getting a ruling from the Supreme Court.  In the end, three of mine were dealt with by the High Court.  I have never understood why decent judges get so uptight about what happens on appeal from them.  It never troubled me.  As often as not, I did not even get to hear to hear about it.  I was intent on expedition – fairness, of course, but at a properly controlled speed.  Lord Mansfield knew the truth.  Most delay in litigation comes from the lawyers.  No litigant with a good case wants delay.  Delay suits those with power and wealth.  In 1215, the English Crown acknowledged that justice delayed is justice denied.  In my, view the fall from grace of our trial lawyers and systems has come from our failure to deal with delay.  It is partly a failure of nerve and partly a sustained flirtation with the inquisitorial – which as a matter of simple but long history is not the way we practise the law.  Well, all that in me sounds like a broken record – but it does hurt other people more than me.

A stream of consciousness of an ageing white male – and a member of an elite, to boot

Reminiscences of a barrister in autumn

III

So much in all our lives depends on chance.  You might stumble over something that leads you to see the world through different eyes.  In about, I suppose, 1960, I watched an interview on the ABC with Professor Andrew Boyce Gibson.  Gibson was the Dean of the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University.  He would lecture me in philosophy at Melbourne University in 1964.  He just looked to me to be wise and kind.  .  He said he had learned to speak French so that he could read Descartes in its original form.  He said that this had given him a new window on the world.  That made me wonder how much our view of the world is shaped by our language.  Later, I would ask if that was not the main question facing philosophy.  Gibson was a Christian apologist.  (As were my other philosophy lecturers in each of the next two years.)  A rather preppy young interviewer got into high flown language about the role of the Church in modern industrial society.  With great calm, this very wise man said: ‘The problem is that the whole thing began in a carpenter’s shop and has just got a bit out of hand since.’  That seemed to me then, and it still does now, to sound like true wisdom.  Kant said that some things had a ‘fancy price,’ but that each of us has a worth or dignity above price merely because we are human.  Wittgenstein said that about some things we must be silent.  He also said that during the war, trains carried a sign: ‘Is this journey really necessary?’  A Greek philosopher said that we do not live to see our own death.  For some reason, that struck a very comforting note for me.  (I am not sure whether it was he who said that you never step into the same river twice.)  In War and Peace, Prince Bolkonsky said that when we die, we either get all the answers or we stop asking the questions.  Sir Lewis Namier referred to a need of plain human kindness, and ‘restraint and the tolerance that it implies.’  Hannah Arendt said ‘Every government assumes political responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor…every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.’  Finally, in burying his grandmother, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: ‘She came out of a different time, out of a different spiritual world, and this world will not shrink into the grave with her.  This heritage, for which we are grateful to her, puts us under obligation.’  If I was asked what proposition in our past best expresses my hope for the world, that one would take a lot of beating.  There is about it an aura of nobility.

*

Books can furnish the house as well as furnish the mind.  I collected fifty of what for me were the great books or writers either in literature or affairs that were either part at least bound in leather or fitted with a slip case.  About half of them have been rebound by Helen Williams, a local bookbinder. ( Well, that is at least some contribution to the economy.)  There are books published by the Folio Society or those sumptuous American products from people like the Franklin Library or Easton Press.  I have added three more volumes about great books, so that there are now two hundred books that stand for something that counts in my life – apart from the novels, histories, plays and poems, there are books about fly fishing, wine, Barassi, cooking, Jussi Bjorling or Maria Callas, cricket, Ferrari or golf – and so on.  They are gorgeous to look at and they almost demand to be taken out and fondled.  For better or worse, they are the evidence of my journey here, and a source of real comfort – especially since we put the Wolf to sleep.

*

It is curious that Benjamin Britten and Tim Storrier had a fascination about water.  Britten brought it to life musically in two of his operas, Peter Grimes and Billy Budd.  You can just about taste the salt water in each.  A dealer at Australian Galleries told me that Storrier dealt with the fundamental.  He did a series of paintings of the sea with ladies’ hats.  He was also fascinated with fire.  I have one of his that is a blazing pyramid.  Would that I could afford one with a television box standing before a blaze in the bush – with a picture of the sea on the screen.  I have one of his firelines and a drawing of a saddle.  He could obviously draw –as could Jeffrey Smart and Fred Williams and others whose works I have – just works on paper, but theirs.  Storrier looks to me to have a patrician streak.  I went to hear him speak at the opening of a swish new gallery in High Street, Armadale.  He said that asking an artist to open a gallery was a bit like asking a cow to open an abattoir.  The owners did their best to put on masks of affability.  I was the art partner at Blakes, and I enjoyed it immensely.  It allowed me buy stuff I could never afford – and defend the acquisition for the occasional Presbyterian Philistine.  It also gave me the chance to have some fun.  I could go into a gallery on my way to or from gym looking like a bum.  And being looked down upon.  Until I responded to their query ‘Can we help?’  ‘Perhaps.  I am the art partner of an international law firm that is leasing six floors of a landmark building in Collins Street, and I have been instructed to acquire appropriate works of Australian art.’  The response was like that described by Banjo Paterson.  ‘There was movement at the station for the word had got around…..’(Did you know that Banjo was a lawyer?  And a good looking one, to boot.)

*

When I started at the Bar in 1971, I was almost completely dependent on my clerk, Ken Spurr, for briefs.  Most of them were in the Magistrates’ Courts.  There were three main categories of briefs – crash and bash (civil claims for motor car accidents); police prosecutions – mainly traffic; and maintenance cases between husband and wife.  We are speaking of a time about half a century ago – and I suspect that nearly all of that kind of brief has now gone by the wayside.  Most magistrates then had been clerks of courts, and were firmly on the side of the police – some of whom congregated in the clerk’s office before court.  It was almost impossible to get a magistrate to make a finding against a copper.  Some of them liked to have a drink with counsel over lunch at a bar.  One of them was addicted to Autumn Brown.  The grog did not soften them up after lunch.  It made sense to me to start at the bottom, and over time I noticed a kind of aloof distraction in those barristers who had the connections or front to avoid that kind of stuff.  Those briefs were marked at about $20 each.  And I thought that if I could get, say, three of those in a week, I could keep my head above water.  You used to drive out to a suburban court, and meet the punter there at about 9.30 am.  And then you would spend your time praying that you would get on.  There was nothing worse than waiting round all day at, say, Ferntree Gully and not getting on.  There was then the dispiriting drive back to the city – without a cracker to show for all that time out of your life.  You were not helped by bromides about cab ranks or swings and roundabouts, but this was a priceless way to learn about both the lottery and the pain of litigation.  You may not have wanted to say this to the punter, but the best way to learn was to lose – and lose both hard and often.  No sane person wants to embark on this kind of public raffle, and you realise that that your real role is to get the punter out of the clutches of the process as quickly and decently as possible.  As time goes on, you could get consulted before the proceeding was issued – and you could help deal with the hurt by pointing out that the cure was likely to be a lot worse than the disease.  It appals me now to go to mediations where counsel has been involved from the beginning – and you and they are seeing the punter for the first time.  I cannot understand how counsel can say that the course the client is pursuing was only embarked on after counsel took into account all relevant considerations.  What do you do if when you meet the punter, you think either that they will not be able to bear the stress of litigation – or be believed?  Perhaps that is why I wonder why of all the libel actions I have mediated over say the last five tears, I can hardly recall one that I would have recommended –  but I can recall a lot that were obviously too dicey to chance your arm in what Sir Owen Dixon called the temple of justice.

A stream of consciousness of an ageing white male – and a member of an elite, to boot

Reminiscences of a barrister in autumn

I

‘Shifty’ may just be the best word for it.  The Cardinal has the power of the Inquisition, but the exercise of that power haunts him.  What happens if that power gets to be used against him?  He is both suspicious and suspect.  Every revolution brings the risk of a counter-revolution.  In the result, El Greco brings you face to face with the magic of art – there is something there that commands our attention, but which we cannot adequately spell out in words.  What, if any, is the difference between this inquisitor and a Communist commissar?  Has this sometime holy man sold out to Mephistopheles?  El Greco is one of my favourite painters.  He comes down to me like Turner – just so far ahead of his time.  His shimmering images reflect the edginess of faith.  But if he was a champion of the Counter-Reformation, what was he doing by investing a prince of the Church with a pained countenance of doubt, if not downright guilt?  I have seen and I am moved by the paintings by El Greco of Christ dealing with the money lenders at the National Gallery in London and the Met in New York.  For me, they are like Mozart in oils on canvass.  (And did El Greco really use his mistress as a model for the Madonna?)  Well, shifty is the word comes to mind whenever I see Vladimir Putin.  It is just as well that he never set out his stall as a used car dealer.

*

Princess Park, the home of Carlton, was, I thought, different as a footy ground for being reputed to be larger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground.  I have a reasonable recollection of John Lord, a solid six footer who wore number 4 for the Demons (the Melbourne Football Club), kicking a goal from a set shot from inside what would now be the centre square through the goal at the east end – with a drop kick!  Unbelievable.  I think this was in 1965.  (About a generation later, Malcolm Blight would become famous for kicking a goal after the bell at the other end of the ground – from a point not far from the centre of the ground.  Like a certain paint product, it just kept on keeping on.)  The significance of 1965 is that this was the first time Melbourne had met Carlton since Barassi switched from Melbourne to Carlton.  They had won six premierships under Norm Smith before the old brigade at the MCC decided to sack him.  The Demons have not won a flag since then – it is like the curse that descended on the Red Sox – the Demons are the Redlegs –when they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees.  For people of my generation, the move of Barassi to another club entailed a frightful loss of innocence – and an end to the simple loyalty of boyhood and youth.  God only know what we may have done had he gone to Collingwood.  We had had to endure a similar challenge to faith when national heroes of tennis – like Hoad and Rosewall after Sedgman and McGregor– turned pro.  The Davis Cup was tarnished.  We felt diminished – sold out.  We would feel a worse sense of national betrayal when we learned that our government had taken us to war under false pretences.  Twice.

*

My cooking can, I think, fairly be described as Socratic.  That is, I have a profound grasp of my own limitations and failings.  I therefore stick with the tried and the simple.  A friend told me that the first time he tried a béarnaise sauce was the night a well-known cooking identity came to her place for dinner.  That could not happen to me.  For the most part, I only serve meals for guests that I have prepared a day or so beforehand.  Like lamb shanks or ox-tail slow cooked in a low oven in the French blue Le Creuset pot that is an essential part of my life and not just its furniture.  There is somethinguplifting about taking the pot from the oven and lifting the lid and savouring the effect of the heat, the herbs and the wine on the meat on the bone.  Do vegetarians really want to go without this?  The trickiest thing I do is a cassoulet.  Depending on the season, you may find it hard to get one nowadays in Paris.  It was I think Julian Burnside who said that mine was the best he had had south of Lyons.  Well, from a given point in the evening dinner, barristers are prone to a certain level of romance.

*

Wittgenstein said: ‘If Christianity is the truth, then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.’  What if he was right?  Well, as I suspect Wittgenstein may have said: In order to consider that question, you would have to ask what was meant by the terms ‘Christianity’ and ‘the truth’.  Neither question is small.

*

We got to Tel Aviv at dusk and took a car to Jerusalem so that we arrived at the King David Hotel in darkness.  We got up the next morning, took breakfast with the big Jewish mommas and some revolting milk, and asked the cab driver to take us to Gethsemane.  (Can you blaspheme by giving directions to a cab driver?)  I looked out the window and saw the parapets of what looked like a castle wall.  I immediately thought: ‘Look – there is King David’s city.’  The recognition was instantaneous, but it came from nowhere.  It was an unnerving case of déjà vu.  It is curious that I get the same feeling at St James’ Park in London, the Tiergarten in Berlin and Central Park in New York.  They are all names to conjure with, but I get an odd sense of belonging to each when I go into it.  Each is like a beating heart to what is deservedly known as one of the great cities of the world.  For some reason, I do not get the same reaction at the Tuileries in Paris, although my reading probably takes me more often to them than the others.  But to return to the cab driver in Jerusalem, at least when I was there those cabbies were reputed to be rapacious – as some that I found in Rio or Prague.  Which reminds me of the time when Gavin Forrest, a partner of mine, and I took a client to lunch at the Melbourne Club.  He was a charming man – a German lawyer working for a very big Japanese company.  Naturally, we joked about not mentioning the war.  We were later joined by a partner, Charles Brett, who was not a party to that preparation in etiquette.  Something came up about foreign cabbies and I mentioned the trouble I had had at Prague, Rio and Jerusalem.  Charles said: ‘Do you know that there is a hotel in Paris that some cabbies will not go to?’  ‘No – why is that, Charles?’  ‘The Lutetia.  It was the headquarters of the Gestapo during the war.’  Well, there you go.  Your whole life until then flashes before your eyes, and you hope that your frozen wide-eyed immobility masks the fearful din within.  Eat your heart out, John Cleese.