Pamela Burton; UWA Publishing, 2010;
512 pp, $49.95 (paperback with illustrations)

Since Dame Roma Mitchell’s appointment to the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1965, women have slowly but surely claimed their rightful place as part of the Australian judiciary. Since 1987, with the exception of a short period between 2003 and 2005, a woman has sat on our highest court — the High Court of Australia.

The first woman to do so was Mary Gaudron.

Pamela Burton’s engaging biography From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story does more than review a judicial career; it reviews a judicial life. This is fitting, as Burton’s work skillfully highlights, because for Mary Gaudron — like so many other women, both then and now — a strict demarcation between the demands of professional life and personal life did not exist.

AJ Brown; Federation Press, 2011; 484 pp;
$59.95 (hardback with pictures)

Janet Malcolm, in her brilliant rumination on the problem of biography in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,¹ writes:

… the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. … The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee…²

A desire to linger awhile is certainly my reaction to reading and enjoying this fulsome account of the first 70 years of Michael Kirby’s life (drawing on over 117 metres of personal records held by the National Archives of Australia, extensive speeches and other papers prepared by the subject, not to mention his court judgments). Brown also skilfully makes space for a few central images and feelings to assist one’s progress through this extensive and absorbing book. The opening image shared with the reader is of the Khyber Pass, where Kirby was travelling for the second time with partner Johan van Vloten. It is 17 December 1973 and ‘This time, at least, there were no guns’. Three and a half years earlier, Afridi tribesmen ‘brandishing rifles’ asked if he was British and ‘the young Australian traveller answered yes’ (p 1).

Rebecca J. Cook and Simone Cusack; University of Pennsylvania Press; 2011;
270 pp; $US 24.95 (paperback)

How seriously should we take a snide ‘meow’ directed towards a female Minister during parliamentary debate? Should we care that Australian work safety advertisements depict scenes of women cleaning and caring for children while their breadwinner husbands are out to work? Does it matter that a Toronto police officer advised a group of students that if a woman does not want to be raped she should not ‘dress like a slut’?

According to Cook and Cusack, not only do these things matter, they are significant issues of human rights concern and must be acknowledged and addressed as such if we are to adequately respect and protect women’s rights.

Bryan Keon-Cohen; Australian Scholarly Press, 2011;
$59.95 (paperback)

The Order of the Court: ‘… that the Meriam people are entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the island of Mer …’ (1992).

And so the case was won, 6-1 in the High Court. Perhaps an alternative title for this book may have been ‘Mabo: a plucky but lucky victory’ for it is almost certain that it was a most favorably constituted court that handed down the judgment, giving Justice Dawson (the sole dissenting judge) a thorough thrashing. But it is often said that we make our own luck and so it was with the Mabo case. The Mabo team went in as underdog; the case was run on a shoestring budget and skeleton staff, but fought with a vigor and resolve that perhaps took their more resourced opposition by surprise.

Directed by Rachid Bouchareb; produced by Jean Bréhat; starring Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyaté;
English and French language; 2009; 90mins, available on DVD

In the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, Elizabeth Sommers leaves her remote farm to travel to London to look for her daughter Jane, who can’t be contacted by phone. Eventually she finds her daughter’s flat, above a halal butcher shop in London’s predominantly Muslim West End. Although Jane’s Muslim landlord offers her the keys to the flat, Elizabeth couldn’t be more distrusting or suspicious. Aren’t these the people who just detonated bombs on three peak hour trains and a bus?