I read this book whilst looking for reasons to work inside as we have had unrelenting rain since January. As I start this review, we have had 43mm today.
Thus, one readily recognises that our weather appears to be changing, changing for more frequent flooding episodes.
This book is not so much a story but a study of the two most recent severe rain periods that we have endured in the Brisbane area, 2011 and 2022.
I vividly recall experiencing the aftermath of the 1960 floods in Tasmania. As a teenager, I thought it was ironic that my father had to row our dinghy down one of Hobart’s main streets because my brother was marooned at his work. These days, I suspect we are all able to conjure up similar visions from television news, if not firsthand, including people on jet skis, in tinnies and so on, boating in “streets” of water.
I also visited Katherine in the Northern Territory, not long after their big flood, when the motel we had booked was free of water but not ready for occupation. The owners gleefully pointed out the high water mark for us which was above our heads.
This book is a well constructed analysis of a number of issues relating to the propensity for Brisbane to experience flooding. I will only mention some of these in the interests of brevity.
No such study would be complete without looking at the history of why Brisbane was settled where it was.
Then we would wonder about the consequences of that decision.
Anyone affected by flooding would, by now, have had endless correspondence with their household insurers, builders, Councils, their banks and, possibly, experts in flood mitigation for advice as to steps that could reduce their risk in the future.
The buyback scheme has been of immense benefit to some homeowners but not to others. As well, what of those who rebuilt after 2011 only to suffer similar damage within 10 years?
A curious bystander might wonder at the litigation that occurred over the 2011 floods and might ask the question of whether or not it was worth it, when the successful plaintiffs only received a very small sum compared to what they had claimed, and many claimants did not succeed at all.
That same curious bystander might ask about the future. Are there suburbs in Brisbane that will never be suitable for housing, despite the housing shortage? Where are all the much vaunted new houses going to be built?
The by now very curious bystander would be wondering about the significance of the Somerset and Wivenhoe dams and even wondering whether any new dams should be built and, if so, where.
I raise these dot points, so to speak, because the author eloquently considers them and largely allows readers to form their own conclusions.
His book has some excellent illustrations, mostly by photograph. But could I suggest that, in future editions, he uses a footnote immediately beneath these as sometimes finding their relevance is not easy because the explanation is located a page or more away from the photograph, forcing the reader to read backwards and forwards.
Finally, by way of an unintended segue, the reader’s understanding of this book will be greatly enhanced by the many footnotes, which I found particularly helpful.
Reading this book, one will readily appreciate that, for many of us, these floods mean more than just a talking point. They have been and, possibly, still are a cause of great hardship.
We may all wonder at the future. The effects of Climate Change and what, if anything, we in the South of Queensland can do to minimise the risk of future flooding events.
Professionally, I was involved in a number of flood claims and heard the chilling stories of hardship, suicides, feelings of helplessness, etc, felt by people who felt they had no home and no future. If this study can help to identify solutions, as I think it does, then the author has succeeded in his aims.
Author: Dr John Kennedy McLaughlin AM Publisher: The Federation Press Reviewer: Matthew Hickey
By the time English colonies in this continent were established, a century-long division along the lines of social status, religion and law had besieged Ireland. [1] Penal laws, passed in the wake of the Reformation, imposed penalties upon practising Catholics Priests who celebrated mass in Britain and Ireland, did so under threat of execution. The same laws prohibited Catholics from holding public office and owning land. They could not practice law or medicine. Nor could they enter academia or hold military commissions.[2]
Against that background, despite the gradual and eventual relaxation of those laws, it is perhaps unsurprising that some Irish found the prospect of life on the other side of the world a more promising prospect than languishing in “the bogs of Connemara”.[3]
In 1791, New South Wales received its first Irish settlers—convicts, to be clear. 155 of them banished from County Cork.[4] The purpose of the policy of penal transport, as the Times of London contemporaneously reported it, was:
to send the convict abroad to a distant colony, in which, after the expiration of a certain number of years, he is set free, with the certainty of employment before him, and without any of the temptations which prompted him in the first instance to the commission of crime, is to make a man of him once more – to give him, as it were, a fresh start in life.[5]
Nearly 70 years later, 7000 or so more settlers (some free, some coerced) had arrived.[6] Among those were lawyers. Their experience is the subject of a book written by the late Dr John Kennedy McLaughlin AM, recently published by The Federation Press: The Immigration of Irish Lawyers to Australia in the Nineteenth Century. McLaughlin[7] was a barrister, master in equity and, later, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. His book (which, sadly, he did not live to see published) is based on a dissertation for which he earned a PhD from Monash University in 2020.
The liner notes explain that McLaughlin was a “deeply devout man”, who (like Sir Gerard Brennan, according to a recently published biography by the same publisher[8]) was inspired by the example of Sir Thomas More. Among other things, McLaughlin was a Councillor of the Royal Australian Historical Society. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2014 “for significant service to the judiciary and to the law, particularly through the documentation and preservation” of Australian legal and constitutional history, and to the community. A tribute published by the NSW Bar Association suggests he was a barrister’s barrister for whom this book was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with his Irish ancestry.[9] It is an interest many readers likely share.
Of the Irish, Edward Gibbon Wakefield[10] is supposed to have said they “do not colonise, they only emigrate miserably”.[11] Perhaps less disparagingly, although it is arguable, Benjamin Disraeli[12] said:
“the Irishman is an imaginative being. He lives on an island in a damp climate, and contiguous to the melancholy ocean. He has no variety of pursuit. There is no nation in the world that leads so monotonous a life as the Irish, because their only occupation is the cultivation of the soil before them. These men are discontented because they are not amused. The Irishman in other countries, where he has a fair field for his talents in various occupations, is equal, if not superior, to most races”.[13]
In a way, those ideas point towards the issues McLaughlin explores in this book: what were the motivations of those Irish lawyers who came here? What was their experience here? What contribution did they make?
On McLaughlin’s analysis, a number of themes emerge as explanations for the migration of Irish lawyers to Australia: historical sectarian division; transport to the colonies by way of criminal penalty; practical and economic impediments to success in Ireland in the early 1800s; then later (particular in the wake of the Great Potato Famine and the Revolutionary Spring of 1848, which saw the uprising by Young Ireland in July that year, which later gave birth to the Fenian movement),[16] the hope for new opportunities elsewhere.
The works of Dickens,[14] and plenty of others since, have given rise to the trope that those transported were peasants found guilty of crimes of desperation driven by poverty. But, as McLaughlin explains, it was not “merely denizens of the Dublin slums” who were so transported;[15] lawyers were among those dispatched to the great southern land.
Irish lawyers enjoyed high social status in Ireland at that time.[17] And they were plentiful. By the end of the 18th century, there were more than 400 members of the Irish bar in a Dublin population of around 150,000.[18] Despite their number being many, the bar was a “closed shop”, with new members being accepted on the basis of already established connections, rather than on merit.[19]
The sectarian divisions made establishing a career at the bar even harder for Catholics in particular. And those Catholics who found their way to the bar came from the well-trodden path of study at Trinity College (University of Dublin),[20] where the majority commenced between the ages of 16 to 18.[21] Even though the rule was that Catholics were prohibited from entering Trinity without the express permission of their bishop, that rule seems to have been honoured in the breach as much as in the observance. After graduating from Trinity, pupils enrolled at King’s Inn Dublin and at one of the English Inns.[22] A restriction imposed upon Irish pupils (which continued until 1886) was that they had to be called in England, in order to practise at the Irish bar.[23]
The converse, of course, did not obtain.
Poverty was rife in Ireland. More than 50% of the dwellings were described in a national census as “fourth class”, and consisted of no more than a mud cabin with one room.[44]
In 1792, Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher,[25] wrote that the Penal Laws then in place in Ireland “divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy or connection. One of those bodies was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education; the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them.”[26] So, one part of society found itself subjugated, both formally and informally, at various times in Ireland. As a consequence, in the fledgling colonies, where infrastructure and commerce was limited (if not non-existent), opportunities were still far greater than those that existed for lawyers at home in Ireland.[27]
Work was slim, even for those with connections. Because of that, as William Stawell (later to become Victoria’s second chief justice) put it, because “there were 40 hats on the Munster Circuit and not enough work for 20, it was time to go.”[24]
But the enormity of that undertaking cannot be understated. McLaughlin includes an evocative quote[28] from Sir Victor Windeyer, writing of his great-great-grandfather, who had emigrated (albeit from England) in 1828:
To leave England [Ireland might easily have been written] for Australia was a big decision in those days: to leave one’s native land; to say goodbye to friends and kinsfolk knowing that almost surely this was forever; to set out on a long, and sometimes hazardous, voyage in a sailing ship to a new land, still known as a Convict Colony—to do this with a young family, to do it voluntarily, require courage. Many of the men and women who made this decision were not adventurers going out to seek a fortune and expecting to return and spend it at home. Rather they came to make their homes in a new country… Hope, not bitterness or compulsion led them to a new land which was to be their home.
The colonies of this place did provide an opportunity for those Irish lawyers brave enough to come, because they had automatic rights of appearance here and the lawyers were few but the criminals were many.
Though it would be wrong to think they were welcomed with open arms. The local press described Ireland as a country where “pigs and people huddle together promiscuously” (the Melbourne Age) and its inhabitants as “lawless savages” whose arrival here threatened its Anglo-Saxon racial character (Melbourne Argus).[43]
And for some (at least) of those who came, it proved well worth it. In 1866, one Irish-born barrister in New South Wales wrote to his father (who held a senior position in the Irish Court of Chancery) and told him of his income for that year. His father’s response? “There are not five men at the Irish Bar making that [great an] income.”[29]
Part of the reason for the influx of Irish in Australia, McLaughlin explains, was because “neither Irishmen nor lawyers—let alone Irish lawyers—were particularly welcome in the British colonies of North America.”[30] This reminds me to mention one minor criticism of the work. Similar to the way Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace contain discursive non sequitur essays in the midst of the drama, which (on one view) seem justified only on the basis that the author had something to say at the time, McLaughlin takes the reader a leisurely side-quest into the history of the Irish in colonies other than in Australia. To me, it was a little like finding a potato gem in a box of hot chips: tasty, but not what I ordered. But an elderly author indulging his life’s passion can be forgiven a digression or two.
Because of the lack of any other qualified lawyers in New South Wales in the early 1800s, two rogues—Edward Eagar and George Chartres, who arrived here on the same ship in 1811[31]—were permitted to appear in Court on behalf of clients, despite their criminal antecedents.[32] Eagar received a pardon from Governor Macquarie in 1813 and wasted no time getting to work. His advertisements appeared in the Sydney Gazette as early as 10 April that year.[33] Chartres was bolder than Eagar. He began advertising his practice in the Gazette in October 1812, two years before he had even received his conditional pardon (and even after having been sentenced for further misconduct in the colonies after he had arrived).[34]
Irish arrivals apart from criminals included those who (perhaps) felt they had little to lose, whether at home or in the colonies. One was Charles William Blakeney, who had been born into an upper-class family in County Roscommon. After being called to the bar in England, then spending some years at the Irish bar, Blakeney squandered his family’s estate on gambling debts. “Mortified”, he fled to Queensland, where his son (the Registrar-General of Queensland) lived. Here, Blakeney the elder enjoyed professional success: he was elected to the Legislative Assembly and was later appointed a judge of the District Court.
Poor-born migrants also fared better here. One such example to whom McLaughlin refers was Patrick Real. Bruce McPherson described his life as “a triumph of talent and determination over poverty and adversity”.[35] Real’s father died en route from Ireland, while the family was emigrating. Because of that, Real received limited education in Ipswich but left it to pursue hard work labouring to support his family. Impressively, he eventually gained admission to the Queensland Bar, and was so professionally successful that he was appointed to the bench.
By the time the last Irish convict arrived, one-quarter of Australia’s overseas-born population was Irish.[36] Many among those had been active in rebellion against the Penal Laws in Ireland. They contributed to the “rich discourse of rights” that ultimately became a hallmark of Australian life.[37] In his seminal work of Irish-Australian history, The Irish in Australia, Professor Patrick O’Farrell suggests that “the distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove … it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremeness of Englishness.”[38] That “insubordinate” minority’s agitation led to “a general atmosphere in which exclusion, discrimination and rigid hierarchies became increasingly less possible to sustain”.[39] O’Farrell argues that the “tension, abrasion and sometimes collision” between the competing cultures of the Protestant English and the Catholic Irish, “far from being divisive, became the main unifying principle of Australian history”.[40]
Those kinds of contributions also feature in McLaughlin’s work. The involvement of Irish lawyers in attempts to protect the legal rights and entitlements of the First Nations people is especially illuminating. His discussion of the role Irish-born Attorney-General George Plunkett and Irish-born barrister, Roger Therry, played in the prosecution of those involved in the Myall Creek massacre is remarkable.
Women, of course, were among the Irish who made contributions. McLaughlin does not forget them. One Queensland story is that of Anne Beatson, an Irish woman, born in County Clare, who arrived with her parents in 1853. At the age of 82, she became the first female justice of the peace appointed in Queensland.
Particularly interesting is McLaughlin’s explanation for why Australian judges came to be called “your Honour”, instead of “My Lord or Your Lordship” as was (and remains) the custom in the superior courts of Britain. He contends it is because the first Chief Justice of New South Wales, Francis Forbes, was born in Bermuda and practiced in the West Indies before coming here. “Your Honour” was the form of judicial address of there. McLaughlin also explains that the Irish are responsible for the quirk of Victorian courts, in which solicitors face counsel, with their backs to the bench, unlike their northern counterparts.[42]
The highlight of the book, for me, is an hilarious anecdote about a duel that was convened after an act of affrontery at the Melbourne Club in 1841, between an Irish barrister called Snodgrass and an older Scottish squatter called Barry. Their stoush resulted in a challenge and a duel, at which at least one of them arrived resplendent in top hat, gloves and a swallow-tailed coat. According to McLaughlin, duelling was a relatively common form of dispute resolution among barristers in Ireland, during that era. I won’t spoil the outcome of this one.
If the Irish were the sand in the English oyster, and whose combined irritation gave us the pearl of settler identity while the first nations’ cultures were displaced and eradicated, the question of what role Irish lawyers had to play—as part of the “insubordinate” minority (to adopt O’Farrell’s phrase) in either agitating, observing or resolving the “tension, abrasion and sometimes collision” between those of competing cultures, and no doubt afterwards defend other active participants—begs for answers. And Dr McLaughlin’s book provides them, in a thoroughly researched work which swells with fascinating stories and illuminating tidbits.
The results of Dr McLaughlin’s evident labour of love—this very interesting book—demonstrates that, at least in the case of Irish lawyers who made this place home, there was (at least) a kernel of truth in what both Wakefield and Disraeli had to say.
Dr John McLaughlin AM, The Immigration of Irish Lawyers to Australia in the Nineteenth Century (Federation Press, 2023) 3 (Irish Lawyers).
A key promoter of the free-settler colony in South Australia.
Irish Lawyers, 4.
A British novelist who served as British Prime Minister twice in the late 1800s.
Irish Lawyers, 16.
For instance, Great Expectations.
Irish Lawyers, 13.
As to the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe, for an excellent recently published history of those events, see: Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring (Allen Lane, 2023).
Irish Lawyers, 7.
Ibid, 10.
Ibid, 11.
Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 8.
Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 35.
Ibid, 5.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid, xvi.
Ibid, 74.
Ibid, 37.
Ibid, 45.
Ibid, 22.
Ibid, 13.
Ibid, 21.
Ibid, 22.
B.H. McPherson, The Supreme Court of Queensland 1859-1960, p 188, cited in Irish Lawyers, p 13.
Cane, Ford & McMillan (eds), The Cambridge Legal History of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 539.
Elizabeth Malcolm & Dianne Hall, A New History of the Irish in Australia (NewSouth, 2018) 8.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Irish Lawyers, 23.
Ibid, 108.
A New History of the Irish in Australia (n 38 supra), 22-23.
Gibney, A Short History of Ireland 1500-2000 (Yale University Press), 143.
Quarterly Essay 92
Author: Alan Kohler Publisher: Schwartz Media Reviewer: David Topp
Housing. A topic dear to the hearts and close to the minds of this profession. Either as owners of homes. Or as recipients of briefs pertaining to peoples’ homes. Or both. The varieties of housing related briefs are many. Land titling litigation, mortgagee in possession actions, equitable claims to real properties registered in other persons’ names, defective performance of domestic renovation contracts and executors taking action to evict hold-overs in a deceased’s house, post-death, are but five examples of housing themed litigation. I’m sure readers could conceive of plenty of others.
The cost of home ownership, along with cost of living concerns, generally, are the two primary focal points of politicians and commentators at present. Into the mix comes Alan Kohler’s contribution: THE GREAT DIVIDE: Australia’s housing mess and how to fix it (‘Great Divide’).
Kohler begins by citing the approximate 3.5 times household income cost his parents paid during 1951 for their first home. Which ratio also applied 30 years later when he and his wife purchased their own first home in 1981[1]. However, by August 2023, the median Australian house price had risen to $732,886, being 7.4 times annualized average weekly earnings[2]. This extent of disparity forms the ‘basis’ of Great Divide, namely, that ‘the high price of housing is undermining social cohesion and the proper functioning of the economy and the nation … [and] has distorted Australian society over the past twenty-five years’[3].
Has it though? Distortion of society and undermined social cohesion are strong charges to make. Compared to the United States over the last quarter century, one could argue that those statements much better describe that nation than ours. Australia has, after all, been spared the 2020 Black Lives Matter nationwide riots after George Floyd’s death, shooting massacres too many to mention and the January 6, 2021 invasion of Congress. Even the 2024 cause de jour – university campus arguments over the current Gaza Strip conflict – are being conducted on this side of the Pacific without the violence afflicting varsities state-side. ‘Sydney [as opposed to a US city] is the second-most expensive place to buy a house on Earth, after Hong Kong’[4]. Yet our social cohesion is demonstrably greater than America’s.
More on the politics later. Turning now to the facts and historical aspects of Great Divide – easily its strongest suits – Kohler cites the year 2000 as marking the crossing of the Rubicon, away from the relative closeness of the income/house price ratio he and his parents both observed as first homeowners to the contemporary great divide that made inevitable the way in which Kohler entitled his Essay. Four turn-of-the-millennium phenomena are cited for the ‘supercharging’ of housing demand between 2000 and 2023, namely, the Howard Government’s 50% capital gains tax discount, re-commencement on 1 July 2000 of the First Home Owner Grant, 200 basis points worth of interest rate cuts between February 2001 and February 2003 and a tripling of net migration between 2003 & 2009 which was not matched by new housing supply[5]. In turn, because most immigrants rent at first, combined with lower rates of homeownership among extant Australians, this ‘has exacerbated a rental property shortage that has been bubbling since immigration doubled in 2006’, creating a national capital city record low rental vacancy rate of 1% compared to a ten-year average of 2.8%[6].
18 pages of the 86 page Essay are devoted to Kohler’s in-depth demand side analysis, preceded by 24 pages of explanation of 3 broad supply side crunches which create price pressures at the other end of the traditional supply and demand equation. The three crunches are public housing, Australian preferences to coalesce in the major cities and the roles of state and local governments.
Turning first to public housing, Kohler cites two failed referenda: that of the Chifley Government in 1948 seeking to give the federal government permanent control of house prices and rents, which failed by 59.34% to 40.66%, and Gough Whitlam’s December 1973 reprise seeking to control all prices, not just housing; ‘although Whitlam managed to increase the Yes vote to 43.81 per cent [it was] still nowhere near enough’[7]. As an aside, Great Divide just so happens to be the immediate Quarterly Essay published after Professor Megan Davis’s Voice of Reason on Recognition and Renewal, also reviewed by this writer in these pages[8], into the then upcoming Uluru Voice From the Heart referendum, which, at 60.06% to 39.94%[9], was lost by a very similar margin to Chifley’s in 1948. Students of history will, of course, know that the third of the ‘big 3’ prime ministers during the period between the end of World War 2 and 1975 was Robert Menzies. By the time Menzies and his social services minister Sir William ‘Bill’ Spooner retired in the mid 1960’s, ‘the ideal of home ownership had been elevated to an almost religious status…and the destruction of public housing was well underway’[10], Kohler going further by strongly criticizing the way Menzies folded housing into social services: ‘It doesn’t belong there: housing is not welfare, it’s an economic right’[11].
That 67% of our population live in the capital cities[12], along with a generalized eschewing of moving out of cities into regional areas[13], will always make matters on the supply side of the equation ‘very hard indeed’[14]. And this is before Great Divide turned to the next hurdle: the role of state and local governments of which, by default {due to land use not being mentioned in the Constitution} take up the policy reins. Without zoning, ‘and the restriction on land supply that comes from it, housing would be an average of 36.8 per cent cheaper’ in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney according to a Reserve Bank commissioned report directed to the impact of zonings on house prices[15]. Kohler explains how the post World War 2 ubiquity of cars due to their new-found affordability meant that cities could afford to stage houses on large blocks, 20-30 kms away from CBDs, in all directions. The result is to have placed planning and zonings ‘in the hands of local councils elected by the local residents, who became NIMBYs as soon as they moved in. Serious medium density was out. On top of the control exercised by councils, private ownership… meant it was impossible for developers to get hold of enough land to build more than four units at a time, and still is’[16].
And not just in the inner cities is the search for suitable land beset with difficulties. ‘Minister under fire for slow pace of reform’ is an attention grabbing title of any news report. However, the anger cited was not directed towards state and federal housing ministers. Rather, it was from the Australian Conservation Foundation, Birdlife Australia and the Wilderness Society, amongst other groups, towards Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek for alleged failure to deliver on promises to create an Environment Protection Agency to handle development decisions and enforce regulations, national standards to rule out damage to critical habitats and strengthening of the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act[17]. Be those arguments as they may, a natural concomitant effect of that list of demands being met in full is a lessening of lands capable of being released on which to construct new homes on and beyond the fringes of major cities.
Great Divide does not delve deeply into this particular policy conflict, apart from a tangential, though, of course, completely correct, observation that ‘…the geographic wealth gap is being widened by climate change, as floods and bushfires make living in large parts of the country uninsurable and financially crippling, but many families have no choice but to stay where they are because those areas are low-priced and they can’t afford to move’[18].
This particular notion was created in Great Divide wholly independently to that postulated in your present reviewer’s Brisbane Breached, The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain (‘Brisbane Breached’): ‘Rocklea, an inner-southern suburb, is … serviced by a direct railway line into the inner city, making it… an … attractive residential proposition. In addition, Rocklea is in close proximity to public hospitals … For one of the … Rocklea residents … interviewed, the fear of moving further away from medical care seemed a greater risk than living in the same house so badly damaged in both 2011 and 2022, even when forced to convert their garage to a makeshift living room and kitchen… The inferential trade-off for that interviewee being that, to sell and purchase something genuinely floodproof, would involve moving much further away from hospital care than the actually quite conveniently located, in all senses bar flooding, Rocklea … The dilemma is palpable. Permanently removing 500 houses forever…to add to the 112 homes in Rocklea already discontinued … means 612 persons at least – plus their family members – added to the increasingly desperate pool of rental and mortgage applicants in a market as competitive as Queensland’[19].
Haplessly flood-prone suburbs like Rocklea, Goodna and the almost sadistically named Depot Hill – for a hill, it is anything but. Rather, it is a low-lying outer Rockhampton suburb on a natural Fitzroy River overflow floodplain – ought never have been built on in the first place. However, they were and, hence, remain established suburbs in which houses, businesses and schools operate, making complete levelling and removal of their many occupants impossible.
Proving that, for the supply side of the land and housing equation, it is not only local government zonings and not in my backyard animus towards higher density living that are hurdles to supply constraints. There are many many more.
Kohler’s thesis is that it will be ‘impossible’ to return to the status quo of his parents’ era ‘without purging the idea that housing is a means to create wealth as opposed to simply a place to live’[20]. He explicitly argues that ‘[T]o achieve anything in life you have to aim high … the aim must be to return the ratio to three to four times average weekly earnings, as it was twenty-five years ago’[21]. How then to achieve such a goal? Especially, one as lofty as that? And even more so when, based on the current average full-time adult wage of $99,174.40 per annum, returning to the turn of the millennium’s house price-to-income ratio would require the latest national median house price of $740,668 to have to halve to $370,000[22].
To merely state that proposition highlights its obvious impossibility. Something Kohler admits in the immediate next sentence: ‘…that’s not going to happen, of course, and it wouldn’t be a good idea even if it could’[23].
Rather, his suggested avenue to this goal is to increase the average full-time adult wage to $210,000, annually, so as to re-create the 3.5 times ratio[24]. At 4% growth in incomes per year, that would take about 18 years. Therefore 15-20 years of static house prices, co-existing with sustained wage growth of 4% per year would be required to restore that particular balance. ‘[T]hat sort of timeframe might also get Australians out of the habit of thinking that house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth’[25].
‘Might’ being the operative word. Especially, as how such a change away from this mindset would, of itself, create a concomitant failure of any form of rise in housing prices on the ground over the next 15-20 years. No causative factors were nominated. Besides, a desire to find a place to live and pay, accordingly, is, after all, an instinctive feature of the human condition. As is the subsequent desire to maximise the price received when the sale side of the property acquisition equation occurs. So long as other investment vehicles have drawbacks of their own – the unavoidable volatility of shares traded on stock exchanges and the erosion of the real value of funds earning bank interest only in these days of high inflation – the ‘habit of thinking that … housing is the best way to build wealth’ seems less than a habit than a concession to empirical reality.
Ironically, Kohler quotes Chinese President Xi opining in the same way: ‘He’s been banging on … for five years, saying that housing is not for speculation but for living in, but no one seems to be listening in China’[26].
If a leader who wields such immense power to the exclusivity of all others like Xi is not being listened to, what hope does a Prime Minister in democratic Australia – with a national history of dissent towards government and a free and open press only too willing to so engage – have to convince the populace that Australians must be disabused out of the habit of thinking that house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth?
In any event, Kohler answers his own question by pointing to the only phase of Australia’s history of unchanged house prices for a period as long as the 15-20 year time period he prescribed: 1930 – 1949, due to the Great Depression and then the period of price controls in World War 2[27].
A repeat of the 1930s depression and/or a third world war does seem a rather high burden to bear to achieve a holy grail of returning house prices to 3.5 times annual earnings.
Admittedly, no such case is made. Solutions actually postulated in Great Divide are to cut the CGT discount to 25%, limit negative gearing to new builds and to link immigration rates to the capacity of the Australian construction industry. On the supply side, pressure on councils is oft-mentioned, including a suggestion by demographer Simon Kuestenmacher to force all local councils to meet a quota of medium-density housing approvals, failing which money would be taken from those councils. ‘And if they don’t meet it for two years in a row, sack them’[28]. Still though, there’s much in the way of hope over reason in these entreaties. For a start, the constitutional efficacy of how such penal-style laws against councils failing ‘to take one for the team’ could be enacted then enforced was not explained. Not only that, it actually seems that the more challenges local councils come under, the more emboldened they are to resist; not three months after Great Divide’s publication, The Australian’s Margin Call reported that James Packer, one of this nation’s wealthiest – and most well-connected – people, ‘is still battling on with his $100m Edenville Corio project, a property play anticipated for suburban Geelong. That one’s questing through reams of red tape in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal owing to repeated rejections by local planning authorities’[29].
Proving that, if James Packer gets stymied in such ways, what hope do run of the mill property developers, already facing blowouts in the costs of labour and materials, have?
The Melbourne based Kohler goes on to cite his city’s many ‘Victorian or Edwardian terraces and villas [that]…can’t be pulled down for heritage reasons’[30]. The Brisbane equivalent is the way in which real estate agents love to promote the magic words ‘post-war’ to describe houses built post-1945, due to their substantially greater ability to be knocked down. As opposed to pre-1945 Queenslander style houses which are heritage protected. Meaning that owners of the latter cohort of properties must spend large amounts of money to maintain and improve their homes due to the lack of easy ability to knock down and re-start. The opportunity cost being the consequential directing of resources of the building industry, both human and capital, to renovations rather than new-builds. In this humble reviewer’s opinion, controversial as this may sound to some, if the greater good of housing an increasing number of homeless persons is to be better achieved, substitution of renovation by creation would be a good start. Heritage may be dear to some. However, it comes at a cost, and not just to the direct user but society as a whole. The very society whose cohesion Kohler expressly stated was being ‘undermined’ by the present state of housing prices.
Kohler concludes Great Divide this way: ‘It won’t be enough simply to restore the amount of housing construction to what it was before the pandemic, as the federal government is now aspiring to do’[31]. Rather, the restoration of the 3.5 incomes to prices ratio ‘will require active, and serious, government intervention’[32]. Which, in turn, will depend on which governments – at all 3 levels – members of the voting public, with their permanently differing and conflicting vested interests, elect, re-elect or depose every 3 and 4 years.
Meaning that the genie that escaped the bottle back in 2000 will remain elusive. Only time will tell if it can be recaptured, wholly or even in part, to attempt to alleviate and recalibrate during the second quarter of our current century.
Law: the Way of the Ancestors (“Law”), published in 2023, is the sixth volume in the First Knowledges series. The preceding volumes have addressed the topics of Songlines, Design, Country, Astronomy, and Plants. Three further volumes have followed it: Innovation, Medicine and Seasons.
The First Knowledges series is edited by Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director at the Australian Museum. Neale, in an introduction to Law, describes the books in the series as showing how traditional knowledge, beliefs, systems and practices inform contemporary life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and, indeed, for all people who have the will and knowledge to take them on, to listen and to learn. Neale adds that this kind of respectful engagement could be the path to true belonging in Australia.
Neale is of Aboriginal and Irish descent, from the Kulin nation with Gumbayngirr clan connections.
Each book in the series is co-authored. Neale explains that co-authorship offers a broader range of perspectives and knowledge from different cultural backgrounds, lived experience and research. Neale refers to the expertise of knowledge holders from Aboriginal and Western disciplines and the power that comes from such collaborations.
The idea of different backgrounds and experience is developed in the first chapter of Law which follows Neale’s introduction.
First, Marcia Langton, and, then, Aaron Corn, writing separately in this chapter, set out aspects of their life journey towards an understanding of Indigenous knowledge.
Marcia Langton has a Yiman and Bidjara heritage. Her distinguished career as a writer and academic has resulted in her appointments as a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Associate Provost at Melbourne University.
Langton states that, as a child living in south-west Queensland in a native camp on the edge of town, she did not realise that the special rules for Aboriginal life such as not walking in front of adults or speaking while adults were speaking were laws. She was, however, fascinated by the rituals of adults in her life such as when they were treating sickness or worrying about spirits.
In contrast, Langton’s experience of teachings in school about “savages” who had no idea about law, property and property law were so alien to her experience of the people she knew that she experienced such teachings as an elaborate lie.
Langton, then thirty years old, listened to Eddie Mabo speaking at a conference in Townsville in August 1981. Mabo was the first person that Langton met who clearly articulated that Indigenous Laws existed.
Langton credits the great anthropologist, WEH Stanner, with recognition of the importance of the rules that underlie ceremony and describes her excitement at witnessing a makarrata ceremony at the Yuendumu Sports Carnival similar to that described by Stanner in the 1930s. Langton’s fascination with and desire to write about the laws that govern the intricacies of Aboriginal life led to her writing her doctoral thesis on the subject.
Langton concludes her explanation of her personal perspective by stating that both her personal experiences in everyday life and in public contexts, and her academic training and work, have provided her with some skills for describing the resonating presence of Aboriginal laws in Australian society despite the grand failure of that society to recognise them. Langton hopes that she has done justice to the ways of the ancestors.
Aaron Corn is Professor and Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute and convenor of the PH D in Indigenous Knowledge course at Melbourne University. Corn grew up on the Gold Coast of Queensland in the 1970s and 80s. Despite an absence of meaningful exposure to Indigenous perspectives, Corn was fascinated by the topic of Indigenous history from the age of 7 triggered in part by the location of the Jebribillum Bora Park on his daily journey to primary school.
Corn was musically talented and he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in music at the Queensland Conservatorium, including an Honours year. Corn’s Master’s research, in the 1990s, was into musical instruments held by the Queensland Museum. These included instruments from around the world as well as many Indigenous instruments from across Australia. Working with the curators of the instruments including Indigenous curators, Corn learned much from them although his dominant realisation was how little his previous years of education had taught him about Indigenous culture.
Having completed his Master’s Degree, Corn started Ph D studies at Melbourne University. He was interested in the music of Yothu Yindi. He was particularly interested in the way the music of that band blended Indigenous traditional song styles with Western popular music band styles. As he dug deeper, Corn realised that Yothu Yindi’s work drew on Indigenous lived experience, traditional knowledge and beliefs and Indigenous political aspirations at that period drawing on the desire to conclude a treaty recognising Indigenous sovereignty in accord with the 1988 Barunga Statement which had been presented to the Australian Parliament as part of the Bicentenary celebrations of that year. Corn’s PH D studies were focused on understanding this emerging Indigenous music and the influences that were driving it.
As a result, Corn came to know and collaborate with Mandawuy Yunupingu on a series of projects combining music and culture. Corn has, since, collaborated with and learned from a number of other Indigenous leaders including Yolngu elder, Joe Neparna Gumbula and Warlpiri leader, Steven Wantarri Jumpijinpa Pawu.
Corn has worked at Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne Universities as well as the Australian National University. Corn was and remains Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne.
The chapter titles in Law, apart from Personal Perspectives, are: First Law, Everything is Related; Respect and Responsibility; Family Business; Gendered Business; Wisdom and Leadership; and The Gift of Law.
Of these, a fundamental message concerning Indigenous Law is conveyed by the phrase, “Everything is Related”. Not only does Indigenous Law cover all aspects of human activity (which, at some level of generality, is true of all legal systems) but Indigenous knowledge is integrated such that music, dance and visual art all are influenced by law and, in their turn, reflect and evidence Indigenous law.
As part of illustrating this, Langton and Corn refer to the Michael Nelson Jagamara painting, Possum and Wallaby Dreaming. Possum and Wallaby Dreamingis reproduced as a mural located in the front of Parliament House in Canberra. Langton and Corn explain the composition of the painting and the meaning contained in the symbols used as part of the work. They also explain the way in which the painting, taken as a whole, represents a form of community decision making in which the community members as a whole have a part to play, albeit, with the community elders playing leadership roles.
Possum and Wallaby Dreaming is not, however, just somebody’s idea of how a community might make decisions. It is a means of visually representing the law as it provides for decision making of Jagamara’s community, the Warlpiri People. Just as Indigenous art seeks to represent aspects of the law of the community, Indigenous knowledge and law is reflected in traditional dance and song. Indeed, the long years of work and study required to become accepted as a leader includes the gaining of knowledge of the community’s dance and song ceremonies and the principles they express and embody. Neither is it coincidental that song and dance and painting reflect country and myths and relationship with country. All of these are part of the law and all are connected and learning about one’s place in the universe and the community is assisted by the ceremonial events which go on around you and in which you learn to take part.
Langton and Corn illustrate many of their general points about the nature of Aboriginal law by reference to specific knowledge drawn from the traditions of the Warlpiri people or the Yolngu people. I suspect that this is partially because both authors’ lifelong studies have given them more detailed knowledge of the traditions of those two groups. I also suspect that the traditions of the Warlpiri and Yolngu peoples have survived the two hundred years of dispersion and dispossession in a more intact state than the traditions of many other groups.
Langton and Corn convey the way in which the lives of an Aboriginal Australian are affected by the traditional laws in a great deal of ways. Despite the detail, the rules and the underlying logic of the rules are conveyed in an accessible manner. There is a great deal of complexity about how one is born into sub-groupings of the whole group that are dependent upon but different to the sub-group to which one’s parents and grandparents, respectively, belong. One’s sub-group will determine many aspects of one’s life not the least the sub-grouping of the person to whom one may marry and the sorts of bush foods which one may be prohibited from eating.
To the uninformed eye, such rules appear arbitrary and without purpose. Langton and Corn point out, however, that the rules serve the purpose of ensuring ethical decision making, particularly, among the elders of the group. While different elders may come from different sub-groups, each person involved in making decisions has loyalties not only to members of his or her own sub-group but, also, through their parents and siblings and grandparents share sympathies with the interest of the members of many other sub-groups. In this way, the apparently arbitrary rules have an underlying logic which seeks to ensure that communal decision making will seek consensus and work to advance the interests of everyone in the group and not to prefer sectional or factional interests.
While this is an important example, Law provides many other examples of the way in which traditional laws work to ensure the well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For the same reason, Law is not a mere list of rules about behaviour. It manages to explain why those rules exist and the way in which they operate for the welfare of everyone to whom they apply.
Law is a relatively slim volume of slightly less than 200 pages. It comes with an informative and useful set of end notes and a comprehensive index. It is a thoroughly rewarding read.
In the concluding two pages, Langton and Corn set out a set of rules to follow as a means of embracing Indigenous law. The rules provide a guide to living a good and
useful life. The authors conclude with the following words: “Indigenous law – the way of the ancestors – is a gift to all Australians and the entire world. Instead of looking to our colonial past, Australia’s origin story can be found here, in its own deep history.” This reflects Neale’s thesis that traditional knowledge, beliefs, systems and practices not only inform contemporary life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples but, also, can do so for people who have the will and knowledge to take them on, to listen and to learn.
[1]Law is published in conjunction with the National Museum of Australia and its publication was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Author: David Marr Publisher: Black Inc. Reviewer: Stephen Keim
David Marr explains everything about Killing for Country in a note that occupies no more than one page and immediately follows the Contents page.
He says:
“I remember my great-grandmother. She had a crumpled face and faded away when I was too young to notice. She was a blank. Stories weren’t told about her. In 2019, an ancient uncle of mine asked me to find what I could about Maud. He knew so little. I dug out some books. It wasn’t long before I was looking at a photograph of her father in the uniform of the Native Police.
I was appalled and curious. I have been writing about the politics of race all my career. I know what side I’m on. Yet that afternoon I found in the lower branches of my family tree Sub-Inspector Reginald Uhr, a professional killer of Aborigines. Then I discovered his brother D’Arcy was also in the massacre business. Writing is my trade. I knew at once that I had to tell the story of my family’s bloody business with the Aboriginal people. That led me, step by step, into the history of the Native Police.
…”
The family story nature of Killing for Country is reflected in the three parts into which the book is divided: “Mr Jones”, “Edmund B. Uhr” and “Reg & D’Arcy”.
Richard Jones was a leading Sydney merchant who came to Sydney as a clerk in a merchant house in 1809. Jones returned to London in 1818 and conducted his various Australian enterprises from afar. In 1922, Jones married Mary Peterson. Jones was 36. Mary had five younger half-brothers named Uhr.
Marr describes the union between the pair, Jones and Peterson, as “unlikely” and the text does not explain how it came about. The effect was, however, that Edmund Uhr was “plucked from a poor street by the Thames” to drive and run expensive Saxony sheep for Jones, his half brother-in-law, initially, in the area of the Liverpool Plains.
In focussing the three parts of Killing for Country on individuals from, effectively, three generations, Marr covers a wide swathe of Australian history both in time and geography. Killing for Country is always about how the settler colonists killed the Indigenous people of Australia with great cruelty and in extraordinary numbers. It went on for a long time because pastoralists, in particular, were continually broadening their horizons by stealing new land and Jones and the two generations of Uhrs played very significant roles in that killing.
Killing for Country is, however, more than a family memoir. That tends to happen when the family story is told by one of Australia’s greatest documentary writers. Marr manages to tell the story of the four individuals. In covering those four lives, however, Marr also manages to tell a much broader story of the social and political context in which they lived. Jones’ early time in Sydney coincides with Macquarie’s governorship. The land being newly occupied by squatters and the resultant conflict with the Indigenous owners of the land and the resulting killing of those owners had moved beyond the immediate environs of Sydney but not by a huge distance. By the time the patchy careers of Reg and D’Arcy were coming to an end, the far north of Queensland and the top end of the Northern Territory had long been the subject of dispersion, a euphemism for killing, and dispossession, the whole point of the exercise. Killing had become industrialised for many years by then, primarily, through the use of the Native Police in which both Reg and D’Arcy had served as white officers.
In between, Jones and Edmund Uhr and others had shifted their focus to the Brisbane Valley, the Darling Downs, and coastal areas of Queensland such as Gympie and Maryborough.
The politics of dispossession were much fought over during the whole period covered by Killing for Country. Just as in modern settler colonial states, there was never any question that the settlers might not dispossess those to whom the land belonged. There was, however, even among the squatter class, the illusion of shades of opinion, a battle between moderates and radicals when it came to the killing. Some argued that the Indigenous former occupants should not be excluded from the new pastoral holdings but should be allowed to conduct aspects of their former lives and should be utilised as cheap and extremely competent labour on the holdings. Only the guilty, those who stole or attacked whites, these moderates argued, should be punished by being murdered.
Radical proponents of murder, however, argued that allowing any Indigenous person near towns or holdings was naïve and asking for trouble and would result in attacks on white people. Where crimes were committed, Indigenous people could only understand severe punishment and the best lessons involved massacres of whole communities including women, children and old people. If the alleged perpetrators of crimes were not part of the communities massacred, it mattered little since the lesson would be broadly learned and understood, in any event. And who, after the event, could say that the right people had not been killed?
These shades of opinion were reflected across the broader settler society. Governors tried, in accordance with their instructions from the colonial secretaries, to restrain the worst conduct of the squatters but tried not very hard. In any event, the rich merchants and squatters of which Jones was a member of both categories were, generally, at war with the governors, and had connections back in London with the use of whom they could conduct those wars. And colonial secretaries of a Whig persuasion tended to huff and puff about looking after the welfare of those whose land was being stolen but did so, ineffectively. Colonial secretaries of a Tory persuasion tended not to do much at all about the native question.
Marr’s treatment of the politics at the level of governors and colonial secretaries is assisted by his quoting of passages from their communications. My generation learned about the early governors of New South Wales in social studies in primary school. It was an important focus of the curriculum. What I learned, however, was little more than a list of names and a shorter list of bare facts. Killing for Country, in contrast, conveys a much deeper understanding of the early settler politics of New South Wales and Queensland than I have previously enjoyed. Marr manages to do this despite the narrow thematic focus of his subject.
In the same way, my primary and secondary education gave me a sense of the history of settler Australia that contained a huge black hole from the gold rushes of 1851 to federation in 1901. In covering the establishment of the Queensland Native Police and the conduct of that body over subsequent decades and the freelance killing conducted by squatters during the same period, Marr has also succeeded in conveying a vision of parliamentary politics and the personalities and styles of early Queensland politicians including a number of premiers.
Despite the failings of my schooling, in recent years, the efforts of historians and journalists like Marr had made me aware that the administration of justice had achieved something brave and wonderful in making murderers accountable for the slaughter of 22 Kamilaroi people at Myall Creek in the New England area in northern New South Wales. In reading Killing for Country, one is impressed both by how late and how early the Myall Creek events took place. The massacre occurred in June of 1838. For half a century, Indigenous people had been murdered in numbers before any settler was made accountable for such killing. Notwithstanding the convictions, another half a century and more of killing was to pass with Myall Creek becoming not the signifier of an era of even handed justice but, rather, the great anomaly of Australian history. The killing went on. The accountability died its own death.
The Myall Creek story recalls Marr’s dedication to those who told the truth. A station hand who alerted his supervisor; a squatter who alerted a police magistrate and then went on to Sydney to raise the alarm; that police magistrate who travelled to the site and actively investigated the crime and its perpetrators; and a Kamilaroi boy called Davy who hid behind the tree and witnessed the murders formed part of that crew. Davy’s evidence could not be received by the court because the law then stated that heathens, who had no fear of the eternal damnation promised by a Christian God, were not competent to testify in legal proceedings.
The success, and even the fact, of the prosecution was due in large part to the Irish lawyer, John Hubert Plunkett, who had, by this time, acceded to the post of Attorney-General of the colony of New South Wales. Plunkett with the support of the new governor, George Gipps, marshalled the available evidence into a powerful case for conviction. When, despite the quality and quantity of the evidence, the jury returned a not guilty verdict, Plunkett, forthwith, recharged 11 of the defendants with the death of four children who had also been killed in the massacre but were not the subject of the first set of charges. The result of the second trial was that seven of the perpetrators were convicted and, ultimately, hanged for the crimes.
But Myall Creek, despite Plunkett’s best efforts, was also flawed. A Gwydir squatter, John Fleming, had recruited twenty stockmen to ride on an expedition to find blacks to kill. The crime was particularly egregious because the group of Kamilaroi victims lived peaceably on another squatter’s property and had had nothing to do with any active resistance to the stealing of Kamilaroi land. They were killed, nonetheless.
Despite his organising and directing role in the slaughter, admissible evidence against Fleming was not available. He was not charged. Those who were on trial were successfully marshalled such that no one accepted the offered incentives to give evidence against Fleming and, thereby, save their own lives. Fleming was never made accountable. In the wake of Myall Creek, settlement continued to expand and, as the later chapters of Killing for Country graphically record, the killing only accelerated.
The acknowledgements section of most books I read are of much interest. They constitute a short-form version of the making of the Book. Killing for Country is a great work that was six years in the making. Its acknowledgements are particularly interesting.
At the front of the book, Marr’s dedication is “To those who told the truth”. On the following page, Marr writes: “I did not work alone. This book is the result of a deep collaboration over four years with my partner, Sebastian Tesoriero.” The story of the collaboration is told in more detail in the acknowledgements. In March 2020, Covid shut down the archives. It was at that point that Marr turned to Tesoriero, asking him to hunt for material online. Marr goes on: “[Tesoriero] has a lawyer’s mind and a hunger for facts. I knew he was a skilled internet sleuth. Trove opened its riches to him. As the year went by, we began working closely together and continued doing so until the end. He proved a fine-at times, savage-editor.”
Marr reveals the extraordinary amount of work done on the subject of the killing for country that took place in Australia. He, particularly, acknowledges Henry Reynolds and his 1981 work, The Other Side of the Frontier. Marr also mentions the wonderful poet, Judith Wright, as being the first person to make sense of this history through family memoir. The depth of research and search for understanding is illustrated by Marr’s heartfelt tribute to a series of local historical societies and local historians in the various parts of Australia covered by Killing for Country.
It would be remiss of me to conclude a review of Killing for Country or, indeed, any piece of writing by Marr without acknowledging the beautiful prose with which he delivers his narrative. Despite the meticulous research that has been undertaken by Marr, the learning and the references never get in the way of the narrative. The endnotes evidence the sources and verify the facts but one almost has to tear oneself away from the unfolding story to pursue one’s interest in a particular source.
Marr, as has been seen above, explains his family connection to the subject of Killing for Country and the questions it has raised for him as an active writer in the field of Australia’s colonial past and present. He then disappears from the page into the identity of the omniscient one. Marr returns to the page as the story reaches its conclusion and his precise connection with the protagonists is described.
The point is that nothing gets in the way of the story being told. The events are set out. The actors are introduced. They play the role in the events. The reader gets to know a lot about each person as their actions are unveiled. Personal foibles and shameful actions are acknowledged as they are conveyed. No time or space is wasted, however, on an excess of condemnation. For the plot is still unfolding and the rest of the story is still being told.
One approaches Killing for Country with caution. The reader knows that horrific events happened and those horrific events will be related without any lily being gilded or any sensibility being spared. Notwithstanding the horrific nature of the events, the reading of Killing for Country is a pleasure. The beauty of the prose and the fascinating quality of the narration ensures that that occurs.
Author: Nicholas Seddon Publisher: The Federation Press Reviewer: Robert Quirk
For this type of book, the best test is how useful it is in practice.
I have had Seddon on Deeds [1] for about a year, now, and have used it as a first port of call on a number of specific issues, including those relating to equitable remedies and volunteers. To get a flavour for the style of writing in discussing equity and volunteers, Dr Seddon says, hitting the nail on the head:
‘Perhaps one of the most fundamental misunderstandings about deeds is that they are supposed to eliminate any risk arising from the possibility of a lack of consideration. It has been said that a deed “imports consideration”. But this is misleading. It is true that a promise can be binding in the absence of consideration if it is embodied in a deed. However, if the appropriate remedy for breach is an equitable one, the lack of consideration immediately encounters the maxim “equity does not assist a volunteer”. A “one-way” promise in a deed will not be enforced, for example, through an injunction or specific performance, so long as the maxim applies. Why this was so, historically, is not clear.’ (footnotes omitted)
Even when the authorities are sparse, or run out, the learned author provides useful suggestions as to the appropriate solution.
Like a contract text, it is not one of those books that you will read from start to finish. Rather, it is designed to be used as a reference when faced with an issue in practice. The contents are comprehensive (see list of chapters below).
For anyone whose work involves the enforcement of contracts, this usually means deeds, as well. Accordingly, I would recommend Seddon on Deeds to anyone with this type of practice. I have found this book very useful in my own work.
The book is hardcover with a glossy gold colour, and the paper is high quality. The price reflects the high quality of the contents and the physical book. Recommended.[2]
Foreword by The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG Preface to first edition Preface to current edition Table of Cases Table of Statutes 1. The Use of Deeds 2. Execution 3. Delivery and Escrow 4. Alteration and Variation 5. Interpretation 6. Enforcement and Remedies 7. Discharge
Author: Judy Ryan[1] Publisher: Scribe Publications Reviewer: James McNab
This is a book about the ripple effects of heroin addiction. It addresses the associated issues within the Melbourne inner city community of Richmond and the ultimate introduction by the Victorian Government of safe injecting rooms. The book highlights the strength of a community voice as agents of change for local issues. Specifically, it demonstrates how all levels of government need help from the community in addressing the insidious addiction not only of heroin, which is featured in the book, but indeed of all addictive drugs.
The author, Judy Ryan, shares her personal account of people using drugs and drug addicts in her neighbourhood until she reached breaking point in 2016. That point was when she saw yet another young man slumped in a local laneway. Fortunately, he survived the overdose. Sadly, the author had also been touched previously by the horrors of addiction, with a family member having passed away due to drugs.
The author recounts how she embarked upon attempting to change policy, views and laws and details the obstacles she encountered during that process. The book shows how she was able to garner support over time from journalists, medical experts, politicians, and police.
After much campaigning, the steadfast attitudes against safe injecting rooms began to mellow. A major stakeholder in the debate was the Victorian Police Union which, ultimately, said that they “would not oppose a safe injecting facility in Richmond”. This was in many ways a watershed moment in the campaign and momentum for change gained more pace and support.
Without fanfare, the safe injecting room opened a day early on 30 June 2018.
The book is very insightful of the community issues and prejudice relating to drug addiction. It really demonstrates how a driven community can instigate and achieve change.
At an RRP of $32.99, it represents great value. It is also available electronically.
[1] Judy Ryan moved to inner city Melbourne in 2012. In 2016 she launched the campaign to commence a safe injecting room in Richmond Victoria. She has also run for election in all three levels of government in Victoria
8 April 2024 marked 30 years since Kurt Cobain of Nirvana passed away, at 27.
I have friends that saw Nirvana perform at Fisherman’s Wharf, Southport in 1991 – not long after the release of It Smells like Teen Spirit.
Nirvana was then the support act for the Violent Femmes. Unfortunately I didn’t make it, but I hear it was fantastic, and hectic.
They then played at the first year of the Big Day Out – in 1992 – in Sydney on Australia Day.
It would be safe to say that if Nirvana had come back to the Southport Spit a year later – the crowd would have been huge – and utter chaos.
In 1993 Nirvana recorded MTV Unplugged in New York.
This record was released on 1 November 1994, some 7 months after Kurt’s passing.
There is a lot I could say about the record – it is one my favourites – but I won’t bore you.
Suffice to say that it does not contain a large number of the group’s then big hits – apparently a cause of some disagreement with record producers.
I could have picked any of the songs, they are all excellent, but here are two:
Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam
About a Girl
You will notice a youthful Dave Grohl on drums, who had been recruited in 1990.
I would recommend a dinner party or drive with the whole record playing through.
I’m no expert – just a music lover, but in my view the record is a legitimate bookmark in the history of rock and roll.
As readers may appreciate from previous reviews, the writer is an aficionado of the music of the 70s and 80s. ‘Layla’ – written by Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon, and recorded in 1971 by their band ‘Derek and The Dominos’– is among my top 5 picks of the music of such period.
According to Wikipedia, the song was inspired by a Persian love story of the seventh century, being the tale of a young man who fell so hopelessly in love with a beautiful young girl he went crazy so he could not marry her. In turn it was inspired by Clapton’s secret love for Pattie Boyd, who was married to his friend and fellow musician George Harrison (of Beatles’ fame). Clapton and Boyd eventually married.
The song is unusual because of its approximate 7 minute length, with latter half comprising a non-vocal second movement with quite distinct piano and progressively guitar piece. This was composed by Gordon. In truth it makes the song. This second movement is commonly referred to as a ‘piano exit’.
The song was re-recorded by Clapton in 1992 in an acoustic ‘Unplugged’ performance, albeit without the second movement and thereby about 3 minutes shorter in duration.
The ‘Unplugged’ version won the 1993 Grammy award for ‘Best Rock Song’. In 2004, the original version was listed as number 27 of Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’.
The writer greatly prefers the original version over the acoustic version, but for comparison the YouTube version of each is below. Clapton performs lead guitar and lead vocals in each.
Wikipedia quotes Clapton from 2011:
‘Layla’ is a difficult one, because it’s a difficult song to perform live. You have to have a good complement of musicians to get all the ingredients going, but when you’ve got that … its difficult to do as a quartet, for instance, because there are some parts you have to play and sing completely opposing lines, which is almost impossible to do. If you’ve got a big band, which I will have on tour, then it will be easy to do something like ‘Layla’ – and I’m very proud of it. I love to hear it. It’s almost like it’s not me. It’s like I’m listening to someone that I really like. Derek and The Dominos was a band I really liked – and it’s almost like I wasn’t in that band. It’s just a band that I’m a fan of. Sometimes, my own music can be like that. When it’s served its purpose to being good music, I don’t associate myself with it any more. It’s like someone else. It’s easy to do songs then.
Boyd is also quoted as reflecting:
I think he was amazingly raw at the time … he’s such an incredible musician that he is able to put his emotions into music in such a way that the audience can feel it instinctively. It goes right through you.
