J.M. Bennett - Sir Henry Wrenfordsley: Second Chief Justice of Western Australia 1880-1883

J.M. Bennett

Sir Henry Wrenfordsley: Second Chief Justice of Western Australia 1880-1883

Leichhardt NSW: The Federation Press, 2004

(Series: Lives of the Australian Chief Justices) (with foreword by Roy M. Mersky)

Pp. xiv + 146.              Hardback  $49-50       ISBN 1 86287 528 6

By seeking to interpret the actions of their subjects, biographers usually slip into defending them. In his ninth contribution to a self-imposed series devoted to the lives of Australia’s chief justices, J.M. Bennett offers a more detached judgement. Describing Wrenfordsley as ‘a weak judge’, ‘a poseur and a judicial fraud’, he adds that ‘the pattern of his uniform incompetence and self-interest emerges only when all of his colonial service is taken into account.’ This one of Trollope’s minor characters transferred to a W.S. Gilbert libretto. His father was a Dublin solicitor who double-barrelled his surname, Sly, which cannot have been good for business. The son elided and elaborated the elements. Wrenfordsley was not without some positive characteristics. He was a qualified barrister, who unluckily lacked both briefs and brevity. He was a fluent orator, and Disraeli’s Conservatives twice ran him as a candidate in the hopelessly Liberal borough of Peterborough. He also spoke good French, and when his political allies first paid him off with a colonial appointment it was to Mauritius that they sent him. Thereafter he was rapidly shunted around the Empire, amassing a knighthood plus a host of quarrels, grievances and unpaid debts. The pinnacle of his career was a brief spell as acting governor of Western Australia, which he marked by stealing souvenir crockery from Government House. ‘This gentleman knows how to blow his own trumpet,’ noted a Colonial Office minute early in his odyssey. A later assessment was more blunt: ‘the main thing is to get rid of him’. For me, the only cloud in this enjoyable romp was the reflection that I have encountered several incarnations of the subject during my career in academe.