J.M. Bennett - Sir William Stawell: Second Chief Justice of Victoria 1857-1886

J.M. Bennett

Sir William Stawell: Second Chief Justice of Victoria 1857-1886

Leichhardt, NSW: The Federation Press, 2004

Pp. xvi + 239               Hardback         ISBN 1 86287 520 0

J.M. Bennett is to be congratulated on writing all nine volumes (to date) of the series Lives of the Australian Chief Justices, and this latest comes with a supportive preface from a recent chief justice of Victoria, J.H. Phillips. William Stawell (he pronounced his name ‘stole’) was a County Cork Protestant, a neighbour in his early years of the family of Redmond Barry. Famously, he counted twenty ‘hats’ (barristers) on the Munster (south of Ireland) circuit but estimated that there was work for only twenty. In 1842 he sailed for Port Phillip, and on his death in 1889 he was described as ‘the history of Victoria personified’ (p. 192). Separation from New South Wales, gold-mining and responsible government all hit Victoria at about the same time. Stawell, as Attorney-General, was close to the centre of events throughout the Eureka upheaval, and many felt that he was the real government of the colony. He was no friend of the diggers, and his reputation among progressive historians is accordingly besmirched. He was, in fact, an easy man to dislike and more or less pitchforked the incumbent chief justice, A’Beckett, into retiring so that he could grab his job. Bennett defends Stawell as a judge, as a founder of the Victorian Bar and as a practical reformer who helped shape the colony’s legal system. Perhaps it is symbolic that he died in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, having hoped to climb that famous but dormant volcano.