Geoffrey Sawer and the Art of the Academic Commentator: A Preliminary Biographical Sketch
| Author | Michael Coper |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.22145/flr.42.2.7 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
GEOFFREY SAWER AND THE ART OF THE ACADEMIC
COMMENTATOR: A PRELIMINARY BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCH
Michael Coper*
ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Sawer was the Fou ndation Professor of Law a t The Australian National
University, appointed in 195 0 at the age of 39. He was a pioneer in the understanding of
law in a broader context, especially at the intersection between law and politics, and his
fluid and incisive writing has been a maj or influence on succeeding gene rations of
academics, practitioners and judges. Drawing on Sawer's writings, oral history
interviews and private papers, Michae l Coper makes an affectionate biographical sketch
of this outstanding scholar and warm and genial human being. In particular, he explores
how Sawer's scholarship st ands up today, when so muc h has changed in the lega l and
political landscape; what is enduring and what is transient in a life's work; and what
lessons we can draw when we look at law and life thr ough the lens of biography.
NOT SO MUCH A LECTURER AS A RACONTEUR …
He was not so much dressed in as draped about with baggy slacks and shapeless sports
coat, elbows suede-patched long before this became the intellectual's hallmark. He was on
the dais, it was true, the proper place for lecturers, and that was some re-assurance; but he
sat on its floor, a thing surely not done by proper lecturers, legs swinging over the edge
while he rolled himself a rather unsuccessful cigarette.
We eyed warily this academic, our Constitutional Law I lecturer for the year, an oddity
among the succession of barrister-lecturers who, splendid in morning suit or three piece
blue worsted, regularly dictated their set-piece lectures which we scribbled into our
notebooks, ready for regurgitation at exam time. They brought the air of Selborne
Chambers and Chancery Lane to the lecture theatre, he some quite unfamiliar air.
We waited while a disconsolately deformed cigarette was wrought from the reluctant
makings, but still no lecture notes emerged, no rapid recital of proposition and supporting
case, culled from the day's selected pigeonhole. Instead, a deprecating introduction of self
and subject, as if both were necessary evils which better acquaintance might nevertheless
make tolerable. And gradually that first lecture took shape.
* Professor of Law, ANU College of Law, The Australian National University; Dean and
Robert Garran Professor 1998–2012. This article originated as the 'Sixteenth Annual Geoffrey
Sawer Lecture' (Speech delivered at the Centre for International and Public Law, Australian
National University, 15 November 2013).
_______________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________
390 Federal Law Review Volume 42
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The years have blurred memory of the lecture, although not of the man, so that all his
lectures merge into one narrative. A narrative of the closely bargained federal compact: of
the old chrysalis colonies taking faltering flight as States; of the three who first sat
interpreting a Constitution with the ink, much of it their own, barely dry on it; of Quick
and Garran foretelling the future; of Isaacs and Higgins overturning immunities of the past.
He was not so much a lecturer as a raconteur, his unlikely source book the Commonwealth
Law Reports, the cases annotated and flagged in the memory with political sidenote or
disreputable anecdote. He gave to dry doctrine its context in the social and economic forces
of the day. Names took on a new significance. Menzies was no longer just the current leader
of the Liberal Opposition but was seen turning the Court around in the Engineers Case.
Evatt was no longer the current Minister for External Affairs but instead the apostle of a
section 92 which could accommodate nationalisation. We saw Dixon and Fullagar barely
restrained from writing elegant judgments entirely in Greek, Starke and Rich trailing
personal legends across the pages, and Williams ever at his tax cases.
Sawer's student audience of the late 1940s was of a unique sort; ex-servicemen largely,
making good the wasted war years and financed to the luxury of a law course in a fee-
paying university by a grateful government. Professor Paton apart, he was, I think, the first
academic to teach us in a sea of barrister part-timers. He was, and remains, for many of us
our outstanding teacher of the law, clothing each dry decision with living relevance and so
marshalling the cases that s trategic patterns emerged fr om tactical march and
countermarch. He gave to the constitutional law he taught a new relevance, superimposing
the curial shape of Australia's federal experiment upon the nation's social and physical
landscape.
This delightful 1980 recollection of Geof frey Sawer, as part of a 70th birthday tribute,
comes from the elegant pen of then High Court Justice Sir Ninian Stephen, who wa s a
student of Sawer's at the University of Melbourne in the 1940s.1 How appropriate was
it, then, for Sir Ninian to be invited to give the inaugural Geoffrey Sawer Lecture in 1998,
just two years after Sawer's death in 1996 at the age of 85. Sir Ninian had some further
reflections about Geoffrey Sawer on the occasion of that inaugural lecture:
[Geoffrey Sawer] was not only Australia's doyen of academic writers on constitutional law
… but a modest, witty and charming human being. [His] regular articles in The Canberra
Times on every imaginable and some unimaginable subjects were for years a delight, just
as were his lectures, long ago, to law students in Melbourne University … As one of those
students he taught me all I know, or , at least, once knew, of Australia n constitutional law
and gave to an otherwise forbidding subject a unique quality of humanity that reflected
his own enlightened view of life and law. It was typical of Geoffrey Sawer that in Who's
Who his stated recreation on retirement was vegetable growing.2
Already disclosed here in these two quotes are many of the defining features of
Geoffrey Sawer: his informality, his modesty, his wit, his insight, his abilit y to bring the
law to life by placing it in a broader context, the breadth of his interest s, his iconoclasm,
1 Ninian Stephen, 'A Recollection of Geoffrey Sawer' (1980) 11 Federal Law Review 261. Also as
part of the 70th birthday tribute, see Ross Cranston, '"Lawyer in the Social Sciences" —
Geoffrey Sawer' (1980) 11 Federal Law Review 263; Anne Schick, 'Bibliography of the Works
of Geoffrey Sawer 1935–1980' (1980) 11 Federal Law Review 271. As to Sir Ninian Stephen
himself, see below n 64.
2 Ninian Stephen, 'War Crimes Trials and the Future' (Speech delivered at the Inaugural
Geoffrey Sawer Lecture, Centre for International and Public Law, The Australian National
University, 21 May 1998).
_______________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________
2014 Geoffrey Sawer and the Art of the Academic Commentator 391
_____________________________________________________________________________________
and, perhaps underlying all of this, his hu manity. These are some of the the mes I want
to pursue in this 16th Annual Geoffrey Sawer Lecture.
As I am also, like Sir Ninian, someone who was deeply influenced by Geoffrey Sawer,
I want to take this opport unity to look at the man him self and his contributi on to
Australian legal and political life. How does his scholarship stand up today, when so
much has changed in the legal and political landscape? What is enduring and what is
transient in a life's work? And what lessons ca n we draw, what insights can we gle an,
when we look at law and life thr ough the lens of biography?
THE ACCIDENTAL LAW STUDENT
Let us begin with a journey through Geoffrey Sawer's life and career.3 This will serve to
provide something of a frame for my reflections, some reference points in time and space
that may help you connec t the man, his times and his work. Like the f rame of a painting,
it may serve in a sense to contain and impose some coherence on the complexities, cross-
currents and contradictions that form the rich tapestry of any life.4
Sawer was born, in Burma , on 21 December 1910.5 The High C ourt in 1910 still
comprised its three original judges, Chief Justice G riffith and Justices Barton and
3 In addition to the articles cited above nn 1 a nd 2, there are, as you would expect, multiple
short bios and tributes: see, eg, R Else-Mitchell, 'Introduction' in Leslie Zines (ed),
Commentaries on the Australian Constitution: A Tribute to Geoffrey Sawer (Butterwor ths, 1977)
xix; 'Geoffrey Sawer 1910–' (1980) 11 Fed eral Law Review 259; Geoff Lindsay and Rob
O'Connor (eds), 'Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Sawer' (1992) 66 Australian Law Journal 473; J R
Nethercote, 'Sawer, Geoffrey' in Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (eds), The Oxford
Companion to Australian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2007); Anthony Mason, 'Geoffrey
Sawer: The Priceless Professor', The Canberra Times (Canberra) 21 December 1990, 7; Ninian
Stephen, 'Obituary: Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Sawer', The Canberra Times (Canberra) 10
August 1996.
4 As I have observed elsewhere, the telescoping of time in any biography, full length or not,
'cannot do justice to the complexities, cross-currents, subjectivity and diversity in the
interaction between self and others. It is one person's prism through which the sprawling
chaos of human affairs is artificially refracted. It is art rather than life': Michael Coper,
'Sensitive Insights into the Life of an Intellectual Achiever', The Canberra Times (Canberra) 3
March 1993, 15. As Inga Clendinnen nicely put it, 'we are about to enter the hall-of-mirrors
world of the biographer and the biographee': Inga Clendinnen, 'In Search of the "Actual Man
Underneath:" AW Martin and the Art of Biography' (Pandanus Books, 2004) 16. Even
autobiography (as to which see below n 5) is referred to by Clendinnen as 'a constructed
narrative, endlessly redrafted as experience is interpreted and incorporated': at 21.
5 In the narrative that follow s, I rely to a considerable extent on Geoffrey Sawer's own
autobiographical writings and recollections: see especially Geoffrey Sawer, Papers of Geoffrey
Sawer (National Library of Australia, June 2000) ('The Sawer Papers'). See generally National
Library of Australia, Guide to the Papers of Geoffrey Sawer (June 2000)
<http://www.nla.gov.au/ms/findaids/2688.html>. There are also oral history interviews
from 1971–2 (Mel Pratt), 1982 (Ian Hamilton), 1990 (Daniel Connell) and 1995 (John
Farquharson). My thanks to the Sawer family for giving me permission to access the
otherwise restricted diaries and autobiographical writings. As my narrative is constructed
from multiple sources, I have not consistently pinpointed precise locations in The Sawer
Papers or the oral history interviews for the source of my observations.
_______________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________
To continue reading
Request your trial