A Recollection of Geoffrey Sawer
| Published date | 01 September 1980 |
| Date | 01 September 1980 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0067205X8001100302 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
ARECOLLECTION
OF
GEOFFREY' SAWER
,
By
NINIAN
STEPHEN*
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, athing surely not done by proper lecturers, legs swinging over the
edge while he rolled himself arather unsuccessful cigarette.
We eyed warily this academic, our Constitutional Law
II
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 Selbome
Chambers and Chancery Lane to the lecture theatre, he some quite
unfamiliar air.
We waited while adisconsolately 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 pigeon
hole. Instead, adeprecating 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.
The years have blurred memory of the lecture, although not of the
man, so that all his lectures merge into one narrative. Anarrative of the
closely bargained federal compact: of the old chrysalis colonies taking
faltering flight as States; of the three who first sat interpreting aConsti-
tution 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 alecturer as araconteur,
his unlikely source book the Commonwealth Law Reports, the cases
annotated and flagged in the memory with political sidenote or disrepu-
table anecdote. He gave to dry doctrine its context in the social and
economic forces of the day. Names took on anew 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 asection 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 aunique sort;
ex-servicemen largely, making good the wasted war years and financed
to the luxury of alaw course in afee-paying university by agrateful
government. Professor Paton apart, he was, Ithink, the first academic
*The Honourable Sir Ninian Stephen, K.B.E.
is
ajustice of the High Court of
Australia.
261
To continue reading
Request your trial