Grant Bailey

This review of some contentious criminal cases in Australia over the last thirty years purports to demonstrate how the processes of the criminal law may, if mishandled, produce an unsafe conviction. The author has made her own investigations into most of the cases. She outlines her own discoveries and compares these to the findings of the police and the courts.

In this fascinating and irritating book, Elizabeth Farrelly hits out at almost everything about the modern world. She is an architect, and urban sprawl and ugly buildings are her bêtes noires, though obesity, kitsch and fakery also attract her coruscating attention.

Blubberland is a curious mixture of diatribe and philosophical treatise on cultural theory. Farrelly makes many good points: tight-knit cities, for example, are more energy-efficient than sprawling suburbs, and the ‘sea-change’ fad destroys beauty spots with little increase in happiness. She wonders ‘[w]hy we demand a built lifestyle whose habitual over-indulgence is, by even the standards of our parents’ generation, extraordinary? … Why these houses, and the suburbs full of them, are so ugly? Is it an aesthetic or a moral repugnance?

Bob Burton is not one to pull punches: early in Inside Spin he describes the public relations (PR) industry as one dominated by a ‘culture of secrecy’ with its practitioners operating ‘on the basis that they are most successful when they are nowhere to be seen’. That the industry is largely unregulated adds to the sense of unease that many Australians feel about its activities.

From September 1958 until his capture in August 1963, Eric Edgar Cooke conducted a terrifying campaign of violent crime in greater Perth which left eight people dead and several others permanently injured. The damage did not stop with Cooke’s arrest. A young labourer, John Button, had previously been convicted of one of Cooke’s murders: the hit-and-run killing of Button’s girlfriend., Rosemary Anderson. Button was serving ten years’ imprisonment. Neither Cooke’s confession to the murder of Anderson nor subsequent police investigations were sufficient to convince authorities that the justice system had miscarried. All of Button’s legal appeals (including one to the High Court of Australia) were dismissed. Button steadfastly maintained his innocence, even after he had served his sentence, fruitlessly petitioning politicians for a reopening of his case. For many years the injustice remained, until a chance encounter in 1992 between Button’s brother and a journalist named Estelle Blackburn. With a reporter’s nose for a good story, Blackburn began an investigation of Button’s case that was to last six and a half years and create Australian legal history.

The problem with many ‘big occasion’ publications is that they are written for the occasion rather than for an audience. This collection – the first reference work to cover all the premiers of New South Wales from 1856 until July 2005 – has been published to coincide with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of responsible government in New South Wales. Happily, however, The Premiers of New South Wales displays none of the failings typical of other ‘landmark’ volumes. On the contrary, this is a valuable and relevant work that merits the interest of non-specialist readers. The authors have profiled the premiers in their social and personal contexts, as well as in their political environments. This extends the appeal of the collection and adds considerable interest. Together, the two volumes provide valuable insights into the evolution of New South Wales from a colony to a state.

Besides being a bookseller, publisher and literary agent, Henry Hyde Champion (1859–1929) – the subject of this fascinating biography – was also, at various stages, an army officer, a journalist, and a socialist organiser. Born in England to a wealthy family with aristocratic roots, Champion turned his back on a conventional upper-class life after witnessing the appalling poverty of London’s East End. He embarked on what was to become a lifetime of activism on behalf of the poor and the working classes. Champion was a pioneer socialist of late nineteenth-century England and in this capacity, had dealings with such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and the union leader John Burns. He was a key participant in the London Dock Strike of 1889, which was to prove a watershed for the labour movement, and was an early promoter of the eight-hour day.

Many older readers of ABR would remember Peter Russo – whether fondly or otherwise – for his newspaper columns (principally in the Melbourne Argus) from 1941, and for his ABC radio broadcasts, which continued until his death in 1985. As for younger readers: picture a journalist–commentator (his career defied easy description) who was as controversial in his day as any of our present ‘shock jocks’, but who actually knew what he was talking about. Leading politicians approached Russo not to curry favour with his audience but to understand matters within his areas of expertise: Asia and international affairs. Such expertise – including fluency in eight languages – made it difficult to ignore his contributions to public discourse which, as Prue Torney-Parlicki’s biography makes clear, were substantial. Until this biography (the first comprehensive study of the subject to be published), Russo risked being remembered not for what he said or did but, rather, for what others said about him.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Australia is suffering a litigation explosion. Newspapers have been full of reports of supposedly undeserving plaintiffs receiving million-dollar damages awards; governments have introduced legislation to limit pay-outs; local authorities and volunteer organisations have cancelled events due to concerns over public liability; and insurers have blamed rising premiums on unsustainable damages awards. Even the courts have joined the chorus: several leading judges recently declared the justice system to be in crisis due to increasing litigiousness, lawyers who stir up claims and a judiciary that has, according to one recently retired judge, ‘enjoyed playing Santa Claus’.

It is comforting to think that the foundations of the legal system are sound. Perhaps this explains why there are so many common myths about the law, such as the notion that every legal problem has a ready solution, or that the law is essentially objective and value-neutral.

As students, litigants, witnesses and others who have suddenly become more familiar with the system of justice can attest, a closer look at the structure is usually disconcerting. This book, written by a professor of law, will be a revelation to those yet to become familiar with the cracks in the structure. It examines the fundamental concepts and assumptions that underlie law, taking nothing for granted. In the process, it explodes most of the myths.

Speaking in the context of the Quebec secessionist movement, Stéphane Dion described Canada as ‘a country that works in practice but not in theory’. Whilst particularly telling of that country’s political turmoil, Dion’s summary also points to an abiding tension in all Western democracies: the perceived gulf between the theory and the practice of modern government. Constitution and parliament, the people and their representatives, tradition and modern requirements: in theory, each pair dovetail, but in practice they tend to be loose at the edges. (Try finding, for example, any reference to ‘prime minister’ in our Constitution.) The ongoing efforts within Australia to reconcile the theory and practice of government are at the centre of this important book, which was released to coincide with the South Australian Constitutional Convention (held in August 2003).