Rather His Own Man Read online

  About the Book

  In this witty, engrossing and sometimes poignant memoir, a sequel to his bestselling The Justice Game, Australia’s inimitable Geoffrey Robertson charts his progress from pimply state schoolboy to top Old Bailey barrister and thence onwards and upwards to a leading role in the struggle for human rights throughout the world.

  He wryly observes the absurdities of growing up as one of ‘Ming’s kids’; the passion of student protest in the sixties; and his early crusades for ‘down underdogs’, before leaving on a Rhodes Scholarship to combat the British establishment, with the help of John Mortimer of ‘Rumpole’ fame. There are dramatic accounts of fighting for lives on death rows, freeing dissidents and taking on tyrants, armed only with a unique mind and a passion for justice – on display whenever he boomeranged back to Australia to conduct Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals.

  His is an amazing life story of David and Goliath battles – riveting, laugh-out-loud tales filled with romance and danger, featuring a cast of characters ranging from General Pinochet to Pee-Wee Herman; from Malcolm Turnbull to Mike Tyson; from Nigella Lawson to Kathy Lette and Julian Assange. Throughout his exploits – recounted here with irreverent humour and dashes of true wisdom – Geoffrey Robertson has remained determinedly independent and his own man. He has also, in respect of human rights, changed the way we think.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 Who Do I Think I Am?

  2 My Parents’ War

  3 Baby Boomer

  4 Striving to Achieve

  5 Ming’s Kid Goes to Uni

  6 Freedom Rides

  7 The Queen and I

  8 Must Rhodes Fall?

  9 Down at the Old Bailey

  10 Family and Friends

  11 Hypotheticals

  12 Spy-catching

  13 Hard Cases

  14 In the Privy

  15 Doughty Street Chambers

  16 Freedom of Speech

  17 Struggling for Global Justice

  18 The World’s Fight

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Index of Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Geoffrey Robertson

  Praise

  Picture Section

  Copyright Notice

  To the memory of my mother and father

  Preface

  This is the story of a life lived in and between Sydney and London, by an expatriate determined not to become an ex-patriot – a dual citizen whose prostate is felt in Harley Street in London and whose teeth are fixed in Sydney’s Macquarie Street. (If you have seen an Englishman smile, you will understand why.) There are over one million Australians who are obliged – for work or travel or in search of some global aspiration – to live abroad, but as the old judges who fashioned the law about the persistence of the domicile of origin knew, peripatetic people end up panting for their native land. In my case, despite being based overseas since 1970, I have regularly been lassoed by an emotional umbilical cord, bringing me back home to the house and the love of my parents, to share the fortunes of my friends and extended family, and to recapture something of that restless and mischievous spirit which sent me abroad in the first place, as one of Ming’s kids keen to point out other emperors who had no clothes.

  So in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, I remain an Australian – firstly, because other nations do not let us forget it. (The English, in particular, describe us as ‘refreshing’, by which they mean we are loud-mouthed, uppity and irreverent.) Secondly, because of empathy – whenever news comes of fire and flood in our sunburnt country, we expats grieve sincerely and begin to yearn for the hot beaches and cold beer of our motherland. Time does not wither national loyalties – when a reactionary Thatcherite politician, Norman Tebbit, suggested a ‘cricket test’ for Commonwealth citizens seeking English nationality, it was a test I would always fail. I am psychologic ally unable to support England when it comes to the Ashes.

  There is a third reason I have kept boomeranging back to Australia. The early chapters of this book describe the frustration of growing up in a materialistic society in which politicians were reluctant to think imaginatively or to envisage – or even understand – how the nation could become a better place. Many of the policies against which I fought – censorship, White Australia, Vietnam and so on – are now policies of the past. But a parochial mindset lingers: witness the determination to expose refugees to detention on offshore islands, the media’s campaign against the very idea of a Human Rights Act, the longstanding denial of same-sex marriage based on prejudices it took a postal survey in 2017 to dispel, the opposition to becoming a republic and so on. There is stubborn resistance to reform of our horse-and-buggy era constitution: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ – a philosophy which would have us still driving around in FJ Holdens and playing LPs. So I return regularly and pay my taxes in order to add my voice – however Pommified – to progress on these issues, which affect expatriates because they diminish Australia’s standing in the world.

  This is an autobiography about growing up in Australia and my later connections with it – Hypotheticals, Spycatcher, and so on – together with accounts of some cases I have done at the Old Bailey and in international courtrooms. I have tried not to plunder my earlier memoir, The Justice Game, although there is some overlap. It describes in detail my major cases until 1998 and curious readers might treat it as a companion volume. I have avoided plagiarising myself (if that is legally possible) by repeating my arguments for a Bill of Rights that were set out in The Statute of Liberty, or retelling the stories of our past and future that featured in Dreaming Too Loud.

  Just as autobiographies of sports and movie stars and politicians tell stories of sport and movies and politics, so this account of a barrister’s life must delve into the arcane milieu of the law. Lawyers’ memoirs are always in danger of sending non-lawyers to sleep because our tricks and tragedies and triumphs so often depend upon intricate rules that have taken us years to learn and which defy quick explanation to a general reader. I have consciously tried to write a book that will not take a law degree to understand.

  The Bar is a lonely profession: you live in your head, even when you are on your feet. Your trade is to juggle laws and precedents while reaching for scraps of old wisdom from the garbage bin of past cases to construct an argument to favour your client or your cause. You go into battle alone, with no army to lead or supporters to rally, or speech writers and researchers to back you up. Your efforts may actually influence social progress more effectively than other blatherers, like MPs or bishops or media commentators – but you must not expect to be loved.

  My forensic father, John Mortimer, did create in Rumpole of the Bailey a lawyer the world could love, but I could never be that lawyer. Although I partnered John in many of his cases ‘down the Bailey’ and learnt much by his side, the only characteristic I share with Leo McKern’s Dickensian barrister is a commitment to my client. In my early days I restored many a burglar to his friends and his relations, but I always worked with the theory that certain trials at the Old Bailey had a wider significance, with consequences that could improve civil liberties in England and abroad. I had picked this up from my schoolboy fascination with a book banned by the Menzies government – The Trial of Lady Chatterley – which had inspired my ambition (however far-fetched for a boy growing up in an outer Sydney suburb) of joining the English Bar to fight causes célèbres at London’s central criminal court. I followed that dream, and some of the consequences are described in this book.

  I
moved on from the Old Bailey to devote my practice to human rights around the world, appearing as counsel for dissidents in countries much less fortunate than Britain or Australia, taking their cases to international courts in The Hague, Strasbourg and Geneva, even for some years serving as an appeal judge on a UN war crimes court in Africa. My book Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice deals at great length with the nuts and bolts of this politically controversial and legally complicated subject. Here, I try to describe more personally the pleasure and privations of this new form of legal practice, and the thinking behind establishing Doughty Street Chambers – now the largest collection of barristers dedicating themselves to human rights work. There are plenty of books reminiscing about professional lives lived under wigs and gowns; in this book I have tried to explain how dedication to ‘the world’s fight’ has its challenges and rewards.

  My neighbour in North London these days is Dame Edna – there is not much more than a Hills hoist between our houses – and we often discourse about ‘the old country’ and our fears of ending up in care in Lulworth House, that Sydney retreat for elderly and dementia-struck politicians, business identities and lawyers. When I visited it recently on behalf of my ailing father, I noticed my own age – I have just passed three score years and ten, the biblical allotment of the length of sentient life. I had, when young, assumed that by now I would have retired, and like my grandparents would ‘travel north’ to a small village at the mouth of the Manning River, fishing and listening to the cricket until the inevitable heart attack. Reaching out to touch the nearest wood, I cannot envisage, or even comprehend, retirement: as the adage on John Mortimer’s coffee cup put it, ‘Old lawyers never die. They just lose their appeal.’

  This book is written in my anecdotage. I’ve subtitled it Reliable Memoirs, a nod to my wittier compatriot, although all memory tends to be skewed and subjective, as I have often had to demonstrate in relation to the recollections of prosecution witnesses. I make the occasional digression into what I am told is the usual stuff of autobiography – family and favourite music and what I like for breakfast – but have tried to hold the thread of human rights, which is the nature and content of my practice and my beliefs. I have attempted to explain how and why I have dedicated my workaholic life to this pursuit, although I do pay tribute – insufficiently – to family, friends and lovers who have done their best to relieve the loneliness of the long-winded lawyer.

  A word about the title Rather His Own Man. Some years ago, a minister in the Blair government decided to appoint me to an important European judicial position. He told his permanent secretary, one of the breed so accurately personified in Yes Minister by Sir Humphrey. ‘What a brilliant idea, minister,’ said the permanent secretary, with feigned enthusiasm. ‘But … he is … rather his own man, isn’t he?’ In other words, I could not be trusted always to do what the government might want. As the minister explained to me later, he could not find a way around civil service opposition. But I was quite taken with Sir Humphrey’s tribute to my independence, which would presumably forever disqualify me from a government job. I thought then that I would have his remark engraved on my tombstone, but since an autobiography is the literary equivalent, here it is.

  Introduction

  The young pilot gasped at the ethereal beauty of the clouds, their corridors of cumulus filter-lit by the sudden appearance of the full moon. It was midnight on his first solo night flight somewhere over the Murray River, and he was scared. His aircraft, an Australian-made Wirraway trainer, was not equipped for flying through cloud, and an hour after take-off from Deniliquin in New South Wales into a clear sky a cold front had moved across the country, enveloping him in thick blackness. He had lost direction (the flight plan was to reach Tocumwal and return) and now, two miles up, he was in a machine that made the noise of a motor mower and was low on fuel. The boy thought not of God but of his mother, at home in Drummoyne, and put the joystick down for a dive along the dark canyons briefly struck by moonlight.

  It was May 1943. Francis Albert Robertson, a nineteen-year-old bank clerk, was three months into his training to be a fighter pilot in the war against Japan. His family was poor – a father thrown out of work by the Depression, a mother from a farm near Taree, an elder brother starting out as an officer in the RAAF. Frank had proved a diligent recruit, and the values of working-class Australia, heavily laced with the Methodism in which he had been brought up, had turned his mind to the moral dilemma he had hoped never to face: how to crash your plane without causing civilian casualties, even if that meant killing yourself in the process.

  He flew beneath the clouds, the plane jolting and juddering as lightning flashlit teeming rain, and tried to find the lights of Tocumwal. A searchlight stabbing the sky some way to the north offered hope, and he headed for it, only to discover that it was a safety beacon in a town without an airstrip. Robertson was far off course, lost and with only a few minutes of fuel in the Wirraway’s tank.

  So what would you do? He realised that bailing out was the best option: to climb to a height from which he could safely parachute, abandoning his plane to crash by itself onto the high gum trees of Kelly country, but also, quite possibly, onto a house or a hospital. The youth had seen the lights of the town below, and he was not prepared to save himself at the risk of civilian life: he would take his chances and go down with his aircraft. So he nosed his way through some low cloud to look for a landing site, with the help of two flares. He descended to five hundred feet, slowed the plane and chucked one flare. It illuminated a railway line bisecting a large paddock. That, he decided, would be his landing place.

  He wheeled the aircraft around in a loop and descended, putting the wheels and flaps down, now flying parallel to the power lines. He threw the second flare, which dazzled him momentarily but showed he was heading straight for a telegraph pole. He stepped hard on the right rudder so the plane began to slew, but too late to avoid the impact, which tore away the engine and the left wing. The rest of the plane bounced high to the right, landing on the power lines. The fifty-six strands of rubber wire cushioned the craft for a second then quite literally catapulted it into the air, from where it descended almost sedately onto the flat roof of a nearby house.

  When Frank came round, he saw a vision – a lady with long white hair and a white nightgown. ‘Oh gosh,’ the young Methodist thought. ‘I’m in heaven.’

  He was in fact in the small bush town of Chiltern, just over the Victorian border, and had landed on the roof of the local nurse’s house. She was woken by the crash and had climbed to the roof in her dressing gown – then fainted at the sight of the burning plane and its pilot. His epiphany over, the trainee gingerly hoisted himself out of the cockpit and slid down to the roof to embrace the recumbent nurse, at which point he lost consciousness – as much from the shock of surviving as from the pain of his bruised arm and broken ribs.

  He came around as an army doctor and nurse were inspecting his injuries, and heard them say, ‘We’ll have to cut it off.’

  ‘Be buggered,’ he interjected, but they were talking about his sleeve.

  He recorded the crash quite laconically in his logbook, adding, ‘Had three days bludge in Wangaratta Hospital.’

  Frank was soon back flying, and was in combat three months later. The official RAAF investigation of his crash made no criticism: he had made a moral and honourable choice. As he told his debriefers, ‘I had glimpsed a town beneath me and I was not prepared to let my aircraft go with the possibility of it causing damage and loss of civilian life.’

  The story and photographs were in all the newspapers and are now on display at the Chiltern Athenaeum Museum. When ABC host Barrie Cassidy, who grew up in the town, told the story – which had become a local legend – in 2015, I was pleased to read that the nurse had been compensated – the plane’s impact had pushed her house a metre off its alignment.1 The only effect the crash had on Dad’s career was to supply his nickname: his mates in 75 Squadron dubbed hi
m ‘Home-wrecker’.

  They marvelled at the newspaper photographs, which became the pictures I held in my mental attic after I first discovered them in my father’s dresser, rooting around, as small children do, among the impedimenta of their parents’ war experience. It is impossible to look at them without wondering how the pilot survived. Given this photographic evidence, I was the by-product of providence.

  Looking back, I cannot say that the photographs of the crash brought me intimations of mortality, but they may have subtly influenced me to seek with determination and accept with gratitude whatever fortune this life would put in my direction.

  1

  Who Do I Think I Am?

  The first Rhodes scholar to sell his semen to a sperm bank with the avowed purpose of propagating his intelligence (and the unavowed purpose of making money) was William Shockley, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist. His theory was that IQ was genetically inherited, though he had already fathered three exceptionally dull children. When asked how this squared with his theory, he replied that his wife was stupid.

  I have always been a believer in Dr Spock rather than Dr Shockley. Nurture, not nature, shapes who we are: specifically those qualities that really matter in our character – integrity, morality, decency, compassion, consideration for others and so on. This life-long belief has not been shaken by developments in genetics: DNA obviously has a bearing on our physiognomy and our health, and may explain our predilection for our own or another sex, or for alcohol or nicotine, but we are essentially influenced by upbringing and education, by life experiences and by what we make of ourselves. Heredity is not a guide – a hereditary monarch, as Tom Paine pointed out, is as ridiculous as a hereditary mathematician or (to update) a hereditary airline pilot.