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Drew, Michael --- "Reminiscences on Early Legal Education in North Queensland and the Role of James Cook University" [2020] JCULawRw 2; (2020) 26 James Cook University Law Review 1

REMINISCENCES ON EARLY LEGAL EDUCATION IN NORTH QUEENSLAND AND THE ROLE OF JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY

Michael Drew^[1]

Recently, I telephoned the office of one of Townsville’s oldest legal firms (established 1895) and was put on ‘hold’ to listen to the firm’s legal services offerings whereupon I learned that the firm employed many law graduates from James Cook University. That caused me to recall the 1960s era when university law graduates in North Queensland were few and, indeed, largely limited to members of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who obtained University of Queensland law degrees upon their discharge from the World War II armed forces, as part of the transition to peacetime process. Sir George Kneipp was prominent among those few degree graduates practising north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

My memory of the early Townsville University College (‘TUC’), part of the University of Queensland, as a late-teen from Cairns visiting friends who had enrolled at TUC, was of a rather ad hoc set-up which provided lectures, mainly in science, at its Pimlico Campus (now a new TAFE College) and with ‘Halls of Residence’ located in very tired old Army Barracks at Stuart opposite a noxious cement factory and a 19th century prison, on the site of the present Stuart Police Station. Mr Ian Moles, the North Queensland historian, was the ‘Warden’ of perhaps 50 mainly brash young male North Queenslanders who had answered the call of higher education in response to very early 1960s’ high school photographic slide nights depicting earnest-looking exotically bearded male undergraduate Bachelor of Science students wearing corduroy trousers and leather arm-patched houndstooth jackets, smoking pipes in a leather lounge setting. The women wore pre-Carnaby Street ‘sensible’ outfits. No TV then! (When I visited the Stuart Halls of Residence in 1964, I found it to be more Hogan’s Heroes barracks than Magdalene College).

In far-off Cairns I had seen the slide night depiction of Townsville’s version of Dreaming Spires and Aspiring Dreams which was focused on science subjects with no law offerings at all.

My own thoughts of a legal education were initially inspired by observations of a Cairns neighbour, Tom (later Sir Tom) Covacevich of MacDonnells, Solicitors and Mr Justice Lyle O’Hagan, the son of a family friend, who was the Northern Supreme Court Judge in the 1950s and who was North Queensland born. (His father died in the Mt Mulligan mine disaster in 1922).

Most of North Queensland law learning between 1870 and about 1980 was through a system of articles of clerkship, whereby parents of students would sign an impressive wax-sealed document which ‘apprenticed’ a young man (not usually women) to an experienced Solicitor for a term of years of on the job legal training by the solicitor, who himself would have undergone similar training except for the very few who held degrees from southern Universities. (I am told that one of the terms of articles was that the articled clerk had to strictly account for all pencils to his Master, which gives one some idea of the rigours of that employment).

The process of articles education usually took between five and seven years, depending on examination success, whilst living on miniscule wages (eg $21.00 per week in 1973) in a system which would have been very familiar to the novelist Charles Dickens (eg Bleak House).

The articled clerks’ examinations were set and corrected by practising barristers in Brisbane, subject to the Rules of the Solicitors Board of Queensland.

This legal education process produced many fine lawyers, particularly in the smaller towns of the North, but it was very much focused on local legal practices’ bread and butter issues. For example, the arcane legal process of buying and selling cane farms which were subject to laws designed to strictly regulate the industry and the value of its farms (now long abandoned).

The difference in outcome between a Solicitors Board Certificate and a University law degree was that the latter could be an entrée to other types of legal and business employment in Government and private industry rather than a position offering the routine legal services by local firms of solicitors to loyal long-term local clients.

Life as a budding barrister was not dissimilar if one chose not to attend University and opted to undertake ‘Bar Board’ examinations whilst working in some legal context (e.g. Judges’ Clerks and Crown Prosecutor’s Clerks). These examinations were set and corrected by barristers practising in Brisbane and professional success was measured and tested in the crucible of trials before juries!

Whilst most appointed judges held law degrees, usually from the University of Queensland, there were a number who held the Barristers’ Board qualifications.

Women legal practitioners in North Queensland prior to the 1980s were not generally employed in the firms with the notable exception of a very competent Sue Cahill, a solicitor with the firm Dean, Gillman and Thompson.

And so it was the case that, prior to 1969, North Queenslanders wishing to undertake the law degree course offered at the University of Queensland would have two options, either move house to Brisbane and attend lectures at the St Lucia campus Law School or undertake the course ‘externally’ by correspondence utilising lecture notes produced by the Law School and the University of Queensland External Studies Department.

Alas, the external lecture notes, over time, became grossly out of date and out of kilter with the course actually taught at the St Lucia Law School, upon which the annual November examinations were based. Notwithstanding this hurdle, a number of external North Queensland law students prevailed and achieved the LLB degree. Some examples of this dogged perseverance were Mr Doug Suthers LLB, a practising solicitor of many years standing, Mr Peter Toy LLB, a practising surveyor and later barrister and Mr Jim Wheeler LLB, a senior Commonwealth Public Servant, later a barrister with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

In addition to this avenue of legal education, during the late 1960s some TUC students undertaking the Bachelor of Arts course (eg English, History and French) could enrol for the introductory legal subjects offered by the University of Queensland and were lectured by local barristers including a young graduate barrister named Kerry Cullinane, who gave lectures in his inner city chambers to university students and articled clerks on Saturday mornings.

In March 1969, law teaching at TUC made (like the moon landing that year) a giant leap forward with the appointment of Marylyn Mason (soon to become Marylyn Mayo when she married John Mayo in 1970, then a resident tutor at James Cook University’s Douglas Campus University Hall).

Marylyn Mason was allocated a study within the History Department’s enclave on the top floor of the Humanities 2 Building, for administrative purposes only, which she appreciated greatly as she became a great ally and friend of her fellow New Zealander, Professor Brian Dalton, an academic author on American History and dynamic Head of the then academically forthright History Department.

Marylyn Mayo lived for a year in the ‘Guest Flat’ at the Hall and delivered law lectures of very high quality befitting a very conscientious graduate of the University of Auckland (BA, LLB) who had worked for a few years in a private New Zealand law firm and then as Auckland/Northland District Solicitor with responsibilities for the legal aspects of Main Roads. She came to TUC with a wonderful combination of the academic and the practical.

The first law students under Marylyn Mason’s tutelage were not numerous. Martin Smith, a retired Townsville solicitor, can recall no more than ten students in March 1969, six of whom were commerce students garnering a first year subject for their Bachelor of Commerce degree. Martin Smith was one of only two students with a legal career gleam in his eye. He subsequently completed his law degree at St Lucia before undertaking legal employment with the Brisbane and Townsville offices of the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, and then moving to a private firm.

Marylyn Mayo in the late 1960s and 1970s can be described thus: vivacious, attractive in personality and presentation, ‘sharp as a tack’ and an artiste of the one word riposte to any brash male student who vainly attempted to put her down in tutorials and lectures!! She was admired and loved by her students!

I was her student in 1970 and 1971 for the introductory law subjects, Elements of Law and Criminal Law. (She was occasionally assisted by Mr Bob Greenwood (later RF Greenwood QC), a local barrister.

She had an amazing poise, great confidence and a true understanding of the fundamental principles of the law, bringing alive to callow North Queensland youths the concept of the Rule of Law, the separate roles of common law rules and legislation, the legal philosophies of Montesque, Jeremy Benthan and JS Mill and the world-changing thought of Wilberforce. She truly shone in explaining the development of the law of torts through its stages in developing the law of negligence, starting with the late 19th century English cases which culminated in the 1932 House of Lords decision in Donoghue v Stevenson which was required reading for tutorials and the understanding of which was mercilessly probed!

This case-based approach to legal learning had a dual purpose. Firstly the law student was introduced to the incremental process of common law principle evolution, in particular causes of action such as negligence, as well as absolute liability cases (Rylands v Fletcher now subsumed in Australia into the law of negligence), trespass, rights to possession of ‘found property’ and defamation. Secondly, students saw first-hand the shifting sands of opinion in various English and Australian courts and the ‘legal politics’ at play.

Marylyn Mayo was also something else to TUC, its staff and student body alike, namely introducing a cultural difference from the reigning football and horse racing pre-occupations of North Queenslanders. Her interests were in art and film, especially foreign films. Her estate since her death on 26 November 2002 has not only funded the Cancer Council Queensland run Marylyn Mayo Lodge in Cairns but also has made contributions to the Auckland Art Gallery coupled with an annual internship as well as funding the Members Lounge and Art Conservation Studio. Her interests in art and film influenced many others in Townsville from the time of her first arrival in 1969 and on into the 1990s.

Some have characterised Marylyn Mayo as being someone in the early vanguard of womens’ rights. She was so inclined but only to the extent that she led by example. She felt that men and women should advance on their own merits and neither be held back nor advanced on the sole basis of gender. She supported equality and never felt any discrimination toward herself.

Wholesomeness shone from her as she presented lectures and she was the exemplar for women lawyers-to-be. One such person was Althea Harding, a very conscientious JCU law student with impeccable Townsville credentials, who made history when she became the first solicitor to be sworn-in before the Northern Judge in Townsville after she completed her ‘two step’ law degree at University of Queensland. (Previously candidates for admission to the Bar and as a solicitor were required to travel to Brisbane.)

Marylyn Mayo’s introductory lectures in Elements of Law (LA101) included an exhortation for students to make themselves familiar with political issues of both the State and Commonwealth arenas. She highly recommended a 1960s’ morning ABC Radio program which discussed political issues of the day (a field which has now become confusedly over-populated by ‘shock jocks’ who are a far cry from the relatively measured ABC evaluations of the policies of the competing parties in the John Gorton, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen and Gough Whitlam eras).

Marylyn Mayo was responsible for raising a flicker of student political interest.

In 1970, 200 years after Cook sailed past Cleveland Bay and ‘Magnetical Isle’, the James Cook University of North Queensland became autonomous from the University of Queensland, with Queen Elizabeth II signing the enabling statute into law in a large marquee erected on the main football field on the Douglas Campus, which was crowded with ‘town and gown’ dignitaries as well as student interlopers.

Sir George Fisher, the Foundation Chancellor of James Cook University and Chairman of Mount Isa Mines, officiated at the ceremony attended by Mr George Kneipp, an early intellectual force behind the establishment of the University. (Sir George Kneipp became Chancellor in 1974).

Sir George Fisher was a mining engineer from South Australia and had a vision that the University would become the intellectual driver of the mining industry in northern Australia with all faculties in support of that objective.

The establishment of independence from the University of Queensland did not automatically result in increases to the Law teaching staff and it was a number of years before Marylyn Mayo obtained the assistance of her first tutor, Ms Denise O’Donnell. Marylyn Mayo attempted to lobby the local profession for support to establish a full degree course. However, there was little support from that quarter as, unfortunately, it was a widespread attitude that the local profession could never absorb the graduates. When I was appointed as tutor in 1978, I also attempted to gain the profession’s support for a full degree course at the annual North Queensland Law Association conferences. My appeals relied on citing my own example of the disruption and expense I incurred in moving to Brisbane in 1974 and attending lectures at St Lucia before returning in 1978. Unfortunately, it was hard to overcome the profession’s perception that the University would ‘flood the lawyer market’.

Arguments were mounted that the degree course would provide wider employment outside the profession. However, this failed to excite support because it did not necessarily advance the interests of the members of the local profession.

Marylyn Mayo by this time (1979-1980) was focusing her attention on serious legal research into ethical matters, especially the issues raised by the then new IVF science and technology. Ultimately Marylyn’s interest and publications in these matters led to her appointments as Chair of the JCU Ethics Committee and Chair of the Townsville Regional Hospitals Board and a member of the NHMRC Ethics Committee which involved Australia-wide assessments of protocols for medical and other scientific researchers.

In 1978 I took up the post as law tutor in the History Department Law sub-unit. The requirements of the job left time to engage in my own interests in the law, namely environmental matters, Aboriginal rights and welfare as well as Community Radio broadcasting. I also taught a course for Social Workers ‘Law for Social Workers’ at the College of Advanced Education (‘CAE’) which was located on the now ‘Western Campus’ of JCU, but which was originally a State Government Teachers College, before teacher education was taken over by the University Education Department under Professor Ted Scott.

Law for Social Workers has disappeared like a morning mist but I understand Social Worker undergraduates can elect to take the introductory law subject.

In 1980, Marylyn Mayo had her own health crisis which necessitated a long period of leave during which time I attempted vainly to fill the lecturing breach, without tutorial assistance. I was but a pale shadow of Marylyn Mayo.

During this time the University was undergoing one of its many navel-gazing exercises in cutting budgets by establishing ‘CRUA’ (Committee of Review of University Activities). It was aimed squarely at some Humanities courses in History, English and French, with the law ‘appendage’ being a target of the bean-counters. CRUA was derisively dubbed ‘The Cruels’ by the fractious law students of the time who organised protests both in the lecture theatres and on campus generally. A ‘Cruel’ cartoon published at this time by law students bore a striking resemblance to the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the day, who was a renowned Engineer.

The Humanities versus the Science and Engineers divide at JCU had a long history ever since the University was staffed in the mid-1960s by seasoned academic campaigners in the funding dispute field from other established Universities. The campus at Douglas was divided by the ‘Creek’, both geographically and politically, with the Staff Club being neutral ground.

The embryonic law team had been placed within the History Department for administrative purposes. This was indeed fortunate as the History Head, Professor Brian Dalton, was very protective of law teaching and often took up the financial cudgels on behalf of Marylyn Mayo, his fellow New Zealander.

Professor Dalton had an added feisty dimension in that he had been a Spitfire Pilot in the British RAF in World War II. He brought all the charm and deadly earnest of a Spitfire pilot to negotiations with the scientists and engineers on Academic Board where the budget and resources were ‘debated’. One could always detect an important financial meeting of Academic Board because, on the appointed day, Brian Dalton would park his modest Holden sedan in the Deputy Vice Chancellor’s ‘reserved’ carpark. (‘unlawfully reserved’ according to Professor Dalton) and would don his signature pink shirt before determinedly treading down the Humanities 2 top floor corridor towards the University’s Council Chamber. He was very successful in his protective endeavours of the law unit such that CRUA disappeared like a snake in the grass, although there were covert steps afoot to eliminate the law tutor for other reasons.

An added bonus to being part of the History Department was the cross-fertilization of ideas, particularly, in my case, the massive research and publication of North Queensland local history by very active academics such as Ms Diane Menghetti (Charters Towers History) and Dr Kett Kennedy, whose specialty was mining history which was funded to a large extent by Mount Isa Mines. I was delighted when invited to contribute a chapter to Dr Kennedy’s two volume ‘History of North Queensland Mining’ which chapter detailed the early mining statutes of the 1870s to the 1930s and the reasons for some now arcane provisions, some of which linger in modern legislation. Included in the cross-fertilization of ideas between law and history was the opportunity to observe and participate in history exploration projects.

Major Les Hiddens (AKA ‘The Bush Tucker Man’ of ABC–TV fame) was a post-graduate student who supplied a ‘Unimog’ truck for a History Department post-graduate expedition led by Les Hiddens and Professor Dalton in a search for artifacts of the ill-fated Kennedy expedition on Cape York. The locations of those objects (belt buckles, bones and a buried wagon) had been plotted from old documents by post-grad student members of the expedition. Alas, the search using metal detectors and shovels proved fruitless, but it was a nice change from the post-graduate students ‘Donga’ accommodation existence.

On another occasion I was seconded, for my alleged 4WD driving expertise, to transport a post-grad student and two elderly pioneers from Aitkenvale to follow the old Charters Towers coach road in the Woodstock area. Our elderly informants pointed out bush grave sites, old stone houses of a failed 19^th century English immigrant farming scheme near Landsdowne Station (now underwater) as well as the location of several wrecked US Vultee Vengeance fighter planes from the 1942-1944 era.

Law students in that period who undertook history courses benefited, in the opinion of a number of them, from the involvement of history and law in the wider issues of the time, namely the early Aboriginal Land Rights issue and a number of nascent environmental concerns. In respect of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Land Rights, Native Title and the early Kanaka presence in the cane fields of the north, Senior Lecturers Henry Reynolds and Dr Kett Kennedy, PhD student Clive Moore (now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Queensland) and Dr Janice Wegner researched and published extensively on these topics.

Into this heady mix was melded Senior Lecturer in History, Paul Rose’s work on Hitler, Wagner and the Holocaust. (Paul was a true enfant terrible, according to the higher echelons at JCU).

In 1979 Paul took on the University establishment over his discovery of the presence of asbestos fibres each morning on the furniture in lecture theatre HA001, they having filtered down from the high ceiling asbestos tiles. The University rejected Dr Rose’s opinion, based on his reading of the history of asbestos, that it was very dangerous to human health. Dr Rose sought legal intervention from members of the law unit as law lectures were held in HA001. Eventually, Sir George Kneipp caused the removal of the offending material. Paul Rose moved on to the University of Pennsylvania where he died in 2014.

Throughout all of this, Marylyn Mayo proceeded like a white swan untroubled by such disputation but ever the academic seeking truth in her study researching IVF.

Not so her tutor who became involved in land rights issues pre-Mabo and an objection to the grant of a uranium mining lease west of Townsville. On the issue of civil liberties, students were required to read the Lucas Report as an insight into misuse of Police Powers by politicians and police. The later Fitzgerald Report led to the wholesale restructuring of the rotten superstructure of the State policing establishment as well as major reforms to the Magistracy and the Queensland Public Service. Students who had studied the JCU law subjects would have been academically familiar with the type of corruption which was exposed by Fitzgerald. In particular, having extensively studied the separation of powers doctrine at the centre of English (and therefore Australian) governance structures, they would have been amused and astonished at Premier Bjelke-Petersen’s performance as a witness before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, when asked for his understanding of the doctrine of the separation of powers (after decades in Parliament). He was nonplussed and responded to the cross-examiner: ‘You tell me what you think it is and I’ll tell you if you are right’.

As to Native Title, students of the day would have observed the solitary ruminating figure of Eddie Mabo driving a tractor-slasher around JCU grounds in his role as a gardener. His many lunch time visits to Henry Reynolds’ study (adjacent to Law) and the Department tea room may not have excited much interest in the student body but these meetings were fundamental to his case then wending its way through the legal system.

In 1981 a History Department inspired Conference on Land Rights was held at James Cook University whereat a decision was made to take the Torres Strait Islanders’ land rights case to the High Court of Australia. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eddie Mabo’s case was, of course, the vehicle for the elaboration of the principles of Native Title by the High Court of Australia in 1992, a result which was driven by Mabo’s determination and extensive contacts within the History Department.

Eddie Mabo died on 21 January 1992 and was posthumously named Australian of the Year in January 1993 by ‘The Australian’. Eddie’s leading role in the case (despite dying before the decision was handed down) has been memorialised at James Cook University Douglas Campus.

The student body in the Bjelke-Petersen era was energized by the clear breaches of citizens’ liberties which ultimately led to wholesale changes following the Fitzgerald Report. In 1982, the Law-History-English students organized campus-wide protests against the regime and a petition to Parliament was signed by hundreds of staff and students. It read:

To the Speaker and Honorable the members of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland, in Parliament assembled.

The humble petition of the undersigned concerned constituents of the State of Queensland is presented in order to make Honorable Members aware of the disquiet which your petitioners feel in relation to certain recent erosions of the liberties of the citizens of this State. In particular the undersigned see recent executive decisions regarding Education, the right of assembly in public streets, and Aboriginal Affairs as being contrary to commonly accepted standards. Such decisions in our opinion have set Queensland apart from the rest of the nation and as such are seen to be by many as un-Australian.

We pray that Honorable Members will acknowledge our expressions of disquiet and will move to ensure that Parliament be reinstated as the forum for discussion on matters which vitally concern the well-being of our Community.’

(A copy of the petition is buried in a time capsule somewhere in the grounds of the Douglas Campus).

On the environmental front, the law unit tutor put together, with the Townsville Regional Conservation Council (now the NQCC), an objection to challenge the grant of a uranium mining lease at Keelbottom Creek in the hinterland of Townsville, to Minatome – a French mining company.

Many disciplines of the University lent support to the case including a geologist, a geographer as well as input from a Townsville City Council engineer and Dr John Williams, a leading soil scientist at the neighbouring Douglas CSIRO laboratory, who ultimately was a key member of the Wentworth Group. The objector also called a leading London-based nuclear physicist, Professor Kerr.

The case was heard over two weeks in Charters Towers during University vacation and resulted in the Mining Warden, Mr Eric Lendich SM, rejecting the Minatome application on environmental harm grounds, probably the first of many such environmental court cases since 1980 in Australia. (The decision was later nullified by Ministerial decree).

As a result of the decision against a ‘sacred’ mining project my future as a JCU tutor was subsequently examined and discussed in high places in the University without my knowledge, until several years later when my near employment-death experience was revealed by a talkative official at a social occasion, after I had been at the Townsville Bar for some years. (So much for the principle audi alteram partem).

The fact that many academics and other University staff contributed both financially and in expertise, probably prevented my inglorious exit from academe. Also, the Ministerial lease ultimately granted contained onerous provisions such that the mine has never proceeded because of clear dangers to the Charters Towers water supply, as demonstrated by the 1981 Minatome Bund wall failure, leading to pollution of the Charters Towers weir.

On a more collegiate note, the law unit was also responsible for the co-ordination of University resources from both sides of the creek in the years 1978 to 1982 in the establishment of Community Radio Station 4TTT FM, which utilised the invention of a new generation of FM transmitter developed by Dr Keith Kikkert of the JCU Engineering Faculty.

The now late-lamented University printery was vital to the long and circuitous process of putting multiple application documents before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal.

The University authorities were very supportive of this effort as a ‘town and gown’ effort to bring some music and intellectual relief to the airwaves’ cultural scene in Townsville, which was then characterised by wall-to-wall weekend race calls on the three existing AM Stations.

Many academics financially supported the 4TTT FM application process, as did the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor and many members of Townsville’s medical profession. The application called for the deployment of legal skills which came from the law unit in the History Department.

The station commenced full time in 1983 and the following few years saw the proliferation of similar FM stations in Townsville after the advantages of diversity of music and programs became better understood. Without the material assistance of the University, the station would not have sparked the 1980s’ radio station growth in Townsville.

But what of the student body within the early law unit? It included a diverse mix of both male and female students (thanks to Marylyn Mayo) with ambitions ranging from those who intended to pursue law as a career to those who simply sought an education in legal basics by undertaking Marylyn Mayo’s very popular subject ‘Elements of Law’. An example of the latter was an insurance salesman who undertook the course to aid his understanding of legal issue, which would lead him to stormy notoriety in later years. Others were simply putting their toe in the legal water to determine if a career change was possible. I got to know many of the mature age students who were thinking of a change, many of whom were employed in both State and Federal Government Departments in North Queensland.

In recent years mooting has been a popular law student event with the JCU team doing well in national competitions. The first moot was conducted in 1980 in the largest lecture auditorium with Mr CF Wall of counsel from the Townsville Bar (later a judge of the District Court of Queensland) being the Moot Judge. This event was attended by many students across the various disciplines of the University and was enjoyed by all who attended with some of the participating students demonstrating flamboyant thespian-style advocacy.

From the south in the late 1970s there came a large number of students who could not gain entry into southern universities or the recently established Queensland Institute of Technology course (now QUT). Many law students living at University Hall were from Melbourne and had personal contact with Marylyn Mayo as occupant of the Hall’s Warden’s Lodge with her Warden husband, John Mayo, from 1985 to 1998.

The southern student influx commenced in the late 1970s and had the effect of alerting the University accountants to the positive potential of increasing student numbers in law who would not necessarily seek to compete with the local profession. This led to the big expansion of law offerings and increased staff in the late 1980s and the 1990s with the support of Chancellor Sir George Kneipp and Vice Chancellor Professor Ray Golding, who took the view (promoted actively by Professor Dalton) that James Cook University could not be a proper University without a Law Faculty.

And so the Law Faculty came to be, some time after my term of employment ended in 1982.

In the new era Marylyn Mayo was instrumental in persuading Professor Ken Sutton (a fellow New Zealander) to take the leader’s reins of the Law Faculty. He also taught contract and commercial law, subject areas in which he was an acknowledged and well-published expert, with many decades of experience at the University of Queensland, where I had had the privilege of being a student in his excellent contract law lectures.

In the period of 1978 to 1982, I knew many local budding lawyers who went on to practice in the profession as well as in law teaching roles. Early in that period a cohort of young men from the Public Trustee Office in Townsville undertook the preliminary subjects and later graduated from the University of Queensland and QIT. I recall the enthusiasm of Greg Humphries and Daniel Lavery in 1980 when they started on their careers, the former to become a commercial litigation partner at Connolly Suthers (after serving as Justice George Kneipp’s Associate) and the latter a Native Title expert with a JCU PhD as well as an Honours degree in Law from the University of Queensland and an LLM from Ottawa University in Canada. He is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at James Cook University after practising at the Queensland Bar between 1991 and 2016.

I am informed that the firm I mentioned at the outset of this piece, Connolly Suthers, has employed over the years at least 20 JCU Law Graduates, which has shown up the short-sightedness of the 1970s’ nay-sayers regarding the establishment of a North Queensland law college. Indeed, to my knowledge Law teaching at James Cook University has, since 1969, been responsible for educating hundreds of lawyers including Police Prosecutors (for example Senior Sgt Kevin Smith, sadly now deceased), Crown Prosecutors of both the State and Commonwealth offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions, as well as nurses, social workers and public servants, both State and Commonwealth.

It is fair to say that the origin of this now well-established provider of legal education was germinated by the efforts of Marylyn Mayo (the inspiration for many of us). Her placement in the very rich seed bed of the Brian Dalton History Department at a unique time in Queensland history created what has been recently described by 90 year old Rev Father John Maguire PhD (a former JCU History lecturer) as an ‘alive’ environment for both academic and social creativity and progress within a University setting which was striving to establish for itself a place within the old institutions of North Queensland.

Marylyn Mayo’s legacy as the foundation JCU law lecturer is remembered by an annual ‘Marylyn Mayo Lecture’ which was instituted by students in the new Faculty of Law in 1991. It has been delivered by several Justices of the High Court of Australia, the Federal Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of Queensland, various other courts as well as by State and Federal Attorneys-General and a Senator of the Federal Parliament. Many notable persons in law and academe have also contributed to commemorating Marylyn’s vital role in establishing the law degree course in North Queensland.

^&#6[1] Former student, tutor and lecturer at James Cook University of North Queensland 1970-1971 and 1978-1982, retired Barrister-at-law, Townsville Private Bar, RJ Douglas Chambers, 1983-2014.