The revolutionary Heydons. (Ryan).(Column)

RARELY DO JUDGES offer writers a rich source of riveting copy; they are not to be held at It for that. Just as Doctor Johnson maintained that a man could seldom be more innocently employed than when he was making money, so a judge is most likely to be fulfilling the terms of his oath when he is actually judging: that is to say, when he is suffering excruciating hours of boredom, perched up there in isolation in full public view upon the Bench; or when he is slaving silently in chambers writing his judgments, half-buried under law books, affidavits, and transcripts which report all the rubbish which his poor ears have already endured in court. A judge's metier is not found in the heady world of public controversy, press release and television grab.

Day-to-day judicial tribulation amounts in itself almost to cruel and unusual punishment. To my mind, the only imaginable fate unkinder than elevation to the Bench would be that of a judge who had piles as well. (Recall the strange-looking photographs of that grandest of grandees, Lord Curzon: in his white silken breeches, why did he perch so oddly crosswise on the plush and gilded throne of the Viceroy of India? Because the poor man was a martyr to haemorrhoids, that's why. To him, a half-hour vice-regal audience must have been eternity.)

So it is unusual that two members of the Australian judiciary should together furnish the materials for the back pages of this month's Quadrant. The first is the Honourable Justice Dyson Heydon of the New South Wales Court of Appeal.

I have never met His Honour, though I knew his father quite well. Heydon senior (Sir Peter Heydon, 1913-71) was one of the most remarkable (and amiable) of Australia's senior public servants. Widely tipped in Canberra to become head of External Affairs, he was instead appointed Secretary of the Department of Immigration in 1961. In that post, his was the key role in achieving a momentous alteration in Australia's relations with the rest of the world, and in particular our relations with Asia. This was the abandonment of the White Australia policy--that nation-defining dogma which had, for over a century, been central to Australia's notion of itself.

The Labor Party, then facing what seemed likely to be an eternity in opposition, was led by the embarrassing race-bigot Arthur Calwell, and railed against the change. Most conservatives took the revolution in their stride. Harold Holt, the new Liberal prime minister, was relaxed about it; the Minister for Immigration (famous racing cyclist Hubert Opperman) happily adopted it as departmental policy; Sir Robert Menzies, older and crustier, was a bit uneasy, but was reassured--Menzies told me this himself--by the fact that "young Heydon" had the conduct of this grave departure from the doctrine on which Sir Robert had been raised in the nineteenth century. Peter had once been Menzies' private secretary.

In his ambassadorial and other postings overseas, Peter Heydon had often been embarrassed by the White Australia policy, especially by the red-necked, racist expression of it, and by the hypocrisy of the phony "dictation test" used to exclude non-whites. Australia continuing to shout "Australia for the White Man"--as Arthur Calwell and the Bulletin long continued to do--had a short future in the world which followed the Second World War. Heydon would have had small patience with today's multicultural loonies; a nation must be a nation, not a random collection of not always compatible tribes--but crude and unreflecting racism had had its day.

Peter Heydon was a big, gusty, ebullient man, whose rich flow of entertaining political anecdote made some think him indiscreet: not so. He knew exactly how far he could (and should) go; any apparent indiscretion was a calculatedly baited hook.