Celebrating 100 Indigenous UNSW Law Graduates 100-Indigenous-Law-Graduates-Event_Booklet_V13_FIN | Page 4

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From the Foundation Dean
In celebrating its 100th Indigenous graduate, the UNSW Law
School marks a milestone in the development of a relationship
with Indigenous Australia that was already in place when the
Law School opened its doors to students in 1971. Although the
Law Faculty was formally established in 1964, nothing further
was done until I became Foundation Dean late in 1969. It was
then agreed that the Faculty should open in 1971, which would
give me time to envision what the new Law School could be
like, obtain the approvals and resources needed to support the
vision, and find and engage staff who could share it and make
it happen.
From the very first attempts to articulate a vision of the new Law
School, it has emphasised the notion that in our community the
law exists to serve the interests not of privileged groups but
the whole of society. Generations of staff and students have
welcomed a banner that quotes from the Dean’s letter to the first
new students, which asserted that a Law School should have
and communicate to its students a keen concern for those on
whom the law may bear harshly, a phrase which in Australia is
an immediate reference to Indigenous people. Quite explicitly
the letter asserted that Aborigines “need their champions in the
law as elsewhere”.
As Foundation Dean with no Faculty yet appointed, it fell to me
to respond during 1970 to a challenge from young Aboriginal
leaders in Redfern, who saw the new Law School’s vision
as directly relevant to the harsh and often illegal treatment
they received at the hands of police. To meet this challenge,
I worked with these young leaders, and others in the Redfern
community, to establish The Aboriginal Legal Service, the first such
community-controlled organisation in Australia. Newly arriving Law
School staff, notably Richard Chisholm and Garth Nettheim, joined
in the work. Originally an unfunded organisation with its only office
and phone in the Law School, it started by providing Aboriginal
residents of Sydney with legal representation against the police.
In the course of time it gave birth, with a little help from Gough
Whitlam, to the network of government-funded Legal Services that
now serve Indigenous people all over Australia.
Like almost all white Australians of my era, prior to the experience I
have just described I had had no meaningful contact with Aboriginal
people. The experience led me to ask myself why there were no
Aboriginal lawyers who could have defended their own people. For
a dean setting up a new law school this led inexorably to another
question: why were there no Aboriginal Law students?
In my brief experience of working with local Aboriginals it was
obvious there was no shortage of people with the requisite
intellectual capacity. However most had interrupted or otherwise
deficient educational preparation, and all were handicapped by low
expectations, both on their own part and on the part of those who
advised them. I wonder if any vocational guidance officer had ever
advised an Aboriginal to stay on at school and aim to be a lawyer.
But even if they had, the students would probably have found
themselves excluded by matriculation requirements or inability to
make the competitive “quotas” that limited entry to many courses,