“Your Honour’s personal work habits are extraordinary. It has been said about your Honour that you have always taken on a workload that should have been outlawed by some post-Dickensian Factory Act, and I trust that such an allusion will gratify you. Your Honour has been described as an “old-fashioned intellectual - in the very best sense”. As a classical scholar you are blessed with a passion for and knowledge of history, and allusions to historical events and seminal statements by history’s characters regularly enliven your own conversation and observations.”
The Honourable D. Williams, AM, QC, Attorney-General for the Commonwealth, Ceremonial - Heydon J - Swearing in C0/2003 [2003] HCATrans 563 (11 February 2003).
The seemingly insatiable work-ethic of Justice Heydon was a continuing theme at his swearing ceremony. Thus, we had Mr R.K. Heinrich, President of the Law Council of Australia:
It was my privilege and pleasure to brief your Honour over many years from the time you first commenced active practice at the New South Wales Bar in the 1980s up until the time you were appointed to the New South Wales Court of Appeal. I must say that it was somewhat of a relief when you were appointed. As not being a particularly early riser I am no longer troubled by your kind offers of 6 am early morning conferences.
And Mr B.W. Walker, SC, President of the New South Wales Bar Association:
For reasons not susceptible of rational explanation, the Law School at Sydney University hides its students well underground. Nearly all teaching, particularly at undergraduate subjects at the core, like equity, was conducted in rooms which but for artificial lighting would be nothing but caves. At any season they are unattractive. In the middle of an academic year, coinciding with winter, they are even less attractive. An undergraduate population does not rise early or does not rise early in a good or eager mood. These are all matters of personal recollection on my part.
I share with many others, therefore, still some wonderment at the way at which at 8 am - an hour which is far more extreme than the 6 am Mr Heinrich recalls from a remunerated legal practice - a crowded lecture hall well underground would attend your Honour’s equity lectures.
Speaking in reply, the newly-appointed justice of the court alluded to the same issue:
It is a truism that the families of lawyers do not have easy lives. My family, like others, probably suffered less while I was on the Bench than in the years during which I was involved in the din and dust of life at the Bar. Judicial life is calmer but it still imposes some strains. The Egyptians made the lives of the Israelites bitter with hard bondage and caused them to sigh and groan. Barristers can do the same to judges and the effect flows on to their families.
But we thought we would leave you with Dyson’s penultimate remarks, which seemed for us to sum up much about his rhetorical approach in the 10 years that have followed his appointment:
Sharp memories of my childhood in this city have been revived by the sights and sounds and contrasting smells of Canberra as I walked across to the Court yesterday and today.
It was on another late summer day that my father first walked to work in this city 67 years ago. He was the grandson of a wheelwright and the son of a State primary school teacher. His starting salary as a clerk at the Department of External Affairs was described as being in the range of £288 to £354, £258 actual. The formula shows the eternal wisdom of the Australian people. Not only do they, then as now, take care not to spoil their servants with generosity. They also created the mathematical miracle of an actual number which is lower than the lowest point of the range of which it is said to form part.
(Source: austlii.edu.au)
