President, Australian Law Reform Commission
BA(Hons), LLB (Sydney), PhD (UNSW), AMusA (AMEB), FRSA, Hon. FACLM, FAAL, TEP

Rosalind Croucher addressed graduates from the Faculty of Law in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Monday 13 May 2013, 10.30am.

Our speaker today is Professor Rosalind Croucher.

Rosalind was appointed to the Australian Law Reform Commission in February 2007, and became President in December 2009, after a period of 25 years in University teaching and management, which included her role as Dean of Law at Macquarie University. She has lectured and published extensively in the fields of equity, trusts, property, inheritance and legal history.

Rosalind was the academic member of the inaugural panel that developed the standards and assessment for accreditation of practitioners in the field of wills and probate in New South Wales. She served as Chair of the Council of Australian Law Deans, Chair of the Scientific Committee for the World Congress of Medical Law in 2004 and on the Program Committee for the 8th biennial conference of the International Association of Women Judges in 2006.

She is an elected Academician of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law; an elected Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and in 2008 was elected to the Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners.

Rosalind obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney; and her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New South Wales in the field of legal history. She was admitted as a legal practitioner in New South Wales in 1981.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Professor Rosalind Croucher to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Dean, university staff, graduands, family and friends; it is a great pleasure to be here today.

On behalf of the Australian Law Reform Commission, may I begin by paying my respects to the elders, past and present of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we celebrate today.

In speaking to you this morning, I want to share a little of my own story and of a chance meeting that had a profound effect on me.

Each of you here today recognises the value of education, especially those who are graduating for the second, third times. For me, education has been a constant theme in my life, influenced very much by my own family, and in particular my mother.

I grew up with the value of education imprinted in my DNA. I come from a family of women. My mother is one of seven children, including four daughters. I am also one of four daughters. My mother and her siblings were born from the 1910s to the 1920s, with a 17-year gap from top to bottom. Their father, my grandfather, was the first Commonwealth Director General of Public Health, the numberplate ACT 4 is still in the family. Sadly, he died the year I was born, so I never got to know him. He was an enlightened man, and placed a high premium on the value of education, especially for his daughters at a time when tertiary education for women was not a high priority. The eldest of those sisters said to me her father told her that although he could not give them equity, anything material, he could give them an education. Three of them undertook PhDs. One became a Reader in History at Birkbeck College, University of London. One became an entomologist and researcher in PNG on mosquitoes, with her medical doctor husband. In 1998, at the age of 82, she completed her PhD at the University of Queensland. The youngest had the prospect of doing medicine, but, as she said to me, she wanted to get married and medical study was not amenable to married women at the time, so she did physiotherapy instead. My mother was the second youngest. She is a poet, playwright, novelist and all-around extraordinary woman. At 91 years, she is the last surviving sibling.

In my mother's generation, this was an exceptional standard of education which my grandfather created as the norm for his children. This is not normal for many. Such a standard, as an experience and an aspiration, influenced me profoundly. I recall my mother undertaking her PhD during my school years and the ‘tap tap tap’ of the typewriter long into the night. She won a scholarship for her doctoral study, which she promptly spent on whitegoods, very sensible for a woman with four young children.

My father was the first in his family to go to university, as was my husband and as, no doubt, many of you, or your parents, are today. Here, at a graduation ceremony, we all bear witness to the value of education.

When I was admitted as a solicitor in December 1980, it was not as a lawyer but a solicitor, proctor and attorney of this honourable Court. Sir Laurence Street as Chief Justice, had a famous invocation to the mother with the crying baby, deployed at every ceremony: ‘Madam, do not feel you have to leave the court—this is a family occasion.’

I held a practising certificate only for one year. I wanted to be a barrister and saw admission as a solicitor as the first key step. Well, you can see where I ended up; as President of the Australian Law Reform Commission. I never imagined I might end up here. If you join the dots over the years between then, where you are, and now you might think how natural; how obvious, such a career path as mine has been. Career paths only have a kind of natural order look to them in retrospect. I would never have imagined I would end up where I am now. Mine was certainly not a career path I would have sat down with a careers adviser to plan.

I wanted to be a barrister, like my father who was later a judge, and retired at the age of 72 after twenty-seven years on the bench. I did Arts/Law; starting at ANU on a National Undergraduate Scholarship, but after missing Sydney too much, I finished my undergraduate studies at Sydney University. Along the way, I played lots of music as an Oboist and Cor Anglais player with the ABC National Training Orchestra, Australian Youth Orchestra and then as part of the Opera and Ballet Orchestra at the Opera House. But Tchaikovsky did that in. While the opera season is in repertory, with several operas on at once, the ballet season is unrelenting. Sleeping Beauty was a killer, over three hours and two intervals long. Deadly dull. Poor Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky must have been desperate for a few rubles. Perhaps he was contemplating his own change of career directions, albeit some years earlier, he had been sent to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg to train for a career as a civil servant.

When my daughter was nearly a year old, I applied for a position in teaching at Macquarie University. I got it. Curiously, what secured me the teaching position, at the age of 27, was none of the things that a career path would have mapped out. Not a higher degree, I hadn’t even thought about that one yet, although I did have an Honours degree in History which evidenced research ability; not publications, I didn’t have any of those, all essential these days even to start in the academic world. But I did have teaching experience in music. I had taught a residential summer school in early music, with a group aged from 17 to 70. It was a great background for teaching distance students, who came in for weekends at a time on campus. How lateral was that to appoint me?

With teaching, I was like a duck to water. I loved it. And the rest, as they say, is history. Twenty-five years later I was appointed to the Australian Law Reform Commission, and for the last three years, like my grandfather, I have led a government body.

Career paths are formed through a wonderful conjunction of twists and turns, opportunities, and lots of life’s experiences. Life just turns up different opportunities, and you need to be alive to them. The problem is if you lock your thinking too much into a fixed idea of where you want to end up, you miss seeing the opportunities for diversions that will lead you to that point in which, retrospectively, appears so logical and natural a pathway. You may also miss out on doing things that are really fun. You should never regret things you do; only the things that you don’t.

Life also brings you into contact with the stories of others. Here, too, the lesson is a simple one: to leave off your introspection and self-absorption, listen and learn. I will tell you a story that has stayed with me: it is a story of a Cambodian taxi driver.

I don’t even know his name, but he taught me so many things.

I was catching a plane to the airport, long before the Eastern Distributor had opened, and we were stuck in a traffic jam. I had a plane to catch to present a seminar paper somewhere in New South Wales in 1989. There was important new wills legislation that had just been passed and I became an instant expert, doing CLE presentations all around the state.

I was an excessively punctual person. Punctuality was almost an obsession for me. And here I was really stuck. I could see the hands on my watch going round and round before my eyes. Panic seized the pit of my stomach; my worst fear was going to be realised, “I am going to be late! I will miss my plane!” To allay the sick feeling in my belly, I turned to the driver and asked him about when he came to Australia, and he told me his story.

Cambodia lies to the north of Malaysia and is by Vietnam to the east, Thailand to the west and Laos to the north. My driver’s family had been small business people in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. They just ran a little shop. This was the time of the Khmer Rouge, the extreme Communist regime, under the notorious Pol Pot that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979. It changed the country to ‘Kampuchea’ and killed an estimated 1.5 million people in a population of only 7 million as it worked to create a new society. Capitalists were the enemy. Families and religion were rivals in loyalty to the state.

My taxi driver was 14 at the time. His family, the little family of shop owners, parents and children, were the enemy. They and many others were up and put on trucks and driven out of the city. The whole population was to work in collective farms or forced labour camps. The whole society was to be re-educated or die. His parents pushed him and another boy out of the truck and told them to run away.

He never saw his family again. Their graves, as undoubtedly they are dead, are not , nor will ever be known. They lie with so many of their countrymen and women in the mass graves of the killing fields, probably having dug their own graves

The two boys hid in the trees and fields for several months. Eventually, they found their way to a refugee camp on the Vietnamese border. I don't know how long he was there, but at some point he befriended an Australian soldier. He worked for him in the camp. And through his support he came to Australia.

He then found his way to the Cambodian community in Sydney and eventually to driving my taxi. He had recently married a woman from the local community who had escaped.

He changed my whole perspective on life. He made my concerns seem awfully trivial. I will never forget that journey. How many of you here today, or your families, have stories like these to tell?

Just what would you do if your world ended up like my taxi driver? If instead of sitting here, graduating with your families and friends around you, you were fleeing for your life and your entire value system was thrown upside down?

At moments of profound confrontation and challenge, you will need all the lessons you have learnt. A university education is one that trains you in critical thinking. Quite apart from what you have learnt, the most important skill is the training in how to think. It is that which is the central core of your tertiary accomplishments, and using that skill wisely will help you achieve in the real sense in life.

It may lead you to question and challenge things in public life. It may also lead you to survive when all you have left about you is your wits.

I know today is a day of celebration, and I did not wish to throw a pall upon such a day. I take heart in my taxi driver’s story as one of survival and also the power of optimism.

Be proud of your achievements. Appreciate the love and support of all those who have helped you to this point; your families, your teachers and your university. Value your education and value each day for its own sake.

I hope that none of us has to learn the lessons in the way my taxi driver did. I also hope that each of you learns a story that provides its own epiphany for you.

Congratulations Chancellor on the University’s 25 year. Best wishes to you all.