Rob Lynch

Let me begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and their elders past and present, on whose ancestral lands the university now stands. Deputy Chancellor, Mr Brian Wilson; Vice Chancellor, Professor Attila Brungs; Professor David Brown, Associate Dean Business Practice and External Engagement in the Business School; Professor John Daly, Dean of the Faculty of Health; Mr Bill Paterson, University Secretary and Director of Governance; Associate Professor Joanne Grey, Chair of the Academic Board; Dr John Lake, UTS Council; my former colleagues and friends, some of whom are here today; and the professional and academic staff of the university; distinguished guests, including Associate Professor Bruce Hayllar and Joan Hayllar and my wife, Professor Sandy Lynch; parents, family and friends of the graduating students; and most importantly, I wish to acknowledge the graduating students on this day.

This is an occasion which, as the Deputy Chancellor has said, marks a very significant milestone in your life’s journey. To all the graduates in business, in leisure and tourism management, and in nursing, I extend my heartiest congratulations for your hard work, your perseverance, your creativity, and perhaps on occasion, a little bit of luck in making it to this auditorium today. It is a long and difficult journey to this point, and each of you graduating will know that you were supported and assisted by many others along the way, again, as the Deputy Chancellor has so well said. The help may have come from your family, from your friends, fellow students, a student counsellor, an academic staff member, or many other people both inside and outside university. So your achievement, then, is also an accomplishment shared with a wider group who’ve helped you to make a difference to your own life and hopefully later to that of others. I trust that you enjoy the shared celebration of your accomplishment today, and I’ll return to the idea of making a difference. I also want to acknowledge the kind words of the Vice Chancellor earlier in relation to the Distinguished Service Award, which I’m very honoured to receive. I’m aware of the outstanding contributions made by other recipients of this award, and therefore I’m somewhat humbled to be in this position. It’s not something that I’ve worked towards or ever thought about receiving in relation to the many tasks that I’ve happily undertaken in my 32-year association with UTS. I also greatly appreciate and thank those colleagues who thought enough of my contributions to put my name forward for this award, and may I also pass on my thanks to Deputy Chancellor Brian Wilson, and to the UTS Council, for bestowing this award upon me.

At the outset of what I have to say today, I wish to come clean and let you know that in my 48-year career as a student and academic, I’ve been to many graduation ceremonies, and I have listened to many occasional addresses. Indeed, I’ve listened to more than 100 of these, and I have to admit that not all of these speeches kept me or the rest of the audience fully awake. And so I will be very forgiving if my speech leads some of you to nod off; indeed, I already forgive those of you who’ve drifted down that pathway. But along the way I’ve been privileged to listen to some memorable speeches, and the ideas in these have remained with me. Today I’m going to refer back to two of these speeches, and offer my interpretation of what I took from a speech in 2001 and another in 1993.  Both speeches were about the idea and importance of making a difference in the world, and how this has been achieved, even by an individual’s small action. How can graduates in business, in leisure and tourism management, and in nursing, or indeed any citizen, influence ethical change in society? Aren’t the problems surrounding us just too big for individual actions to make any difference?

The two speeches I will draw from are first former Deputy Vice Chancellor Brian Lowe’s 2001 occasional address at this very point where I’m standing, and an earlier address by the Honourable Hal Wootten in 1993 who was a former Chancellor of the NSW Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1988. And during his chancellorship, the NSW Institute of Technology achieved the university status under the name University of Technology Sydney. Hal Wootten was also Foundation Dean of the University of NSW law school, a Supreme Court judge, he was Chair of the Australian Law Reform Commission in NSW, and an influential member of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Wootten’s life’s work is focused on justice, as was his 1993 occasional address here at UTS. Unfortunately, I wasn’t present at his address, nor was I able to gain access to the text of the speech, and have instead relied on a couple of paragraphs in Brian Lowe’s excellent address drawing on what Wootten had to say in 1993, and you’ll have to excuse me here for quoting Brian Lowe, who is quoting Hal Wootten, but academics do that sort of thing. In 1993, Wootten wrote ‘Every citizen can give the law and society generally little nudges in the right direction. Without them to prepare the ground, judges and statesmen would not be able to seize the opportunities for more definitive action.’ It’s the idea of citizens giving law and society a little nudge in the right direction that has stayed with me, and I find it a liberating idea, which I’ll try to illustrate today.

To make his point about the power of ordinary citizens to create context for legal and societal change, Wootten traced the judicial removal of slavery in England in 1772, arising from a judgement of the Chief Justice Lord Mansfield. Britain has a long history of slavery, but within the Britain of the eighteenth century, it was not widespread on the home shores. However, the nation’s businessmen and entrepreneurs were heavily involved in the West African slave trade, and Britain profited greatly. African slaves were not bought or sold in London itself, but to use contemporary language, they were traded offshore. The legal status of African slaves in England was unclear, until what is known as the Somerset case in 1772. The slave Somerset escaped from his master Charles Stuart while in England. Stuart had him re-captured and imprisoned with the intention that he would ship him to Jamaica to be resold into slavery. However, while in London, Somerset was baptised and his three godparents took up his case and issues a writ of unlawful detention. As a result, Lord Mansfield, a chief justice, had to judge whether Somerset’s abduction by Stuart was lawful or not under England’s common law. No legislation had ever been passed in England as it had else in the world with regard to establishing slavery. The case received widespread national attention at the time. In his judgement in 1772, Mansfield held that ‘the state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but it is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconvenience therefore may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England, and therefore the black’ – and he was referring to the slave, Somerset – ‘must be discharged.’ With this judgement, Lord Mansfield declared it illegal of the slave owner to forcibly remove the slave from England, and it’s Lord Mansfield’s name that’s gone down in history as making the first major anti-slavery decision in English law. Hal Wootten’s point is that Lord Mansfield would not have been able to make his judgement without many hundreds, if not thousands, of small and large acts of resistance and protests against slavery in England prior to the judgement. Slaves themselves resisted their status and escaped. People started anti-slavery groups. Smaller legal cases were run against slave owners. Widowers that had inherited their late husband’s West African slaves now felt free to speak their anti-slavery views. Indeed, women were central to the whole anti-slavery moment at a time when they didn’t have the vote. Lord Mansfield also had a – in addition to those matters, there were conversations and arguments which took place in pubs, in clubs, on the street, and they focused on the immorality of slavery. Pamphlets were written and newspaper articles denounced slavery. Lord Mansfield also had a grand-niece; her name was Dido and she was black and born into slavery as the illegitimate daughter of his nephew. Dido lived with Lord Mansfield and his wife for nearly 30 years, and the 2013 British movie Bell presents a version of her possible influence on his anti-slavery decisions.

In his 2013 biography, Norman Poser presents a picture of a conservative chief justice who considered slavery odious but was reluctant to make any decisions on the status of slaves that might prejudice Britain’s vast commercial interests in the West Indies and the American colonies. If he was such a conservative, then the myriad of little nudges aimed towards the illegality and immorality of slavery may indeed have created a climate which was difficult for Lord Mansfield to ignore in making his decision. Again, according to Poser, many people believe that Mansfield had put an end to slavery, and the decision gave the abolitionists the impetus they needed to lobby parliament to outlaw the slave trade in 1807, and eventually to abolish slavery all together throughout the British Empire in 1834. There can be no doubt that the thousands of anti-slavery actions of the time formed a web of little nudges which greatly facilitated the landmark legislation of 1834, abolishing slavery. And to conclude, I’m returning to the words of Hal Wootten in a speech he gave at the University of NSW in 2008 – I’m not doing this through some laziness of thought, but because he has something very important to say, and he says it very well: ‘Consciously or not, everyone seeks meaning in their lives, although they find it in a great variety of ways. Aware of it or not, everyone has a role, however small, in historical changes that inexorably sweep through and shape our world. In 1994, when I’ – Hal Wootten, that is – ‘was still at an impressionable age, Lord Wavell published an anthology of versus entitled Other Men’s Flowers. I too have gained much comfort, inside and help, in expressing my thoughts by appropriating other men’s flowers.

For me, one unwitting florist was Lord Diplock who remarked that a judge seldom had the opportunity to say, like Lord Mansfield, “The air in England is too free for any slave to breathe. Let the black go free.” But every now and then there is the opportunity to give a little nudge that sends the law along the direction it ought to go. I believe it is not just judges, but every man and woman who, in everything they do, can give the world little nudges that, in conjunction with all its other little nudges, can affect where the world goes.’ To each of you graduating here today, I wish you every success in the little nudges you will give in the context of your profession, and of your national and local communities. Thank you.