Tom Hughes QC

There are many biographies of Queen’s Counsel who become judges, but not many of QCs who do not go on to be judges. This biography of Tom Hughes is one of those few. Hughes was much more than a QC, and this makes for a very interesting life story. … The biography is written by Ian Hancock, a non-lawyer, who is an Editorial Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. Hancock has done an outstanding job, giving chapter and verse of Hughes’ 92 years to date. He gives more than that by detailing Hughes’ ancestral family history of four earlier generations in Australia. … The book provides a snapshot of the political and legal landscape over the past 50 years. Altogether, it is an exceptionally enjoyable book for a lawyer to read. Read review… - Robert O’Connor QC, Brief, Law Society Journal WA, September 2016 Most Sydney lawyers have a repertoire of Tom Hughes stories. He became a legend in his lifetime, and was still practising as a barrister well into his 80s. His trademark was a rare ability to persuade and intimidate: judges, juries, witnesses, legal opponents, clients, colleagues, all. Instructing solicitors were fair game, yet it was always an honour to work with Hughes. For more than 50 years he was a commanding presence in Australian and English courts. And as Ian Hancock demonstrates in this excellent biography, he has lived a life of multifaceted eminence. … Hancock explains the root cause of Hughes’s notorious “frostiness”. It is a -symptom of inner tension. To quote Hughes’s diary again: “This idiosyncrasy must be difficult for those around me at the time; but that is the way I am made; and I fear nothing will alter me.” Read review… - Roy Williams, The Australian, 6 August 2016 The subtitle of this compellingly readable biography of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes AO QC borrows the underlying philosophical metaphor of the independent Bar. A barrister is available for hire by those who will pay the fee, irrespective of personal, political, social, or other co- incidence with the client, or approval or disapproval of his or her cause. Hughes’s advocacy style has been described as declamatory and theatrical, a characteristic pose was, with ‘menacing pirouette’, to address the side, or even the rear of the courtroom. Occasionally there would be penetrating wit, as when he said of a trade union hearing which had expelled his client that to describe it as a kangaroo court ‘would be an understatement and an insult to a great Australian marsupial’. Hughes emerges from the book as a warm, generous, and thoughtful man, notwithstanding an initial somewhat austere impression. He had the same secretary for over four decades and the same farm manager for three - a good indication of his human side. Read review… - Peter Heerey, Australian Book Review, August 2016 When preparing for his biographical Koh-i-Noor - big but not dull - Ian Hancock must have been tempted by the modern format involving a peak experience and a flashback to the rest of the life. In the case of Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes, however, Hancock’s difficulty might well have been deciding which peak experience to go for. Intrepid World War II Sunderland flying boat skipper on U-boat hunting patrols over the Atlantic with perhaps a reference to Ivan Southall’s classic of such warfare, Fly West, to supplement the modest Hughes account. Attorney General, during the Vietnam War, famed for using a cricket bat to defend his enclosed home in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill. Contrasting his disciplined career with that of one of his younger brothers, the rambunctious art critic Robert Hughes. His relations, social and legal, with his Bellevue Hill neighbours the Packers. His appearance for Lionel Murphy, surely the only High Court judge in the silk and fustian patchwork of English Common Law (domestic and foreign) to appear in the dock charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Resisting the temptation, Hancock begins at the beginning with the birth of Tom Hughes in 1923, coupling it with his Irish and English lineage to provide an invaluable social history of colonial and modern Australia. … Hancock’s sub-title A Cab on the Rank is judicious for he makes it clear that the other version First cab off the rank does not always apply; he relates how Hughes raised his fee to deter an unwanted client. Read review… - James Murray, Annals Australasia, July 2016 This biographical work of Hughes by Ian Hancock is a fitting and formidable work. It is exhaustingly well researched and superbly constructed. The style is fluid and flowing whilst at the same time being informative and detailed. It is a pleasure to read. That is not surprising given the abilities of the esteemed author. Read review… - Queensland Law Reporter - 22 July 2016 - [2016] 28 QLR Crime, defamation, constitutional issues, commercial litigation, inquiries - for 60 years Tom Hughes was there, a big man with a big capacity for the big cases. … He has attained almost legendary status as being perhaps the last of his kind. The case for reading his biography is substantial on these grounds alone, and reinforced because Hughes’ story comprises many other fascinating narratives. Read review… - Kate Allman, Law Society Journal NSW, July 2016 Hughes’ personal life is dealt with candidly by the author. After the end of his first marriage Hughes found there was no shortage in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs of divorcees looking for another husband but ultimately he entered a very successful second marriage. … Hughes’ comments on judges and colleagues in diaries and letters could be caustic. Two judges of the NSW Court of Appeal are referred to as “an intellectually inferior breed of judicial monkey”. Another judge is described as “ill-tempered, discourteous, suspicious and slow”. A fellow silk is portrayed as a “strange mixture of dishonesty, stupidity and sanctimoniousness”. … This is certainly a book to be enjoyed by lawyers but also by anyone who has an interest in the legal profession and some of the best-known cases of the post-war years. Read review… - Michael Sexton, SMH, 15 July 2016 This absorbing biography falls into three parts: before politics; politics; after politics. The early chapters trace a family saga of almost epic proportions, beginning with the arrival in 1840 of Hughes’s great-great-grandparents as boat people from Ireland. His grandfather Sir Thomas Hughes - like his own daughter Lucy Turnbull a century later - rises to the position of lord mayor of Sydney. His father Geoffrey is a first world war flying ace, who engages in a pitched battle with Baron Manfred von Richthofen, and shoots down von Richthofen’s brother Lothar (who then recovers in hospital). In the second world war it seems inevitable that Tom should enlist in the airforce. Unlike his father, he is not a very good pilot, but he assists in the Normandy landing. … Tom Hughes QC: A Cab on the Rank is splendidly produced, and halfway through comes a lavish portfolio of photographs, the most recent of them from February this year. Read review… - Tony Blackshield, Inside Story, 1 July 2016

Ian Hancock is an Editorial Fellow of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, part of the National Centre of Biography located in the College of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. A graduate of Melbourne and Oxford Universities, he has researched, taught and published in several areas, including African and Australian history and politics, and British imperial history. For ten years he was the historical consultant to the National Archives for the annual release of Cabinet records and has been a member of the National Archives Advisory Council and of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Documents on Australian Foreign Policy. His two most recent books are The Liberals: A History of the NSW Division of the Liberal Party of Australia 1945-2000 (2007) and Nick Greiner: A Political Biography (2013). He has also published chapters on Sir Robert Askin in The Premiers of NSW (Vol 2), 1901-2005 (2006), Sir John Carrick in The Worldly Art of Politics (2006) and Sir Arthur Roden Cutler and Sir David Martin in The Governors of New South Wales 1788-2010 (2009), all commissioned by the Committee for the Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government in New South Wales, 1856-2006. In 2011, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Archives published his monograph Australian Policy Towards Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in 1979-1980 in the RG Neale Lecture Series.