For The True Believers

True Believers is like a family snapshot album that illuminates familial traits. It is genial, embracing and fiercely loyal, proud of who it is and what it is. It can be a little pompous at times, and sometimes a little teary but its great redeeming qualities are pragmatism and egalitarianism; equal outcomes are subject to constant debate, but the right to equal respect was never in doubt.If there is an argument against publishing an anthology of this kind – a handsome hardback no less with a binding that should preserve it well into Labor’s third century – it is Google. Yet good books show up the internet’s shallow pretensions, hollow promises and limited horizons. Many of these speeches would still only be available in part or in memory if Bramston had not hunted them down in some forgotten archive.What Bramston also offers, and the internet conspicuously doesn’t, is context. It actually matters what happened before and after, and it matters to whom the oration was directed. Bramston tells us in a concise, authoritative introduction to each speech. - Nick Cater, The Australian

Keith Mason has been a solicitor, barrister, law reformer, solicitor-general, president of a court of appeal, law teacher and mediator. He has published on topics including judicial method, legal taxonomy, the law of restitution, and the interface of law, morality and religion. Currently he is a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales and the chancellor of the Anglican diocese of Armidale. This work, Lawyers Then and Now, combines the interests of an amateur legal historian with insights drawn from a fortunate life in the law.