Kirby, Michael --- "Professor Alex Castles & Associate Professor Gordon Hawkins" [2004] ALRCRefJl 16; (2004) 84 Australian Law Reform Commission Reform Journal 67

---

Reform Issue 84 Autumn 2004

This article appeared on pages 67 – 69 of the original journal.

Obituaries: Professor Alex Castles & Associate Professor Gordon Hawkins

By Michael Kirby*

The deaths of Alex Castles and Gordon Hawkins sees the passing of two of the inaugural Commissioners of the Australian Law Reform Commission.

Alex Castles

Alex Castles held office as a member of the Commission between 1975 and 1981. As such, he played an instrumental part in the foundation of the Commission and in its influential early reports.

Born in March 1933, Alex Castles was raised and educated in Melbourne. He attended Scotch College and the University of Melbourne before taking the J D Degree at the University of Chicago. He returned to the Melbourne Law School as a tutor. He later served as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the Ivy League. From there, in 1958, he took up a post in the Faculty of Law at the University of Adelaide. It was in that Faculty that he was to offer his greatest service to the law. He was appointed Professor in 1967 and on several occasions served as Dean of Law. At the time, the Adelaide Law School was in a period of great strength. Castles was one of its acknowledged leaders. After his retirement from the Law School in 1994 he was made an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow of the University. He later accepted appointment as a Professorial Fellow at the Flinders University School of Law.

His speciality was Australian legal history. He wrote An Introduction to Australian Legal History in 1971. He published a source book on the subject in 1979. His best known work An Australian Legal History was published in 1982. These books on legal history freed Australian lawyers from a perception of their history as wholly derivative from that of England. On the contrary, Castles emphasised the early emergence of local demands for jury trial, representative government and other features of a modern state. He portrayed Australians as beneficiaries of the revolutionary war fought by their American cousins. His writing and thinking concerning Australian legal history was to play a part in freeing Australian lawyers from the conventional legal doctrine of terra nullius in land law. He was always insistent on the need for a readjustment in the response of Australian law and institutions to the reality of the Indigenous peoples and the particular conditions of the continent.

Alex Castles was active in community bodies, such as the United Nations Association, the International Commission of Jurists, and the Australian Institute of International Affairs. After his period on the ALRC, he served as a member of the Dix Committee, which conducted a review of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He was also a long-term member of the Council of the University of Adelaide. On election nights in Adelaide he was a witty, good-humoured media commentator on the perils of democracy in action. He was comfortable in the modern media, making frequent appearances on television and radio. He was a great talker. He was controversial and always engagingly going on about some new bee in his bonnet. Such enthusiastic scholars are relatively rare in the law. He was theatrical, inspirational, annoying and distracting, all in the space of a given five minutes.

On the ALRC, Alex Castles brought his enthusiastic, sometimes quirky but always knowledgeable, awareness of legal history to bear on the Commission’s projects. He was diligent in his participation in the Commission’s early affairs. He could sometimes be quite contrary in resisting perceived wisdom. At the time of his death in 2003, he was the acknowledged doyen of Australian legal historians.

It is a reproach to us that Alex Castles was not adequately honoured in his lifetime for his service to Australian law, in public bodies and in his historical and popular writings. He received no honorary degrees nor civil honours. Australians are sometimes ungenerous to the interpreters of their history. Yet as a legal historian, he helped lawyers and others to perceive Australia’s history as unique, different and worthy of special study. He often said that it was out of our history that we came to see our mistakes and the need to reform them. On his death, he was described by his daughter Jennifer Castles and Dr John Williams, both of the Adelaide Law School, as “a lifelong democrat and egalitarian, trusted by everyone [having] a rare ability to combine the life of an academic with a role in the public arena”.

It was assumed that Alex Castles’ lively, enthusiastic personality would keep bubbling along for decades to come. Instead, at the age of 70, he died. His surviving colleagues in the ALRC honour his contribution to institutional law reform. Generations of Australian lawyers honour the way in which he made Australian legal history a proper subject of study and national instruction.

Gordon Hawkins

The death of a second foundation Commissioner of the ALRC, Associate Professor Gordon Hawkins, occurred in Sydney in February 2004. Coinciding with the death of Professor Alex Castles (above), his passing marks an end of the beginning of the ALRC’s history.

Gordon Hawkins was British born and educated at the then University College, Cardiff, in Wales and at Oxford University. He served in the British Army in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Corporal of the 1^st and 8^th Armies and Captain in the 14^th Army. He concluded his military service in 1946. How such a mild and apparently reticent man could have been a fierce soldier is difficult to imagine. And yet it must be remembered that the island nation produced generations of ruthless warriors who conquered a quarter of the world ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Gordon Hawkins was the archetypical British military person. Totally reliable and original in thought—a good person to have fighting on your side. Deceptive gentleness was his disguise and his armour. Underneath, he was tough and, on principle, unyielding.

He was a Fellow of the University of Wales 1950-1954. He then entered the United Kingdom Prison Service where he served from 1954-1960. He became a real live prison governor. This gave him a distinct advantage when he later came to Australia and taught criminology. For Gordon, it was not theory. It was the management of human beings in the most humane way possible given the available resources and the depressing Victorian institutions available for the task, in Australia as in Britain.

He became puzzled by the theory of punishment and this took him back to academe, at first concurrently with his work in prison administration. He served as Associate Principal of the UK Prison Staff College from 1958-1960. From there he migrated to Australia in 1961 as a senior lecturer in the Law School at the University of Sydney. It was there that I first met him—teaching criminology and taking charge of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney. He lectured me in an advanced criminology unit in my Master of Laws degree at that university. He was in total command of the theory. But he was an early devotee of the need for sound empirical data. He had seen too many prisoners and too many custodial institutions to be content with theories. The most noticeable feature of his teaching style—indeed of his entire character—was his humanity. Taking a puff on the ever-present cigarette in those unreformed days, he would pause and then tentatively propound this or that viewpoint, but always with an edge of kindness and belief in the redemption of most prisoners and offenders. Perhaps in war and in those early days in UK prisons, he had seen too much cruelty to be enthusiastic for still more. One can only imagine his reaction to recent legislative and political trends towards ‘law and order’ in Australia and beyond.

He later went to the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the famous University of Chicago, where he was Visiting Fellow and Resident Consultant from 1967. In that post he collaborated with the outstanding Australian criminologist Norval Morris who had taken up professorial appointment at Chicago. In another irony, Norval Morris died within days of Gordon Hawkins—a double blow for the modern study of criminology throughout the English-speaking world.

In 1971 Gordon Hawkins was appointed Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Sydney. He filled that post until 1984. It is further evidence of the lack of generosity of universities that his notable contributions to community understanding of criminology—as well as long years of teaching—were not recognised by promotion to professor. Perhaps he never applied. He was never one to push his own barrow.

After his retirement from Sydney University in 1984, he continued to serve on the Board of Management of the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra. He also served a term as Senior Fellow at the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California 1982-1984.

Gordon Hawkins was appointed one of the foundation Commissioners (part time) of the ALRC when Lionel Murphy announced the list of first members in January 1975. He was a lively companion in the exciting days of setting up the Commission. As the first projects Complaints Against Police (ALRC 1) and Criminal Investigation (ALRC 2) were within his area of expertise, he played a notable part in the policy formulation that went into them. Likewise, he was a most active participant in the later projects on Sentencing of Federal Offenders (ALRC 15) and Child Welfare (ALRC 18). He was always temperate, sane, realistic and respectful of diverse views. He was a warm and affectionate colleague.

Amongst Gordon Hawkins’ best known books were The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control (1970), Deterrence (1973), The Prison (1976), Letter to the President on Crime Control (1977), Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1977), Prisoners’ Rights (1986), The Citizen’s Guide to Gun Control (1987) and Pornography in a Free Society (1988). Many of these books were published jointly with his friend Norval Morris. He became a notable broadcaster and television documentary anchorman.

Gordon Hawkins was a keen swimmer. He lived at Manly in Sydney and had a permanent suntan. He is survived by his wife Stephanie and three daughters. He was civilised, suave and urbane. He was quite a contrast to Alex Castles but they got on well. Fortunate was the ALRC in the mix of its first members. To lose two of them in the space of a short interval in early 2004 is a big blow to those who were ‘present at the creation’. But each of them played an important part in helping to make the law in Australia more humane, just and up to date. We who are left honour their vivid memories.

* The Hon Justice Michael Kirby is a Justice of the High Court of Australia and was the foundation Chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission.