The Trials of Justice Murphy

Launch of Stephen Walmsley's book The Trials of Justice Murphy ... Legal and political history ... Mixed crowd from the law, journalism and literature receive David Marr's speech in frosty silence ... Despite the jury verdict, the question remains, why did Lionel do it? ... Marr's launch speech, unexpurgated 

Marr, in launch modeA gathering of celebrities, semi-celebrities, legal types and others assembled at Maurice Byers Chambers in Sydney's MLC Centre for the launch of Stephen Walmsley's book The Trials of Justice Murphy. 

Walmsley is a retired District Court judge and the son-in-law of Judge Paul Flannery whose allegations were among the reasons Murphy was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice - in that he sought to improperly influence Flannery and the then chief magistrate Clarrie Briese in criminal proceedings against his little mate, solicitor Morgan Ryan. 

It was a stormy period for the judiciary with the High Court's third most senior judge in the frame. There were senate hearings, a trial, a conviction on the Briese allegation, an appeal, a trip to the High Court, an acquittal, followed by the Stewart Royal Commission into The Age tapes, a parliamentary commission of inquiry into 14 separate allegations, which did not finish it's investigation because of Murphy's impending death from cancer in 1986. 

The release of documents before the parliamentary commission is now being considered by the parliamentary presiding officers. 

At the launch we found, among others, Ian Barker, former DPPs Nicholas Cowdery and Ian Temby, Justice Anna Katzmann, journalist Kate McClymont, author Anna Funder, Rosemary Flannery (Paul Flannery's widow), Judge Leonie Flannery (aka Mrs Walmsley), and assorted members of the Sydney Oyster Bar. 

Absent were Justice Virginia Bell who wrote the forward to the book and reporters Wendy Bacon and Evan Whitton, who wrote as much then about the trials as Walmsley has written now - in this the 30th year since Murphy died. 

Journalist and biographer David Marr did the honours and cut the ribbon for the launch of the book, published by LexisNexis. His speech was received frostily, or as Marr himself said, "it went down like a cup of sick". 

Rosemary and Paul Flannery

Here's how Marr launched the meaty volume ... 

"This is a book about how Lionel got away with it. 

It's a lucid, balanced, detailed and – as far as I can tell – absolutely accurate account of how a High Court judge committed a serious crime against justice and got away with it.  Not unscathed, of course. But not imprisoned.  

And Wran got away with it. And Foord got away with it. And in one way or another the system blessed a well connected little bugger facing forgery charges who is living out a blameless old age in a house in Neutral Bay that Stephen writes about in oddly glowing terms. 

The author: WalmsleyAnd we can't reassure ourselves that Sydney has somehow cleaned up its act in the 30 years that have passed, because we meet this tonight in the shadow of Megan Latham's forced resignation from ICAC. 

In 1983 I was the ex-editor of the National Times. We wont go into the sad story of my downfall. It involves Bill Priestley and a Patrick Cook cartoon and various other things. But I was an ex-editor given a rare privilege by Fairfax: I was allowed to go back to the paper I had edited as a writer. 

I was there in [Jones] Street when there was – even by Wendy Bacon's standards – a great sense of excitement coming from her corner of the room. But her desk was protected by such a force field you couldn't get even a hint of what was going on. We learned what it was in November when the paper broke one of its greatest stories: Big Shots Bugged. 

And at this point the first gross injustice in this narrative occurred: we were the first to report them yet ever since they've been known as The Age Tapes. 

Forgive me while I indulge a little journalist's self pity. These were terrible times for us with our friends haranguing us that us we owed it to the nation, we owed it to the Labor Party, we owed it to the very idea of progress itself - to shut up about Lionel. 

I remember one young woman assuring me that I was worse than Goebbels for the stories I was writing about Lionel. She went on to have a distinguished career in the law reform business. 

Another great friend rose from my table screamed at me and the National Times for the terrible things were writing about his hero, and tore out of the house. It was 20 years before we had another congenial word to say to one another. 

I'd completely forgotten this detail until I found it in the book: we – not the lawyers but the journalists - were blamed for giving Lionel cancer. The more nuanced, the more scientific accusers, would admit that maybe he had cancer but the journalists encouraged it to spread more quickly. 

It still goes on. Jenny Hocking in her 2000 biography of Murphy muses that the National Times was engaged in an operation to deny Lionel the chief justiceship on the retirement of Harry Gibbs. Now really, Jenny: as if. And a phone call to discuss the accusation before you published it would have been welcomed. But really, as if. 

In contrast, ladies and gentlemen, this book is the real deal. And while ever Lionel troubles the memory of this country, they will be quoting Walmsley on Murphy. 

It's all here, every meticulously recorded step of the way. I was telling Stephen yesterday that I have never read a book before that made me feel quite like this – not a reader so much as a juror. This is a judge's book: after the inquires and the trials, this is the great summing up. 

It is the story of a progressive politician ruined by Sydney. I do not blame his upbringing. I do not blame his education. I do not point to faults in his character. Murphy ran the Double Bay branch of the party, as far as any of us can tell, blamelessly. But Sydney got into his bones. 

Sydney is a place where one judge asks another judge to meet him at City Tats to deliver a message that the premier wants a favour for a mate facing trial. That is still the city we still live in. 

Lionel's problem was that he took Sydney's ways to Canberra. Now he wasn't the first and he wasn't the last to do that and come unstuck. I'm not going to go down a list of names of those people – perhaps Sydney Labor right wing figures –because I know there are men and women in this room hungry for a defo brief.

Let's just say, Murphy went to Canberra did some fine work and came undone courtesy of some cops who - and here we encounter another sub plot as old as this city – were willing to break the law, this time to make what to this day are wrongly known as the Age Tapes. 

Somehow or other, God knows how, the press got hold of précises of those tapes – why couldn't they leak us the transcripts?! – and that's the reason we are here tonight. Nothing much was happening behind the scenes. Everything happened once they were leaked. 

Stephen makes no secret that his book is a homage to Paul Flannery, a man who I wrote in 1984 - and Stephen is kind enough to quote here - "was credited with a quality that set him apart from his colleagues at the bar: he was extremely good-humoured and without malice." 

It's also a homage to Clarrie Briese and to the judges and magistrates who,  though leant on by Lionel, though stroked by this mighty judicial figure, told him, though not in so many words, to fuck off. 

And because Stephen couldn't resist it, it's also a herogram to the barristers who saw Lionel walk free - in particular that magician Ian Barker who is standing here. I now know his secret courtesy of Stephen Walmsley, and it's such a simple trick. 

It wasn't getting Lionel to take the illiterate's way out, the unsworn dock statement. (And though you know it's coming your heart sinks when you reach it in the book. You cannot believe that a High Court judge would be standing there making an unsworn statement.) 

No. It was Barker's instructions to his team not to carry any files into court - particularly not ring clip binders – so that they would look astonishingly confident, almost negligently confident that they were going to win. And it worked. 

Stephen, there are one or two errors in the book which I regret having to point out at the launch. 

I've always worried about the shortcomings of the cultural life of my old fellow articled clerk from Allen, Allen and Hemsley. And here is the glaring evidence on page 378 where the author reports that one of the jurors at the second trial was excused because he was "a singer in a ballet company". 

Stephen, was that your error or David Hunt's?

Walmsley (off): "That was from The Sydney Morning Herald." 

OK. A moment's inattention by a journalist. Very puzzling. 

And frankly there's also not enough of me. Enough is never enough and back then I could still write an elegant sentence. Don't know what happened after that.

And perhaps, just perhaps, you might give a co-author credit to my old colleague Evan Whitton because his stately – and it has to be said astonishingly catty – observations are beautifully peppered through this book. 

Stephen, congratulations. In the thirty years since these unhappy trials, we've made up our minds about Lionel. He was a crook. And the great truth your book points to in the most subtle way is that juries acquit, but history doesn't." 

Here's how Justinian saw the unfolding Murphy saga in 1985 ...