In 1842, a young Anglo-Irish barrister, finding there were "40 hats on the Munster circuit but not enough work for 20," set sail for the even younger settlement of Melbourne. William Stawell quickly made his mark in the nascent city, becoming Attorney-General within 10 years. He was a leading political figure and Governor Hotham's chief adviser, as the colony moved towards self-government in the heady, unstable prosperity of the gold rush. He was, wrote the Argus, "The Government."

The catastrophic treason trials following the Eureka Rebellion should have sent Stawell to political oblivion, but they did not; soon after, he was elected to the first Victorian Parliament under the new Constitution he had helped to write. A year later, in 1857, he manoeuvred himself into position as the Colony’s second Chief Justice, serving with great distinction for almost 30 years.

The foreword to this biography comments that "as a judge, and Chief Justice, Stawell was ideal for his times." Dr. Bennett reveals Stawell as an epitome of Victorian manly virtues: intellect, ambition, energy, bravery, charm, [and] compassion. He shows why detractors would add arrogance, impatience, and ruthlessness, and why history sustains the contemporary verdict on Stawell’s death in 1889: "one may see in the life now terminated the history of Victoria personified."

Table of Contents

Foreword - Professor the Honourable J.H. Phillips, AC, QC
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
"Dramatis Personae"

CHAPTER 1: "Building Castles in the Air"
CHAPTER 2: "Stawell is Getting on Remarkably Well at the Bar"
CHAPTER 3: "Mr Stawell is Inferior to None"
CHAPTER 4: "A Legislative Declaration of Independence"
CHAPTER 5: "The Attorney-General was the Primary Adviser"
CHAPTER 6: "The People Panted for a New Constitution"
CHAPTER 7: "I Scarcely Know Myself – The Chief Justice"
CHAPTER 8: "Privileges, Immunities and Powers"
CHAPTER 9: "We are Sitting as in London and Middlesex"
CHAPTER 10: "So Great a Debt for Long, Honest, and Arduous Service"

Abbreviations
Notes
Index

"...Of course, things were not entirely the same back then... When a trial of bushrangers broke down upon a crown witness’s recanting, Stawell [as Attorney-General] initiated another charge and set off with five constables to get further witnesses. It is no discourtesy to Attorney General Debus or Director of Crown Prosecutions Cowdery, but a tribute to our modern highway system, to note that Stawell had to gallop cross-country, swim through a rain-swollen river and travel all night and all the following day to ensure success....
And what of Stawell the judge? In his foreword John Phillips, himself Chief Justice from 1991 to 2003, suggests that he was ideal for his times: 'In the latter half of the 19th century, what Victoria needed, and got in Stawell, were judges who were able to dispense justice speedily and without elaboration--men who were also well known public figures prepared to lead the community by speaking out in a variety of venues, on the necessity of the rule of law, as the most vital plank in an ordered society.
Certainly, while Stawell seems to have had a very happy home, he seems to have preferred for his family a crisp Socratic method which have found favour in courts other than Sir Owen Dixon’s. Bennett recounts that, on leave, Stawell and his family holidayed in Europe. One of his boys fell ill and was unable to return to school in London with his siblings. When better, he worried at travelling alone. 'Do you know a train when you see it?' his father asked. 'Yes' was the answer. 'Can you get into it when you see it?' 'Yes' 'Then where is the difficulty?'...
Stawell was an Attorney-General happy to reward his own ambition, but the result is a chief justice of vitality and probity, vain perhaps but not lacking in the three qualities--dignity, fairness and a sense of justice--of the ideal judge."

-- David Ash, NSW Bar News, Winter 2005, 74