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In the double issue of Quadrant marking the dawn of 2014, Peter Ryan reviewed Peter Golding’s An Unqualified Success: The Extraordinary Life of Allan Percy Fleming, whose various careers saw him at different times “the personal prisoner of German Field Marshal Rommel; journalist; Australian parliamentary librarian; Australian national librarian; spymaster and anti-terrorist leader.”
By way of illustrating Fleming’s deft touch, Ryan writes of Lionel Murphy, the soon-to-be Mr Justice:
It is worth adding one detail to Peter Golding’s account, because it so perfectly illustrates Fleming’s gift for firm executive action when he judged that to be needed. And needed it was, in the case of Labor Party grandee, Senator Lionel Murphy, later a judge of the High Court. I have no doubt about my facts, because Allan himself told me every lurid detail later, at one of our frequent private lunches at a favourite South Melbourne Italian restaurant in Clarendon Street, during his retirement.
Allan found that, on nights when parliament was sitting, Senator Murphy was regularly the cause of difficulties with the library staff on duty; to be fair, with half the staff. Nobody who got to know Lionel at all well could remain long unaware of his proclivity to treat the whole world as his saddling paddock: why should the parliamentary library be any different? One answer might be that the library was run by Allen Fleming.
The regular toleration of larrikin misbehaviour there would greatly have harmed the library’s eager-beaver plans and prospects, but simple discipline is not easily applied to an erring senior senator on his own ground. A formal complaint by the staff union, or a parliamentary question at question time would instantly have created the most harmful publicity; and a sinner as hardened as Lionel might not have been deterred even by that.
Without delay or fuss, amended staff rosters for night duty were prepared. Whenever the Senate was scheduled to sit at night, it just so happened that only male staff were on duty. Problem solved.
With Dyson Heydon’s name much in the headlines, it is good to recall what the party now smearing the TURC Commissioner regarded as the embodiment of judicial comportment and probity.
Ryan’s review can be read in full via the link below.
