Highlights
- Justice Lincoln Crowley has been sworn in as Australia's first Indigenous judge of a superior court.
- The judge thanked his family, including his late father, for their enduring support.
- He mentioned incidences of racism in his early life and career.
He said his appointment was “remarkable” in that it had taken so long for an Indigenous person to be appointed to a superior court position and in the early days of his career, the judiciary had felt like a “a club in which I didn’t fit into.”
Justice Crowley is the 133rd person appointed to the position in the Queensland Supreme Court's 163-year history.
“Diversity matters,” he said, adding that Indigenous people should be represented more at the highest levels of decision-making including politics and the judiciary.
“At the end of the day, justice is what it’s all about, always was, always will be,” he said.
In his speech, he said that his mother, who was watching the livestream of the ceremony in Bundaberg, had named him “Lincoln Kinglsey” after the United States President, Abraham Lincoln, and renowned English author, Kingsley Amis, in the hope that he would one day become something important like “a doctor or a lawyer”.
He said his appointment had been a “…humbling experience but a touch of humility is a good attribute for a judge.”
Justice Crowley said he had experienced racism in applying for a job while still at high school when he found out later that the manager had thrown his application straight into the bin because of his Aboriginality, comments made by a headmaster and during Army reserve training while at university.
He also said that while working as a barrister in Sydney, an older colleague had said, after finding out about Justice Crowley’s First Nations’ heritage: “Oh, so you’ve got a touch of the tar, that’s OK.”
He highlighted “the three Is” – Impartiality, Integrity and Independence -- as being the key attributes needed for the role of judge, but said for him, there was another “I”, “Identity”.
It was especially poignant that his appointment was announced on National Sorry Day and at the start of National Reconciliation Week, he said.
On a lighter note, he said he had been overwhelmed by all the attention his appointment had generated and realised how widespread it was when a friend contacted him to say his name had come up as the answer to a trivia question on the TV show “Have You Been Paying Attention?”
Justice Crowley said: “Judges are not robots” and must bring “human understanding, compassion and insight” to their decisions.
Tribute to father
He said he wished his late father, Major Crowley, could have seen his progression to becoming Supreme Court judge.
His father had been one of the few Indigenous people to rise to such a senior position in the Australian Defence Force (ADF), he said.
From early high school, his father had brought Justice Crowley and his brother up as a single parent after their mother left the family home.
He described this event as “devastating” and not something he had not coped well with.
He said his father “…had loved us in his own way” and had always told the brothers to “…use your bloody brain(s)”.
Growing up In Charters Towers, Justice Crowley said a career in the law had not crossed his mind but that he had known “…what was fair and what was not.”
Justice Crowley thanked his wife Jacinta, whom he had first met when she was a court reporter for the Courier-Mail, and his children because “…without you, I wouldn’t been here today.”
Queensland Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman spoke at the swearing-in ceremony. Source: AAP
Queensland Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Minister for Women and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Shannon Fentiman, praised Justice Crowley’s “outstanding professional journey”.
“His appointment reinforced the quality of equality before the law,” she said.
On a lighter note, she said she was prepared to forgive the fact that he was a “Blues supporter” in the State of Origin rugby league series even though he had grown up in Queensland, in Charters Towers.
Vice-President of the Bar Association of Queensland, Damien O’Brien QC, said Justice Crowley had a reputation for remaining “…calm, measured and unwaveringly polite” however junior members of his chambers were nonplussed about his “choice of music”.
Justice Crowley has had a long career as both a solicitor and a barrister. Source: Pixabay
Queensland Law Society President, Kara Thomson, commended Justice Crowley’s “...lifelong passion for social justice” and said that many Indigenous members of the legal profession had commented that his appointment was “about time”.
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