Roddy Meagher - tall tales and true … Keddies man dumps Woollahra pile … UK clients given cash before they win cases … Manbags on the High Court … Solicitor General gets a frothy top … Revenge of the Queensland bogans … Goings on …
Meagher: more celebrations (pic by Mark Tedeschi)
THE Roddy Meagher legacy machine rolls on.
April 23 will see the old law school at the University of Sydney buzzing with devotees of the deceased judge as they celebrate the launch of Damien Freeman's biography, Roddy's Folly - R.P Meagher QC, Art Lover and Lawyer.
The launcher, fittingly, is Hon Tony Abbott, fellow old boy of Riverview and St John's College.
Dyson Heydon, who gave the panegyric at Meagher's funeral mass at St Mary's, is slated to deliver a "recollection of Roddy as student and scholar at the university, at the bar and on the bench in Phillip Street".
We can never have too much of Dyce and, fortunately, he has also written the forward to the book, which also contains "illustrations by the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG".
Apparently these "previously unpublished" works are doodles done while "listening" to submissions at the time Kirbs and Meagher sat on the Court of Appeal.
NSW Governor Prof Marie Bashir is also slated to speak at the launch.
Roddy’s Folly draws on interviews with a range of luminaries, including: Laurence Street, Smiler Gleeson, Spiggsy Spigelman, Cardinal Pell, Pierre Ryckmans, Leonie Kramer, Edmund Capon, Glenn Murcutt and John Howard.
The biographer is a celebrated scholar and writer - Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a lecturer on "beauty, art and aesthetic experience" in that university's philosophy faculty.
His previous book is Art's Emotions: Ethics, Expression and Aesthetic Experience.
He's also working on a new tome: Robe River Rambo: Charles Copeman, the New Right and the Industrial Relations Club in Australia.
Freeman studied law, classical Hebrew, Aramaic and music. He worked for a member of the House of Lords and the NSW Court of Appeal.
Connor Court is publishing the Meagher bio. It's a snip at $39.95.
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Roulstone home hammered for $9 millTHE family pile of Scott Roulstone has gone under the hammer, fetching a miserable $9 million.
Scott is the former VP of the NSW Law Society, former principal of Keddies and now plies his trade somewhere in the bowels of Slater & Gordon.
The Woollahra manor house has five double bedrooms, "lush" private gardens, a pool, cabana and tennis court.
There's also a sandstone butler's pantry, "an open plan gourmet marble eat-in kitchen", "dual studies", a library plus "soaring ceilings".
The over-wrought ediface passes for "style" in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
Property experts tell me the Edgecliff Road property, which was owned by Mrs Roulstone, sold at the same price for which it was purchased - so with agent's fees, stamp duty and inflation, it looks as though the vendor has taken a bit of a bath.
Scotty, and the other former Keddies' partners, have been doling out slabs of cash to former clients who claim to have been overcharged by the law shop.
The urgent need to put things right has seen payouts soar to over the $1 million mark.
To add to the pain, Scott, Tony Barakat and Russell Keddie have been fighting an expensive Supreme Court case in an unsuccessful effort to head-off proceedings for contempt of court.
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TALKING of intriguing personal injury ramps, Leverhulme, our man in London, has sent me a clipping from the back of the Daily Mirror.
A compo law shop, fetchingly called ClaimsForYou, is advertising its wares and is "so confident we will win your claim we'll give you an immediate £300 cash advance, [small print] … once the case has been admitted".
Handing cash to clients before running a case - a dignified marketing ruse that's sure to catch-on here.
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Chief Justice clutching a bag
I SPOTTED the Chief Justice of the High Court striding across Elizabeth Street, Sydney.
What's that in his left paw?
Has he succumbed to the lure of the "manbag"?
It didn't seem a particularly swish variety of the male clutch purse - vinyl, maybe with a touch of velcro.
Former solicitor general David Bennett also has been caught in public with a manbag dangling from his wrist, yet it was an accessory that never really gripped the imagination of style mavens.
Are there any other manbags on the High Court?
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Solicitor General's frothy productTASWEGIAN solicitor general Leigh Sealy SC has been working on the development of a vastly superior line in his range of Tassie ales.
The latest has a luxurious, foamy, head - while the taste has overtones of malt and Patterson's Curse with delicate hints of corroded bath enamel.
In 2009 we revealed the emergence of Sealy's "Deacon's Digit Dark Ale".
At that stage he was also fine-tuning the formula for a new drop: "The Pope's Toe - Strong Hobart Ale".
This took a platinum medal at the Hobart Show.
Now this latest, which comes in the famous bottle bearing the Sealy family crest and the words, "Quality Product".
The glassware looks to have been purloined.
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QUEENSLANDERS are rightly proud of their artful ways.
That's why (Can Do) Campbell Newman was elected with such a thumping majority.
Already the pint-sized premier is strutting about giving lectures on climate change and carbon taxes.
It seems Newman may have attracted votes from the tiny handful of people who comprise the Sunshine State's bogan community.
Democracy at workOne of Justinian's field agents, who was recruited as a scrutineer during the Queensland poll, snapped this ballot paper.
It may seem peculiar to those who haven't closely followed affairs north of the Tweed, but the vexed scrawl is connected to former Premier Anna Bligh's attempt to "clean-up" the Gold Coast Indy V8 supercar race.
Apparently young women on high-rise balconies close to the speedway have been in the habit of flashing their breasts to the adoring rev-heads below.
In 2008 Bligh said this sort of thing had to stop.
The then premier thought that breast exposure would ruin the Gold Coast's "international reputation" and that if police could identify any lewd person they would be arrested.
This ukase inflamed the locals. The website of The Bowen Hills Bugle was flooded with indignant responses from people who insisted that intoxicated women had a god given right to expose themselves in a freedom loving county.
Come the 2012 ballot, they struck - extracting their high minded revenge against Nana Bligh.