I’m Michael Kirby and I was a Justice of the High Court of Australia and more recently
I’ve been working on committees for the United Nations.
I’m going Back to School with Student Edge.
Now, reading your biography A Private Life, I discovered you had a particular love of
plasticine as a very young child.
Yes, I got a passionate feeling for the taste of it and I thought it was better than my
mother’s cooking
but ultimately I gave away plasticine and other such vices and I settled down to study
which is what is important to do in school.
Well, how would you describe yourself as a student, growing up?
Not very good at sport. Very good at linguistic things, language things. English, history;
anything where it involved expressing myself. Good at debating. Good at plays.
I went to public schools; my entire education was in public schools.
The local primary and infant school and then the opportunity class that we have in New South Wales.
And then a selective high school. I had a wonderful education.
I’m a great supporter of public education.
Well, I’m assuming you were obviously fairly well behaved, but you did have one run in with
a cane, early on.
Yes, and it was a great injustice and it had a profound effect on me later on;
because it made me a bit of a softie, as far as punishment in the courts was concerned.
I actually spilled some ink. In those days, we had no computers.
We didn’t have even ballpoints. We had ink wells and pen and nib. I spilled ink on the
departmental exercise book.
I tore the pages out.
The headmaster who was standing in for our teacher who was off, saw that the book was
light and he gave me four of the best;
two strokes on the left hand and two on the right.
I kept saying “but but but” and he said “no buts, you have torn pages out of the
king’s property.”
So I was punished. Very unfair, very unjust.
All goes to prove you should listen to those who you are considering punishing, because sometimes
they’ve got something useful to say.
Well, you went to school in a very interesting time in Australia's history.
Not just at the end of World War 2, but it was during the White Australia policy, as well.
I’m curious, what kind of racial discrimination did you see at that time?
Well we didn’t see it because it wasn’t visible, in the sense that everyone in the
class – except one – was a Caucasian child.
That was the nature of Australia at the time. We were overwhelmingly an anglo-celtic country.
That was in fact instilled in the law and it made it very difficult for people of other
racial groups to get into Australia.
There was one exception in my class. Bobby Chong. He was the only boy in the class
of all boys in those days – who could beat me,
and he sometimes came top of the class and I came second, and that was a terrible shock
to my ego.
But we’ve kept in touch and in fact had lunch with him and his wife and he has said how
difficult it was growing up as a non-Caucasian; as an Asian person in Australia at that time,
and how people had prejudice.
Prejudice is based on ignorance and on stereotyping but the way in which we in Australia have
got better on race is by meeting people of different races and realising we all have
so much in common that trivial differences are not really important.
It was also an era where homosexuality was a criminal offence. Can you talk a little
bit of what it was like?
In your book you describe it as “an age of shame and silence”. Was that another,
like the White Australia policy, were these the things that instilled a sense of justice in you?
To seek fairness?
I have to say that I never felt as a gay person growing up, I never felt discriminated against
in the class.
I went to public schools and therefore they were free, secular and compulsory.
They were not religious. I never felt that the other boys in the class were discriminating
against me because basically I knew the rules.
The rules were you had to keep silent, don’t ask, don’t tell. That was the rule.
But it was a very lonely sort of a time and there was virtually no one that you could
talk to.
Even your parents and even your siblings you couldn’t really talk about it because it
was so terribly shameful.
And there are still some people in Australia who would like to go back to that era but
it’s over, and people have to realise that, just as my brother Donald was left-handed,
and they tried to make him write with his right hand until his mother intervened, and
I was gay,
that was just one of those variations. One boy was Asian. People were of different religious backgrounds.
Variety is the essence of humanity. In fact it’s a strength.
Charles Darwin teaches we make progress as a species by the rule of variation.
That is just a feature of the human and other species.
One of your nicknames on the High Court was “the great dissenter” because of the number
of cases on which you were the dissentient.
It’s interesting. A lot of young people are encouraged not to speak up. Not to kind
of argue back. I’m curious from your perspective, what is the value of dissent?
Is it good to speak up? Yes of course it’s good. That’s how progress is made.
When I was growing up, Australians, including in schools, disrespected Aboriginal people.
They regarded them as dirty nomads, uncivilized who’d ultimately die out.
We disrespected women. We did not treat women and see women as complete civic equals.
We disrespected Asian Australians, or Asian people generally.
We were ignorant about their long civilisation. And we certainly disrespected gays.
We called them poofs, we disliked them, we had hostility. And all of this has begun to change.
And why has it changed? It’s changed because people are standing up and they say,
"This is me, this is who I am. Get over it.”
Do you have any regrets from those schooling years?
Well I regret that I didn't done enough sport. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t be so tubby
and I would have a six pack.
I regret not being as close to my parents and siblings as I should have been.
I was just in my room studying. I was a swot.
I don’t think you’re alone in being a teenager who locks themselves away in their
bedroom. I think that’s a pretty wide spread.
Yes, but what are they up to?
Well, not necessarily studying. That’s true.
Well, finally, do you have one piece of advice for students today?
All of us have to think big now. We’re not just living in Sydney or Perth.
We’re not just living in Australia. We’re living in this little blue planet.
Pluto is out there and we’ve just gone past it.
There’s a mighty universe and the fact we have atomic weapons and we threaten each other
and there are dangers is really a very serious accusation of human beings.
I hope the next generation is going to be more insistent on human rights, more insistent
on equality, more insistent on mutual respect and more insistent on peace and security in
our world.
It’s a little blue planet. We’re here alone in this might universe.
We've just got to get used to that and try to make the world a better place.
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