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DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES
SEX, POLITICS AND RELIGION
Susan Magarey
Susan Magarey is Adjunct Professor in History at Adelaide University, where she was the
founding editor of Australian Feminist Studies (1985–2005). She is the founder of the
Magarey Medal for Biography. Currently she is writing a history of the Women’s Liberation
Movement in Australia.
Correspondence to Susan Magarey: susan.magarey@adelaide.edu.au
This address was given at the Fourth Annual Lecture of the History Council of South Australia, on 24 July
2007, at the State Library of South Australia.
The subject of the biography that Kerrie Round and I have recently completed is Dame Roma
Mitchell (1913–2000), Commander in the Royal Victorian Order (2000), Companion of the
Order of Australia (1991), Dame Commander of the British Empire (1982), Commander of the
British Empire (1971), Queen’s Counsel (1962–65), Judge of the Supreme Court of South Australia
(1965–83), Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission (1981–86), Chancellor of the
University of Adelaide (1983–90), Governor of South Australia (1991–96): probably the most
decorated and distinguished woman in Australia’s history.
1
She was also very widely admired and loved throughout her life: popular at school, and as
a university student she went on to gain singular affirmations of affection and respect. At the
third Commonwealth and Empire Law Conference, an English QC prefaced his remarks with
the salutation: ‘Mr Chairman, gentlemen and members of the Roma Mitchell fan club’.
2
When
he retired, Sir Herbert Mayo passed on to her his judicial robes, as a tribute (Powell 1991: 8).
When she was being sworn in as Governor of South Australia, the pomp and ceremony on the
lawns of Government House was interrupted from time to time by shouts, wolf-whistles and cat-
calls from the Myer Centre building site across the road. This was the Builders’ Labourers Fed-
eration shouting ‘Good on ya, Roma’.
3
Let me bring her back to you for a moment in this video-clip.
4
This is the opening of an ex-
tensive interview conducted in Government House in June 1993. Interviews like this, together
with the speeches that Dame Roma made during the time when she was Governor, many of
which included personal reminiscences, provide us with the story that constitutes her public life,
a biography of the public person. That, in itself, would be quite a narrative, for her public life
was a succession of pioneering triumphs. It could readily be said – indeed, Kerrie and I have said
– that she was forging a new kind of womanhood, leading the changes which saw the gradual
acceptance of women being anything but bare-foot and pregnant, chained to the kitchen sink.
But none of this tells us much about what it was like for her, being such a pioneer. And it
tells us absolutely nothing about what she was like as a human being: what was it like being her
friend, her sister, her associate, just for instance? What family did she have? How did she live?
What got her up in the mornings? What made her bells ring, what pushed her buttons, what
made her laugh, flush, flinch or gag?
When Kerrie and I embarked upon our research, we wanted, of course, to compose as full a
story as possible of Dame Roma’s public life. But if that was all we had aspired to, we would
probably have completed our project three years ago, instead of now, after six years of work.
ADDRESS
HISTORY AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1, 2008 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS
12.1
We were far more ambitious. Dame Roma left a considerable collection of papers and photographs
to the Mortlock Library. We hoped these would tell us about Roma Flinders Mitchell the person.
We wanted to write a book that would allow you, our readers, to understand her. Endeavouring
to understand Dame Roma compelled us to raise the three topics that used to be unmentionable
in polite society, the topics that I will address here: sex, politics and religion. I will take them in
the reverse order.
RELIGION
Roma Flinders Mitchell was a Catholic. She drank in her faith with her mother’s milk. Her
mother, born Maude Imelda Victoria Wickham, grew up as Catholic with her maternal grand-
mother in Mount Gambier, coming to live in Adelaide when she left school.
5
In 1908, bright-
eyed Maude married tall, handsome law student, Harold Flinders Mitchell, son of a judge, a
prize-winning graduate of the exclusive Anglican St Peter’s College, and an active member of the
Church of England.
6
So it was a mixed marriage.
Did it matter? Yes, it did, even in South Australia where the proportion of Catholics in the
population was considerably smaller than in other Australian states: 14% in 1901, for instance,
compared with 25% in New South Wales and 22% in Victoria.
7
Did that lessen the likelihood
of tension between Catholics and Protestants in this state, a state known as the paradise of dissent?
The short answer to that question is yes: South Australia’s Catholics accounted for a large pro-
portion of the state’s publicans, and had a small but respected presence in the élite professions
of law and medicine, as well as in political life. So it would seem that there was no absolute
barrier fashioned by religious prejudice to social or political advancement.
Nevertheless, Catholic clergy developed the cohesiveness of their community by emphasising
its distinctiveness. They built up a network of Catholic schools, founded exclusive Catholic or-
ganisations, promoted their Irish heritage – with large and exuberant celebrations of St Patrick’s
Day on 17 March – and encouraged Catholics to keep their distance from other sects and religions.
Even if there was little overt or public antagonism between members of different Christian de-
nominations, there was a good deal of hostility among evangelical Protestants to the doctrines
and rituals of the Catholic religion (‘Romanism’), and a good deal of quiet discrimination against
Catholics in some businesses and government departments. Roma Mitchell recalled that when
she was a child there was, ‘to a substantial extent, distrust on the part of adherents to one
Christian religion of the religious practices of other Christian religions’ (Gale 2000: 3, 6, 7).
8
Maude and Harold were not alone in their mixed marriage, though. Maude Wickham may
have been raised in the Catholic faith, but her older sister, May, had been brought up an
Anglican. And May married Frank Villeneuve Smith, who was a Catholic, in St Oswald’s Church
of England in Parkside. The sisters were, and remained, good friends. Besides, Harold and Maude
Mitchell were in love. Their first-born, Mignon, was born just seven and a half months after
their wedding.
9
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.2
Figure 1 Harold Flinders Mitchell, father of Roma
Copied with permission by the author from Dame Roma Mitchell’s Scrapbooks at Master Peter Norman’s chambers, 2001.
10
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.3
Roma was their third daughter. Mignon died of meningitis while Maude was pregnant with
Ruth. So Roma was the younger of the two, competing in the beginning for the love that their
father lavished on Ruth. She would grow up the centre of attention in an all-female household.
For on 5 April 1918, Harold Flinders Mitchell was killed in the Battle of Dernancourt in France.
First had come the telegram, ‘Missing, believed killed in action’. Then, after an agonising wait,
the confirmation.
11
Amid her own anguish, Maude determined to lessen the shock for seven year-
old Ruth, at school at St. Dominic’s Priory down the road: she would wait and tell her after tea.
But she had not reckoned on four year-old Roma.
Maude suffered from headaches. Roma had taken to waiting at the door to meet Ruth when
she came home from school, to warn her not to make any noise when their mother’s head was
hurting. This time, though, she pattered along the street to meet her sister – to tell her that their
father was dead. After they had eaten that evening, Maude began to tell Ruth that there was,
now, no hope of her father returning. Ruth burst into tears. There was no need to go on, she
sobbed. Roma had already told her. Later, when Maude asked Roma why, the child replied, ‘I
wanted to save you having to do so.’ Many years later, she reflected, ‘I had a very strange pro-
tective feeling. My mother and I were very close’.
12
It was as though a great gong had sounded, a note that would reverberate throughout her
life. Her mother would now be the single most important adult in her world until she was herself
grown up, and she would protect her mother, take care of her, with all her heart and mind and
soul, because her father was no longer there to do so. Her love for her mother was integral to
her faith, and that faith – beliefs, rituals and sacraments rich with antiquity – formed a bedrock
for her being, imparting a certainty in the fundamental ordering of the world, a sureness of be-
longing in it, as secure as her mother’s love. Maude Mitchell called Roma her ‘blue-bird of hap-
piness’.
13
Now Maude Mitchell had to make some decisions. The first concerned her daughters’
schooling. She removed Ruth from St Dominic’s Priory, where the education emphasised fancy
needlework and lady-like behaviour, and enrolled both girls in St Aloysius College, run by the
cultured, musical and educationally distinguished Sisters of Mercy. There Ruth and Roma could
learn how to win a livelihood. School days were saturated with religion. Each day began with
morning prayer, everyone kneeling on the floor beside her desk. Each lesson began with a prayer.
All pupils recited a Hail Mary each time the clock struck. Everyone joined in reciting the Angelus
at noon, and in singing a hymn at the end of the day. The church’s liturgical calendar governed
their year. Younger girls learned the catechism by heart. All students heard stories from the Bible,
prayed, sang hymns, often and every day. They attended lessons on Christian doctrine. They
competed with each other for prizes for attendance, for good conduct, for amiability, awarded
at the monthly assemblies before the whole school. They visited the new chapel for Mass and
Devotions, made their first Confession and received their first Communion in the Cathedral
Church next door; Latin services, with the clergy remote at the high altar, a challenging mystery.
Roma Mitchell joined the Sodality of the Children of Mary, wearing a blue cloak, ribbon, badge
and a veil for the consecration ceremony. She was to emulate the Virgin and pray to her for the
virtues of purity and modesty.
14
After ten years or so, it would feel as though the ritual was hard-
wired into your heart and brain, as essential to your being as breathing.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.4
A second decision: Maude Mitchell moved her household across town from North Adelaide
to Kingswood, close to the Villeneuve Smiths in Unley Park, their house named ‘Halsbury’ after
the foundation legal text, Halsbury’s Laws of England, their three children named after English
and Scottish Law Lords. For Catholic Frank Villeneuve Smith was the doyen of the South Aus-
tralian Bar. He coupled extremely hard work with a forceful personality, good looks, an ex-
traordinarily wide vocabulary, a ready wit, and a large pince-nez that he kept attached to a long
black ribbon around his neck, and used to impress members of the jury. It is frequently said that
there is a narrow border between the practice of the law and a career on the stage. Flamboyant
Frank Villeneuve Smith showed just how narrow it could be. But his most legendary exploit
dates from the days before he appeared in court, when he was a student.
After a late night, the youthful Villeneuve Smith was on his way home from a
student gathering. He stopped and thumped on the door of a two storey
building on the corner of Grote and Brown Street calling out repeatedly for
‘Paul, Paul’. Villeneuve Smith knew only that someone named Paul lived at this
address. In time, a drowsy Paul appeared at an upstairs window. Villeneuve
Smith called up, ‘Have I the honour of addressing Paul?’ ‘Yes’ replied Paul,
testy over this early morning disturbance. ‘I’ve often wondered, old man’, said
Villeneuve Smith, ‘whether you ever got an answer to that long letter you wrote
to the Ephesians’.
Francis Villeneuve Smith was made King’s Counsel in 1919 at the age of thirty-six, one of
the youngest silks then practising in Australia, and only the second Catholic appointed to silk
in South Australia (Playford 1988: 642–643; Whitington 1986).
It was her uncle Frank who came to the rescue when Roma needed to find a firm in which
to do articles at the end of 1931. She went to see the principal of one firm, and he asked her if
she was Catholic. Maude was with Roma, and she answered for her: that is not a proper question
to ask. Of course the answer told her interlocutor what he wanted to know; Roma was not taken
on in that firm.
15
Instead, Villeneuve Smith helped her find a Catholic firm: Rollison & Rollison;
Bill Rollison had been in articles with Villeneuve Smith.
16
But when Roma Mitchell graduated – brilliantly, with a George Murray Scholarship
17
– she
could not continue to work with Rollison & Rollison because they were too small to take on a
paid solicitor. She had to find another Catholic firm. This was, eventually, Nelligan & Parsons.
Like Rollison, Joe Nelligan was an old scholar of Adelaide’s Christian Brothers’ College, married
to Nora Maguire, who was an old scholar of St. Aloysius College. So Roma Mitchell was taking
a job in the heartland of the distinctively Catholic branch of the Adelaide legal profession of
which her uncle Frank was so eminent a member. After only four months they made her a partner,
at the age of only twenty-two.
18
She went on to develop an extensive practice with a marked
emphasis on matrimonial law, a subject on which she would also lecture at the University of
Adelaide.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.5
Figure 2 Francis Villeneuve Smith QC
Copied with permission by the author from Dame Roma Mitchell’s Scrapbooks at Master Peter Norman’s chambers, 2001.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.6
John Bray once remarked: ‘When I was young at the bar it almost seemed as if a trial lawyer
did nothing but endeavour to salvage the wrecks of motor cars and the wrecks of marriages’.
The wrecks of marriages presented Miss Mitchell with profound injustice in the lives of women.
She found herself acting for ‘a lot of women who were… subjected to domestic violence who
had literally nowhere to go because nobody had the power to put the husband out of the house
if the house [was] either his or was rented in his name’. She acted for women who were ‘deserted
wives’, and women who lost custody of their children if it was their morals that could be called
into question.
19
Was there not a direct conflict for her between acting in such cases, and her reli-
gion? In the encyclical Casti Connubii issued in 1930, Pope Pius XI had reiterated the Catholic
Church’s abhorrence of divorce, associating it with ‘perverted morals’, ‘vicious habits’ and
‘contagious disease’. In 1937, he also issued Divini Redemptoris, declaring the emancipation of
women and the education of children by the state to be among the great evils leading to a ‘hu-
manity without God’. Miss Mitchell was not about to change her faith. On the contrary. In
November 1936 she spoke at the first National Catholic Education Congress declaring the pro-
mulgation of church doctrine to be the most sublime social service.
20
How did she adhere to such
teachings and, at the same time, endeavour to lead an emancipated life herself, working for her
living, and spending so much of her working life involved in cases of divorce and custody?
The best answer to that question comes from Len King, a fellow Catholic, articled to Miss
Mitchell in 1948 and 1949, who would go on to become Attorney-General in the governments
of Don Dunstan in the 1970s and subsequently Chief Justice (Castles et. al. 1983: 53). ‘She was
a person of independent mind’, he affirmed, and at times out of sympathy with ecclesiastical
moral rulings, particularly intrusive rulings affecting the practice of her profession in the family
law area, which seemed to her, and to others, to show scant understanding of the Australian
legal profession and the way in which it operated in Australian society.
21
The 1960s brought great changes to the Catholic Church in Australia as elsewhere. Even
before the Second Vatican Council, barriers between ‘the one true church’ and other Christians
began to crumble before a wave of ecumenicalism. Liturgical change brought the vernacular into
church services, and rearranged the furniture, bringing the altar forward so that Mass could be
celebrated facing the congregation. Catholics learned to sing Protestant hymns.
22
Roma Mitchell
did not say what she thought of these developments, or of the subsequent promulgation in 1968
of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the church’s traditional prohibition of artificial
contraception. But we do know that when her good Catholic god-daughter added a fourth to
her family, Roma murmured to her that that was probably enough now.
23
When she was made
Governor, Dame Roma knew that the job would require at least a degree of ecumenicalism, and
she counted herself ‘fortunate indeed to have been appointed Governor in this era of religious
tolerance and co-operation’. But she noted with some amusement that her staff were puzzled,
when her duties scheduled her to attend a service in a non-Catholic church on a Sunday, that
she still wanted to go to Mass.
24
There was never anything token or formulaic about Roma Mitchell’s faith. She insisted on
attending Mass every week, even when she was at a United Nations seminar in Tokyo in 1965
and finding a church was extremely difficult, even when she was on holiday at her beach house
at Carrickalinga and had been up discussing the law with her Associates until past midnight the
night before. During her time in Government House, she attended Mass every day, walking up
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.7
King William Street to St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral. In 1992, she thought that the church’s
widening horizons should not obscure ‘the prime functions of its priests, namely the saying of
Mass and the administering of the Sacraments’. She considered it ‘unthinkable that the Mass
should cease to be the centre of our devotions’.
25
POLITICS
I want to consider this topic in two parts. One is concerned with traditional conceptions of the
political, that is power relations based on economic class and allegiance to political party. The
other, which I’ll touch on only briefly since it is the subject of our whole book, is concerned with
power relations between women and men, and the continuing struggle for rights for women.
In terms of traditional conceptions of the political, Roma Mitchell’s politics were quite
wonderfully contradictory. She was to say, ‘I’ve never had any political affiliations’.
26
Her ap-
pointments and awards came from both sides of the party spectrum. It was Labor Party Attorney-
General Don Dunstan who made her a judge, the Hawke Labor government that appointed her
a Royal Commission into what was popularly – and erroneously – called ‘the Greek Conspiracy
Case’, and the Labor government of John Bannon that made her Governor. But her CBE came
from the Liberal-Country Party government of William McMahon, on the recommendation of
Steele Hall, Liberal Premier of South Australia; her DBE was awarded by the Liberal-National
Party government of Malcolm Fraser on a recommendation probably made by David Tonkin,
Liberal Premier of South Australia, and her appointment as Chair of the Human Rights Commis-
sion was also the work of the Fraser government. When she was made Governor of South Aus-
tralia, the Don Dunstan’s former Press Secretary, Tony Baker, observed: ‘She is a perfect appoint-
ment… She is looked on kindly by both the Adelaide Establishment… and by reformers’: she
had gained the peak position in the heartland of the Protestant Adelaide Establishment, or, Baker
noted in passing, ‘what remains of it’.
27
Yet her origins made such an achievement entirely un-expected. Her religion, and her imme-
diate family’s financial dependence on Maude’s meagre war widow’s pension, positioned Roma
Mitchell as an Outsider in the Paradise of Dissent. Former diplomat, Sir Walter Crocker defined
it clearly, even though his own connection with the Adelaide Establishment was tenuous. His
family
thought of Catholic as being synonymous with Irish. They saw a single entity,
Irishromancatholic, and it was anti-British and therefore disloyal (Crocker
1981).
The Mitchell girls knew this view with some intimacy: their father’s parents would not associate
with Maude Mitchell and her children – because they were Catholics.
Moreover, Roma Mitchell spent almost thirty years working closely with Joe Nelligan,
principal of the firm that she joined in 1935. Nelligan was a well-known friend of the under-dog,
member of the United Labor Party (Lang Movement), the barrister retained by the unemployed
following the 1931 Beef Riots during the Great Depression (Moss 1985: 306, 313, 314: Elliott
2000: 5, 6, 27). Among Miss Mitchell’s clients, even after she parted from Nelligan in 1962,
were two large trade unions, and the last case that she argued as a barrister was the successful
defence of Clyde Cameron’s brother, Donald, and nine others, against the Secretary of the Aus-
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.8
tralian Workers’ Union who was trying to expel them.
28
Miss Mitchell was, then, Catholic and
associated with unionists active in the labour movement. (As an aside: a moment in the preparation
of that case brings into unexpected focus just how unusual it was for her, a woman, to be doing
such work. Cameron sent one of his fellow unionists to see Miss Mitchell and afterwards asked
how he had got on. All his distracted mate could tell him was that he didn’t know, he had been
too busy looking at her three-pennies’: threepenny-bits: rhyming slang for ‘tits’.)
29
However, the economic status associated with their cousins, the Villeneuve Smiths, situated
the Mitchells firmly in the middle class. Listen to the Penny Post waxing lyrical about a dance
at ‘Halsbury’, on 16 February 1931, when Lindley Villeneuve Smith and Roma’s sister, Ruth
Mitchell, made their debut: ‘brilliant cushions’ studded the steps of ‘the exquisite staircase that
rose out of the great hall with beamed ceilings’, the dance room, also ‘brilliant’ with ‘gold and
yellow balloons, lines of small gold baskets filled with orange poppies strung across the room’,
and the Collegians’ Orchestra strumming rhythmically. Roma was there. She was about to begin
her first year in Law at Adelaide University.
30
What she remembered best about this occasion
was that she danced with a St Peter’s boy a year older than she was, already a student of the law:
John Jefferson Bray. Like the Villeneuve Smiths, the Catholic Mitchells were not Irish, not anti-
British and far from disloyal. The social space that they occupied was liminal, spiking its uncer-
tainties with possibilities of self-definition and political self-determination.
Then, in October 1939, through her sister, Roma Mitchell effectively married into the Adelaide
Establishment. For Ruth’s English husband, Hugh Gooch, was related to the family of Sir Sidney
Kidman, the cattle king whose pastoral holdings covered areas greater than England (Bowen
1987). Gooch was also friends with war-hero, Sir Kenneth Wills, descendant of the founder of
the multi-national company, G & R Wills, and Chancellor of the University of Adelaide
(Huffadine 1949). Roma Mitchell liked these people, visited them, invited them, enjoying what
she learned from them about the initiation of the Adelaide Festival, appreciative when they pro-
posed her for membership of the exclusive and expensive Queen Adelaide Club. Perhaps wanting
to ‘give back’ to them, she not only joined the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust but accepted
appointment as deputy chair of the South Australian committee, and membership of the trust’s
otherwise all-male national committee.
31
Coupled with these contradictory allegiances was Roma Mitchell’s embrace of modernity.
She identified with it; it offered a context for her exceptionalism – as an unmarried professional
woman. She explicitly chose to go to a new, modern and ‘challenging’ Musica Viva concert instead
of the concert and speech day at her old school. She looked forward to the arrival of an exhibition
of modern art being brought to Australia by the British Council; she went to listen to one of
Adelaide’s own pioneering modernist artists, Ivor Francis, talking about it in the Art Gallery,
and decided that it would shock traditionalists. She quizzed her sister Ruth about sculptures by
Jacob Epstein in London. She went to a new, experimental Italian film and was impressed.
32
She
moved, in 1962, into a new, clean-lined, fresh-smelling white block of flats in Melbourne Street,
North Adelaide, designed by Modernist architect, Jack McConnell (Ward 2004). She was a
modern, independent, professional woman. And that aligned her politics with those of Adelaide’s
progressive, liberalising bohemia.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.9
Figure 3 Roma Mitchell in her ball dress
Copied with permission by the author from Dame Roma Mitchell’s Scrapbooks at Master Peter Norman’s chambers, 2001.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.10
She had become good friends with John Bray, who was not only a distinguished lawyer but
also an anti-establishment intellectual, a poet, and a bohemian. Shortly after her own elevation
to the Bench, Bray was made South Australia’s Chief Justice, an appointment which shocked
establishment Adelaide to the core (Prest 1997). There is a lovely description of Bray and Roma
Mitchell at Nell’s. This was a house in a back street somewhere near Pirie Street where Nell
Dowd, reputedly a communist, would admit the local intelligentsia, especially members of the
artistic and legal professions, and sell them stew and coffee cups of port if they had not brought
their own drinking supplies. (We are still in the era of six o’clock closing.) The publisher Max
Harris was often there, and Dave Dallwitz the jazz musician, and Wlad Dutkiewicz the artist,
and legal identities Roma Mitchell and John Bray. Everyone sat on couches and cushions – in
one room listening to poetry readings or conversing about morals, politics, the arts and the law;
in another, listening to live music. Roma Mitchell was usually to be found in the conversation
room. But on at least one occasion she appeared in the music room, playing a washboard, in
imitation of a guitar, accompanied by John Bray on a double-bass made from a tea-chest, while
someone else kept time by tapping on the floor with a broom-handle, with beer bottle-tops nailed
to it.
33
The politics of her modernism and progressive liberalism appear most clearly in her work as
chair of the Criminal Law and Penal Methods Reform Committee in the early 1970s. The law
concerning crime and punishment in common law jurisdictions oscillates between two poles:
retribution and rehabilitation. Retribution – punishment – emphasises the offence rather than
the offender, and seeks to take revenge upon the offender for his or her offence against society
and its laws. Retribution is associated with notions of deterrence; punishments are supposed to
‘fit’ the crime in ways that deter other people from committing them. Rehabilitation – reform –
at the opposite pole, focuses primarily upon offenders and how they think about their actions
and place in society. Rehabilitation endeavours to find ways of reforming offenders so that they
can resume a place in society and fill it usefully, refraining from committing any more crimes.
At present in South Australia, we can observe both poles at the same time: our strongly law-and-
order government expresses views that are predominantly retributive, while our judiciary passes
sentences which are primarily rehabilitative. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, by contrast, the
views of government and at least some of the judiciary converged. They agreed on the need to
reform the criminal law, the courts, the prisons and the police in ways that would make them
more rehabilitative, more reforming. Dunstan’s Attorney-General, Len King, asked Justice Mitchell
to undertake this task.
34
The Criminal Law and Penal Methods Reform Committee – the Mitchell
Committee – met from late in 1971 until the middle of 1976 and produced four reports containing
no fewer than 907 recommendations.
35
Some of those recommendations expressed views already on their way into – or out of – the
statute book. The death penalty was abolished, at last, and male homosexual acts were decrim-
inalised. Other recommendations concerned the appalling condition of the state’s prisons; what
the Mitchell Committee defined as inappropriate treatment of Aboriginal people by the criminal
justice system – concerns which were at least a decade ahead of their time; and the need for more
education among the police. Some recommendations were more cautious, though: they argued
against random breath-testing car-drivers, for instance, on the grounds that it would infringe
human rights and provoke hostility to the police. And having made the major conceptual leap
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.11
involved in considering the possibility of extending the law concerning rape to include rape in
marriage, the Mitchell Committee then retreated, deciding that a husband might be charged with
raping his wife, but only if they were living apart. By this time young radical Peter Duncan was
Attorney-General in Dunstan’s last government, and he considered this recommendation alto-
gether too tame and limited. He introduced legislation which extended the law governing rape
to rape in marriage regardless of where the husband and wife might be living, legislation which
attracted interest across the whole common law world.
36
The politics of the Mitchell Committee
were progressive and reforming, no doubt, but cautiously so, and those cautions meant that they
were never as radical as Premier Don Dunstan had hoped, even though many of their recommend-
ations were too radical to achieve easy acceptance among conservatives.
Roma Mitchell’s work for rights and protections for women, the second aspect of her politics,
a subject that I will merely touch on, certainly had elements of a similar caution, at least in the
beginning, but that fell away before her steady ascendance – ‘Why should I be modest!’ she ex-
claimed at a gathering in 1992, I heard her – and her generosity: not ten years earlier, when we
organised a women’s dinner to celebrate her work as Chair of the Human Rights Commission,
she responded to our plaudits by carefully and generously explaining to us how to go about
nominating other women for national honours like hers.
A narrative about her work for rights for women extends from her participation in the Women
Law Students’ Society, an innovation to overcome discriminatory separatism by the men, through
the arguments with which she and the National Council of Women finally persuaded Premier
Tom Playford to allow women to sit on juries, through her wonderfully artful lecture on ‘Women’s
Liberation and the Law’ delivered in Hobart, to her advocacy of the Sex Discrimination Act
which Susan Ryan carried through the Commonwealth Parliament during the first Hawke Gov-
ernment.
37
For Roma Mitchell was quite as much an advocate for such rights and protections
as she was an example of all that a woman could achieve. When she was elected Deputy Chan-
cellor of the University of Adelaide in 1972, and she was invited to address the commemoration
ceremonies of that year, she took occasion to assert the justice of some of the demands of the
Women’s Liberation Movement. She deplored the fact that women applying for jobs in commerce
and industry were often asked only if they could type. Later she emphasised that she did not favour
‘token’ appointments, but held that a woman’s sex should not operate to her disadvantage. She
also took a well-aimed pot-shot at her stuffy and sexist alma mater. ‘Universities that said that
they always had one woman dean’, she said, ‘were like curators who said “this zoo always has
one giant panda”.’
38
SEX
Roma Mitchell never married. But everyone in South Australia – everyone, from the plumber
who came to fix my kitchen tap who announced, ‘Oh she was in love with a man who was killed
in the Second World War’, to a senior member of the History Department at Flinders University
who led off discussion of a paper about biography by asking, ‘Well, was she a dyke?’ – just
everyone has a view about her sexuality. The Flinders historian thought she must have been a
lesbian because she used to lunch at the same café as a number of men known to be homosexual.
As Kerrie pointed out to him: Miss Mitchell used to take her mother there. Even the saintly Sir
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.12
William Deane succumbed to the need to say something on the subject in his eulogy at her funeral
Mass.
During an interview in her early years on the Supreme Court, the following
exchange occurred with a somewhat brash journalist. ‘You are not married?’
‘I am not’. ‘And you do not drive a car?’ ‘I do not’. Undeterred by the terseness
of the replies, the journalist pressed on: ‘The Chief Justice, Dr. Bray, is also
unmarried. Is there any chance that the two of you might get together?’ ‘No’,
Roma replied, ‘that would be no good at all. He doesn’t drive a car either’
(Deane 2000).
John Bray was gay, so there is still a whiff of a question in the air. Was Roma Mitchell gay, too?
She certainly had a gift for strong and affectionate friendship. That great gong still echoed:
she had taken care of her mother, she took care of her sister and brother-in-law, she took care
of her close friends – it was a habit of the heart, rather than an effort of the will – and once she
was a judge, she took care of her Associates, too. Bossy, she could be, and sharp. But, they said,
her confidence and support was a great source of comfort and inspiration. Her Associates told
– indeed, still tell – two stories about her that have become legend, clear sign of the affection in
which they hold her. Here is the first. Roma Mitchell always went out for lunch on Thursdays,
but one Thursday she came back unexpectedly early to find her Associate and a companion
locked together in a tangle of half-discarded clothes on the table in the office. ‘Oh, really!’ she
expostulated. ‘That’s where I eat my lunch!’
39
And here is the second, a story that former Asso-
ciate, Lindy Powell QC, tells.
When we were in Sydney, we were going out, and while Dame Roma changed,
she asked me if I would pop into the laundry and pick up her washing that
she’d… stuck in the dryer. When I picked it up, I discovered it was leopard-
print underwear. So I dashed back to the room. ‘Roma, you’re wearing leopard-
print underwear!’ She said, ‘Yes, I know. Isn’t it gorgeous!’
40
But there was nothing in such friendships to suggest that they might have involved any sexual
expression. So I was especially surprised to encounter, in 2007, a senior Federal Court judge in-
sisting that during her later years Dame Roma had enjoyed a sexual partnership with a woman.
The woman was Phyllis Whyte, one of two sisters with whom Roma and Ruth Mitchell had been
friends since they were children.
During the long hot Adelaide summers, the little Mitchell girls used to spend time at the
beach with the Whytes, who had escaped from life on a station beyond Port Augusta to holiday
in a large house on a hillock near Brighton. They were Jean and Phyllis, Phyllis translated into
‘Billie’. Their mother, born Kitty Macully, would have relished these days. She was a powerful
swimmer with a diploma in life-saving, famous for having saved the life of a drowning woman
in 1919. She spent the summer giving swimming lessons from the Brighton Jetty, and doubtless
taught Ruth and Roma to swim as well, before that dreadful day, 18 March 1926, when she
dived off the jetty into the jaws of a four-metre white pointer shark, and died minutes later. The
Whyte girls would now be raised by their mother’s sister, who later married their father. They
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.13
were younger than the Mitchells. Roma used to be teacherly with them, insisting on Billie rehears-
ing her lessons, even on the beach.
41
Jean and Billie Whyte grew up to be talented professionals. Jean finished her Arts degree at
the University of Adelaide, and gained awards enabling her to spend the mid-1950s at the
Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago. There, it seems – if we can read the poem
that she wrote about it as autobiographical – she had a passionate heterosexual affair. (It’s not
a good poem; I won’t inflict it on you.)
42
Jean Whyte would go on to become the founding Pro-
fessor of Librarianship at Monash University. She was not to marry, though late in her life she
set up house with the philosopher, Hector Monroe.
43
Sometimes she brought him with her when
she came to Adelaide to spend holidays at the house that she and Billie had bought together with
Roma Mitchell at Carrickalinga. Would she have shown her Chicago poem to Roma. Why would
she not? They were like sisters.
By the time of Jean’s Chicago adventure, her younger sister, Billie, had also had a brush with
desire, though without leaving Adelaide. In the mid-1950s, she was teaching English Literature
at the Wilderness School. She used to write hilarious skits on Shakespeare’s plays for the senior
girls to perform at end-of-term concerts. She would adjudicate debates. She adjudicated one in
which I was a speaker, in my first year in the senior school. Afterwards, I longed for the time
when I would be old enough for her to teach me too. But it was not to be. During a school ex-
pedition to the pictures, Billie Whyte made the mistake of holding hands with a student, curly-
headed Jill Holden. Jill Holden would later marry Tony Gibbs who was to become professor of
English at the University of New England. Sadly, we did not see Miss Whyte at Wilderness after
that. From 1961 to 1985, she taught at Adelaide Girls’ High School.
44
Could Roma Mitchell have told either Jean or Billie of a similar experience of her own? One
of Roma’s younger friends and colleagues, a glamorous artist who was also a lawyer, Pam Cleland,
had famously raunchy parties at which guests would drink a lot, fling off their clothes, plunge
into her hot pool and disappear in various combinations among the rhododendrums. Roma
Mitchell ‘was very good at a party’ another friend, Mary Bleechmore, was to remember. But she
was always entirely discreet, said Pam Cleland. Compared with the rest of us, Miss Cleland de-
clared, Roma Mitchell was ‘on the verge’ of being a prude.
45
So the answer to my question is
probably not.
From the time when she retired from school teaching, Billie Whyte used to drive Roma
Mitchell about. It was with Billie that Roma embarked on her stint delivering Meals on Wheels
in the 1980s. Billie would drive them both to Carrickalinga. Roma would take Billie with her to
lunch at Pam Cleland’s. Close friends, they certainly were, as close as siblings. But does that
make them lovers? Lindy Powell could have the last word on this. She told George Negus on
ABC TV:
I don’t consider there is any truth in any of the rumours about Dame Roma’s
preference for other women in terms of her sexual proclivities. People make
assumptions about that sort of thing because a woman is unmarried, because
a woman doesn’t have children. I think people were just loath to accept that
she was a person dedicated to public service and accordingly that was her life.
46
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.14
Straight, then, and going through the usual motions from when she was a student, joining
in the dances organised in the University refectory. She loved dancing; this was the girl who had
learned to Charleston while she was still at school. They danced the Lambeth Walk. They played
the Monte Carlo: a pointer spun in the middle of the dance floor, eliminating couples until only
the prize-winners remained. Supper lasted from half past ten until midnight, time enough for
couples to sneak away for a kiss in the cloisters, and dancing continued until two in the morning.
47
At the end of one of these evenings, Roma had stayed so late that the University’s gates had been
closed, locking her in. How was Roma to get home? She climbed the gate in her ball dress.
48
Surely she must have thought of sex and marriage and children at some time during or soon
after her student days? Her good friend from school, Lorna Williams, thought that if Roma had
married it would have been to Jim Brazel.
49
He would have been eminently suitable: a Catholic,
old scholar of Christian Brothers’ College where he is still regarded as one of their best students;
he had to take his matriculation exams twice, not because he had failed to achieve outstanding
results the first time, but because he was too young to enter the University. He was only twenty
when he graduated in 1926, reputed to be one of the two youngest graduates in law in Australia.
By the time that young Roma Mitchell was dancing in the University refectory, Jim Brazel was
established in a new legal partnership in the chambers previously occupied by Roma’s famous
uncle Frank. He would have been a spectacular dancing partner: he was known in the legal
profession as ‘Gentleman Jim’ for his striking good looks, piercing blue eyes and immaculate
dress. He was fun, too, with a dry and often cynical wit (Cassidy and Corkery 1988).
But it would have been a little surprising if it was Jim Brazel helping Roma Mitchell over the
locked university gates in 1932. For he married Kathleen Jones at St Ignatius’ Church in Norwood
in September that year. All the same, talk about Jim Brazel in Roma Mitchell’s life persisted.
And persists. ‘I always thought that Jim Brazel was a bit keen on her actually’, Pam Cleland told
us. Many of their colleagues, too, thought that there was definitely a tendresse between them.
Alec Genders, at one time junior to John Bray, declared unequivocally of Jim Brazel, ‘Now, for
your information, he was on with Roma’, and Justice Roderic Chamberlain told Sir Walter
Crocker that Roma Mitchell had been the mistress of a well-known lawyer for some years.
50
Brazel became a widower in 1951, but he was to marry again, Lynette O’Brien, mother of
Amanda Vanstone, in 1959, shortly before he was elevated to the Bench of the Supreme Court,
the first Catholic to achieve such eminence.
By this time, Roma Mitchell was in her mid-forties. She considered questions of marriage to
belong well in the past: ‘You must remember that I’m a war-generation person’. ‘Circumstances’
she told interviewer Susan Mitchell, ‘dictated the fact that I never married. It wasn’t a matter of
a definite decision. Gradually one path closes and another one opens’. She said that she would
not have been able to build the career in the Law that she did, had she been married. Even so,
she might have longed for emotional intimacy, so missing from her modern, professional life,
however crowded it was with friends and work. It is always possible to love, of course, without
that necessarily leading to marriage. Did she and Jim Brazel have an extremely modern fling?
Or did Roma Mitchell, as other, strong rumours relate, have a different relationship, a long-
running affair with a married man quite a lot older than she was, lasting some years, but not
until the 1970s? Or is that story no more than a tease for the gossips? Roma Mitchell knew about
gossip, and as the leopard-print knickers suggests, was quite prepared to tease.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.15
For – and this is my last point – Roma Mitchell may well have loved no-one, ever, as well as
she loved her heroic mother. And her mother was heroic. Roma was only twelve when Maude
learned that she had breast cancer. The doctor said that he could operate, but that such an oper-
ation would be risky. And risk leaving Ruth and Roma as orphans? Oh no! Maude refused the
operation. But she died in 1938, when Roma was only twenty-five, and Roma mourned her for
the rest of her life.
51
ENDNOTES
1
Magarey and Round 2007. There were other awards and distinctions, too, among them honorary
degrees from the Universities of Adelaide (1985), Queensland (1992), Flinders (1993) and South
Australia (1994).
2
Adelaide Advertiser, 31 August 1965.
3
Australian, 7 February 1991.
4
The video clip excerpt is available from
http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/suppl/10.2104/ha080012. File format: .avi. Run time: 63
seconds. The excerpt is from Frank Heimans (director), Australian Biography: Dame Roma Mitchell
[videorecording], Film Australia, Sydney, 1994, 26 mins. A transcript of the full interview is available
via http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/mitchell/index.html.
5
Kerrie Round, Telephone conversation with Ross Wickham, grandson of Maude Mitchell’s brother
Harry, 28 October 2002; Glenda Condon, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell, 27 March 1992,
Mercy Archives, Adelaide.
6
Dr. A.J. Shinkfield, Headmaster, St Peter’s College, to Dame Roma Mitchell, 12 May 1983; Kangaroo
Island Courier: 15 August 1908, 14 December 1907, 21 December 1907, 14 August 1909, 5
December 1908, 5 June 1909.
7
Figures calculated from the 1901 Census provided in Vamplew 1987: 421, 422, 424.
8
David Hilliard, ‘The Catholic Church and the Community in Adelaide’ in Gale 2000: 3, 6, 7; Margaret
Press, ‘Catholic Church’ in Prest et al. 2001: 97; Margaret Press, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell,
19 March 1990, Mercy Archives, Adelaide.
9
Marriage Certificate, Harold Flinders Mitchell and Maude Imelda Victoria Wickham; Birth Certificate,
Maude Mignon Flinders Mitchell.
10
The Mitchell Scrapbooks are now held in the State Library of South Australia
11
H.F. Mitchell, Form D.16, 30 May 1918, World War I Service Records, National Archives of Australia.
12
Susan Mitchell, ‘Dame Roma Mitchell’ in Mitchell 1987: 30.
13
Kerrie Round, Telephone conversation with Rosemary Wilkinson, 2 June 2003.
14
Stephanie Burley, ‘The Classroom: Challenges and Changing Curriculum’, in Gale 2000: 47–48;
Condon, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell.
15
Press, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell.
16
Peter Norman, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell, 22 March 1999.
17
Adelaide Advertiser, 13 December 1934.
18
Film Australia, Australian Biography II; Norman, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell.
19
John Bray, ‘The Bench and the Legal Profession’, Law Society of South Australia Bulletin, March
1977; Film Australia, Australian Biography II.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.16
20
Roma Mitchell, ‘Self-education for Social Service’, Catholic Women’s League Magazine, vol.2, no.2,
1937, pp.8–10.
21
Southern Cross, April 2000.
22
Katharine Massam, ‘Catholic Church’, in Davison et al. 1998: 113.
23
Susan Magarey, Interview with Mrs Lorna Williams and Mrs Adrienne McMahon, 17 August 2001.
24
Dame Roma Mitchell, ‘On the Role of the Clergy and the Churches in South Australia’, on the occasion
of the Golden Jubilee Mass and Dinner St Francis Xavier Seminary, 25 September 1992.
25
Kerrie Round, Interview with Aline Fenwick, 29 November 2002; Susan Magarey, Conversation with
Helena Jasinski and Noni Farwell, 2002; Dame Roma Mitchell, ‘On the Role of the Clergy and the
Churches in South Australia’,
26
Film Australia, Australian Biography II.
27
News, 19 October 1990.
28
Guy 1999; Film Australia, Australian Biography II.
29
Susan Magarey and Peter Norman, Interview with the Hon. Clyde Cameron, 2002.
30
Penny Post, 17 February 1931, clipping in Dame Roma Mitchell’s Scrapbooks.
31
Margaret Walters Auchmuty, A Perpetual Trust: The Story of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust
Travelling Fellowships. no publication details, page 13. Susan Magarey, Conversation with Paul Tys,
Chief Executive Officer, Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Churchill House, Canberra, 6 February
2004; Adelaide Advertiser: 14, 15 July 1965, clippings in Dame Roma Mitchell’s Scrapbooks.
32
Roma Mitchell to Mrs W.H. Gooch: 7 December 1948, 21 December 1948, 7 March 1949.
33
Adelaide Advertiser, 6 March 2000; Kerrie Round, Telephone conversation with Alek Mathieson,
27 November 2003.
34
King CJ, ‘Transcript of Proceedings at Special Sitting On the Retirement of Her Honour Justice
Mitchell, 28 September 1983’; Bright 1981.
35
Criminal Law & Penal Methods Reform Committee (Mitchell Committee): First Report: Sentencing
and Corrections (Government Printer), Adelaide, 1973; Second Report: Criminal Investigation
(Government Printer), Adelaide, 1974; Third Report: Court Procedure and Evidence (Government
Printer), Adelaide, 1975; Fourth Report: The Substantive Criminal Law (Government Printer), Adelaide,
1977. For a fuller account and discussion, see Magarey and Round 2007 chapter 7.
36
Robert Holmes, ‘A Political Biography of Peter Duncan’, research project essay in Politics II: Party
Systems and Society in Australia, Flinders University, July 1977, in Allan Patience’s notes towards a
biography of Don Dunstan, held with the Dunstan Papers, Flinders University Library. Our gratitude
to Gillian Dooley for permission to copy this essay. Chapell and Sallman 1982.
37
Dame Roma Mitchell, ‘Reminiscences of a 1930 law student and practitioner’, speech given to law
students in 1993; Film Australia, Australian Biography II; News, 3 October 1963; The Hon. Roma
Mitchell, Women’s Liberation and the Law, the Sir John Morris Memorial Lecture (Government
Printer), Tasmania, 1971; Ryan 1999; Magarey 2004.
38
Adelaide Advertiser: 5 May 1972; 18 March 1978.
39
Senator Amanda Vanstone told this story in her speech launching Dame Roma: Glimpses of a Glorious
Life in the Bonython Hall, Adelaide University, 7 March 2002.
40
Lindy Powell QC, on George Negus Tonight, ABC Television, 2 August 2004.
41
Dame Roma Mitchell, Speech at the opening of the beachside Community Centre, Seaford Community
Fund, no date; Nadine Williams, ‘In memoriam’, Adelaide Advertiser, 24 March 2001; Magarey,
Interview with Mrs. Lorna Williams and Mrs. Adrienne McMahon.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.17
42
Manuscript dated 11 February 1962 in Jean Whyte’s handwriting, marked with stains of tea or coffee
cups. Jean Whyte Papers, uncatalogued, National Library of Australia.
43
Australian, 24 July 2001.
44
Information from Bill Pearce, Archivist, Adelaide High School, 14 July 2005.
45
Kerrie Round, Interview with Mary Bleechmore, 16 December 2003; Susan Magarey and Kerrie
Round, Interview with Pamela Cleland, 22 May 2003.
46
Powell, on George Negus Tonight.
47
S.A. Dance News, September 1935, quoted in ‘Music! Dancing! An exhibition on Adelaide’s Dancehalls
and Nightclus during the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, presented by the Performing Arts Collection of South
Australia, 26 February–21 March 1982, Barr Smith Library, Special Collections.
48
Mary O’Kane, in the Adelaidean, 13 March.2000.
49
Magarey, Interview with Mrs Lorna Williams and Mrs Adrienne McMahon.
50
Magarey and Round, Interview with Pamela Cleland; Peter Norman, Interview with Alec Genders,
23 September 1998; Entry for Thursday 8 November, 1979, Diaries of Sir Walter Crocker, Barr Smith
Library, Special Collections.
51
Film Australia, Australian Biography II.
PRIMARY SOURCES
COLLECTED PAPERS
Papers of Dame Roma Mitchell, State Library of South Australia PRG 778.
Mercy Archives, St Aloysius College, Adelaide.
World War I Service Records, National Archives of Australia.
Jean Whyte Papers, National Library of Australia.
Diaries of Sir Walter Crocker, Special Collections, Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide.
S.A. Dance News, September 1935, quoted in ‘Music! Dancing! An exhibition on Adelaide’s
Dancehalls and Nightclubs during the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, presented by the Performing
Arts Collection of South Australia, 26 February–21 March 1982, Barr Smith Library,
Special Collections.
Papers of Don Dunstan, Flinders University Library.
Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Canberra.
NEWSPAPERS
Adelaide Advertiser, various dates.
Australian, various dates.
News, various dates.
Kangaroo Island Courier, various dates.
Southern Cross, April 2000.
Law Society of South Australia, Bulletin, various dates.
Government publications
Criminal Law & Penal Methods Reform Committee (the Mitchell Committee): First Report:
Sentencing and Corrections (Government Printer), Adelaide, 1973; Second Report:
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.18
Criminal Investigation (Government Printer), Adelaide, 1974; Third Report: Court Pro-
cedure and Evidence (Government Printer), Adelaide, 1975; Fourth Report: The Substant-
ive Criminal Law (Government Printer), Adelaide, 1977.
INTERVIEWS
Film Australia, Australian Biography II, 4 June 1993, shown on SBS Television.
Lindy Powell QC, on George Negus Tonight, ABC Television, 2 August 2004.
Glenda Condon, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell, 27 March 1992.
Peter Norman, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell, 22 March 1999.
Margaret Press, Interview with Dame Roma Mitchell, 19 March 1990.
Susan Magarey, Interview with Mrs Lorna Williams and Mrs Andrienne McMahon, 17 August
2001.
Susan Magarey, Conversation with Helena Jasinski and Noni Farwell, 2002.
Susan Magarey and Peter Norman, Interview with Clyde Cameron, 2002.
Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round, Interview with Pamela Cleland, 22 May 2003.
Kerrie Round, Telephone conversation with Ross Wickham, 28 October 2002.
Kerrie Round, Telephone conversation with Rosemary Wilkinson, 2 June 2003.
Kerrie Round, Interview with Aline Fenwick, 29 November 2002.
Kerrie Round, Interview with Mary Bleechmore, 16 December 2003.
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Cite this article as: Magarey, Susan. 2008. ‘Dame Roma Mitchell’s unmentionables: Sex, politics and reli-
gion’. History Australia 5 (1): pp. 12.1 to 12.20. DOI: 10.2104/ha080012.
DAME ROMA MITCHELL’S UNMENTIONABLES ADDRESS
12.20
