Sir Ninian Stephen
Ladies and gentlemen I have got strict instructions to be short. Alan tells me that there is a time limit of about five minutes. This is to enable all of you to contribute after the four speakers.
Maurice Ashkanasy, or Ash as I always knew him was, I think the most engaging character I ever encountered in my years at the Victorian Bar. Those were years when the then quite small Victorian Bar seemed to a young man full of characters and when each Supreme Court Judge, and their numbers were then less than ten, was known by barristers for his particular quirks and individual eccentricities - and on all of those Ash played. He was not only a great personality he was also an outstanding lawyer, a keen intellect, a great wit and a very shrewd judge of individuals. That of course was a characteristic that he used to great advantage in cross-examination.
He was a delight to work with, I had a number of briefs junior to him, both in cases in the Supreme Court and in lengthy arbitrations and the charm of working with him was that he ensured that life was never dull. He was a great teller of tales, he could make the most dreary engineering arbitration an entertaining event with his caustic asides in his lunchtime conversations and he was as critical of food as he was of legal argument.
I remember one lengthy building arbitration I had junior to him spread over several months when he insisted on lunching at a different restaurant, I am happy to say at the cost of the client, each day. His particular expertise in food seemed to lie in soups and he used to complain, and in some detail, at the lack of imagination of restaurants in their offered selection of soups.
Even after a dull lunch, and soup not entirely to his pleasure, he produced an exciting display of advocacy in the afternoon. He was a great worker, and a brief junior to Ash always seemed to involve evenings at his home working on the case. After I took silk I had only one case against him and I was very wary of him as an opponent but it did me very little good and I lost the case with ease.
He was a man full of tales, tales of his army days, which in the 1950's weren't so far behind us. He told, always humorously and with modesty, of his escape from the Japanese in Singapore and his hazardous journey back to Australia through the islands of the Dutch East Indies that were to become Indonesia. But his tales were by no means confined to wartime memories.
I well remember his pride in Mount Scopus College of which I think he was President, a pride which as usual he disguised with humour. He used to say that at Mount Scopus pupils were taught all the essentials right from the start, multiplication, division and above all sub-division.
Things really happened to Ash as to no one else, or perhaps it was just the way he recalled them. I remember a story of his going home early one day, finding the house empty and finding also he didn't have his keys with him. But quite undeterred he began to climb through a narrow bathroom window, which wasn't at all easy for a man of his particular girth, only to be grabbed violently by the feet when half way through by strong hands which turned out to be those of two policemen who thought he was a burglar.
Quite apart from his immensely busy practice at the Bar he was also of course a leader of Melbourne's Jewish community and you are going to hear something of that in a moment. He ran those affairs, its always seemed to me, with high enthusiasm but in doing so he freely admitted that he heavily relied very largely on his highly efficient secretary. She was an Irish Catholic lady and he took quiet delight in the fact that Jewish affairs were in safe Catholic hands.
His career at the Bar was as long as it was distinguished. Admitted, as you heard in 1924, I think, he read as a pupil of Robert Menzies, took silk in 1940, served then with the AIF with distinction, he was mentioned in dispatches and on his return from the army he began his long career as the distinguished and always colourful QC.
Chairman of the Bar Council in the mid 1950's he played a very important role in what was then a traumatic change for the Bar, moving from the long established premises that we had in Little Collins Street to Owen Dixon Chambers.
He was sadly missed by all when he died in 1971, at age only 69. He was especially missed by all who knew him in his great days as a leading silk in the Melbourne Bar.