Basic Fairness Was The Final Arbiter

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday April 28, 2008

Paul Sheehan

There is a view, a cliche, that the Emerald City glitters with a shallow greed behind its brilliant harbour. That is only partly true. There is also a steel spine of intellectual rigour, a discriminating elite that holds the city together. Discrimination is a good thing, so is elitism.

This spine does not usually seek, nor often grace, the mass media. But it is there, it is sizeable, it is crucial, and it was amply evident in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney last Wednesday night.

The Great Hall seats 600. By 6pm, every seat was taken. A spillover crowd of 100 people gathered in an anteroom. Among those who spoke to this packed audience was the Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, impressive and warm as ever. She was an obvious choice to become the first woman governor-general of Australia but she committed the new crime of not being a Queenslander.

The Governor, like the rest, had come to honour and farewell G.F.K. Santow, who died on April 10, at the age of 67. He had been bristling with his usual energy and curiosity until quite recently, when an onrushing cancer snuffed out the light.

For the great majority of people, his name does not resonate, but his sudden passing was like a large ship slipping quietly out of the harbour on a final voyage.

We don't do profiles on this page, but this was a large life. The Chief Justice of NSW, Jim Spigelman, described Kim Santow as an "intellectual omnivore". The vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, Gavin Brown, likened him to "a hunting ferret". They were talking about what his son, William, described on Wednesday as his father's "essential bigness - his scale was self-evident, but even his physicality was dwarfed by his big-spiritedness and generosity".

Kim Santow did not just attend the University of Sydney, he became its chancellor. He did not simply practise law, he changed the law. He did not merely join a leading law firm, Freehills, he helped transform it. He did not seek a path to high judicial position, but it was thrust upon him.

He was so good at what he did that he became only the second solicitor to be elevated to the state's highest court without having practised as a barrister. His brother-in-law, Bill Frankel, said in farewell: "Kim was without doubt the most remarkable person I had the privilege to know. He was a giant of a man, not only his physical height, but in his sheer intellect."

His was also a quintessentially Sydney life. He was the judge who found that Rodney Adler and Ray Williams had breached their duties as directors. For 14 years, he was the most prolific author of leading judgments on corporate law in Australia.

Before that, he was a commercial lawyer who did a succession of big, complex deals, involving big companies and big corporate takeovers.

Before that, he was a brilliant student and rower at university, where he was awarded first class honours and a rowing blue. The blue and gold striped blazers scattered like flowers in the Great Hall on Wednesday, worn by his fellow blues, provided a touching gesture.

He was also, in the words of his son William, "a property voyeur", surely the most quintessential Sydney foible. He loved the harbour and for many years rowed on the Lane Cove River, picking up the stroke rate as he passed his then home at Hunters Hill.

It was Santow who helped Arthur Boyd donate his Shoalhaven estate in Bundanon to the nation. He was a charitable Clydesdale, serving on the boards of some of the city's most precious institutions, the Sydney Opera House, the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Grammar School and St Vincent's Hospital, among others. He loved classical music, especially Bach. He loved his family, his wide circle of friends, and books. He was passionate about cats.

He left behind a wife of 41 years, Lee, and three intelligent, hulking sons who loved their father; as always, a man's greatest achievement.

Above all that, he was a rigorous intellectual. And he started early. As one of the speakers on Wednesday night, Stephen Chipkin, said of his early life: "Geza Francis Kim Santow was the son of an intellectual Hungarian father, an occasional mother and, as a young boy, was in the care of a governess who wrote letters to Aldous Huxley ... when he was nine, he wrote a letter to the local newspaper urging that all Australian children should be exposed to the music of Mozart."

Pierre Ryckmans, one of Australia's most elegant writers and thinkers, was another who paid tribute in the Great Hall on Wednesday:

"In an age like ours, when we see the professions and even the university - alas - being increasingly dominated by a modern breed which an old teacher of mine used to call, 'les brutes specialisees' - how to translate this, specialised brutes? - Kim could genuinely appropriate the magnificent claim of the Latin poet: 'Homo sum. Humani nil a me alienum puto' - 'I am human. Nothing that is human should be indifferent to me'. And, indeed, Kim's intellectual curiosity was boundless.

"In Kim's farewell address to the Supreme Court," Ryckmans continued, "to sum up what he believed from a lifetime's experience of the law, Kim chose to quote from another judge: 'A legal answer which offends common sense or basic fairness is usually wrong, however cleverly contrived.'

"I wish those words were carved in letters of gold in all the courtrooms of the land!"

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home