Australian Dictionary of Biography

Justice R. M. Hope, by Malcolm Lindsay, 1973 [detail]

National Library of Australia, PIC Box PIC/12604 #PIC/12604/1

Robert Marsden Hope (1919–1999), judge, royal commissioner, and university chancellor, was born on 24 July 1919 at Haberfield, Sydney, second of three sons of New South Wales-born parents Sydney Natt Hope, wool expert, and his wife Pearl Blyth, née James. Included among Robert’s forebears was the missionary Samuel Marsden, as was reflected in his middle name. His uncle, Father John Hope, was rector at Christ Church St Laurence, Sydney, and the historian Manning Clark was his cousin. He was educated at Lindfield Public School and Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore), where he did well academically, winning the Russell Sinclair memorial prize (1936) and a public exhibition to study law. Although somewhat rebellious, a career in law was predicted at an early age by a phrenologist, consulted by his mother.

Hope served articles of clerkship (1937–40) while studying at the University of Sydney (LLB, 1944). Interrupting his course early in World War II, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 29 May 1940. He served in the Middle East (December 1940–March 1942) and Papua (from September 1942) with the 2/6th Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery, as a signaller, rising to bombardier (acting August 1942, substantive November). In August 1943 he was evacuated to the 113th Australian General Hospital, Concord, Sydney, suffering from malaria and scrub typhus. He spent three months recovering, before being granted leave without pay to complete his degree (achieved with first-class honours), and was discharged from the AIF on 4 August 1944. On 11 December 1945 at St Laurence’s Church of England, Barraba, he married June Llewellyn Carter. With her, he would raise a son, Robert John, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Deborah.

Starting professional life as a lecturer in divorce and property law at the University of Sydney in 1945, Hope quickly switched to the New South Wales Bar. Admitted in October 1945, he spent fourteen years as a junior barrister, often engaged in intricate landlord and tenant cases. With Allan Freeman, he co-wrote the standard text on that field of law, Landlord and Tenant Practice and Procedure in New South Wales (1948). For nearly twenty years he taught the complex subject of property law. Students joked—in reference to rules relating to the transfer of property known as limitations—that ‘Hope knows his limitations’ (Edwards 2020, 49).

Nurtured at the Bar by John Holmes and other mentors, Hope took silk in 1960, building a practice in all jurisdictions, but exclusively in non-jury trials. When Cyril Walsh was appointed from the Supreme Court of New South Wales to the High Court of Australia, Hope was sworn in to fill the vacancy on 22 September 1969. Assigned originally to the Equity side, he served there until elevated to be a judge of appeal of the New South Wales Court of Appeal from 7 August 1972. He served in that capacity until his retirement from the court in July 1989. Thereafter, for various intervals from August 1989 to February 1990, he served as an acting judge of appeal. As an appellate judge, he disposed of the very wide variety of civil, criminal, constitutional, and other cases coming before that court. During the 1970s he was reportedly considered for elevation to the High Court, but was not appointed. He was professional and optimistic in outlook. If he was disappointed by being passed over, he never let on.

Before his judicial appointment, Hope had been elected president (1967–69) of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties. He helped draft the booklet If You Are Arrested, providing legal advice to citizens, and participated in CCL protests, mostly concerning censorship. Throughout his life, he was a liberal, not then a common judicial characteristic. His reputation led to non-judicial appointments that drew on his broader talents. In 1973 and 1974, he served as chairman of a Federal committee enquiring into the national estate. From 1974 to 1977, he was appointed as royal commissioner on intelligence and security. His eight reports closely examined the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the Defence Signals Division, and the Joint Intelligence Organisation. He made extensive recommendations on the legislation, structure, and operational doctrines of the agencies, shaping their relationships with the public, parliament, ministers, government agencies, and each other. The government implemented his recommendations to create the Office of National Assessments, placing an assessment agency at the centre of the national intelligence community, and to establish an appeal process for the security assessments made by ASIO.

Following a bombing incident at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney in 1978, Hope was tasked with examining protective security in Australia. Later, in 1983 and 1984, he was called on by the Australian Labor Party government of Bob Hawke to serve again as royal commissioner on Australia’s security and intelligence agencies, surveying the improvements resulting from his reports of the previous decade. He recommended the appointment of an inspector-general, to provide external scrutiny. The enquiry also included an investigation of the Combe-Ivanov affair. Most of his many recommendations were implemented. They bore the stamp of his civil libertarian inclinations.

From 1970 Hope had served on the senate of the University of Sydney. He resigned that post in 1975, when he accepted election as inaugural chancellor of the University of Wollongong, which had previously been a constituent college of the University of New South Wales. The university grew in size and stature under his guidance. A proponent of excellence of teaching and scholarship, he encouraged the creation of a new law school. In February 1991, the university conferred on him an honorary doctorate of laws. He retired in September 1997, his steady hand as chancellor over twenty-two years having won praise in the Illawarra region. His hallmark at graduation ceremonies was speaking personally to each graduate. He was appointed CMG in 1977 and AC in 1989, and in 1993 he received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Sydney.

Between 1990 and 1993, Hope had served as chairperson of the New South Wales Law Reform Commission, deftly steering its sensitive enquiry into independent procedures for investigating complaints against lawyers. During his career, and in the years after his retirement as university chancellor, he was engaged in the arts, music, theatre, and education. At various times, he sat on the board of Musica Viva; chaired the Old Tote and Nimrod theatres in Sydney; and served on the board of Tranby, the Aboriginal educational and training body. He was a keen gardener and pursued his interests in skiing and tennis beyond physical prudence. Sailing and squash were also among his sporting passions.

‘A tall, dignified man,’ Hope had ‘a craggy, somewhat stern face (until he smiled)’ (McKinnon 1999, 14). He was ‘a great raconteur with a rich fund of wonderful stories’ (Farquharson 1999, 33), and was admired for his warm personality, good humour, common sense, and contempt for official pomposity. Still, he was never a soft touch. In court and as a royal commissioner, he could be ‘sharp, angry, dismissive, curt and freely express[ive of his] disbelief’ (Marr 1983, 7) at propositions with which he disagreed. Truly independent in outlook, he could convey—without malice or severing personal friendships—a judicial finding that a fellow judge had denied natural justice. He sometimes recounted how his graduate clerk had said that he expected to find judges as ‘red-hot lawyers deciding cases on very difficult questions of law,’ but instead discovered ‘a group of elderly men trying to do justice’ (Hope 1998). This was a verdict that Hope was willing to embrace. He died on 12 October 1999 at Turramurra, survived by his wife and children; he was cremated. A crowded memorial service was conducted at St James’s Church, Sydney, which had been consecrated 175 years earlier by Samuel Marsden. The University of Wollongong established a major prize in his name, and a portrait is in the possession of the university. A building in the parliamentary triangle in Canberra was named for him, and—in tribute to his work for the National Estate and on the Heritage Council of New South Wales—a park named after him was created in the Australian Capital Territory.