Australian Dictionary of Biography

Dame Roma Mitchell, c.1954

State Library of South Australia, PRG 778/57/1

Dame Roma Alma Flinders Mitchell (1913–2000), judge, governor, and human rights commissioner, was born on 2 October 1913 in North Adelaide, second daughter and youngest child of locally born parents Harold Flinders Mitchell, solicitor, and his wife Maude Imelda, née Wickham. The first-born, Mignon, born just seven months and a half months after their wedding, died of meningitis. Roma was only four when her father, having enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, was killed in action in April 1918 in France.

Mitchell was educated at St Aloysius College, Adelaide (1920–30). An intelligent and industrious student, she was awarded the Annie Montgomerie Martin medal in French (1929) and the State’s prize for Latin (1930), having placed first in the State in both subjects. In 1931 she entered the University of Adelaide’s law school (LLB, 1934): ‘always,’ she said later, ‘I intended to be a barrister’ (Mitchell 1999). This necessitated training in legal argumentation in moots organised by the Law Students’ Society. As the society would admit only men, she helped establish a Women’s Law Students’ Society (secretary 1934), and won its debating prize in 1933 and 1934.

On 12 December 1934 Mitchell graduated with the David Murray scholarship for consistently achieving outstanding results throughout her law degree. Three days later she was admitted as a legal practitioner of the Supreme Court of South Australia. Her proud mother declared her ‘my bluebird of happiness’ (SLSA PRG 778/22). Roma had a great affinity with her mother and grieved for the rest of her life after Maude’s death in 1938. With the assistance of a distinguished barrister uncle by marriage, Frank Villeneuve Smith, Mitchell had commenced her articles of clerkship with Rollison & Rollison. As this firm was too small to engage a paid solicitor, she transferred to another where, within four months, she was made a partner, the new firm thus becoming Nelligan, Angas Parsons & Mitchell.

At first, Mitchell did little work in the criminal jurisdiction. She regretted not gaining such early experience but reasoned that a woman in an otherwise all-male court would be regarded as an object of curiosity, distracting participants and so doing a disservice to her client. Not until 1960 did a delegation of the League of Women Voters and the National Council of Women, led by Mitchell as their sole speaker, succeed in persuading South Australia’s long-standing premier, Sir Thomas Playford, that it was appropriate for women to serve on juries in that State.

Mitchell’s care and capacity for empathy with her clients won her esteem and gratitude. ‘It is not the huge and very obvious things you have done but all the “tiny” kindnesses that will go unsung, because you will never mention them and those who received them pay you the honour of silence’ (SLSA PRG 778/3/8/6), wrote one. She could be tough, though, when this was called for. Len King—articled to Mitchell (1948–49), and a future attorney-general and chief justice—recalled that domestic violence cases drew ‘a few recalcitrant husbands who appeared on her doorstep.’ One particularly aggressive man ‘was absolutely objectionable and shouting and carrying on and brow-beating and swearing at her … She just bounced him out of that office with an absolute assurance’ (King 2003).

Following an austere period during World War II, during which the lawyers who remained in Adelaide maintained the practices of those who were away on active service by picking up their briefs, Mitchell was elected to the council of the Law Society of South Australia (1952) and joined its legal assistance committee. In London in 1954, at the first Commonwealth and Empire Law Conference, she presented an account of the South Australian legal assistance scheme that would eventually influence the system introduced into Britain. By the time the third conference was held in Sydney in 1965, she had a vocal international following. The prominent English QC, Tom Kellock, described himself as a member of the Roma Mitchell fan club. In 1958 she was appointed the first part-time lecturer at the University of Adelaide in family law.

On 20 September 1962 Mitchell became the first woman in Australia to be made a Queen’s Counsel. She was immensely proud: ‘The only thing that I really felt was an achievement on my own was when I became a silk, a Queen’s Counsel’ (Australian Biography 1993). That year she established a new firm with two younger solicitors, David Haese and Doreen Curnow (later Bulbeck), and subsequently Ted Mullighan. Growing to appreciate the excitement of court work, she often acted for women who were subjected to domestic violence yet had nowhere to go because no authority could put the offending husband out of the house if it was his or was rented in his name. She also acted for deserted wives and for women with no way of earning an adequate living.

Mitchell’s responsibilities within the legal profession grew. She was made vice-president of the Law Council of Australia in 1963, and was expecting to be elected its first female president. However, in 1965 she was invited to lunch at Parliament House with Don Dunstan, then attorney-general, who asked if she would accept an appointment to the bench of the South Australian Supreme Court.

Though Mitchell felt there was ‘no excitement in connection with a judge’s life’ (Australian Biography 1993), there was a tradition that barristers had a moral obligation to accept such an offer. For her there was another imperative: ‘I thought I owed it to women’ (Australian Biography 1993). The press responded with nonsense about how she was to be addressed. In Britain a similar recent appointee was addressed as ‘Her Lordship,’ but South Australia’s lieutenant governor vainly decreed that the new judge should be addressed as ‘Mr Justice Mitchell.’ It was nonetheless an extremely popular appointment: Mitchell herself counted 482 letters and telegrams of congratulation. She took her seat on the bench of the Full Court on 27 September 1965, concluding her remarks by echoing United States President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, asking for God’s blessing and His help, ‘but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own’ (Mitchell 2002). Working in both criminal and civil jurisdictions, first instance and appellate, she wrote her judgments promptly, believing that she owed a timely decision to those who appeared before her, and that too long an interval risked the loss of her initial impression. In 1971 she was appointed CBE.

Mitchell was not known as a great or radical jurist, but her years on the bench were marked by four particularly significant contributions. First, in delivering the 1971 Sir John Morris memorial lecture in Tasmania on ‘Women’s Liberation and the Law,’ she presented a persuasive discussion of new publications on the women’s liberation movement, principally from the United States of America, during which, as Justice Elizabeth Evatt was to observe, Mitchell ‘nailed her feminist colours to the mast’ (Evatt 2002, 282). Second, she chaired the Criminal Law and Penal Methods Reform Committee of South Australia (1971–77), which delivered four extensive reports and 907 recommendations. The committee’s prodigious labours showed its members to be reformers rather than punishers. They urged, for example, that sentences should continue to be passed by judges and magistrates, rather than enshrined in statutes by politicians, as had been proposed in some quarters. Furthermore, jurists and police needed to be better informed on criminology and the workings of the correctional system.

The committee’s report of 1973 dealt with the wide-ranging neglect and ill-treatment of Aboriginal people, recommending that minor offences be abolished, detoxification centres be established, and supervised prohibition replace short-term imprisonment. Law enforcement officers should ‘take a special responsibility for the welfare of these singularly disadvantaged citizens’ (CLPMRCSA 1973, 207) to ensure that they were fully informed about the justice system. The committee was appalled by the condition of South Australia’s prisons and recommended better care for inmates. The committee’s report of 1977 on rape declined to recommend that the onus of disproving ‘guilty intent’ be placed on the accused, but did urge that husbands be indictable for rape of a wife (though only if they were living apart), asserting that, ‘it is anachronistic to suggest that a wife is bound to submit to intercourse with her husband whenever he wishes it irrespective of her own wishes’ (CLPMRCSA 1977, 110).

Some of the Mitchell committee’s reports and recommendations were highly controversial at the time and became widely influential, in part a result of the third standout event of Mitchell’s time on the bench. In 1975, International Women’s Year, she became the first woman to deliver the annual Australian Broadcasting Commission Boyer lectures. In this series, entitled ‘The Web of Criminal Law,’ she presented central elements of the committee’s work to a national audience. The former Justice of the High Court and Governor General, Sir William Deane later described this as ‘among the most insightful overall analyses of the criminal law in this country’ (Deane 2002, 15). She was now both a public intellectual and a national figure.

The fourth highly consequential feature of her years on the bench was the 1978 Royal Commission on Dismissal from the Office of the Commissioner of Police, better known as the Salisbury commission. This was a messy story of conflict between the Dunstan government and the South Australian police force under commissioner Harold Salisbury. The matter concerned the Special Branch’s long-standing practice of retaining reports about South Australians which were often ill-founded and libellous. When the government asked Salisbury for a report on the branch’s holdings, he obfuscated, and on three occasions his replies were ‘very seriously wrong.’ There was, it was finally revealed, ‘a mass of records … relating to matters, organizations and persons having no connection whatever with genuine security risks’ (South Australia 1978, 1362). Salisbury, with support from the State Opposition and some conservative sections of Adelaide society, resisted the government’s urging that he resign. On 10 February 1978 Mitchell was appointed to inquire into and report on whether Salisbury had misled the government about the nature and extent of Special Branch operations; whether the government’s decision to dismiss Salisbury was justifiable; and, finally, whether there was reason to modify the prerogative rights of the Crown to dismiss the commissioner of police. She submitted the committee’s report on 30 May 1978: ‘yes,’ it concluded, ‘yes,’ and ‘yes.’

Mitchell’s judicial career ended in 1983. There were eleven unsuccessful attempts to have her appointed to the High Court of Australia. In retirement she contributed to the work of bodies ranging from the Ryder-Cheshire Foundation and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, to the council of the University of Adelaide, where she was elected chancellor (1983–90). In 1981, with her lifelong friends, sisters Jean Whyte and Billie Whyte, she bought a block of land at Carrickalinga, a coastal town south of Adelaide, where they built a kit home as an occasional retreat. She and Billie delivered lunches to frail aged people for Meals on Wheels.

In December 1981 the Australian government had announced the establishment of the Human Rights Commission, with Mitchell as its chair, a part-time position she held until 1986. In June 1982 she was appointed DBE. The congratulatory letters this time totalled six hundred. In public, she was quite happy to make fun of her new award, declaring it to be all a bit of a pantomime. But she prized this honour highly: from now on she would be known as Dame Roma, though not when she met her colleagues on the commission. The disability advocate Elizabeth Hastings recalled her first words to the other members as being ‘Good morning, my name is Roma’ (Hastings 1997, 13).

The commission consisted of talent drawn from each of the States and represented many different community concerns, including the rights of women, Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities. But it was not a prosecuting or judicial body: rather, its functions were to listen to complaints, enquire, conciliate, and educate. Mitchell was appalled by many attitudes and behaviours that she encountered, singling out Western Australia and the Northern Territory as centres of racial intolerance. The human rights of people with disabilities involved some careful and innovatory distinctions between, for instance, mental illness and intellectual disability.

After a Federal Labor government was elected in 1983 the commission supported the sex discrimination bill proposed by Susan Ryan in her capacity as minister assisting the prime minister on the status of women. Mitchell told a national television audience not only what she thought of the policies and practices of the National Party premier of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but also accused Australians of being ‘bigoted, prejudiced, intolerant and narrow-minded where racial, social and moral issues are concerned’ (Nationwide 1984). The commission combatted a wave of opposition to immigration following comments made by historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1984. Between 1984 and 1986 Mitchell conducted a judicial inquiry with the powers of a royal commission to determine appropriate compensation due to migrants from Greece who had been wrongly accused of conspiring to defraud the social security system. At the end of its five-year term the commission was superseded by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, with a broader mandate.

In January 1991 Mitchell was appointed AC. On 6 February she was sworn in as South Australia’s thirty-first governor, making her the first woman to hold vice-regal office in Australia. This was an enormously popular appointment, and her last, to which she gave all of her still immense capacity for care and concern, deriving pleasure, too, from visiting widely around the State. She considered it a very good retirement occupation.

On 5 March 2000 Mitchell died from cancer at St Andrew’s hospital, Adelaide, and was cremated. Her State funeral filled St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral in Adelaide, with hundreds more in marquees outside. Speakers ranged from the archbishops of both the Catholic and the Anglican churches, to senior representatives from the Salvation Army and the Lutheran church. Deane declared her funeral ‘an occasion for celebration … of the life of one of the greatest of all Australians. A life of wonderful achievements, including an incomparable number of nationally significant firsts. A life which blazed a trail for all Australian women’ (Deane 2002). The Aboriginal community of Tandanya declared that she had become a legend in her own lifetime.

Mitchell’s career spanned a time illuminated by new freedoms and responsibilities for women, for which she was a leading inspiration. Her life was one of contradictions. Her Catholic religion aligned with her Irish working-class heritage, yet she attained the top position in a largely Protestant establishment, and prized her imperial honours. She was deeply committed to the common law that she sought to change, and while also an internationalist, remained a committed South Australian. Her achievements were commemorated through the Roma Mitchell Commonwealth Law Court in Adelaide (2006), and the Roma Mitchell Secondary College at suburban Gepps Cross (2011). Portraits were also acquired by the National Portrait Gallery (by the photographer Jessica Hromas, 1998) and the Adelaide Town Hall (Kate Kurucz, 2021). A statue by Janette Moore on North Terrace, Adelaide, was dedicated in 1999.