Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Edward Stratten Williams, no date

State Library of Queensland

Sir Edward Stratten Williams (1921–1999), judge, sports administrator, and exhibition organiser, was born on 29 December 1921 at Yungaburra, on the Atherton Tableland, Queensland, youngest of four children of Queensland-born parents Claudia Zilla Williams, née McHugh, and her husband, Edward Stratten Williams, a merchant. Sir (Henry) Sydney Williams (1920–2003), a Far North Queensland businessman, was his brother. The extended Williams family were entrepreneurial and close knit. Young Ned’s father died in September 1929 and his mother in June 1930, after which he lived with an uncle and aunt, Fred and Erin Williams, and their five children. He attended Yungaburra State School and then boarded at the Christian Brothers’ Mount Carmel College, Charters Towers, where he gained colours for cricket and football and was dux (1939).

In February 1940 Williams commenced articles of clerkship with the solicitors J. F. Fitzgerald & Walsh, Brisbane. World War II having broken out, he served in Queensland (July to December) with the 2nd-14th Light Horse Regiment, Citizen Military Forces. On 1 February 1943 he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He trained as a bomber pilot in Australia and England but was not required for operations until after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, when he flew recovered prisoners of war from the Continent to Britain. While in England, he enrolled as an external student at the University of London (LLB, 1946). He was demobilised in Australia with the rank of temporary flight lieutenant on 24 February 1947.

Admitted as a barrister of the Supreme Court of Queensland on 19 November 1947, Williams began practising at the private Bar in Brisbane. On 15 January 1949 at the Holy Spirit Church, New Farm, he married Dorothy May Murray (1919–2017), an air hostess. He took silk on 4 March 1965; served as a member of the Supreme Court’s library committee (1965–68) and the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for the State of Queensland (1966–71); and presided over the Bar Association of Queensland (1970–71).

On 13 May 1971 Williams was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland. He impressed a future chief justice, Paul de Jersey, with his ‘willingness to cut with tradition and strive for efficiency’ (1999, 2). Although a fellow judge, James Thomas, considered Williams’s knowledge of the law to be superficial, de Jersey cited the case of Lewis Construction Pty Ltd v Southern Electric Authority of Queensland (1976), which was ‘extremely complicated [with] great ramifications for the people of South-East Queensland’ (1999, 2). After a few days of hearings, Williams delivered ‘a comprehensive, lengthy, apparently ex tempore judgment’ (1999, 2) that astounded de Jersey with its quality and which ‘must have relied on extensive preparation, fed by an acute perception of legal principle’ (1999, 2). The judgment was upheld on appeal by both the Full Court and the High Court of Australia.

Williams resigned from the Supreme Court on 17 February 1984, by which time he had undertaken considerable extra-judicial work. He chaired the Queensland Parole Board (1976–83); headed the Commonwealth royal commission into drugs (1977–80); held office as a member (1982–87) of the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board—the first Australian to do so; and accepted nomination to head the Fraser government’s National Crimes Commission in 1983, before its supersession by the Hawke government’s National Crime Authority that year. Later, he would serve as chair of the Queensland Corrective Services Commission (1989–90) and as a judge of the Court of Appeal of Fiji (1993–96).

In 1979, during the royal commission into drugs, Williams had recommended that the Federal Narcotics Bureau be disbanded as inefficient and ineffective. That year the premier of Queensland, (Sir) Joh Bjelke-Petersen, asked the commission to investigate allegations that Queensland politicians and senior police officers were involved in the illegal drugs trade. An agent of the Narcotics Bureau, John Shobbrook, had obtained information that Glendon Hallahan, a former policeman, was trafficking illicit drugs; he was alleged to be an associate of two senior officers, the commissioner, Terence Lewis, and the head of the criminal investigation branch, Anthony Murphy. The counsel assisting, Cedric Hampson, and Williams as commissioner, limited the weight given to Shobbrook’s testimony and cast doubt on Hallahan’s culpability.

Leadership roles in two major national events, both attended by Queen Elizabeth II, made Williams a public figure. From 1977 he chaired the XII Commonwealth Games Australia (1982) Foundation Ltd, which organised the games in Brisbane that year. He worked with the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, the Commonwealth secretary-general, Sir Shridath Ramphal, and other officials to defuse a potential boycott by African countries, following the South African rugby union team’s 1981 tour of New Zealand. The well-conducted competitions ran from 30 September to 9 October and the foundation was wound up with an unplanned cash surplus resulting from larger than expected ticket sales.

In 1984 Williams was appointed as commissioner-general for World Expo ’88 in Brisbane, representing the Federal government and responsible for ensuring that the exhibition complied with the regulations of the Bureau International des Expositions. Complex intergovernmental relations and personal differences led to friction between Williams and Sir Llew Edwards, chairman of the Brisbane Exposition and South Bank Redevelopment Authority, complicating the management of the project, which, nevertheless, was widely acknowledged as a success. In a State-wide poll—titled ‘Queensland’s 150 Icons’—conducted for the sesquicentenary in 2009, residents placed the exposition first and the games fourth among defining moments in the State’s history.

A horse-racing enthusiast, Williams was a member (1953), committee member (1966–91), chairman (1980–91), and life member (1991) of the Queensland Turf Club. As chairman, he opposed the Labor minister for racing, Bob Gibbs, in his determination (from 1990) to reorganise the sport and strip the club of its joint powers to control and regulate thoroughbred racing in southern Queensland. Williams blamed the dispute for the government’s decision to replace him as head of the Corrective Services Commission after only two years. He was a long-serving and energetic president (1971–94) of the Playground and Recreation Association of Queensland, declaring it ‘one of the best things I ever did’ (1995). In 1986 he provoked controversy by proclaiming that mothers should stay home with their children and that the Family Law Act 1975 should be repealed because it helped to break up families. Interested in business, he sat on the boards of a number of companies, including Elders IXL Ltd (Foster’s Brewing Group Ltd from 1990) (1985–92).

Williams was appointed KBE (1981) and KCMG (1983) and was selected as Australian of the Year (1982), Queenslander of the Year (1983), and Queensland Father of the Year (1984). He was just under six feet (183 cm) tall and solidly built. Blunt, informal, and outspoken, he acknowledged that, beginning in his childhood, he ‘had a fair amount to say’, and that one of his ‘character defects’ was believing himself ‘always right’ (1995). James Thomas, who knew him well, wrote that he

was a mixture of talent, energy, desire to make the world a better place, and capacity to wheel and deal. He had little respect for the conventions other than the primacy of the family and his basic Catholic beliefs, but was overall a beneficent human being. (2011, 217)

From the late 1950s, the Williams family lived at Clonlara, in the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield, a large house in extensive grounds containing, extraordinarily, two tennis courts. Sir Edward and Lady Williams, known as Dot, were a devoted couple, she strongly supporting him in his professional and public roles. She was ‘a perfectionist’ who ‘put the same effort into looking after the Queen as she did preparing [her children’s] lunches’ (Lyons, pers. comm.). Sharing her husband’s passion for the turf, she was a well-informed and successful staker at Eagle Farm racecourse on Saturday afternoons. The couple’s children remember loving and attentive parents interested in their lives and later the lives of their sons- and daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Williams died on 10 January 1999 at Auchenflower and was buried in Nudgee cemetery. His wife survived him, as did their four daughters, Zilla, Judith, Therese, and Elizabeth, and three of their four sons, Edward, Sydney, and Anthony; their son Michael had tragically drowned in the family’s swimming pool aged eighteen months. The family donated a framed photograph of Sir Edward’s portrait by Sir William Dargie to the Supreme Court of Queensland.