Nobody Cared About Fishwick

Fishwick and Cleland

On an inconspicuous door inside a very modest building in a back street of Melbourne there appeared a little typewritten notice:

Fishwick And Cleland

Inside, one found the solemn panoply of one of the world’s most famous judicial bodies —the Full Bench of the High Court of Australia, in session.

It appeared singularly unexciting.

Now and again, a newspaper reporter would look in, listen for a minute to the quiet drone of an eminent legal authority as he read from books and documents, and flee.

This went on day after day. There were no reporters in the Press box and practically nothing about it in the newspapers. Three or four spectators nodded drowsily on the public benches.

The radio broadcasts mentioned it once.

Yet this was the scene of one of the most interesting constitutional argu ments ever heard in Australia. The verdict of that Court will be closely studied in United Nations and on it depends the shape and character of the future government of Papua and New Guinea.

With every hour that passed, huge sums provided for Australia’s most highly-paid judges and counsel were disappearing from the pockets of the public.

But the public could not care less.

Neither newspapers nor radio gave more than a bare Inkling of what “Fishwick versus Cleland” meant. (“Pishwick” is Mr. M. W. Fishwick, of Rabaul, who initiated the High Court action on behalf of the Tax payers’ Association: and “Cleland” is Brigadier D. M. Cleland, Administrator of the Territory.)