lit a candle 2h agoJustice Gaudron shaped the law on equal pay and native title. Her work mattered beyond Australia.
Their story
Mary Genevieve Gaudron was Australia's first woman appointed to the High Court of Australia, a working-class daughter of Moree who rose from rural New South Wales to the summit of Australian law. Born on 5 January 1943 to Edward and Grace Gaudron, she grew up amid the everyday racism directed…
Mary Genevieve Gaudron was Australia's first woman appointed to the High Court of Australia, a working-class daughter of Moree who rose from rural New South Wales to the summit of Australian law. Born on 5 January 1943 to Edward and Grace Gaudron, she grew up amid the everyday racism directed at Indigenous Australians in Moree, an experience she later said shaped her lifelong opposition to discrimination of every kind.
As a child she once interrupted H. V. Evatt during a 1951 referendum campaign stop to ask what a Constitution was. Evatt compared it to the Ten Commandments of government and mailed her a pamphlet. When school bullies scoffed, she answered that it mattered to lawyers, and that she would become one. She kept that promise.
Educated at St Ursula's College in Armidale, she won a federal scholarship to the University of Sydney, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1962 and Bachelor of Laws with first-class honours and the University Medal in 1965. She was the second woman, and the first female part-time student, to take the medal. Articles of clerkship were repeatedly refused because she was a woman; she later recalled distinguished lawyers explaining that they did not take female clerks. She worked in the Australian Public Service until marriage rules forced her out, then completed articles and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar in October 1968.
Chambers rooms were hard to buy as a woman. She eventually shared space with Janet Coombs and built a practice strong in industrial law before the Supreme Court and the High Court. In 1970, at twenty-seven, she appeared alone in O'Shaughnessy v Mirror Newspapers Ltd after her client dismissed senior counsel, impressing the High Court with what Peter O'Shaughnessy called her courage and shining intellect. In 1972 she became the first woman on the Council of the New South Wales Bar and successfully argued the Whitlam government's Equal Pay case before the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, extending equal pay principles to workers generally.
In April 1974 she was appointed Deputy President of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, becoming the youngest federal judge to that point. Her notable work there included the 1979 maternity-leave test case that set award standards for a year's unpaid leave. She chaired the inaugural NSW Legal Services Commission in 1979-1980, resigned from the Commission in May 1980, briefly lectured at the University of New South Wales, and in February 1981 became Solicitor-General of New South Wales, the first woman to hold that office in any Australian jurisdiction. The same year she took silk as the first female Queen's Counsel in New South Wales. As Solicitor-General she appeared for the State in landmark matters including the Tasmanian Dams case.
On 6 February 1987, aged forty-four, she was appointed to the High Court with John Toohey, the first woman among the Court's justices and among its youngest. She sat through the Mason and Brennan years on cases that reshaped Australian law, among them Cole v Whitfield, Dietrich v The Queen, and Mabo v Queensland (No 2). In the joint Mabo reasons with Justice Deane she wrote that the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples was "the darkest aspect of the history of this nation." She opposed discrimination in judgments such as Street v Queensland Bar Association and, with Justice McHugh, Castlemaine Tooheys Ltd v South Australia. In the Bicentennial Australia Day Honours of 1988 she declined the Companion of the Order of Australia offered to serving High Court justices. She later served as founding Patron of Australian Women Lawyers and was inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.
She announced her retirement on 21 June 2002, leaving the Court on 10 February 2003 at sixty, a decade before the mandatory retirement age. Colleagues, including Justice Michael Kirby, said her departure changed the Court's character. In March 2003 she joined the International Labour Organization in Geneva, served on an inquiry into trade-union rights in Belarus, and became a judge of the ILO Administrative Tribunal, serving as its President from 2011 to 2014.
Gaudron had two daughters, Danielle and Julienne, with her first husband Ben Nurse, and a son, Patrick, with her second husband John Fogarty. She died on 13 September 2026 aged eighty-three. Governor-General Sam Mostyn called her a trailblazer of remarkable intellect whose career was defined by a series of firsts. Across the Bar, the academy and public life she was remembered as a jurist whose contribution was never merely symbolic: she humanised Australian law while insisting on the rule of law itself.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Sydney Morning Herald, and sources cited on this page.
In their own words
“The darkest aspect of the history of this nation.”
Joint judgment with Justice Deane in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992), describing the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples.
“Please sir, what's a Constitution?”
Childhood question to H. V. Evatt during the 1951 referendum campaign in Moree, as later recounted in biographical accounts.
“The only difference between us is that I sit down to pee!”
Reportedly said when asked about winning the University of Sydney Medal as a woman rather than a man; recounted in Sydney Morning Herald coverage of her death.
“Many distinguished lawyers took a lot of trouble and effort to explain to me that it was not their policy to take on women as articled clerks.”
On being refused articles of clerkship as a young graduate.
“To be a bit player in the maintenance of the rule of law in Australia.”
How Gaudron described herself as privileged in 2005.
“Next you'll be telling us she was born in a bloody manger!”
Attributed to Gough Whitlam responding in Cabinet when Clyde Cameron stressed Gaudron's working-class background before her Arbitration Commission appointment (as later recounted).
Photos
2Mary Gaudron AC QC after a Governor-General swearing-in ceremony, 2011
Dec 2011
by People Forever
Mary Gaudron with Julia Gillard, Quentin Bryce and Nicola Roxon after a swearing-in ceremony at Admiralty House, 14 December 2011
Dec 2011
by People Forever
From social media
8Posts by Mary, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.