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Australia’s first female High Court judge, Mary Gaudron, has died aged 83.
After receiving a scholarship to the University of Sydney, she left it with the university medal in hand. Asked to comment on the award going to a female rather than a male, she said: “The only difference between us is that I sit down to pee!”
Gaudron’s distinguished career included time as a barrister – after being turned down for legal clerkships by lawyers who would not hire women – then becoming the youngest federal judge on the former Conciliation and Arbitration Commission as deputy president.
She was also the inaugural NSW legal services commissioner and the NSW solicitor-general – the first woman to hold that role in any Australian jurisdiction.
In 1987, aged 44, she became the first female judge of Australia’s High Court.
She was a deciding voice on the landmark Mabo case, which recognised the ownership of a group of Torres Straight Islanders over Queensland’s Murray Island which also held that native title exists for all Indigenous people.
In a joint judgment, she wrote that Aboriginal dispossession of their land was “the darkest aspect of the history of this nation.
She retired in 2003, aged 60, to work at the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation.
“As the first woman appointed to the High Court of Australia, and the only woman Justice in the Court’s first century, she broke new ground and inspired generations of Australians to pursue careers in the law and public service,” Governor-General Sam Mostyn wrote in an Instagram tribute on Sunday afternoon.
“Justice Gaudron brought her fierce intellect, integrity, compassion and a deep commitment to justice to every role she held. Her legacy endures in the Australian legal system and in the many people who continue to follow the path she helped forge.”
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