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Edward Harrison, Victorian Justices’ Manual (1910)

Robert Menzies was brought up with a tremendous sense of civic duty, and there is no better example of that than his father James Menzies. James was a humble coach-painter who took up a job running the Jeparit General Store at the behest of his brother in law, Sydney Sampson. Yet, such was James’s concern for the wellbeing of the town and its residents, that he allowed numerous people to take goods on generous ‘credit’ during the federation drought, knowing many of them would never be able to pay him back.

James thus became such an integral part of the local community that he was soon convinced to run for public office, serving on the Dimboola Shire Council from 1898, and thus a career in politics was begun which would greatly influence his son Robert. At a time when the administrative apparatus of the colony/state of Victoria was much less developed than it was today, James also became a Justice of the Peace – a role that back then involved much more than simply signing off on documents.

Indeed, the origins of the justice role date all the way back to the 12th century, when Richard the Lionheart – who spent virtually none of his reign in England because he was too busy fighting crusades – appointed people to quite literally ‘keep the peace’ in his absence. JPs were soon performing functions like hearing and determining offences, and even licensing public houses. When Australia was settled by the British in 1788, JPs were appointed almost immediately. The first JP for the ‘Port Phillip District’ (what became Victoria) was Captain William Lonsdale, and he would hear cases as a pseudo-judge.

The copy of the Victorian Justices’ Manual found in the Menzies Collection was originally James’s, being inscribed with his name and address, the latter being ‘Maniton’ in Camberwell. But it was clearly co-opted by his son, who has stamped the front endpaper with ‘ROBERT G. MENZIES, Barrister-at-Law’. The book is thus a tangible artifact of the manner in which Robert was deliberately following in his father’s footsteps.

This is how the Horsham Times, a newspaper from Victoria’s Western Districts region that James would represent in Victorian Parliament, described the book’s contents:

‘Mr. E. Harrison, P.M., has written a book, and it has been very favorably received. The book, the title of which is the “Victorian Justices’ Manual,” is not a legal book for the use of lawyers so much as a guide for magistrates and justices of the peace in the performance of the multifarious duties they are called upon to perform. In the course of his experience as a clerk of petty sessions, and subsequently as a police magistrate, Mr. Harrison has collected a considerable body of material relating to the statutes under which justices have power to act, and to the decisions of the Supreme Court thereon. That material is now put at the disposal of the public in the present volume. The work is arranged alphabetically, according to the subject matter discussed, from “Abduction” to “Work and labour done.” The author has occasionally made appropriate quotations from text writers on cognate matters and has exhibited considerable research in the numerous references he gives to reported cases. This is a book which, while in no way likely to displace Messrs Irvine and Wanliss’s well-known legal text book on justices, should prove useful to lay men who hold magisterial office, and should help to guide them from errors which their inexperience and their possibly excusable ignorance of the law are not unlikely to lead them into. To this end a copy of the manual should find a place on every police court bench.’