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Launch of 'Paris Nesbit KC' by Hon. Michael Kirby AC, CMG

Name: Launch of 'Paris Nesbit KC' by Hon. Michael Kirby AC, CMG
Start: 2026-02-06T12:30:00+11:00
End: 2026-02-06T12:30:00+11:00
Location: Hall B, Adelaide Convention Centre

About

Graham Loughlin's biography recounts the life of the brilliant South Australian barrister, writer and reformer who was hailed in life ‘as a man of wide culture and scholarship, a poet, an iconoclast, a reformer and a lover of humanity without guile or cynicism,’ and eulogised in death as ‘quite the most striking personality in South Australia … almost a legendary figure, one of Australia’s great and beloved sons.’ To his detractors he was egotistical, opinionated, immoral, erratic and mad. Intellectually brilliant but afflicted by mental illness, he was twice gaoled and four times certified a ‘lunatic’ and confined in asylums.
Nesbit lectured and wrote prolifically with pronounced liberal convictions and Bohemian sympathies. He championed numerous causes, once describing himself as a Don Quixote – when he saw a windmill that he thought should be knocked down, he must try to overthrow it. His crusades included such varied causes as enlightened divorce and lunacy laws, abolition of imprisonment for debt, destigmatisation of unmarried mothers, State-funded legal representation, modified legal procedures for Aboriginals, liberal licensing laws, and prohibition of hare coursing.
Politically inspired by the English liberal tradition and Christian Socialism, he was in turn a foundation member of both the Labor Party and Liberal Union, unsuccessfully contested four elections, and was a leading proponent of federation.
Through its detailed examination of a remarkable and turbulent life, Paris Nesbit KC: Quixotic Counsel reveals the man behind the myth, shines a light on the treatment of mental illness before the advent of psychotropic medication, and makes a decisive contribution to South Australian legal, political and social history. Uniquely, it tracks the career from articled clerk to King’s Counsel of a leading practitioner in a fused profession over 50 years from the 1870s to the 1920s.