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From the Aboriginal perspective Major’s career is told in an oral tradition still found in the east Kimberley
though many of the old storytellers are dying out. In the district he stands somewhat as a legendary figure like
frontier bandits of other parts such as Pidgeon and Nemarluk. Their kind of resistance was endemic on many of
the Australian frontiers, especially so in the north.
G Buchanan, Packhorse and Waterhole, 1934; M Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, 1959; M Durack, Sons in the Saddle, 1983; M Durack,
‘Major the Outlaw’, West Australian, 14 May 1932, ‘Outlaws of the north’, Daily News, 1 October, 1932; N Fanning, Report of PC Fanning,
no 908, Relative to shooting abo natives Major, Nipper and Dibbie at the 9 mile Creek east Kimberley on 5.9.08’, West Australian Police
Letterbook; B Shaw & J Sullivan, ‘They same as you an me’, Aboriginal History, 1979; B Shaw & J Sullivan, Banggaiyerri, 1983; B Shaw,
Countrymen, 1984.
BRUCE SHAW, Vol 1.MALINOWSKI, ELSIE ROSALINE: see MASSON, ELSIE ROSALINEMALLAM, ROSS IBBOTSON DALTON (1878–1954), lawyer and Judge, was born in London on 1 June 1878,
the son of Robert Dalton Mallam, a London solicitor. His mother, Ellen Mary Anne Hyde, nee Ross, was a gifted
artist, and came from a talented literary family.
After completing his education at St Pails School, Mallam entered into articles in his father’s office and was
admitted as a solicitor in 1901. In 1902 he migrated to South Australia, was admitted to the Bar there, and practised
initially in the office of Paris Nesbit KC (a gifted but eccentric Adelaide lawyer) before going out on his own.
In early 1910, in anticipation of the transfer of the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth, he sailed to Palmerston
(now Darwin) to establish his own practice, at which he was soon successful.
Mallam never married. Despite a strict Anglican upbringing, he was intellectually a sceptic, and rejected
religious and other traditions. Politically he was pro-Labor, not so much for dogmatic or doctrinaire beliefs, but
because he favoured the underdog and saw the balance of power between the employer and the working man too
heavily weighted against the worker. Consequently, much of his professional energy was devoted towards taking
on the establishment in court. He opposed the Gilruth administration, and when changes came in the 1920s,
opposed those as well because he considered the changes—and those selected to administer them, inept. A skilful
barrister, he appeared mainly for defendants in criminal matters and championed the cause of liberty in a series of
important civil cases in the 1920s, many of which ended up in the High Court of Australia.
In October 1919, after the Director, (Carey), the Government Secretary, (Evans) and Judge Bevan were
forced to leave the Territory, the government appointed, by a series of short commissions of a few months each
time, the Supreme Court Registrar and Stipendiary Magistrate, Major Gerald Hogan, to act as Deputy Judge.
Mallam intensely disliked Hogan, whom he considered inept and bombastic. After Judge Bevan’s commission
was revoked, in September 1920, Mallam argued that Hogan’s commission as a Deputy Judge was no longer valid.
Hogan, who wished to succeed Bevan, rejected the argument and allowed an appeal from himself sitting as a
magistrate. In January 1921, Deputy Judge Hogan suspended Mallam from practice for 12 months for filing a false
affidavit in a probate matter. Both of these matters were successfully appealed to the High Court. In February 1921,
the Court ruled that there could be no valid appointment as a Deputy Judge in the absence of any person holding
the office of Judge. An embarrassed Administration was forced to pass retrospective legislation to validate such
of Deputy Judge Hogan’s decisions as had not been successfully appealed. Consequently, Mallam’s suspension
was quashed and he returned from Melbourne in May 1921 to resume his practice. Nevertheless Hogan SM on
the pretext that the formal order setting aside his judgement by the High Court had not arrived, still refused to
recognise his right to practice, and it was necessary for Mallam to apply to Acting Justice Herbert to have his
right to practice restored—an order that Herbert made immediately. When Donald Arthur Roberts, the town’s
only other lawyer, was appointed to the Supreme Court bench in November 1921, Mallam became increasingly
involved in attacking the Administration at every opportunity. He was opposed to the abolition of trial by jury in
1921, the division of the Northern Territory into two separate territories in 1926, and he advocated the abolition
of its Public Service.
His closest friend, the poet Frederick T Macartney, who later acted as his associate (besides holding a number
of other positions) described him in the early 1920s thus: ‘With his tropical suit, his topee, and a beard at that
time down to his waist, he looked like a character out of Conrad. He spoke clearly and precisely, an indication
of his upbringing and education, but without affectation. He had rather big steely eyes ready to twinkle at the
oddities and absurdities of life, but his sharply exacting and sceptical mind was scrupulously intent on fairness,
though he unhesitatingly in the course of his profession, took any advantage allowed by the law, which he studied
minutely’.
He spent much of his spare time revelling in his own eccentricities, and his own sense of mischievous fun,
his love of languages and literature. He became a notorious member of the Goose Club, which consisted of himself,
Fred Thompson, editor of the Northern Territory Times, and a police sergeant who would meet on the Esplanade
each evening to criticize the Administration. He anonymously penned critical articles for the Northern Territory
Times.
Upon Robert’s retirement, Mallam was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court on 24 April 1928. By the time
of his appointment to the bench, he had trimmed his beard to a short goatee. Both the conservative Northern
Territory Times and the union owned newspaper, Northern Standard, received his appointment with jubilation and
enthusiasm. Although only 49, his health was beginning to deteriorate, and he was hospitalised almost immediately,
causing him to postpone his first sittings as Judge until 20 June 1928.