Pamela Burton

Pamela Burton lives in Canberra where she studied Law at the Australian National University. Her Master’s thesis was a study of the radical High Court Justice, Henry Bournes Higgins. She founded her own law firm in Canberra in 1976 and later practised as a barrister at the Canberra Bar. Her various appointments have included Senior Member, Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Chair of the Social Security Appeals Tribunal, Chair of the Students Assistance Review Committee, member of the Non-Government Schools Funding Review Committee, and member of the ACT Parole Board.

Pamela’s unauthorised biography – From Moree to Mabo – will be published by University of Western Australia Publishing in late 2010. It tells the story of Australia’s High Court Justice Mary Gaudron, whose legal life has been extraordinary and colourful. Gaudron was the first woman to sit on the High Court, and the only one in the Court’s first 100 years. From Moree’s railway community where she lived as a child in a cottage with dirt floors – a short distance away from a camp of dispossessed Aboriginal Australians – Gaudron became one of the justices who decided Eddie Mabo’s landmark case on Aboriginal land rights.

While Pamela faced obstacles as one of the few women commencing private legal practice in the 1970s, she received the encouragement and support of the brave convention breaker, Mary Gaudron. With wit, graphic language, high intellect and the tool of law, Gaudron exposed inequality and discrimination and took on the fight for equal pay and equal opportunity for women in the workforce.