Richard Blackburn

Sir Richard Arthur Blackburn, (26 July 1918 – 1 October 1987) was an Australian judge, prominent legal academic and military officer. He became a judge of three courts in Australia, and eventually became chief justice of the Australian Capital Territory. In the 1970s he decided one of Australia's earliest Aboriginal Land rights cases. The annual Sir Richard Blackburn Memorial lectures in Canberra commemorate his service to the Australian legal community. Early years Blackburn was born on 26 July 1918 in Mount Lofty, South Australia. He was the son of Brigadier Arthur Blackburn and Rose Ada Blackburn (née Kelly). His father was at that time a prominent legal practitioner in South Australia, and was later to serve as a Commissioner of the now defunct Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Blackburn was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide and was an undergraduate at St Mark's College at the University of Adelaide. He graduated with First Class Honours in English Literature from the University of Adelaide. He won the John Howard Clark Prize as the candidate who was placed highest in the final examination. He was chosen as the Rhodes Scholar for South Australia in 1940, but did not take it up immediately because of the outbreak of the Second World War. On 14 May 1940, during the Second World War, Blackburn enlisted in the Australian Army at Adelaide. He served with the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) on active service in North Africa and Papua New Guinea until his discharge on 7 November 1945 as a captain in the 2/9th Division Cavalry Regiment. Legal and academic life At the end of the war, he took up his Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He and another South Australian, the Honourable Justice Andrew Wells, became the first Dominion students to be awarded the Eldon Law Scholarship. As a result, he attended the University of Oxford in 1949 and graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Law. Blackburn was called to the Bar in the United Kingdom in Inner Temple in 1949.