Cultural Record Keepers: The Library of the Supreme Court of the Colony of Victoria, Australia

In November 1851 the Port Phillip District of the Australian Colony of New South Wales became the independent Colony of Victoria, and Anglo-Irish lawyer Redmond Barry was poised to become one of its most powerful and influential settlers. Barry was determined to replicate in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, the institutions he considered necessary for civilized society as he had known it in Europe, and these included a university, a philharmonic orchestra, a horticultural society, a public library, and a law library. Barry became almost entirely responsible for decisions regarding the formation of these organizations and in particular the Supreme Court and its library.

The original Nolumus mutari seal. Courtesy of the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Figure 1.

The revised Nolumus mutare seal. Courtesy of the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Redmond Barry was made Victoria's first solicitor-general and was largely responsible for drafting the law that established the Supreme Court in the colony and empowered the court to make rules for legal practitioners governing, among other things, admission, qualifications, examinations, fees, and the "mode of application" of the fees paid. Barry then became acting chief justice with the power to set up the rules and regulations of the Supreme Court, which dictated that all fees paid on admission to practice law in the colony were to be used for "the purchase and maintenance of a Library, for the use of the said Supreme Court." The rules were known as "Barry's rules" well into the twentieth century, and from 1853 to the present day admission fees have been paid directly into the Supreme Court Library Fund, giving entitlement to a form of life membership of the library.

Such a library may seem to have been aspirational for so new a society, but the inspiration for it was rooted in the Old World. Barry used the libraries he had known at the King's Inns in Dublin and Lincoln's Inn in London as models for the law library in Melbourne. Thus by the

Figure 2.

The library rules were determined on May 20, 1854, and copies were ordered to be printed and pasted into the front of each volume held by the library. Courtesy of the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

time of the first meeting of the Library Committee, plans for establishing the library were well under way. Barry had decided on a motto for the library based on the seal used at the King's Inns. The original Irish seal depicts an open book on which is impressed the motto Nolumus mutari.The words represent an abridgement of the declaration by English barons at the parliament of Merton in 1236 against the laws of England being changed. Barry's motto was the full Latin version of that declaration. The library's principal supplier was instructed to "have the books stamped with the words Library of the Supreme Court of the Colony of Victoria enclosed in a garter, on which you will place the words 'Nolumus leges Angliae Mutari.'"

The word mutari initially was impressed on the calf-bound boards as prescribed. The motto translates as "We don't want the laws of England to be changed," but very quickly the spelling changed to mutare, with a consequent change in meaning to "We don't want to change the laws of England." Whether the variation was intentional or not has remained a mystery. A correspondent to the Australian Jurist in 1871 asked for an opinion on the correct version of the Supreme Court Library motto, and the reply asserted that mutare was correct and that the motto owed "its origin to the doubtful Latin of the Statutes at Large," of which there is no written authoritative version. In an article in the Argus in 1924 a more simplistic inference was made—that the books in the Supreme Court Library were to...