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Chief Justice, 18 October 1919 to 30 March 1930

Australia’s second Chief Justice Adrian Knox (1863-1932) was a gifted barrister with a prodigious work ethic. He was ‘suave, persuasive, clear and short in arguments’, and armed with formidable administrative talents.¹ He brought to the High Court ‘a deep learning, a clearness of perception, [and] a wide knowledge of the world’² which helped him achieve a remarkable degree of consensus.³

Knox was born in 1863 in Sydney, NSW, the son of Colonial Sugar Refining Co. founder Edward Knox.⁴ He graduated from Cambridge University in 1885 and joined the London and NSW Bars the following year. In 1894, Knox was elected to the NSW Legislative Assembly for Woollahra and served two terms before retiring in 1898. In 1897, he married Florence Lawson and they had three children.

On returning to his legal career, Knox became a prominent barrister. He was regarded as an outstanding constitutional lawyer and ‘a consummate advocate’: ‘[b]efore Courts of Appeal he had no equal in his generation’.⁵ He served on the NSW Bar Council almost continuously from its 1902 foundation until 1919 and became a KC in 1906. A talented cricket player as a youth, Knox continued to enjoy sport in his later life. He was a longstanding member of the Australian Jockey Club, serving as its chair from 1906 to 1919, and was appointed as a director of the AMP in 1909. A founding member of the Red Cross Society’s NSW Branch, Knox travelled to Egypt in 1915 as commissioner. Returning in 1916, he visited local internment camps and became a member of the legal advisory committee relating to war precautions regulations.

In October 1919, Knox was appointed as Chief Justice of the High Court, succeeding Samuel Griffith. Edmund Barton’s death three months later severed the last link with the Court’s original bench. Under Knox’s stewardship, the court saw a shift in constitutional interpretation which fundamentally reshaped Australian federalism. The previously-held doctrines of intergovernmental immunities and reserved state powers were challenged, as the Commonwealth’s powers expanded.⁶ Knox was appointed a CMG in 1918, elevated to KCMG in 1921, and appointed to the Privy Council in 1920.

Already affected by poor health, Knox resigned from the High Court in 1930 to avoid a conflict of interest on becoming a residual legatee from the estate of his friend John Brown which required involvement in Brown’s colliery company. He became a director of the Bank of NSW and the Commercial Union Assurance Co. Ltd, re-joined the AMP board and in 1931 was appointed chairman of the Primary Producers’ Advisory Council. He died at his Woollahra home in April 1932.

Painter and illustrator Jack Kilgour (1900-1987) was born in Victoria and studied at the Sydney Art School. He departed for England in 1931 to further his painting skills, enrolling at St Martin’s School of Art, and periodically at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal Art School. Returning to Australia in 1939, he taught at East Sydney Technical College where he stayed until 1970. Known for his academic approach to his landscape painting and his portraiture, Kilgour was also recognised for his cartoons, illustrations and modernist paintings. He exhibited regularly in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, with a retrospective of his work held at the New England Art Museum in Armidale in 1977. In 1987, Kilgour bequeathed funds in perpetuity for the creation of a major figurative and portrait art competition, today known as the Kilgour Prize. His works are represented in significant state and national collections. Kilgour’s portrait of Sir Adrian Knox is a copy of an earlier work by Tasmanian artist Florence Aline Rodway (1881-1971), now held in the Mitchell Library (NSW).⁷

1. Information in this biography has been taken from the following: M Rutledge, ‘Knox, Sir Adrian (1863–1932)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed 29 March 2021; A Twomey, ‘The Knox Court’, in R Dixon ed., The High Court, The Constitution and Australian Politics, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, Victoria, 2015, pp. 98–115; G Fricke and M Rutledge, ‘Knox, Adrian’, The Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia, Oxford University Press, 2001; D Ash, ‘Sir Adrian Knox’, Bar News, Autumn 2011, pp. 60–83.
2. ‘Death of Sir Adrian Knox’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1932, p. 10, accessed 4 October 2021.
3. Fricke and Rutledge, op. cit.
4. AG Lowndes, ‘Knox, Sir Edward (1819–1901)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1974, accessed 6 May 2021.
5. ‘Tributes’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1932, p. 10, accessed 4 October 2021
6. Fricke and Rutledge, op. cit.; G Fricke, ‘Knox Court’, in The Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia, Oxford University Press, 2001.
7. ‘Jack Noel Kilgour’, High Court of Australia; ‘Kilgour, Jack’, A McCulloch, S McCulloch and E McCulloch Childs, eds, The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press, 2006, p. 574; ‘About Jack Kilgour’, Newcastle Art Gallery; S Backhouse, ‘Rodway, Florence Aline (1881–1971)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1988. Websites accessed 25 June 2021.