Ian Barker was a relative rarity among barristers in that he never used two words when one would suffice. He died in 2021 and is now the subject of a biography by Stephen Walmsley, himself a barrister and then a judge – since retired – of the NSW District Court. This is an unusual exercise in Australia, where judicial biography is a sparse species and the lives of other lawyers are seldom chronicled.

Barker was born in 1935 in Sydney into a family that included both convicts and clergymen among its forebears. His legal career began as an articled clerk in a firm of solicitors. After eight years of study in a non-university course, he qualified for admission as a solicitor in New South Wales. Soon afterwards he took a post in a firm in Alice Springs, a town where Aboriginals outnumbered Europeans. Within a short time, Barker was running the practice by himself. As the only legal practitioner in the Northern Territory practising outside Darwin, he began conducting trials, including murder trials. After almost ten years in Alice Springs, he joined a Darwin firm but confined himself to court work and was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 1974.