My favourite image of Robertson is from Richard Neville’s memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake (1995); it appears in his account of the London Oz obscenity trial of 1971. Then a law student on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, Robertson found himself in the uncomfortable presence of a group of scruffy anarchists who had interested themselves in the trial. ‘Geoff rowed for Oxford before breakfast and played championship tennis after lunch,’ recalled Neville (possibly with some poetic licence). ‘At the end of these basement free-for-alls, he would zip off to Covent Garden for another opening night.’

Private Eye described Robertson, educated at Epping High in Sydney, as ‘an Australian who’s had a voice transplant’. He explains in one of the essays here that he lost his ‘irritable Australian vowels ... bowing and scraping in the English courts’; elsewhere, he has ‘blamed’ them on ‘the faded BBC announcers of the ABC’ of his youth. But if his accent doesn’t conform to any British impression of what an Australian should sound like, in one respect Robertson does fit an influential stereotype of how an Australian should behave: his defence of the underdog. It is surely the thread that connects most of the essays in this somewhat unwieldy yet entertaining collection of ‘reflections’ extending over a distinguished career of more than forty years. Indeed, one of the best contributions, ‘The Trials of Nancy Young’, first appeared in Australian Quarterly in 1970 and was written with a fellow student while Robertson was still an undergraduate. It concerns a miscarriage of justice that resulted in an Aborigine living in the Queensland town of Cunnamulla being prosecuted and imprisoned for manslaughter after the death of her child, possibly as a result of neglect at the hands of the local hospital. It is a passionate and powerful account of the sufferings of a young Indigenous woman in a climate of overwhelming racial discrimination.

Other chapters in the collection also address injustice towards Aboriginal people. These are not the most assured contributions in the book. Dreaming Too Loud includes a ‘“skeleton argument” I drafted on behalf of the skeletons’; that is, a legal argument on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) to prevent the British Natural History Museum from experimenting on Aboriginal remains in its custody. It would be hard to fault the cause, but Robertson and the TAC might be fortunate that the success of the case did not depend on the accuracy of their submission. Instead of George Arthur, it has John Franklin as governor of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s (he arrived in 1837). And it has G.A. Robinson rounding up all surviving Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829 and removing them ‘to a gulag on Flinders Island’. If this were so, it would certainly have saved Arthur from the trouble of creating the infamous Black Line in 1830 in an effort to round them up. There is also a peculiar essay on ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence and the Great Socialist Shame’, written for the New Statesman, in which Robertson wants to blame the English Fabians’ attachment to eugenics for the plight of the Stolen Generations. It is as if Australians of the 1930s were incapable of producing their own ideological claptrap. Meanwhile, drawing an equally long bow, Robertson describes the Western Australian Chief Protector A.O. Neville, who came to the colonies as a child, as an ‘English administrator’.

The chapters in this collection – each of them preceded by a brief contextualising introduction – have only a loose thematic unity. Most, but not all, are in some way concerned with Australia. The book’s title comes from Ned Kelly. In ‘As Game as Tom Curnow’, Robertson reports that at the Glenrowan Hotel, the scene of his last stand, Kelly warned Curnow, a crippled teacher whom he allowed to leave because his wife was pregnant: ‘You are free to go. But drive straight to your home and go to bed. And don’t dream too loud, or you are a dead man.’ Robertson reviles the Kelly gang as surely as he admires the bravery of Curnow, who did ‘dream too loud’ by flagging down the train full of police that Kelly and his gang were trying to derail. Robertson, of course, is hardly the first to play with the idea of Curnow, rather than Kelly, as an Australian hero – it is there, for instance, in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) – and Carey put into Curnow’s mouth sentiments that Robertson would largely endorse: ‘What is it about we Australians, eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer?’

Robertson is concerned, in part, to provide an answer to this question. He has his Australian heroes. There is the first governor, Arthur Phillip, who was determined that there could ‘be no slavery in a free land, and hence no slaves’ – Robertson offers it as his first point in a proposed ‘Charter of Australian Liberty’. He also admires Herbert Vere Evatt, as a founder of the United Nations and president of the General Assembly at the time of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Then there is an affectionate, admiring piece written to mark the seventieth birthday of Michael Kirby, a friend who was a few years ahead of Robertson at Sydney University, followed by a more ambivalent pair of essays at the end on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Robertson admires the cause – more open government – but is less certain about Assange the man, or at least about his capacity, at times, for sensible judgement in his own interests.

It is in the nature of a sprawling collection of occasional pieces that there will be repetition. Robertson is a committed Australian republican, but we probably learn once or twice too often that a principal qualification for a British monarch, and therefore the Australian head of state, is being a Protestant descendant of Princess Sophia of Hanover. Moreover, even one Carry On style ‘Queen’ gag might have been one too many, but in Dreaming Too Loud there are two, with Stephen Fry and Michael Kirby each in view. There are, nonetheless, also lying behind this book abundant wit, original insight, a measured idealism, and a rich store of experiences. Alongside the Australian material, there are fine essays on Václav Havel as well as on John Mortimer of Rumpole fame, in whose chambers Robertson practised as a young barrister.

Robertson is a major figure in international law, an author of considerable accomplishment, and an influential commentator on human rights. Even if he can’t quite rival Kylie, he is still one of the most recognisable faces (and voices) of Australia in Britain. I doubt whether his late friend Christopher Hitchens was truly qualified to offer the judgement that he is ‘the greatest living Australian’, but this collection certainly serves as a reminder of his considerable achievements, which include a continuing and lively engagement with the affairs of the land of his birth.