A rising barrister in the 1920s, he emerged in the 1930s as a founder of Victoria’s Council for Civil Liberties. He joined the Australian Labor Party in 1939, flirted briefly with politics as an unsuccessful candidate in 1943, and took part in successive wartime inquiries. As counsel, he assisted the inquiry into the Japanese bombing of Darwin. Next, he rescued Eddie Ward from having to justify his claims about the ‘Brisbane Line’, above which northern Australia could be abandoned to the Japanese. Later he conducted inquiries into postwar compensation for ‘natives’ in Papua and New Guinea; into the apparent indecision and panic of Port Moresby’s civil administration in 1942; and into alleged RAAF misbehaviour on Morotai in 1945.

In 1947, Barry was appointed as a judge in the Supreme Court of Victoria; but already he and G.W. Paton, Dean of Law at the University of Melbourne, were discussing the idea of a new Department of Criminology. It opened in 1951, with Norval Morris as its first lecturer and Barry a key member of its board. Thereafter Barry devoted himself increasingly to criminology, representing Australia in overseas conferences and producing two notable books: one in 1958 on Alexander Maconochie’s enlightened régime on Norfolk Island, and one in 1964 exploring the symbiosis between the brutality of the penal administrator John Price and that of the convicts who murdered him.

Mark Finnane, himself a criminologist, rightly devotes the second half of his book to this phase of Barry’s career, and adroitly picks out from his earlier narrative foreshadowings of Barry’s penological preoccupations. They include his strong reactions to the hangings of Colin Ross (1922), Angus Murray (1924), and Arnold Sodeman (1936) – this last provoking a pioneering review of the legal defence of insanity, as well as a newspaper campaign. They also include his active involvement throughout the 1930s in the Medico-Legal Society of Victoria, especially in two lively debates on the morality and legality of abortion.

Even Barry’s best-known Supreme Court judgment is fitted into the pattern. This was the so-called Whose Baby? case, in which Gwen Morrison’s conviction that her baby had been accidentally exchanged with that of Jessie Jenkins was upheld by Barry as the trial judge, only to be rejected by successive appellate courts. Finnane finds the appellate view more persuasive, and explains Barry’s judgment by his eagerness to advance the forensic use of blood tests.

Inevitably, Barry’s Melbourne activities dominate the book, and his Sydney connections receive short shrift. His friendships with the New South Wales judges Sugerman and McClemens, and his intellectual bonding with Julius Stone, receive only passing mention. (In his characteristically elegant foreword, Michael Kirby wonders how Barry achieved such insight into the social context of law without having studied jurisprudence with Stone. Part of the answer is that Barry knew Stone’s work well.)

More importantly, the narrative skirts briefly and even evasively over Barry’s role in the extraordinary wartime think-tanks convened by Alf Conlon, which first brought Barry into contact with Sugerman and Stone (and with Peter Ryan, his future publisher). Here Finnane finds ‘little indication’ of any ‘distinctive contribution’ by Barry, though ‘one suspects’ that Barry’s findings on Papua and New Guinea were influenced by Conlon’s plans for those territories’ postwar development, and it ‘seems likely’ that Conlon’s influence channelled those inquiries to Barry in the first place.

There are other gaps. Barry was a prolific writer of letters, and Finnane’s book has both the strengths and the weaknesses of a biography relying heavily on correspondence. For example, the letters from Barry (in Melbourne) to his future first wife, Ethel Prior (in Sydney), vividly explore the anxieties leading up to their marriage, but there after we hear little more of it. Even Ethel’s debilitating ill ness and tragic death are left to unfold in the background.

Moreover, Barry, as a private correspondent, is some times less engaging than he was as a public intellectual. We know from other sources that the British criminologist Barbara Wootton found him ‘learned, stimulating, vital and kindly’. Yet his letters are sometimes strangely cold, and at other times opinionated and bumptious. On an early visit to the High Court in 1922, he is ‘bored to tears with the five old sticky beaks who masquerade as Justices’. Briefed as junior counsel to R.G. Menzies in 1927, he finds him ‘really superficial … he did not exercise his real talents, but was content to skim the surface of things’. These comments, in letters to an adoring mother, might simply be a favourite son showing off; but similar comments keep coming.

Ideologically, like many in the Conlon circle, Barry was a curious mixture of left and right. Finnane concludes that he was never a true libertarian, but rather ‘a utilitarian interventionist’, though concerned to limit state power ‘through careful regulation and the rule of law’.

This conclusion adds to the irony of the book’s introductory vignettes. One (in Kirby’s foreword) recalls the 1946 cabinet meeting that almost appointed Barry to the High Court, but instead chose the mediocre William Webb. The other explores Barry’s ASIO file, precisely the sort of intrusive surveillance he had criticised since the 1930s. From this perspective, the book is a warning against political dogma and its penchant for surveillance techniques aimed, as Finnane puts it, at ‘intellectuals who for the most part spend their lives wondering whether they have any influence at all’.