South Australia's Elliott Johnston on supreme court: only judge in Australia to come from communist party ranks
From the cover of Red Silk: The life of Elliott Johnston QC by Penelope Debelle (Wakefield Press).
Elliott Johnston QC was the only open communist to become an Australian judge, serving on the South Australian supreme court bench. He also led the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody (1989-91).
Born in North Adelaide in 1918 to William Johnston, a Harris Scarfe worker, and Elsie Vivian, Johnston started primary school at Highgate and Unley High School but won a scholarship to Prince Alfred College.
Studying law at Adelaide University, he became involved in student life. Although blind in one eye, he played cricket and football. One of the campus’s best debaters, in 1937, Johnston became the peace group secretary and three years later started the university Radical Club. It was banned within a month. His future wife Elizabeth Teesdale-Smith was Radical Club secretary and on the staff of university newspaper On Dit.
In 1940, Johnston joined the army, served in New Guinea 1943-45, and rose to lieutenant. Back in Adelaide, he worked for law firm Povey Waterhouse but soon opened his own office in King William Street. Johnston used the law to improve the rights of workers in compensation cases.
In 1942, Johnston had married Elizabeth who’d joined the Communist Party of Australia with him the year before. In 1950, after attending Sheffield Peace Congress in Warsaw, a trip to Moscow and Leningrad led to Johnston's passport being cancelled by Australian authorities. A year later he gave up law and became full-time communist party organiser, travelling to places such as Port Augusta, Iron Knob and Whyalla. He was on the party’s state committee for 30 years from 1954 and studies in China 1955-57.
Johnston returned to Adelaide law and won professional admirers but was rejected as a Queen’s Counsel in 1969 on political grounds by Steele Hall’s state government. This was reversed a year later by Don Dunstan’s government.
By the 1980s, Johnston’s firm, with his wife Elizabeth also involved, represented 19 unions. Johnston for many years was the principal counsel of the South Australian National Football League.
Appointed a South Australian supreme court judge in 1983 without major controversy, Johnston resigned from the Communist Party – but resumed it when he retired in 1988 at age 70.
