Read more
The business of the historian, is to remember what others forget: the history of the early community legal centres is not yet forgotten-but it soon may be. Legal centres are not good at recording their past: they are understaffed, resources are stretched, the demands of the work seem urgent and unrelenting, and there's no time for looking back, reflecting on experiences, honouring past workers, no space for archiving or even storing old records. At the time the early centres were established, their mode of operation was slightly anarchic ...no one was interested in recording history, they were too busy were making it.
There's Glory For You traverses the history of Redfern Legal Centre from its establishment by volunteer activist lawyers and students from the University of New South Wales, through development of innovative new legal services which changed the face of legal aid in Australia set against a background of the detailed law and legal profession reform programs introduced by the Whitlam and State governments in the 1970s and 1980s.
Frances Gibson studied law in Canberra and her first encounter with community legal centres in 1984 was through a spur of the moment decision to make a trip to a party hosted by a legal centres' conference which led indirectly to a solicitor's job at Redfern Legal Centre in 1988 and a dedication to community legal centres over the next thirty five years. It's a rich memoir-styled history, documenting one of the most important legal and social reforms in Australia's history.
About the author
Frances Gibson has worked in and with community legal centres since 1988. She was solicitor and joint principal solicitor at Redfern Legal Centre from 1988-1995. From 1996, she was Director of Kingsford Legal Centre, University of New South Wales, and was invited to be the first Visiting Clinical Scholar at New York University in 1999.She was appointed as Coordinator of the new School of Law Program at La Trobe's Bendigo campus in 2004. During her time in Victoria, she worked one day a week as a solicitor at the Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre on community legal education and direct legal service provision to people in remote areas affected by drought.She then returned to Sydney to take up a position as Director of Experiential Learning at UNSW and completed a PhD, which formed the basis for this history. She is also a member of longstanding independent pop band, the Cannanes which have toured in Australia and the world for decades.
