Paris Nesbit KC (1852-1927), a brilliant leader of the South Australian Bar for more than 20 years, was hailed in life 'as a man of wide culture and scholarship, a poet, an iconoclast, a reformer and a lover of humanity without guile or cynicism,' and eulogised in death as 'quite the most striking personality in South Australia ... almost a legendary figure, one of Australia's great and beloved sons'. To his detractors he was egotistical, opinionated, immoral, erratic and mad. Intellectually gifted but afflicted by mental illness, he was twice gaoled and four times certified a 'lunatic' and confined in asylums.
Politically inspired by the English liberal tradition and Christian Socialism, he was in turn a foundation member of both the Labor Party and Liberal Union, unsuccessfully contested four elections, and was a leading proponent of federation.
A prolific writer and lecturer with liberal convictions and Bohemian sympathies, he championed numerous causes - enlightened divorce and lunacy laws, abolition of imprisonment for debt, destigmatisation of unmarried mothers, State-funded legal representation, modified legal procedures for Aboriginals, liberal licensing laws, and prohibition of hare coursing among them.
Through its detailed examination of a remarkable and turbulent life, Paris Nesbit KC: Quixotic Counsel reveals the man behind the myth. Uniquely, it tracks the career from articled clerk to King's Counsel of a leading practitioner in a fused profession over 50 years from the 1870s to the 1920s.
A history graduate of the then University of Adelaide, Graham Loughlin spent several years in education, initially as a secondary teacher and later as a lecturer at the then Murray Park College of Advanced Education. He then served as the first Research Officer appointed in the South Australian Parliamentary Library before accepting successive positions as speech writer with the NSW Leader of the Opposition and policy adviser with the SA Premier and Treasurer. In the 1980s he moved to senior executive roles in the Credit Union industry, first in South Australia and then nationally. He is now retired and lives in Sydney.
