(Born 1947) First Western Australian Chief Justice of Australia
Robert Shenton French (born 1947) was appointed Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia in September 2008. Chief Justice 2008 – 2017. At the time of his appointment he was a judge of the Federal Court of Australia, having been appointed to that office in November 1986. He graduated from the University of Western Australia in science and law. He was admitted in 1972 and practised as a barrister and solicitor in Western Australia until 1983 when he went to the Western Australian Bar. From 1994 to 1998 he was President of the National Native Title Tribunal. At the time of his appointment he was an additional member of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory and a member of the Supreme Court of Fiji. He was also a Deputy President of the Australian Competition Tribunal and a part-time member of the Australian Law Reform Commission. From 2001 to January 2005 he was president of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law. Chief Justice French was appointed a Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia in 2010.
About the Artist:
A highly celebrated figurative and still life painter Lewis Miller was born in Melbourne in 1959 and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he also completed his post graduate studies.
Miller earned national recognition for his work in portraiture. He was awarded the Hugh Ramsay Portrait Prize in 1981, and in 1998 won the prestigious Archibald Prize with a portrait of his friend and fellow artist, Allan Mitelman. Lewis has been a finalist seventeen times.
Other notable awards include the Sporting Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, the James Farrell Self Portrait Award at the Castlemaine City Art Gallery in 2007 and the Belle Arti-Chapman & Bailey Art Award in 2010. Most recently, Miller won the Rick Amor Self Portrait Prize in 2017.
Miller’s commissioned portraits include Nobel Laureate Dr James Dewey Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, Sidney Baillieu Myer AC, the Honourable Justice Kim Santow OAM and Robert French Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia.
In 2003, Miller was appointed Official Australian Artist to the conflict in Iraq by the Australian War Memorial. The artist spent three weeks in the Middle East where he recorded the services of the RAN, the RAAF, the Army and Special Forces.
Miller’s work is represented in private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian War Memorial, National Portrait Gallery Canberra, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Karolyi Foundation Vence, France Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
The National Portrait Gallery holds Miller’s portraits of The Hon. Susan Crennan AC QC, Sir Rupert Hamer AC KCMG, Ronald Dale Barassi AM and Jerry Ellis