A Warramunga man who was told as a boy that his Aboriginal family were “the type that end up in jail” has been appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland — making Lincoln Crowley QC the first Indigenous person to preside over an Australian superior court.
At a glance
- Historic appointment: Crowley, a Queen’s Counsel since 2018 and former crown prosecutor, broke a barrier that had stood for the entire history of Australia’s superior court system.
- First Nations representation: Legal peers noted it took longer than it should have — senior counsel Tony McAvoy, the first Indigenous Australian appointed to that rank, called the absence of First Nations judges at higher court levels “a matter of some significant shame.”
- Queensland Supreme Court: Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk described the appointment as historic and “hopefully the sign of many more to come” across Australia’s judiciary.
From Charters Towers to the bench
Crowley grew up in Charters Towers, near Townsville in Queensland. He was expelled from a private school in year 11 after a confrontation with a teacher — a deputy principal who told him that because his family was Aboriginal, he would likely end up in prison.
Crowley’s response, as he recalled it years later: “You wait and see, mate.”
At that point, he said, he didn’t know anyone who had been to university and had no connection to the law. He went on to study at James Cook University, one of Australia’s leading regional universities with a strong track record of First Nations enrollment. After graduating, he began his legal career as a solicitor-advocate with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, working directly with Indigenous communities navigating a justice system that has long been stacked against them.
A career built on serious work
Crowley was called to the bar in 2003 and built a reputation in both Sydney and Brisbane as a serious and capable barrister. He served as crown prosecutor in several high-profile cases, including the insider-trading prosecution of Oliver Curtis and the foreign incursion case against Omar Succarieh.
He also served as senior counsel assisting Australia’s Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability — one of the most significant ongoing public inquiries in the country.
Tony McAvoy, who in 2015 became the first Indigenous Australian appointed senior counsel, spoke to what the appointment means in human terms as much as legal ones. “I have watched Lincoln rise through his career and he’s always struck me as a very compassionate person and a fantastic lawyer,” McAvoy said.
Why this moment matters beyond one appointment
Australia’s legal system has a complicated and often painful relationship with Indigenous Australians. First Nations people are incarcerated at rates far exceeding their share of the population, and have historically had little representation among those making and interpreting the laws that govern them.
The appointment of a Warramunga man to Queensland’s highest court doesn’t resolve those structural inequities. McAvoy himself said it is “a matter of some significant shame and embarrassment for the legal profession in Australia that there are not more First Nations judicial officers through all levels of the court.” The milestone marks real progress while pointing clearly toward how much work remains.
Queensland Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman put the significance plainly: “The importance of ensuring that our judicial officers represent the diversity of our community cannot be understated. This appointment is significant, not only for First Nations Queenslanders but for the Queensland justice system.”
What Crowley’s appointment offers — beyond one man’s remarkable personal journey — is a visible signal to every First Nations child in Australia that the institutions of justice can include them, not just process them. That shift in representation, slow as it has been, is worth marking.
And for a boy who was once told where he would end up: he ended up on the bench of the Supreme Court of Queensland.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Guardian
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights win recognition ahead of COP30
- U.K. cancer death rates fall to their lowest level on record
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Australia
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