CLASS ACTION

Photo: ADAM WRIGHT

AFTER being in the glare of the world news spotlight, Jennifer Robinson knows all about the doors that can be opened with a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University.

One of the lawyers representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Ms Robinson is a former Bomaderry High School student who won a Rhodes Scholarship after studying law and Asian studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Tomorrow she will speak at her former high school and introduce an annual prize to encourage students to think about what it takes to be a Rhodes Scholar.

Ms Robinson is personally sponsoring the Rhodes prize, offering “a small monetary reward for someone exhibiting the attributes of a Rhodes Scholar,” she said yesterday from her family home just out of Berry.

The reason for the prize was simple – Ms Robinson said she wanted to get students thinking about the Rhodes and other scholarships available to them, and create a tradition within the school of pursuing the scholarships, just as there was a tradition of excellence in the Rock Eisteddfod.

“Students at Bomaderry High School do very well at a wide range of pursuits, but I was the school’s first Rhodes Scholar,” Ms Robinson said.

“It was never talked about when I was at school, and I want to change that, to get the students talking about it, to get them thinking about what they need to do to win one.

“I’m just very lucky that I happened to fit the criteria, but there are other schools around Australia where they have a really strong focus on scholarships, and students know for years what they need to do to be in line for one.”

The prize announcement is just one of the activities Ms Robinson is undertaking during what is supposed to be a holiday with her family in Berry, headed by her father, renowned horse trainer Terry Robinson.

“I’m never really on holidays,” she conceded. The past few days have included meetings with politicians as a spokesperson for Mr Assange, a meeting with The Chaser team, an appearance on ABC news program The Drum, discussions with Mr Assange about the latest information released on WikiLeaks on people held in Guantanamo Bay, and being contacted by a journalist in New York about WikiLeaks.

In the wake of all that, “It’s kind of nice not to turn the news on for a change,” Ms Robinson said.

As well as representing Mr Assange, she has worked with world-renowned QC Geoffrey Robertson preparing a case against the Pope over the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests against children, which resulted in the book published last year The Case of the Pope.

“It was all about forcing the leadership of the Catholic Church to think about their own personal culpability for failing to act when there were allegations of priests abusing children,” Ms Robinson said.

For someone brought up as a Catholic in a deeply religious family, it raised some issues.

“How do you come home and tell your family, ‘Dad, we’re going to prosecute the Pope’?” she asked.

At the forefront in her mind was the example of former Nowra parish priest Father Maurice Crocker, who was “a wonderful man” but was shunned by the church after he was transferred to Wollongong and blew the lid on child abuse by Catholic priests in the Illawarra.

Ms Robinson said Fr Crocker raised his concerns with the church and police but no one was interested, until he finally went to the media.

“Had it not been for Maurie Crocker speaking out, these children would have continued to be abused and the church was doing nothing,” Ms Robinson said.

Yet Fr Crocker was treated so badly by the church after publicising the abuse, he ended up taking his own life, Ms Robinson said.