While my grandfather was a quiet chap, certain other Millanes were not really known as people of few words. One of them, my grandfather’s first cousin Rupert, had so much to say to the courts and governments of Victoria that to keep him quiet he was, by a special Act of Parliament, declared a ‘Vexatious Litigant’, i.e. he was denied further access to the courts and told to go away and to be quiet. This was the first instance in Australia of such legislation being passed.
Rupert was the son of Great-Uncle Patsy and Great-Aunt Anne. Rupert and his brother Gilbert were highly intelligent, well-educated gadflies, flitting from one idea to the next, one project to the next, initiating but rarely bringing to fruition all sorts of business, real estate and engineering ideas. In 1912 Rupert had won a design competition, the prize being a six-month trip to the United States. On his return he urged the Victorian Railways (for whom his father and grandfather had both worked) to replace steam trains by railmotors on the less-frequented country lines, as he had seen done in the USA. His proposal was eventually accepted, but the cheaper and under-powered versions of the railmotor introduced by the VR (against Rupert’s advice) proved unsuccessful and were withdrawn after only a few years of operation. Rupert invented a cheap and quick way of building concrete houses, recycling old kerosene tins (of which there were plenty in those days) for the form-work, but the prototype house built in a Melbourne suburb did not conform to local building regulations, was described as ‘ugly’ by neighbours, and despite Rupert’s protests and lawsuits, was demolished by the local council. Then Rupert and a group of friends started bus services across the city, from Brighton to Preston, without securing the necessary vehicle registration from the Motor Registration Branch of the State government. Rupert argued strenuously in court over this issue, always representing himself and displaying an incredibly good grasp of the relevant legislation. The Melbourne Truth of 8th August 1931 gleefully reported, under the headline:
MILLANE DRIVES STAGE COACH THROUGH BUS LAW He pays 5/- a year for a stage-coach licence to the Melbourne City Council; and by virtue of a statute of Charles II, he needn’t, apparently, pay any more. Prosecutions were piled up against Millane and his friends. The City Council secured 37 convictions, involving £1168 in fines against him … and never col lected a penny. Now they cannot, because the Supreme Court has made an order in Millane’s favour that practi cally sets aside at least one of his convictions, and the Crown allowed him a walk-over.
Eventually, of course, Rupert lost his battle against the government, and he served a six-month term in Pentridge Gaol for refusing on principle to pay the fines imposed. Once released and seemingly undeterred, he re-entered the fray and soon thereafter put up barricades in Collins Street and started to dig a hole in the footpath (just for fun?), as he had discovered, while browsing through the legislation, that it was then still legally possible to take out a ‘Miner’s Right’ over any Crown land, anywhere, to dig for gold. He paid his £5, obtained his certificate from the Mining Warden’s office, which apparently did not check to see exactly where the prospecting was to be done, and dug his hole in the footpath of one of the city’s main streets.
On one occasion in the 1930s, my father drove Rupert into the city and started looking for a spot to park the car. They were in Flinders Street, and Rupert directed Dad to park alongside a cast-iron post about three feet high near the tram stop at the corner of Russell Street. When Dad demurred, Rupert assured him that it would be alright, and produced a length of plaited leather from his pocket. He explained that few people realised that the iron post in question was an old hitching-post, the removal of which had been overlooked by the Melbourne City Council, and that the by-law allowing any person to hitch his horse or vehicle to a Council hitching-post had not been repealed. I don’t think my father did actually park there! There are endless stories about Rupert’s eccentricities, many of them readily accessible in the official records of the Victorian courts and of both Victorian and Federal parliaments. Despite or perhaps because of his genius, Rupert died a poor, frustrated and lonely man. What genetic inheritance do I share with him, I sometimes wonder?