Fiftieth anniversary ceremonial sittings across August and September

Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane host anniversary sittings, with the Queensland Family Law Practitioners' Dinner following the Brisbane event on 4 September.

Fiftieth anniversary ceremonial sittings are being held in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane across August and September 2026. The Queensland Family Law Practitioners' Dinner follows the Brisbane sitting on 4 September.

Ceremonial sittings occupy an odd place in professional life. They are formally proceedings of the court and substantively acts of institutional memory, and practitioners in their first decade often skip them on the reasonable basis that nothing is being decided.

The argument for going anyway

Fifty years is long enough that the people who built the institution are still present and no longer numerous. Anniversary sittings are among the last occasions on which the founding generation of a jurisdiction speaks on the record, in the room, to an audience that includes the people who will run it next.

There is also a straightforwardly practical dimension. A ceremonial sitting puts the bench, the bar and the solicitors' branch in one place with no adversarial business between them. The professional networks that make a jurisdiction workable — knowing which judge's associate to call, which opponent will take a sensible position on timetabling — are built in exactly these rooms, and they are not built by email.

Details

Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane: August and September 2026
Queensland Family Law Practitioners' Dinner: 4 September 2026, following the Brisbane sitting
Attendance: Check individual court notices for robing requirements and whether registration is required

Junior practitioners are generally welcome and frequently absent. Those two facts are related, and only one of them is easily fixed.

Speeches delivered at ceremonial sittings are ordinarily published on court websites and transcribed into the record. For practitioners who cannot attend, those transcripts are worth reading rather than skimming — they are among the few occasions on which senior judicial officers speak candidly about the institution's direction, its pressures and its unfinished business, without the constraint of deciding a case. Set a reminder for a fortnight after each sitting and read what was said.