The
lawyer, activist and winner of a 1998 Monash Distinguished Alumni Award admits
to despair at the conservative Howard government's handling of black-white relations,
particularly the negotiations earlier this year over native title legislation.
It has been a dark chapter, he says, but Aboriginal people take setbacks with
grace and dignity - and also determination.
"The real issue to understand about reconciliation is that we only have one country," he says. "And the only way the legitimate grievances of the Aboriginal people will be accommodated is through honest and good-faith negotiations over how we can best share this one land."
As one of the country's most prominent indigenous leaders, Mr Dodson travels constantly, from the most isolated spots in Australia's outback to the hallowed halls of the United Nations in Geneva. Despite the political brick wall around Canberra, he senses growing grassroots support for reconciliation. "As I've travelled around Australia, I've been greatly heartened by the thousand and thousands of fair-minded Australians who are speaking up," he says.
A graduate of Monash's Law School, Mr Dodson has been an influential player in many pivotal events, including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, drafting of the 1993 Native Title Act and the inquiry into Aboriginal and Torres Strait children removed from their parents - the so-called Stolen Generation.
It was this last inquiry, lasting several months, which had the greatest impact on him. As story after harrowing story unfolded, Mr Dodson says, he was profoundly changed. "I'd never done anything that prepared me for that, for what I heard."
One of his more prominent leadership positions has been that of Australia's first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, a role he relinquished this year after five years of advocacy on issues ranging from racial discrimination to juvenile justice, health, education and cultural and intellectual property.
"I've got a deep and abiding sense of what's just and what's not just," he says. "Also, being a lawyer I know that, realistically, the law doesn't always deliver justice. Through my time at law school I gained skills to try and influence those legal outcomes."
He is confident the next generation of Aboriginal leaders will be ready to pick up where he eventually leaves off. "They're generally better educated, more articulate than my generation," he says. "But they're also more impatient."
An expert in criminal law, the acting dean of Monash University's Law School has played a major part in efforts to find answers to many of society's most complex and controversial questions. Passion, compassion, birth, murder, racism and reform have all at one stage or another provoked his interest.
"What's crime really about?" he asks. "Life and death. Both ends of the great continuum."
The breadth of Professor Waller's involvement is wide, ranging from Aboriginal rights and institutional law reform to the abolition of capital punishment and, more recently, infertility and IVF.
A barrister and solicitor, he occupied the dean's chair at Monash once before, in the late 1960s. In the early 1980s he spent three years as Victoria's Law Reform Commissioner, was founding chair of the state's Law Reform Commission, and more recently has chaired a host of committees and inquiries concerned with IVF and medical ethics. Add to that foundation president of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and foundation chair of the Australian Red Cross Society's International Humanitarian Law Committee and you have a thumbnail sketch of a remarkable career.
As Professor Waller tells it, one thing simply led to another. "That's interesting," he would say. "I'd like to be involved."
It was at Queen Victoria Hospital in the 1960s, at a meeting of "honoraries" ("nearly all women - highly unusual at the time"), that Professor Waller first met the man whose cutting-edge achievements would have a great influence on his own community involvement. That man was IVF pioneer Professor Carl Wood, who was destined to be thrust into the international spotlight within a few years, after the birth in England of the world's first test-tube baby, Louise Brown.
For Professor Waller, that birth was a medical marvel - and one with fascinating medical, human and legal ramifications. "We've become blasé about it," he says, "but it was a high point - an extraordinary development."
Like a stray spark in a forest, it also ignited fierce and enduring discussion about moral and legal issues such as surrogacy and embryo experimentation. As chairman of Victoria's Infertility Treatment Authority since 1995, Professor Waller has remained at the forefront of efforts to monitor and influence such public debates.
He's been lucky, he says, that public service has allowed him to make a difference. "I don't want to beat my chest and say only I could have done this," he says. "I don't think that's true. It was my good fortune to have had these opportunities and to have taken them."
Professor Louis Waller considers himself lucky that public service has allowed him to make a difference.In 1999, the Monash Law faculty will introduce a Graduate Diploma course in Banking and Finance Law.