The Dictionary of Australasian Biography/Lutwyche, His Honour Alfred James Peter
Lutwyche, His Honour Alfred James Peter, M.A., sometime Puisne Judge, Queensland, eldest son of John Lutwyche, of a Worcestershire family, who removed to London and started as a leather merchant, under the firm of Lutwyche & George, in Skinner Street, Snow Hill, was born in England in 1810, and educated at the Charterhouse and at Queens College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1828 and graduated B.A. in 1832, and subsequently M.A. After some journalistic experience as a colleague of Charles Dickens, on the Morning Chronicle, he was called to the bar in 1840, and went the Oxford circuit; but finding his health impaired, he decided to emigrate to Australia, and, after suffering shipwreck, landed in Sydney in Dec. 1853. Having entered the Legislative Council, he was Solicitor-General in the first Cowper Ministry from Sept. to Oct. 1856, and represented the Government in the Upper House. He was again Solicitor-General in the second Cowper Administration from Sept. 1857 to Nov. 1858, when he succeeded Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Martin as Attorney-General. This post he resigned in Feb. 1859, and was appointed in the following October Resident Judge of what was then the Moreton Bay district of New South Wales. Two months later he became sole Judge of the new colony of Queensland, and occupied the bench unaided until the arrival of the first Chief Justice, Sir James Cockle, in Feb. 1863. He died in Brisbane on June 12th, 1880. But for a certain lack of self-restraint in his judgments and utterances, Mr. Lutwyche would himself have been appointed the first Chief Justice of Queensland, and he keenly felt the disallowance of his claims.