WOMAN J.P, FROM QUEENSLAND

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25447, 19 March 1948, Page 2

WOMAN J.P, FROM QUEENSLAND

OPINIONS ON DIVORCE (P.A.) AUCKLAND, March 18. One of the few women Justices of the Peace in Queensland, Mrs F. Hickey, of Brisbane, arrived by air today to attend the annual conference of the New Zealand Justices Federation in Dunedin. She is representing the Queensland Justices Association, of which she has been a member for 12 years. From her experience as a justice. Mrs Hickey is convinced that more women should be appointed to these positions, more particularly so that they could take an active part in dealing with problems that essentially belonged to women and in helping to check child delinquency. She said she believed from experience that many marriages headed for disaster could be restored by conciliation methods which brought the parties together and, although this should certainly not be purely a woman’s task, women justices could play their part in the work. “Conciliation offers a means of getting down to bedrock in troubles,” Mrs Hickey said. “Sometimes a man may be driven away from home by nagging, or it may be that a woman’s apparent unhappiness can be met not by divorce but by the simple expeaient of a holiday from perhaps trying circumstances.”

There was another side to the problem, Mrs Hickey said. There had been many hurried and obviously unsuitable marriages during the war. Should two unsuited people who now perhaps hated each Other continue to be tied? In many cases they had been married at a registry office. Could not a similar office have power to annul a marriage of this sort without recourse to the lengthy and often sordid Court procedure of divorce?