mary sheargold

MAC.ROB Student, 1996-1999
PORTRAIT GALLERY INDUCTEE, 2017
LLM, LLB (Hons), BMus (Hons), LMusA, AMusA
LAWyer & flautist

Mary Sheargold is a Melbourne-based lawyer and flautist. She attended Mac.Rob from 1996 to 1999 and was awarded her Associate Diploma in Flute from the AMEB in 1998. In 1999, she became the school’s third debating and public speaking captain, led Nereids to victory in House Chorals, and participated in Mac.Rob’s first international music tour.

Mary went on to become the first student to graduate from The University of Melbourne’s combined Bachelor of Music/Bachelor of Laws degree program, and was awarded both degrees with honours. During her undergraduate studies, she developed a passion for copyright law and music. In 2004, her penultimate year, she won the Freehills Prize for her paper on Indigenous cultural property rights, and also won the prestigious Leslie Barklamb Scholarship (awarded annually by the Victorian Flute Guild) and the Gold Medallion for Outstanding Instrumentalist at the Dandenong Festival of Art and Music for Youth.

Mary has successfully combined a career in law with high-level musical performance, and her flute playing has been broadcast extensively on ABC Classic FM and 3MBS FM. While working as a lawyer at Clayton Utz, she was a category semi-finalist in the 2008 and 2009 Symphony Australia Young Performer Awards: at her latter appearance in that competition, she walked off stage at the Iwaki Auditorium and into a 14-week trial as an instructing solicitor in Australia’s largest pharmaceutical class action.

In 2013 she completed her Master of Laws at The University of Melbourne with her thesis, ‘Share It Maybe?’ Reconsidering Australia’s Fair Dealing Exceptions to Copyright, that examined Men At Work’s song Down Under and the consequences of judicial findings that Greg Ham’s flute riff in that song breached copyright in Marion Sinclair’s work Kookaburra Sits On An Old Gum Tree.

Mary was appointed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in 2017, where she serves in the Migration and Refugee Division. She was a founding director of The Mac.Rob Foundation, and is a past president of the Victorian Flute Guild. Mary is the mother of four young children, and serves as a co-opted member of their school council. Mary considers herself to be incapable of sitting down or standing still!