of the New South Wales Legislative Council from 19 April 1836 until 5 January 1843. In April 1837, Forbes retired from his office, and Dowling was appointed chief justice on 29 August 1837. John Walpole Willis arrived at Sydney in November 1837 to take the position of third judge; conflict between Willis and the Chief Justice reached such a level that for the sake of peace Governor Gipps transferred Willis to Melbourne in January 1841. Following the brutal killing of 28 unarmed Aboriginal Australians in the Myall Creek massacre on 10 June 1838, Dowling presided over the first trial in which a jury acquitted eleven colonists of the murder of one person, referred to as Daddy. Dowling also sat in the Full Bench which determined questions of law following the conviction of seven colonists of the murder of two children and an adult referred to as Charley. In June 1843, Dowling expressed his willingness to act as speaker of the new Legislative Council, but Gipps ruled against this as he considered it would not be in the public interest. In August 1844 Dowling was granted 18 months leave of absence due to a breakdown in his health, but he died soon after on 27 September 1844. Personal life He was knighted in 1837. He was married twice and was survived by his second wife, Lady Harriott Dowling, and two sons and two daughters from his first marriage. A pension of £200 a year was granted to Lady Dowling. Lady Dowling was the eldest daughter of John Blaxland. At the time of his death, Dowling was preparing a volume of law reports of the decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The volume was eventually published in 2005. Many of these cases are also online. Dowling was regarded as a hard working judge, and rarely took holidays. One of his sons, James Sheen Dowling (1819–1902), was born in England and came to Australia with his father in 1828, practised as a barrister and was a District Court judge from 1858 to 1889 and an acting judge of the Supreme Court from 1878 to 1881. South Dowling Street in Sydney is named after him. See also List of judges of the Supreme Court of New South Wales References Sources T.D. Castle and Bruce Kercher (eds), Dowling's Select Cases, 1828 to 1844: Decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales