Having found his way from law to literature, Michael Pembroke turns to the written word as a medium for blending historical truth, worldly perspectives and moral calling in his latest title, Silk Silver Opium
Michael Pembroke can remember every stop made by the P&O liner he travelled on as a child between the UK and Australia. “My earliest memories were of the exotic trips we used to take by ship. It went down through the North Atlantic, to Gibraltar and then through the Mediterranean, then the Suez Canal and Red Sea, and around to Aden, across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean,” he recounts verbally and with vivid accuracy.
Though he is known professionally as a former Supreme Court judge for New South Wales, it is now his work as an author that occupies the avid historian and naturalist.His youth spent seeing the curious corners and cultures of the earth has evolved into a lasting passion for travel, and a deep sensitivity towards humanity and its multiplicities.
“My mind is open all the time, and probably opens wider with every year I grow older.”
Most recently, he was promoting his latest book, Silk Silver Opium: The Trade with China that Changed History, a comprehensive exploration of how ancient Chinese economic relations with the West have directly influenced the modern world, born of Pembroke’s fondness for the Asian continent and his disapproval of the unjust misperceptions towards the superpower.
Gentle, affable, yet unmistakably driven by the desire to educate others in truth, Pembroke speaks on his diverse upbringing, returning to the arts and what he hopes Silk Silver Opium can achieve — plus a little extra on his legendary garden.
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Tales from earth + sea
Born the eldest son of Lois and Arthur Pembroke MC in Sydney, 1955, a young Pembroke enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood travelling between the UK and Australia, and later Singapore. It was the dying days of the colonial era, and growing up traversing the ancient trading routes of the globe meant unfamiliar garb, languages and accents became, in themselves, oddly familiar.
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Snake charmers and Arab merchants, the stuff of Orientalised imagination, were the common sights for a boy shy of 10 years dipping and dashing, always fascinated, through harbours and city markets.
“It was a long and extremely leisurely ride — took a whole month — but it was also extremely exciting. Every time you stopped from Gibraltar to Colombo was a whole new culture, one I hadn’t yet at that stage seen or known of,” he says.
After the voyages, the family took up residence in Singapore, close to the Far East Land Forces where his father was posted as a junior officer. His most recent visit to Malaysia was hardly his first time either, he reveals, as the family often ventured over to Johor, Melaka and Penang when they lived on the small island. Enthralled, as he describes in the preface of Silk
Silver Opium, by the “tropical heat and monsoon rains”, “voluminous mosquito nets” and “cooking smells” of kampung minutiae, Pembroke came to foster not only a fundamental appreciation but sentimental warmth for the Eastern continent. “It gave me an experience of the world outside my slightly monocultural environment in Australia, which was very valuable, I thought. It contributed to my love of other cultures and travel,” he muses.
Even his first school in England, an institution on the grounds of the Royal Military College of Sandhurst, proved formative in its diversity. “That place was extremely influential because it was full of the sons and daughters of instructors, and they came from all over the Commonwealth. Other young junior officers were attending the British Army Staff College, which was right next door. They came from Malaysia, I’m sure, as well as Singapore, various African countries, certainly India and Pakistan too. I saw parents in sarees and turbans. It was an extremely multicultural little place to learn.”
Braving new worlds
Grounded by worldliness and success in his academic pursuits (not to mention a stellar record as a cricket player in his teen years, an athleticism he still makes healthy effort to maintain at the dignified age of 71 through a daily routine of walks and yoga), Pembroke enrolled in the University of Sydney to read French and Mughal history, only to come away with a
Bachelor of Laws, and later Master of Laws attained from the University of Cambridge in his early 20s.
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Asked what caused him to “succumb” — his word, though he admits some of his former colleagues may take it not so well — to the legal profession, Pembroke breaks into a chuckle and says, “So many of those around me were doing it, it was just a drift! When I was at school, if you were one of the clever boys, you were expected to do medicine or law. That was the mindset, albeit quite a narrow one. I hedged my bets because I did an arts degree as well. My preference had been to go into diplomatic service.”
Alas, it was a lawyer’s life for him. Pembroke took silk in 1995. But despite the occasional “pining for the career [he] did not pursue”, looking back on his 30 years as a barrister followed by 10 as a judge, he is gladly without complaint. “It was a very good path for me, and I was successful enough that it helped me bring up a family of four children and so forth,” he shares.
In fact, it was during his tenure as a solicitor at Freehill Hollingdale & Page that he met his loving wife of 45 years, Gillian. “But I was very pleased about the timing of my departure, because when I left [in 2020], I was still only in my early 60s with plenty of life left in me to do what I enjoyed more — writing."
Pembroke was no stranger to the pen even before wielding the gavel. His first proper foray into the discipline began with a highly personal project, a debut memoir titled Trees of History and Romance: Essays from a Mount Wilson Garden (2009) compiling information on various flora from across literature, poetry, mythology and botany in a sumptuous tome of romantic musings and erudite observations befitting a salt-of-the-earth naturalist.
“I wrote it as an experiment about something that meant a lot to me, the trees I loved and had planted in our garden, Mount Wilson. When that was a success, I realised how much I had enjoyed creating the book, and I just continued on from there,” he says.
Similarly personal were his subsequent works, Arthur Phillip: Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy (2013), about the first governor of New South Wales, and Korea: Where the American Century Began (2018) — both shortlisted for local literary awards. “Arthur Phillip grew out of the fact that on my mother’s side, two of her ancestors, Nathaniel Lucas and
Olivia Gascoigne, were in the First Fleet that came to Australia in 1788. Likewise, the third book stemmed from my father’s role as a young officer fresh out of the Royal Military College. He was sent to Korea and fought in the Battle of Maryang-san against the Chinese in October 1951, for which he received a military cross,” says the author.
Pembroke credits the literary approach in all his works to the relationship he cultivated with writing over the years: “In my senior days as a barrister, and definitely as a judge, I was constantly crafting stories. They are opinions when you’re a barrister, and of course judgments when you’re a judge, but ultimately they’re still stories. And in that story, you always have to explain the conclusion you’ve reached and the reasons you’ve reached it. I think each book is broadly similar in that methodology.”
Though he has also contributed articles to news outlets including Al Jazeera and South China Morning Post, he is ultimately uninterested in reprising his politically focused pieces. “I don’t want to write about what’s happening now. I’m happy to talk about it, and I expect to talk about it at the festivals I’ll be attending because everyone wants to. But I’d rather do something more lasting. Politics is ephemeral, and I’d rather look back than forward,” he adds.
Expressing the Orient
Published in July 2025, Silk Silver Opium covers 2,000 years of China’s trading relationship with the West in intricate detail. It was a five-year project that grew from the pandemic days, as Pembroke’s way of addressing his deep dissatisfaction with the challenging political climate and mounting racial hate festering locally and globally towards China.
“During Covid, there was so much Sinophobia everywhere, but especially in Australia because we had an Evangelist prime minister who thought China was the devil. As a result, China imposed various trade restrictions on Australia, which made it a very hot topic,” he says. “I felt it was all so unbalanced and irrational, and it really upset me. I abhor prejudice. When I was a judge, I tended to always build sympathy for the underdog, the one being treated badly.”
Rather than a political text, Pembroke wanted to dive into the Middle Kingdom’s past, taking an Occidental angle that could help readers discover the context and background of the global superpower many were unjustly villainising. “I had a mission — an educational, or educative, one. I thought if I could teach history, there might be more empathy. Empathy would lead to understanding, and understanding would lead to respect.
“I suppose the same feeling applied to my previous book on US leadership — the need to peel back and expose the reality of hypocrisy,” he says. Play by the Rules (2020), alternatively titled America in Retreat within the US, was one such instance. “[It] grew out of the time I spent at Princeton on sabbatical in 2017 — the first year of the first Trump presidency. I just felt so disturbed that I wanted to write about the way American leadership had played by its own rules, not those it helped establish in 1945.”
Pembroke confesses in interview, and in the introduction to Silk Silver Opium, that the text makes “no claim to academic scholarship”; it means to explain this tangled yet thrilling tale of trade and history rather than to unfurl in acute detail its dialectics. While the events end in 1912, the book concludes with a reflection on how Western anxieties towards the Chinese echoed from the early 20th century well into the present day. “It is chronological, more or less, because I always think doing things in that order makes it easy to understand, but the last thing I wanted to do is make a history textbook,” he says.
The decision to chapter the work primarily around its titular goods came as a sudden inspiration: “With most books, you spend a lot of time thinking about a structure.
It takes a while to figure out how to present your argument. I decided one day that maybe the best way to do it would be to take the main, well-known commodities of China and explain history through them.”
He even readily acknowledges, in an early assessment of his methodology, the Western predisposition towards unfamiliarity, or at times disinterest, in Chinese cultural aspects. It is an attitude he hopes to address and a sentiment that confronts the potential complication of a white man’s take on Asian history without arrogance. Silk Silver Opium tactfully skirts overpresumption, presenting as factual and reading with considerate thoughtfulness. Well-presented timelines, informative lists, colour photographs and plate illustrations make the imposing idea of century upon century’s worth of history far more approachable.
“Most importantly for me, a Chinese publisher very quickly purchased the translation rights in simplified Chinese, and another for traditional in Taiwan and other places. I’m confident there’s a market there, and it’s a big one,” says the author.
If his goal is to help the West learn, one might wonder, what should the Chinese reader hope to gain from this title? “[It is] so they understand their own history from a Western perspective a bit better,” he posits. “Many of the Chinese people I’ve met don’t want to engage in history or talk about it because of the oppression throughout the first three decades of the Republic, and particularly in the 1960s. But I think that might be changing as China becomes so much more confident.”
Following a resounding reception in Australia and an even greater one in Asia — the Pembrokes’ recent visit is part of a wider Asia book tour, which will culminate in a visit to the Lahore Literary Festival in Pakistan — a sequel is already in the works. “I’m very excited about it actually! In fact I’m going to Shamian Island in Guangzhou on Sunday as a research trip because the sequel is partly focused on the foreign concessions in Canton, Shanghai and other places in the 20th century.
The next instalment will cover the period from 1912 to 1950,” he hints.
The un-secret garden
Certainly after his esteemed legal career and acclaimed corpus of books, Pembroke is most famed for his garden, Mount Wilson, a five-and-a-half-acre estate atop Hawthorn Hill just two hours out of Sydney. So widely regarded is the family’s pastoral property that, during the author’s swearing-in ceremony as a judge in 2010, it warranted substantial mention, with the president of the New South Wales Bar Association Tom Bathurst stating many had described it as a “mini-Versailles”.
“We bought the land in 1986. We were very young and took on this huge project, not realising how much was involved. The next three decades were spent creating something that became quite beautiful. It was often open to the public,” says Pembroke. Nothing more than a pine forest upon acquisition (it was formerly a horse paddock, apple orchard and, further back, native forest), the couple devoted their days to constructing a gorgeous family home and lush, ethereal garden.
Pembroke traces his love for nature back to his days in Cambridge. “I was so in love with the various college gardens. I became extremely distracted walking to my examinations in June and took the long route through them, and it was much more memorable than doing the examinations! I enjoy the big trees, and I love the Backs.” On top of the institutions’ natural charms, he also cites one Headfort House in Ireland as the basis for his hill station’s layout.
“It was a stately home owned by the Marquis of Headfort that looked down to a lake, which I tried to, and I think successfully, emulate in the way we built our arrangements.”
Though the couple sadly sold the property a few years ago — it was simply too large for them to manage, and they wished to dedicate more time to doting on the grandchildren — the land is memorialised on Pembroke’s website. A detailed account of the foliage, photographs sorted by season plus a gorgeous watercolour by artistic estate cartographer Catherine O’Neill are enough to make anyone wish they were strolling down the elegant Japanese bridge, inhaling the crisp air and munching on a freshly plucked persimmon. Surely such loveliness was difficult to part with? “Everyone says that to us!”
Pembroke laughs, joined by his wife. “We felt it was the right time, and it was satisfying. It was a family decision, we consulted each of the four children, and everyone was agreeable to and benefited from it.”
Today, the two occupy an apartment by Sydney harbour, where the author’s green thumb works its magic on a wraparound parterre. While his upcoming writing projects are to be historical in nature, the “incurable romantic” — as Bathurst described him, also at the ceremony — hopes to return to poetry and the nature that first inspired him. “I’ve thought about that, and it may be the next or in two publications’ time, but I’m sure I will go back to creating something like that first tree book. I’d like to return full circle.”
