Bray was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 16 September 1912, the elder son of Harry Midwinter Bray (1879–1965), an Adelaide stockbroker, and his wife, Gertrude Eleanore Stow (members of whose family were Congregationalist missionaries in South Australia). His father's family had a history of involvement in South Australian politics and current affairs: Bray's grandfather was the Honourable Sir John Cox Bray, a former Premier of South Australia. On his mother's side, Bray claimed a collateral relationship to the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Bray trained as a lawyer and was admitted to the South Australian Bar in 1933, being appointed Queen's Counsel in 1957.[1]
He was acting lecturer in jurisprudence at the University of Adelaide for the years 1941, 1943, 1945 (due to his being medically unfit to serve in World War II owing to extremely poor eyesight[1]), and in 1951.[2]
He served as a lecturer in Legal History at the University of Adelaide from 1957 to 1958, and then as a lecturer in Roman Law from 1959 until 1966. He was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia on 28 February 1967 and served until his retirement from the judiciary on 28 November 1978.[2] Appointed by then Attorney-General of South Australia, Don Dunstan, he was appointed directly without having first served as a judge, which was an unusual occurrence.[1]
Bray was appointed Chancellor of the University of Adelaide in 1968, and also served as Deputy to the Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia from 1968 until retirement.[2]
Other activities
Bray was an active member of the Libraries Board of South Australia between 1944 and 1989, the longest-serving Libraries Board member until that point. After he retired, the State Library of South Australia named its reference section as the Bray Reference Library, a name given to a suite of rooms when the library was redeveloped in 2001.[1]
He was vice-president of the South Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, and was closely involved with the organisation of the first three Festival of Arts Writers' Weeks (1960, 1962, 1964), with his first volume of poetry launched at the second Writers' Week in 1962.[2][1]
He was at the inaugural meeting of Friendly Street Poets, and remained an active member and contributor to the society's annual anthologies, the Friendly Street Reader. The Satura Prize is a poetry prize funded by a bequest from his estate and awarded by Friendly Streets.[3]
Bray's first book of poetry was published in 1962.[1]
Honours, recognition and legacy
Bray was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1979, and is said, by his younger brother, Dr Robert Stow Bray, to have refused a knighthood. He described his views as "æsthetic - traditional; social - emancipated; political - fluctuating" and his philosophies as "sceptical, some tendencies to Platonism". He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1991.[4]
^Evans, Steve; Deller-Evans, Kate (2008), Best of Friends: The First Thirty Years of the Friendly Street Poets, Friendly Street Poets, in association with Wakefield Press, ISBN978-1-86254-793-3
^Nerlich, John (1995). "John Jefferson Bray"(PDF). Australian Academy of the Humanities. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
Australian Who's Who (see also similar Australia, British, and international biographical publications),
Richard Carruthers-Żurowski,The Bray Family of England, Canada, and Australia(1986), deposited in the libraries of the Hampshire Family History Society and the South Australian Society for Genealogy and Heraldry.