3 weeks ago
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February 10, 2026 — 12:00pm
Peter Jopling, AM, KC, doesn’t like the term “art collector”.
We’re having lunch at Di Stasio Citta at the top end of the CBD, and Jopling wrinkles his nose and grimaces to show his distaste.
“I hate the concept of a collector,” he says. “I bought my first painting when I was 17 with money my grandmother gave me with the express purpose of buying a painting. It’s a little tiny Fred Williams, and I’ve still got it.”
Jopling was one of the Victorian Bar’s top commercial silks, led the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s successful cartel action against packaging company Visy, and acted for and against Christopher Skase, Alan Bond and Simon Holmes à Court, but his great passion in life is art.
He is chair of the Melbourne Art Foundation, which runs the Melbourne Art Fair every February, and has chaired the Potter Museum of Art, the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Foundation and dance company Lucy Guerin Inc.
Jopling estimates he owns hundreds of artworks; just don’t call him a collector.
“I watched my parents buy art, I watched my uncle buy art. It was just something ingrained in me, something that I did,” he says. “It made my world more beautiful, more interesting, more engaged, more challenging, more reflective.”
Jopling is a regular at Di Stasio Citta, which he chose for lunch today because of owner Ronnie Di Stasio’s patronage of the arts.
We eat lunch underneath a projection of a video installation by artist Shaun Gladwell that plays on a continuous loop along the large white wall of the restaurant.
“Who else would put this in a restaurant?” Jopling says admiringly, gesturing above his head.
Gladwell happens to be in the restaurant working on a new installation and pops over to say hello to Jopling.
The pair chat about catching up in Milan and the video portrait Gladwell completed of Allan Myers, KC, for the Bar’s portrait gallery, which Jopling is the driving force behind.
“I could write a book about the ego trip of many of the people who sat for the portraits and resisted what we wanted to do,” Jopling says. “But Allan didn’t flinch, hesitate or draw a breath. He said, ‘Go for it’.”
As we choose what to order from the menu, an appetiser arrives from Di Stasio: small triangles of bread topped with creamy ricotta and crushed peas.
Jopling sighs as he bites into the crostini.
“How good are peas?” he says.
Jopling grew up in Ballarat and attended what is now Ballarat Clarendon College, before moving to Melbourne at the age of 11 and attending Camberwell Grammar School. He studied law at the University of Melbourne.
Jopling says he was inspired to become a lawyer by his uncle, who was a barrister, and because “I couldn’t do maths and science”.
He spent “a nanosecond as a solicitor”, completing his articles before working as a judge’s associate to Sir Keith Aickin at the High Court and Sir Ninian Stephen.
“I was lucky to have two High Court judges that I worked for and formed great friendships with, and [they] had a great influence, really, on my life and my working practices because I saw how hard a High Court judge worked,” he says.
It’s a work ethic Jopling took into his professional life, practising at the Bar for 45 years, where he specialised in commercial litigation.
“In the beginning, you took whatever you could get,” he says. “You couldn’t be that fussy and that was good because you got good training. I got work in the Children’s Court, and it’s tough, but I learnt to cross-examine.”
Jopling says he loves the rigour and preparation required for cross-examination.
“You only ask questions you know the answer to,” he says. “There are a lot of people who are loose with the truth, and so it’s sort of almost the thrill of the chase in uncovering, getting to the core of the real story that they don’t really want to communicate.”
When asked what his most memorable case was, Jopling doesn’t mention Visy, Skase or Bond. He says, “There are some that I’ll probably be remembered for, but it’s probably best not to talk about.”
He’s probably referring to his role as a court-appointed third-party “contradictor” to investigate the extreme fees paid to now-disgraced former silk Norman O’Bryan in the Banksia Securities class action.
All Jopling will say is that litigation is not for the faint-hearted.
“A friend of mine who is a judge on the Federal Court says it is the only activity in the world where everyone’s sort of against you,” he says. “If you’re in surgery and you’re trying to save someone’s life, everybody is working with you. The anaesthetist, the cardiac nurses or the surgical nurses, they’re all working with you to achieve a positive outcome. But in the courtroom, your opponents want to destroy you.”
Jopling says this means litigation is an unusual professional environment, “but that’s what makes it exciting and invigorating”.
When I ask whether Jopling was ever tempted to go to the bench, he shakes his head. “I loved being a barrister,” he says.
Was he ever asked to be a judge? “I wouldn’t go into that,” he says.
“I really admire the men and women who do; they give extraordinary service. I don’t think the public properly understand the service that they do give. I don’t think they’re properly valued. Politicians have no idea.”
One topic Jopling does want to weigh in on is the practice of solicitors being appointed as judges.
“That’s been a trend and I think, by and large, a failure,” he says.
Jopling believes the judiciary should only be appointed from the Bar so they have trial experience.
“Governments love to be able to say, ‘Oh, I’ve appointed the first of this, and the first of that’,” he says. “I don’t think the public really care. The public want the brightest and most efficient person.”
Another area Jopling has been outspoken about is advocating for women to be admitted to the men-only Australia Club.
“We’re not meant to talk about that in public, but it’s just ridiculous that they’re not members,” he says. “If you’re going to have a club in a city of 5 million people, and you’re going to exclude one group on the basis of gender, I just don’t think that’s in touch with contemporary thinking.”
Jopling says a lot of people left the club over the dispute, but quite a few went “up the road” to the Melbourne Club, which is also men-only, “so nothing changed”.
Jopling believes instead in bringing about change by working within the club.
He celebrated his 70th birthday at the Australia Club this year and says the irony was that half the guests were women and “nobody blinked”.
“It’ll happen in time,” he says. “I hope it happens in my lifetime. But we’ve got men from all backgrounds and all races and all sexual persuasions. So why can’t we have women as well?”
Our main courses arrive: thin slices of veal saltimbocca with crisp roast potatoes for Jopling.
I have the linguine, which I couldn’t resist ordering because of its description on the menu of “prawns, parsley, lemon and sunshine”.
On a Melbourne day without much sunshine at all, the bright, fresh sauce delivers.
Jopling’s love of art, he says, began with his mother, who would take him to galleries and choose an artist whom they would then discuss afterwards.
He also attributes his commitment to the arts through chairing and time serving on boards to his parents, who “always told me that you have an obligation to give back”.
However, Jopling says he has gained a lot through his engagement in the art world.
“The joy of it is I then started meeting people who weren’t lawyers,” he says. “The law is a very insular world, and you know, probably it has to be. But I enjoy meeting people from other disciplines and broadening my horizons and my sense of understanding how the world operates.”
Jopling is now focused on the Melbourne Art Fair, which opens on February 19 and, he says, will be “even bigger and better” with a new category called Futureobjekt.
“It will be showcasing talented men and women who are craft-makers and place-makers,” Jopling says. “I’d love to see that really strengthen and grow and become something of substance so that these people can see that there’s a commercial future for adaptation of what they’re making.”
The Melbourne Art Fair aims, Jopling says, to sell art and educate the public about Australian artists.
He’s proud of the fair’s commercial focus.
“You’ve got to sell product,” he says. “People have to earn money, people have got to pay rent, buy food, educate children, and they’ve got to live, so you’ve got to have a commercial proposition.”
The fair receives funding from the federal and state governments but Jopling says the board has focused on achieving corporate backing from sponsors including fashion brand Loewe, champagne house Bollinger and skincare business Rationale, which Jopling’s husband, Richard Parker, owns.
We drink sparkling water over lunch because Jopling doesn’t touch alcohol, apart from the occasional glass of champagne.
“I’m now on trend,” he says. “But if you met me 10 years ago for lunch, it would have been the same story, or 20 years ago.”
Instead, his vice is chocolate, and when another dish arrives courtesy of Di Stasio – a small chocolate-coated ball of ice-cream – Jopling devours it instantly.
“I have an absolute sweet tooth,” he says.
Jopling’s “new project” is to give the artworks he owns to the Potter Museum of Art and the University of Melbourne.
“The aim is not to buy anything from now until the time of my death,” he says. “Instead I’m going to give the Potter money each year to buy something to add to the collection.”
However, Jopling still has a lot of living to do.
“I love meeting artists,” he says. “I love watching how they observe the world because I think that’s part of their native genius ... their ability to observe a world that we’re too busy rushing around to stop and properly observe. They enable us to take stock of that world and to better understand and to better appreciate.”
The Melbourne Art Fair runs from February 19-22, 2026.
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