Many Australian academics and jurists regard Australian High Court Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon’s judgment in Parker v The Queen (1963) as Australia’s ‘declaration of judicial independence’ from Privy Council precedent and from a unified common law more generally. His expression in Parker is sharp, clear; Dixon makes no apologies for his finding. Nor does he limit the decision to its facts: he states, quite clearly, that he believes that the Australian courts should no longer be beholden to English precedent. Further, he states that has the support of the puisne justices in making this declaration. How had the Court arrived at this point, particularly in the context of its members championing ‘interdependence’ with British institutions, and close adherence to legal precedent, only years earlier? The reasons for this volte-face on the part of both Dixon and his colleagues remain unexplored in Australian legal history. This paper reveals that, notwithstanding the justices’ continuing cultural ties to Britain, their changing views as to the desirability of judicial interdependence were largely a reaction to developments in the English judiciary itself. This chapter argues that the justices’ changing conception of the role of the Australian High Court was shaped in part by a growing sense of a uniquely Australian legal identity, but more pressingly as a reaction to disappointment with the Privy Council in particular. It explores the reasons for this disappointment and suggests that Dixon’s own jurisprudence presaged the Australian Federal Parliament’s actions in the decades that followed to abolish appeals to the Privy Council.