Legal Career
I was a lawyer for the first decade of my professional journey, starting with PN Waye and Associates in Adelaide in 1985 and working in law until 1995.
Admissions
When I started in law, it was a requirement to be admitted into each of Australia's jurisdictions where you intended to work. This gave us the ability to appear in Courts and lodge legal documents in that jurisdiction.
My first admission was to the Supreme Court of South Australia in December 1984.
I was admitted to the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in 1986.
I was admitted to the High Court of Australia in 1988 - a bit of a slip-up, I thought I was already admitted in 1984, they said I wasn't: Guess who won that argument!
I was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1995.
My Work
Jan 1995 – Sep 1995
Mental Health Legal Service
Principal Legal Officer
Jan 1994 – Jan 1995
Federation of Community Legal Centres (Vic)
Media and Community Liaison Officer
Sep 1991 – Nov 1993
Independent Barrister (NT)
June 1989 – Sep 1991
Elston & Gilchrist (NT)
Solicitor
May 1988 – June 1989
Royal Commission into Aboriginal & Islander Deaths in Custody
Instructing Solicitor (Manager) NT
Jan 1986 – May 1988
Australian Legal Aid Office
Legal Officer (Senior from July 1986)
Jan 1985 – Dec 1985
PN Waye & Associates
Barrister & Solicitor
The Royal Commission
In the late 1980s, I was fortunate enough to help the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It was the most important work I have been involved with and led to major changes in my life. This is an edited extract of a reflection I wrote in 2010 on the theme of thinking like a hammer.
Throughout the decade before the Royal Commission, the members of Australia's Indigenous Communities were dying in police and prison custody at much faster rates than any other people and this became a major issue as the 200th anniversary of the “settlement” of Australia approached.
I felt proud to be part of this, to be able to help the people who I felt were being discriminated against, who needed to be given our help, including education, decent housing and health assistance, as well as protection from police and prison guards who didn’t understand them.
I was thinking like a hammer. I was thinking like a blunt object of force and power with the only answer that would work. The hammer has no capacity to listen, to feel, to be human and it is damned difficult to make it change direction or do anything other than hit things.
As I stood in the red dirt of Yuendumu in Central Australia, looking at what most would describe as a shanty town, the wrecked cars, the decrepit houses, the people in their dirty clothes, I listened to the members of the community who came to speak to the Royal Commissioner.
Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a nail. Here were proud and passionate people, with strong views and incredible stories. As each person spoke, I felt the sledgehammer demolishing everything I had ever believed and failed to question.
The houses were decrepit because they were inappropriate for their lifestyles and the geography of Central Australia, the clothes dirty because the red dust surrounds Yuendumu for hundreds of miles. These people were treated as unintelligent and uneducated, yet they all spoke at least six languages (where I have been a total failure at learning a second) and were putting together brilliant, passionate arguments and innovative solutions. There were disagreements and disputes about methods, but respect for each member of the community and the culture they shared.
There was one thing that I kept hearing over and over again. Get out of our way. Everything that had ever been done to “help these poor unfortunate people” had in fact tried to change them, to limit their choices, to make them something they weren’t, to drive them to assimilation and integration at the expense of their culture. And despite a couple of hundred years of pressure, here was their culture, surviving and strengthening, and here we were being told to remove the barriers, to remove the patronisation and allow Aboriginal people around Australia the same opportunities for self-determination that everyone else has.
I realised that much of my role should be to identify and remove the barriers and boundaries that have been created and open up opportunities for other people to achieve their successes.
I certainly began to understand the power of listening, of learning and of leadership.
I grew up as a tool, in pretty much every possible way that term is applied. A life changing experience helped me reject the notion of “rightful place” or any limiting barriers. It’s a process that I hope will never stop and I do everything in my power to stop myself thinking like a hammer again.