Awards for magistrate

FORMER Southport magistrate Cathy McLennan has collected two prestigious prizes at the Queensland Literary Awards for her book Saltwater, which tells of indigenous youths caught up in a murder case.

McLennan has won the People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year, and the NonFiction Book Award.

Now working as a magistrate in the Innisfail area, she began her legal career at age 22, fresh out of law school at James Cook University and thrown in the deep end in Townsville with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service.