Trying to bridge divide
True tales from barrister working with indigenous youth raise important questions
Title: Saltwater Author: Cathy McLennan Publisher: UQP/Penguin RRP: $32.95
IT takes enormous courage to look back on years of hard slog trying to help at-risk kids and adults, and condemn all that effort.
“I just don’t feel I helped anyone’’ is Cathy McLennan’s assessment of the long hours and heartbreak spent trying to keep indigenous children and struggling, often battered adults safe and out of detention.
The former Southport magistrate, who now sits in Innisfail, began her legal career at age 22, fresh out of law school at James Cook University and thrown in the deep end in Townsville when, full of idealism and ready to change the world, she took on her first job with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service.
She spent two years fulltime with the service and another six years as a barrister accepting briefs from ATSILS.
“At the end of that time I didn’t feel I’d helped anyone,’’ she said.
“I tried. I had kids I’d talked to for years, kids of 8 or 10 when I started, then at 18 they were going into the correctional centre.’’
McLennan’s frustrating pessimism about her work should not be taken as an admission of personal failure. She is just one of many in the legal, police, health and social services sectors who have been running into brick walls as they try to find answers to enormous problems with alcohol, drugs and domestic violence in a separate world to our relatively safe, white society.
Saltwater is her first book, a true-crime account about her time as a North Queensland barrister back in the 1990s.
“It’s a book of questions, not solutions. If I had solutions I would have written a legal paper,’’ McLennan said.
Townsville and Palm Island in particular had big problems in the 1990s with public drunkenness and drug and alcohol addiction within the home. Vagrants would move from park to park and often camped in the town cemeteries.
Within days of starting work McLennan had flown to Palm Island – reputedly the most violent place on earth outside of a war zone, according to the Guinness Book of Records – and been swamped with cases.
On that first visit to the island as a lawyer (she first went there as a schoolgirl on a failed field trip organised by her Magnetic Island school to meet pen friends) she encountered a tiny child she calls Olivia for the book – an abused and frightened girl who, having experienced little if any kindness in her life, clung to McLennan and would become a haunting figure in the young lawyer’s life, motivating her to write the book.
It was just a short time after the island visit that back on the mainland, McLennan found herself with no option but to take on a murder case in which four Aboriginal youths, including a boy aged just 13, were charged over the violent death of a white adult in a Townsville cemetery.
McLennan’s account of the pressures she was under, the people she had to deal with and the complexities and frustrations of chasing police and clients from watchhouse to courtroom, and in dealing with the original charges through to the committal hearing and then the jury trial in the Supreme Court, is revealing and builds a picture of the enormity of trying to protect not only the innocent kids among the group charged with murder in that case, but large numbers of other children.
“This story needed to be told. The stories of the children deserve to be told,’’ McLennan said this week.
When interviewed, she was understandably guarded about her time on the bench at Southport. But she was free to open up about her time as a barrister in the north – and al- though she claims to have no answers, in fact she does have ideas that make sense.
“The solutions are to be found in giving children safe homes, basic food and medical care from an early age,’’ she said. “If children had the basics from a young age, we would reduce crime. Give all children the basic necessities of life.’’
If things remain the same, McLennan has a bleak view of the future – but hopes it can be turned around.
Babies born to drug-addicted parents, born with foetal alcohol syndrome and born in homes with prolific domestic violence are the ones she fears will become “recidivists’’ caught in a cycle of crime and violence.
“I’ve acted for a lot of recidivist children,’’ she said. “They were also broken. “That statement applies to black and white children. My experience is that children in detention have been severely neglected or abused.
“The country and society need to know what the real problem is. These issues have to be addressed long before (reaching) the court system.
“(Fix these) and we’d have a better chance. Just the basic necessities.”
The book title, Saltwater, stems from McLennan’s idyllic childhood when compared to that of her Palm Island pen friend. The children had shared dreams of what they wanted to be in life. Both lived on island paradises, but McLennan’s first inkling that things were very different for her friend came when her class was flown to Palm Island to meet the other children.
No one met them at the aerodrome and after their teacher walked them into town and to the school, there was no one there to greet them.
The class waited but when no teachers, parents or children came to meet them, the Magnetic Island teacher and kids went down to the town jetty to swim. Eventually some local children joined them, leaping in delight from the jetty into the azure waters of the Coral Sea – a scene of paradise that belied the dysfunctional state of the Palm community.
“That was the beginning of it for me,’’ McLennan said.
“A few kilometres of saltwater made all the difference in our lives.’’
In the course of her legal career, McLennan has met many Olivias – broken children from terrible home environments.
Thoughts of Olivia would plague her in the early hours, eventually driving her to get up each day at 4am to write the book, before putting in a full day as a wife, mum to two children and legal officer.