Judge Elizabeth Gaynor (County Court of Victoria) Interview 18/10/2005

You’ve got a very expressive face so how do you do it when you’ve having to sit, to preside over something and to just listen as you say and to keep a poker face?

I suspect I don’t do it particularly well. Look, the main thing is (that) your experiences as a barrister are invaluable because you remember what you wanted from judges and how you wanted judges to behave and you know what’s an appropriate way to behave because you’ve observed it for so long. I just really don’t know how people who are appointed to this job who haven’t got that sort of level of experience cope. It must be so difficult.

I was reading a sentence that I did when I first, for some reason it hadn’t been revised and it came to me and I’ve had three years now and I read it and I thought oh look at this, oh guess who’s been a judge for five minutes and you go to speak one on one with the accused which is what I was doing. It’s like anything else I think, probably at the start. You’re raw and rough and make mistakes. I don’t think I’ve made too many sort of sentencing mistakes or legal mistakes but my manner in court probably hasn’t been as appropriate then as it would be now and you get better as you go along. The thing about being a barrister, too, is (that) you never master it. You’re never king of the hill (who never does) anything wrong.

That’s not the impression that some of your brethren give.

Yes, I know. Well, they’re wrong. You’ve got to watch that. The other thing that’s really important when you’re a barrister to remember is that a lot of the reason that you’re doing it for is ego, not altruism. One of the reasons I liked being a barrister was because I have a large, not so much a large ego, but I liked performing, I liked being noticed, I liked being the centre of attention. You need to remind yourself that that’s why you’re doing these things because you end up being a bit of a pill if you don’t, and one of the things I’ve learnt about being a judge was that I had to withdraw from the arena.

I was laughing with another friend of mine who is also a judge and who was a terrific barrister, she was one of the pioneering criminal women, and we were both laughing about how over the years as soon as a jury come on the bench, you’d automatically light up. A candle would start: “Look at me, forget the prosecutor, look at me, look at me”. What’s that (character) in Little Britain? “Look at me, look at me”. And we were just both laughing because we still did it as judges. We had to train ourselves out of “Good morning ladies and gentlemen, look at me, look at me” sort of thing.

The thing that’s good about being a barrister is that you never quite master it, it’s a bit like golf I suspect, and you’re always prone at some stage to making some appalling hideous mistake and I remember very late in my career cross-examining a policeman and setting him up: “You’re a fair man and you take scrupulous notes and you’d never have put anything in your notes that wasn’t right, and you’d never include anything that shouldn’t have been included or you wanted…”

What I was trying essentially to demonstrate was that he’d charged my client with stealing something and made no note of it. This client was up with multiple charges and it was one of the few trials where John and I had co-accused and it never worked very well because we seem to clash a bit. John’s going, “I think it’s in his notes”. I’m going “no”, and I’m saying, “Alright, well, you show me, sergeant, where in your notes you’ve mentioned this particular item”. He went “There” and I said (meekly), “ooh yeah”. I got out of court: “Oh God, what an idiot - I’ve been made a complete idiot!” And it can happen to anyone. So the fact is that I will probably always make mistakes. It’s not something you can become definitely flawless at.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky, and filmed by Stewart Carter (People Pictures)