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

So what made you decide to specialise in criminal law?

Oh, that was a very long involved process. I started off doing my articles with my father's firm. I had never thought about going anywhere else. As I said, I was a fairly conventional person and my father had died and I ended up doing probate and conveyancing at their Camberwell branch which I just loathed and I could just see myself hanging off the end of the phone with cobwebs off me down the years and I thought, what am I going to do? If I want to go for a job with anyone, this is all I've ever had to do, probate and conveyancing, which I hate.

I spent most of my articles in the toilet reading romantic novels because I was just so bored, I hated it. And the terrible thing about disliking what you do in law is everybody else wants to be a lawyer, it's so "statusy", so if you don't like it, you think "Oh my God, it must be me" and in fact it wasn't me. What I was doing didn't suit me.

Then I started this great long odyssey where I thought, well I'm stuffed you know, I can't get a job anywhere else. I thought I always wanted to be a journalist so I wrote away and I got a cadet graduateship with Australian Consolidated Press so I left law for three years and I really enjoyed that, it was great. I enjoyed getting away from the upper middle class private echelons that I'd been (in) all my life because journalism still in the early 80s wasn't people who had got brilliant marks and managed to get jobs on newspapers. It was blokes who had been copy boys and left school at the age of fourteen and were these sensational characters.

I did that for about three years and I went overseas for a while and worked overseas and backpacked around and it was while I was doing court reporting that I started seeing barristers - that's when the idea first came to me. I thought I'd like to be a barrister and I'd like to do crime. And after about three years, I realised that because the aim was always to go and work for the Age because it was the most prestigious and I'd rung them up and they said, yes we'd be interested, send us in your resume - that was when I just suddenly realised that I don't want to do this (journalism) anymore. It wasn't quite right for my personality. I started to realise that it's really important to have a job that expresses you and I think I was too bossy and liked dominating the conversation a bit too much to be a successful journalist.

So I got a job at Legal Aid as a duty solicitor which I loved. That was appearing for people at the Magistrate's Court and then I went to the Bar when I was about thirty and that was when I hit the ground running. Legal Aid was very generous to people that had worked for them and I got a lot of work and I just worked as a criminal defence barrister until I got this job.

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