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

In some ways it’s even, I suspect, a little harder for women now. The prejudice women face now is far more hidden. In those days, police would give you a hard time. I used to have police standing over me all the time calling me “girlie”. It could often be quite intimidating.

I mean I had a copper shirt-front me once. I was down at Frankston and told my client, you’re going to plead not guilty because if you plead not guilty, you get on last. This (police) bloke had things he wanted to do and he said “Well, luv, if (your client) goes now, I’ll be charging him with perjury”. “Fine, you can”.

Anyway I’m walking to court and he (the policeman) walks past me and he gives me the big shoulder in the chest and you sort of had to wear and dodge a lot of that. The police were particularly sexist.

I think in crime, the other barristers were not because we’re all so worried about our clients and making idiots of ourselves and feeling like we’ve wrecked people’s lives by our dereliction of duty that we’ve all got our guts out on the table bleeding over each other a bit. When you’re a woman, you want to say, “Oh guess what I did?” You say it to another woman and they go, “Oh did you?” and it’s just a sympathy thing. Whereas if you say that to a bloke, he’ll go (disbelievingly), “Did you?” Like they would never admit in a thousand years that they’d done it.

I really liked the Criminal Bar. I had really good friends there. It was a real feeling of being in the trenches, fighting the good fight altogether. I really liked my male colleagues in crime. I suspect it’s much more difficult for women in civil cases where it’s a bit more of an old boy’s club, but I found the men (in criminal law) pretty generous and pretty nice.

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