Everyday violence
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julienne van Loon
Download the complete article PDF
Julienne van Loon's biography and other articles by this writer
A friend of mine who suffered from schizophrenia once told me of her intention to write a travel guide to the world's psychiatric hospitals. This plan both was and wasn't a joke: travel guides necessarily assume a certain agency on the part of the traveller and, although my friend had seen quite a few of the world's big hospitals from the inside, these were generally not the kind of excursions she took of her own free will. Perhaps precisely because of these complications to do with power and responsibility, hers would have been a great book. I'll never know for sure because the book never eventuated, and many of the big old psychiatric institutions have since been closed down – for better or for worse. In any case, my friend has since died: she was killed many years ago in a single, senseless act of violence.
I was thinking of my friend's planned but unwritten travel guide last winter as I left the Supreme Court of Tasmania and faced the cold southern air on Salamanca Place, pulling up the collar on my heavy grey coat and feeling, well, a bit intrigued about the human dilemma, and especially about this notion of so-called free will. I was in Tasmania for three weeks as part of the Island of Residencies program, a scheme that enables writers from interstate or overseas to spend an intense and (hopefully) productive period in the idyllic Tasmanian setting to produce new work. During my first week in town, I worked furiously on the beginnings of a new novel, but after 15,000 words I came to a bit of a standstill and so I did what I usually do when that happens: background research. One of the main characters in my new book is in a jail on the outskirts of Perth and I needed to invent for him a plausible, if convoluted, criminal record. So, at the beginning of my second week in town, I set out for Hobart's courts, intending simply to sit and listen.
Nicholas Shakespeare's In Tasmania (Knopf, 2004) reminds readers that Tasmania has often been thought to be a kind of boon docks – a place one is transported or exiled to in order to be forgotten by the rest of the world. As I approached the Hobart Magistrates Court along Liverpool Street I noticed, tucked behind the headquarters for Tasmania Police, the gleaming new Hobart Remand Centre, a beautifully frightening multi-storey lock-up in grey steel, without so much as a single window – perhaps this is the real Tasmania?
Sadly, Hobart's prison system – like those in other Australian states – is drastically over-crowded. While I was in town, the state government announced its intention to build a "mini-prison" in the state's north in order to take some of the pressure off the bulging Risdon Prison. The inmates in Risdon are assaulting one another, assaulting prison officers, dying from unnatural causes in custody and escaping from jail at rates that far outstrip those of any other state. What goes through a magistrate's mind, I wonder, when he or she faces sending yet another person into such a system? A human response would be to avoid ordering a prison term wherever and whenever possible. But this, of course, defeats the whole purpose of what it means to discipline and to punish.
To enter The Hobart Magistrates Court, you first need to give yourself over to the kind of security interrogation that has become common to all of us in the post-September 11 state. Your bags and pockets are emptied or searched and you are required to pass through an archway-cum-metal detector, at which point your shoes or a watch or something similarly benign sets off an alarm and you are personally frisked by a security guard with an expensive magic wand. I find it useful to repeat the silent mantra – "I am innocent" – during this process, though whether this is ever a statement of fact I can't be sure.
It is easy to find out who is in court in Hobart on any given day, and which magistrate before whom they are scheduled to appear, although the nature of each case is not for general circulation. All I could tell from the notice board was that there were five courts concurrently in session, and while some had a long list of names on the agenda, others had only a few. I sat in the foyer for a time, unsure about which court to enter. Here I saw half a dozen police in uniform, talking in hushed tones and clearly waiting to be called in as witnesses. They looked cocky, assured, and I got the sense that they felt they were wasting their time. In fact they were: most of them left when somebody came out of Court Five to tell them that the fellow in question had decided to plead guilty. Elsewhere in the foyer there were several lawyers in dark suits making flurried entrances and exits and hauling bundles of paper. There were toddlers, too, rushing up and back along the carpet, ignored as much as possible by their mothers who sat glumly, waiting for news of partners or adult children, or perhaps waiting to be called up to act as surety (again) for a family member about to be released on bail. After a while, I entered Court Four and found a seat in the back row. I stayed there for the best part of two days.
The first case I witnessed involved a man of twenty-two who sat in the section of the court reserved for those in custody. The prosecutor presented the background to the case. The man was accused of stealing $73.49 worth of baby clothes from Big W, ostensibly for his then six-month-old child. The incident took place almost nine months ago when the man and his then girlfriend were observed by store security, who did not apprehend them on the spot. They left the scene in a van, which was later stopped by police. The accused had been bailed, but then failed to appear in court. A warrant was issued. He was arrested and bailed a second time, but then failed to appear in court once more – leading to another warrant.
I watched him leaning forward in his chair with his back curved and his head hung low, occasionally whispering under his breath. His lawyer was explaining that he'd been trying to get in contact with the man's father, to provide surety, but there was no one answering the phone. The lawyer also confirmed that the relationship with the girlfriend, who'd since had a second child, had faltered. The accused was shaking his head. Another man, whose name had been suggested by the accused as a possible surety, was – like dad – strangely unreachable. The magistrate had nothing to do but send the man back to the Remand Centre, promising to see him again at the very end of the day – perhaps somebody who mattered would have picked up their phone by then. I had a strong feeling that nobody would.
Over the following days, I observed a number of motorists accused of driving under the influence. There were several cases of theft, mainly involving the theft of small items from department stores, and various applications for bail. But on the second day – a Friday – almost the whole day was taken up with issues relating to restraining orders. A man and a woman who owned neighbouring retail businesses were seeking mutual orders. "She's a nutcase," said the man. "She won't leave me or my family alone." "He's got guns," said the woman, "and he's threatened to kill me." A young woman with a small baby took out an order against her brother. When asked by the magistrate whether the man in question had a history of violence, a frail, middle-aged woman beside me at the very back of the court spoke out. "Yes!" she shouted. "Against me. And I'm his mother." Her words were striking if only for the fact that this was the only time that any of us at the back of the court spoke at all. There was a bouncer from a local hotel, who was seeking interim orders against four men, all from the one family. There was a woman who was seeking an order on behalf of her fifteen-year-old daughter: the girl was being bullied and threatened by another girl at the local school bus-stop.
The most disturbing case, I found, was a woman who was seeking to cancel an order she'd already taken out against her husband. The two of them, husband and wife, sat close by me at the back of the court, and the man's hand rarely left his wife's forearm or thigh during the several hours they spent waiting for their case to be dealt with. When the woman's name was finally called, they both went up to the front of the court. They stood together, they sat together. The magistrate was – rightly, I think – a little reluctant to cancel the order, which had been granted for a twelve-month period only three months earlier.
"Obviously, there's been a reconciliation," said the magistrate to the woman, "and I don't want to stand in the way of that, but I need to be sure that this is what you want."
"Yes," the woman replied, but she didn't elaborate. There was a silence, into which I cast – undoubtedly a little too willingly – an unflattering backstory about the man. But I was not alone in my musings. The magistrate took away most, but not all, of the conditions of the existing order, but did not cancel it completely, leaving a statement intact to the effect that the man would "keep the peace" in relation to his wife. I felt somewhat reassured by this, but it didn't stop me from shuddering as the shackled couple left the court.
For all the emotion and drama I witnessed over two working days observing the scores of cases that filed through the Magistrates Court (during which, incidentally, nobody was actually sent to prison), there was one key image that stayed with me. It was a brutal stare, given to me by a woman released on bail for a minor offence. She had a beautiful but angry face, and she sat tall and assured in her seat beside the court officer, having come up from remand. When the magistrate declared her free to go, she fixed her gaze on me angrily as if to say "Who the fuck are you?" My first instinct was to lower my eyes, and I did for a second, but I couldn't resist the dare she seemed to be giving me, the dare to look back. We locked eyes again, and I swallowed. Clearly, she wanted to tear strips from me. Perhaps she had eyed my pen and paper and my unnatural interest. Her message was blunt: there is no such thing as a neutral observer.