Senate Inquiry Into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs --- Submission of Chris Howse Principal Solicitor, Whittlesea Community Legal Service

This Submission addresses the following terms of reference:

That the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquire into and report on family, domestic and sexual violence, including with a view to informing the next National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, the following: a) long-term measures to prevent violence against women and their children, and improve gender equality, and; j) The views and experiences of frontline services, advocacy groups and others throughout this unprecedented time. Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

Pandemic is upon us. It is 7:52 am in the year twenty-twenty, on the day after April Fools. I’m by myself in the office of Whittlesea Community Legal Service at Epping Plaza, because corona virus has burst upon the world and it’s dark outside and it’s raining and we’ve transferred our service out of this office and our clinics as well, that we run with students from La Trobe University, and the receptionist is booking our appointments now, on the phone at her house. Our solicitors and students are home and talking to our clients on the phone and so many of the women are beset by the violence of their men, that we must keep this show on the road. All Australia is doing this now, because our people are sick and our people are dying. I can hear outside, the sound of a car. But not many cars are here at Epping Plaza because illness and death are upon us and the message they bring, is stark: ‘It’s time.’ It’s time to reaffirm who we are, and exactly what the heck we have to do. Why now? Well, because of the pandemic and because also, on the 19th February 2020, a woman named Hannah Clark was burned in a fire in her car. She died. Her husband, Rowan Baxter, threw petrol in the car and set it alight. That’s how the fire occurred. There were three children in the car. They were sitting in the back with their seat belts done up. They were young. I suppose their mum might have helped them do up their seatbelts. They were his children. Baxter threw petrol on his children, as well as his wife. The children died in the flames and his wife died in hospital, a few hours later. So terrible in effect, so banal in motivation were these murders, that Senator Rex Patrick, in the Commonwealth Parliament, sought to establish an inquiry forthwith, to find out why this horror is upon us, and what we can do right now, to turn this situation round. Through his efforts, the Senate's Legal and

2 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

Constitutional Affairs Committee was tasked to report on domestic and family violence in Australia, with wide scope to examine the adequacy of current measures, and how the Government could address cultural change. It is about the need for cultural change, that I have something to say. That is the nub of this submission. But it’s complicated. What is the antidote to the dearth of duty, the abysmal lack of responsibly toward women in this country, toward children, toward ignorance of the feminine in our very selves, that these deaths of Hannah Clark and her children, somehow epitomise? The scope of the inquiry sought by Senator Patrick, is wide. The width of that scope is essential. The gravity of our ignorance makes it so. Since the scope encompasses what sort of cultural change might fix this, let us workshop a hypothesis about violence to women. Is it a kind of heat that is found in other things as well? Is it in racism? Is it in greed and the will to fame, which abound around us today? Is it in our sacrifice of the forests and the animals that has brought us to the brink of suicide? Is it in other things also, that are symptoms of ignorance about the feminine? If it is, then what is at the core of this heat? That is the question. If this inquiry is to find out, it must take a deep look. A deeper look, than has ever been taken before. If the heat in violence to women in Australia is a symptom, we must understand the disease. What have we shattered? Of what are we ignorant? What have we considered to be of low worth, such that a man steps out in the sunlight of an Australian morning, with no inclination to examine his existential despair, with no signs or tokens at his disposal, to find a way through, save for petrol in hand, to douse his wife and children and incinerate them? This submission sets itself the task to find out. And to offer a way to put back together what is shattered. Such is the horror before us, that no lesser aim can be acceptable. But that’s a big task. It must needs draw upon experience in

3 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse the law and procedure in Australia. It must look to the limits of the capacity of judges, of politicians and bureaucrats, to be of assistance in the matter before us. It must do all this, if it is to hope for an answer. And it must go further still. It must go back. Back to the time when manhood is formed. It must go back to childhood itself. There is no gene that makes men violent to women. Biologists have isolated nothing of the kind. Since none of us is genetically predisposed to be Rowan Baxter, every one of us is him, in potentiality. The psyche holds within it, every bit of nasty stuff, of which human beings are capable. All of us possess a psyche. Just like Rowan Baxter. That fact extends responsibly for this inquiry, beyond the purview Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. It extends responsibility to fathom that psyche, to you and to me, to better understand the worst that we can do. How otherwise, are we to prevent atrocity? Me and my colleague Moses Florendo, are lawyers who work for the Whittlesea Community Legal Service. A while back, we got hold of a coffee van with an expresso machine in the back, and we called it ‘Expresso Legal’. Armed with the coffee machine and some mugs and coffee and milk and a pad and a pencil each, we drove out into the streets of Whittlesea to find out what was going wrong out there. Our credo? To seek out stories of violence to women, wherever they may be found, and offer legal advice and coffee. At 8:00 am on the streets of the Whittlesea, the wind is cold for Moses and me. Dressed in beanies, scarves and bluey jackets, we look like dags and our message that ‘We are one of you’, needs no words from us.

4 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

‘Chris,’ a social worker calls out, ‘there is a woman asking for emergency relief. She has bruises on her face and her upper arms.1 Can you talk to her?’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Jennifer.’ Out I come with the social worker. I see the bruises. She is in a summer dress, with short sleeves. She does not look up. ‘Hello Jennifer, I’m Chris.’ ‘Hello Chris.’ ‘Jenifer, tell me everything.’ ‘I’ve been with this bloke about ten years. I love him. But he’s got a bit erratic. He’s lost his job. He’s on the grog again. He’s been playing the pokies. My income has to support us both and it has been my money lost. He started hitting me. Last night was the worst time so far.’ ‘What happened last night?’ ‘I was in my nightie. I could not defend myself. I got away from him and I ran over to next door’s place. I knocked on the door and told them what happened and they let me in. I was embarrassed to go over to next door’s place. I was not so much embarrassed by the fact that he hit me. I was embarrassed that I lost control of my bowels and had to stand in front of my next door neighbour in my dirty nightie.’ Last year, Whittlesea had the highest family violence incident count in the City of Melbourne, standing at 3,057 reports. So says the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So I do not offer the story of Jennifer as an isolated case. I rather think she is a classic case. It being the task of the lawyer not to despair about horror, but to seek an antidote, we must be clear about the problem before us. So what is it? That I can tell you in one word.

1Names of clients of the Whittlesea Community Legal Service mentioned in this narrative, have been changed 5 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

‘Fury.’ We have a problem of fury. It is the fury of men. Fury wrecks horror upon women and children. It wrecks horror also upon the men who succumb to it and hit the women and the children because the world of the men is also broken all to pieces. In front of me is a bloke. He says his name is Eric. ‘Can I get some details form you,’ I ask him, ‘for our advice sheet before we start?’ ‘I’ve already done that, I’ve done it at the court and I’ve done it with you.’ ‘But we need these details for our form to be able to advise you.’ ‘You are all the same, you, the court and the police. They push me around and create injustice.’ ‘Look, I need these details…’ ‘Is this the way you are going to play it? Is this what you really want to do? How do you sleep at night you people?’ ‘Eric, it’s Eric isn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me everything.’ He talks. I do not interrupt. He was a border at the house of a man and his daughter. They become anxious about him. They say he is aggressive. The daughter feels so in particular. They say that the boarding situation is not working out. His temper makes their lives intolerable. They ask him to leave. He refuses. He says he ‘has rights’. They call police who apply on their behalf, for an intervention order. That application is up now for mention in the Broadmeadows Court. Eric is calm. Sort of. But his demeanour with me gives weight to the story of the father and daughter who would like a friendly border. If their plight is the consequence of Eric’s fury, embracing not just themselves, but also police, the courts and me, Eric has no insight into that fact. So what’s behind his fury?

6 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

Has it anything to do with the father? We don’t think so. Nor has it anything to do with the daughter or the police, the courts, or even me. T.L.C. with Eric affords him a hearing and gives me the chance to tell him the bad news. I see good reason for this order against him. He should consent to it. Sometimes this approach is effective. Often times though, T.L.C. notwithstanding, it is still an angry man who leaves the office. 3,057 family violence reports to police in Whittlesea last year, includes only the times people rang up the police. So many women keep a secret of fury in the home that most times when it erupts, they don’t ring police. So police suggest we could triple that figure. Conservatively. This is not just a few blokes. This is not an isolated sickness. Not at all. Not one bit. A pandemic of fury is infecting the City of Whittlesea, the nation, as it has also infected the world. Why are men so upset? Does Eric’s hearing at Broady Court have a hope of getting at the cause? If not, what becomes of the public, desperate for an antidote, seeking which, thousands of women pour into courts, when all the courts can offer in the short term, is five minutes of time to deal with the case when the mention comes up in a month or so? Moses and me are intrigued. In seeking the cause of fury, our suspect is not the character of men. No. Behind the fury, is the dark and in the dark, we suspect, there’s an antidote to fury if only we can light the way, and the dark no doubt, is full of fear. But we think that men can stand it. At Epping Plaza, Coles opens at 7:00 am and we are there to buy the milk2 and then we gather up advice sheets, pencil and paper, wack them in the car, and head over to the council depot to get the coffee van. ‘So who wants to be a

2 Customarily, twelve litres of full cream, six of light and three of soy, depending on the gig. 7 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse lawyer?’ I ask a pride of kids, at the window for hot chocolates. ‘I do’ responds a little girl in a hijab. ‘Awesome.’ ‘My mum and dad say it’s pretty hard.’ ‘How are you at reading?’ ‘I love reading. I… er… I have a book journal.’ ‘I’m an uncle!’ cries a little boy, six or seven years old. The other kids in the queue drop everything to workshop how such a thing could be, and I am freed up for a minute or two. A bloke approaches us, stooping a bit. ‘I’m from the Men’s Shed. Can I get a coffee?’ ‘G’iday mate, how are things at the Men’s Shed? ‘It’s a lifesaving organisation mate.’ ‘Life saving?’ ‘I was diagnosed with cancer. A month ago, they give me six months to live. When they told me, I… well, I wasn’t sure how I’d go.’ ‘And you found out about the Men’s Shed?’ ‘It’s a lifesaving organisation.’ Sitting with us at a table at the Whittlesea Library, where the free men’s lunch is on this arvo, another bloke provides his instructions about a Centrelink dispute with a sprinkling of ‘f-words’, all the more comfortable to talk because we offer him a coffee and make it ourselves. What is it about hospitality? What is it about coffee? Everybody knows that fury of men is on the rise. The public is shaken. Here in Victoria, a Royal Commission into Family Violence was recently convened. The first of its kind in Australia. It listened to the stories of victims and experts alike, and came up with solutions. 227 of them. The Commission tabled its report in Parliament on 30th March 2016.

8 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

‘Seizing,’ to use its own words, ‘opportunities to transform responses to family violence, and building structures that will guide and oversee a long-term reform program that deals with all aspects of family violence.’ All aspects? Two years on since the Royal Commission finished up, women are coming to us with stories like Jennifer’s. They pour in unabated. I saw a colleague at Heidelberg Court the other day. As duty solicitor, she saw nineteen men. Some of them needed interpreters, slowing things down for her. Naïvely, I ask: ‘How was that?’ ‘Chris, it was nineteen angry men!’ Not long after, I’m at Heidelberg Court myself, on a typical day. I act for two women. There are 40 cases in today’s ‘mention list’, 5 minutes being allocated to each. But the case against these women is trumped up. So it’s my duty to submit that the magistrate should throw out this baseless case. But that’s going to take more than five minutes. So I’m ready for a showdown.3 HER HONOUR: Well it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. How can I make a decision when you’re making a submission to me in a mention list? This is a mention list, for a directions hearing… MR HOWSE: In none of those statements [against the women] are we given any evidence that [they] have done anything that is abusive, or violent, or threatening… And Your Honour is seized with the jurisdiction, and the duty, to check whether there is a case against my clients, before letting the [other parties] proceed. HER HONOUR: Where is that, where are you referring to in the Family Violence Protection Act? MR HOWSE: Procedurally, I am… HER HONOUR: It doesn’t work that way.

9 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

MR HOWSE: To answer Your Honour’s question, it does in my submission… HER HONOUR: It doesn’t! It does not! MR HOWSE: And… HER HONOUR: They will [appeal] to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court judge would say “What was the Magistrate thinking, to make a cursory assessment, in the middle of the mention list, with forty other cases, have a read of some statements, not hear any evidence, and just dismiss the applications…” MR HOWSE: Your Honour’s question was: ‘What, in the Family Violence Protection Act, allows me to do so?’ And the answer to that question is Rule 64 of the Family Violence Protection Act Rules, which permits me to make an application, that Your Honour has the duty to consider, that, where there is evidence that the application is brought on a basis that is frivolous and vexatious, that it may be struck out. And that basis can be seen, by reading through the statements… HER HONOUR: Okay, well, thank you for the provision of [Rule] 6. It talks about the power to strike out proceedings. [reading] If a proceeding is scandalous or vexatious or may prejudice, embarrass or delay the further hearing of proceeding or is otherwise an abuse of process of the Court, the Court may order the whole or part of the application to be struck out or amended. Okay, well, I’ll stand the matter down and read the statements. A win for us. But lists for intervention orders at the Heidelberg Magistrates’ Court, often in excess of forty cases, can’t cope with more than one or two of these interruptions. The cases are complicated. Looking into them takes time.

4 MAGISTRATES' COURT (FAMILY VIOLENCE PROTECTION) RULES 2008 - REG 6.01 ‘If a proceeding is scandalous, frivolous or vexatious or is otherwise an abuse of the process of the Court, the Court may, on the application of a respondent, stay the proceeding.’ 10 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

Overborne by the lists, a magistrate’s vocation to meet just demands, is undermined. Utterly. And rules for protection of the vulnerable are rendered a dead letter in spite of law and in spite of passion and duty. The widow of a Melbourne magistrate who took his own life last month, believes a crippling caseload contributed to the death of her husband, who often heard up to 90 cases a day:5 Respected magistrate Stephen Myall, 59, was a passionate believer in the court's ability to turn people's lives around before he ended his life three weeks ago. "Everybody got a voice in Steve's court," Mr Myall's wife Joanne Duncan told ABC Radio Melbourne. "I guess I'm trying to be his voice at the moment while there's people listening." Ms Duncan, a former Labour state MP, said she believed a huge increase in magistrates' workloads contributed to her husband's decision to end his life. "Even the weekend before he died, he had spent two of the three days of the long weekend writing a decision and that was all done … at home. It was just an unrelenting workload.” Fury has the public in its grip. But responsibility is vested in the public to understand fury and to look for an antidote and the public is told that the courts are equipped to resolve that fury but the courts are not well equipped at all. So injury to women and deaths of women at the hands of violent men, continue unabated. The public is angry at the injury and death and the tabloid media vents this anger in a manner that is immoderate and in terms that abrogate responsibility on the part of the public. The reason why the courts face blame for the persistence of fury and the failure of intervention orders and criminal proceedings to curb that fury and the resulting injury to women and deaths of women, is because the public is loath to be angry at itself.

5 ABC Radio News – 12 April 2018 11 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

So I was keen to rally lawyers in our sector to discuss the problem of fury and the gambit of the public to dump it on the courts and the media projecting the fantasy that the courts should plumb the darkness all alone and unassisted, and let the public off the hook. I rang up our ‘peak body’, the Federation of Community Legal Services, to organise a meeting. I left a lot of messages with the Federation of Community Legal Services. ‘I’m sorry,’ they finally said to me in an e-mail, ‘we are in the process of recruiting at the moment (and one Senior Policy Adviser is on leave) so unfortunately I won’t be able to send a rep tomorrow. In the future, I also think that it would be very worthwhile if you, or someone from [your legal service] were also part of the Family Violence Applicant Lawyer Group and could feed back your centre’s experiences for wider systemic advocacy.’ So much for the Federation of Community Legal Services. Anyhow, I rang up our funding body, Victoria Legal Aid, and organized a meeting and the meeting went ahead without our ‘peak body’. The rest of us sat down at VLA’s office in the City and told it like it is. The representatives from the other community legal services agreed with me that they see the same horrors that we do. They said that their duty lawyers are overwhelmed. But VLA mob did not feel things were quite so bad. ‘When I was a duty lawyer in the past,’ one of them remarked, ‘things were not this bad.’ ‘That is because they have got worse’ we said. But nothing was offered, save a repetition of the suggestion in the e-mail from the Federation of Community Legal Centers. ‘It might be a good idea for you to join a committee.’ Sea shells on the beach have colours and shapes that are pretty and we look at them with our backs to the sea, while behind us, the ocean has become deranged and is poised to overwhelm us.

12 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

In our coffee van, Moses and me continue to cruise the City of Whittlesea and at the wheel in Doreen, a thought pops into mind. ‘Hey Moe, you were a lawyer in the Philippines right?’ ‘Yes. I grew up there.’ ‘So here we are driving through Doreen, in the City of Whittlesea, right?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Look at these neat little houses, the parks and the gum trees. Is there anything in the geography, just what is here to be seen, that might show why the men here are beating the women in epidemic numbers?’ ‘Chris, when I was in Manilla, I had to travel two hours to work each day, to get from the place where I was living, to down-town Manilla. I had to go through slums. I had to watch for assaults and car-jackings. There were crazy, traffic-choked roads. When I went from work to the café, everywhere, there was begging. Here, there are no beggars. You have civil order. In Whittlesea township, when I have my break, there is no crime. it is a pleasure to walk down the café and get a cup of coffee.’ ‘And the geography of Doreen?’ ‘Look at the beautiful houses and the parks and shopping centers.’ ‘So there’s nothing to show why the men are beating the women in epidemic numbers?’ ‘Nothing. This is a paradise. Why are people so discontent?’ Contented men do not bash up women. Why are we so discontent? Does the legal system possess tools to discover the causes of discontent which has no reason to exist? No it doesn’t. Why not? Because the law is frightened of anything it can’t pigeon hole, by the study of objective fact. The approach of

13 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse the Royal Commission is a classic example of the principle. Its terms of reference did not require it to determine why family violence occurs.6 ‘There are, of course,’ stated the Commission, ‘debates about the extent to which [a variety of] factors7 cause family violence… The Commission did not seek to resolve these debates.’ If the Royal Commission won’t ask why family violence happens, how can we expect it to examine our baseless discontent, living as we are in a paradise? Today, the 21st June 2020, ABC News is reporting that the Senate Inquiry into Domestic Violence, set up at the instance of Senator Rex Patrick in the wake of the murders of Hannah Clark and her children, the forum in which I was hoping to pose these questions, has ‘wrapped up three months early, without taking submissions or holding public hearings.’ So much for our trouble. Yours for reading, mine for writing. The committee said that ‘conducting another lengthy, broad-ranging public inquiry into domestic and family violence in Australia at this time, would be of limited value’. Hmmm. ‘It seems that [the inquiry’s] report, is the outcome of a fairly scanty literature review.’ So said the president of the Law Council of Australia. Like me, they wanted to make a submission. A fairly scanty literature review. Senator Kim Carr, who chaired the committee of inquiry, was a bit defensive. He said that it had not been held ‘in a half arsed manner.’ But he didn’t speak to a single woman, not one social worker, one police officer, one judge, one lawyer, one child. So what are we to do now, you and I? I am so unwilling to dismiss the problem of fury as insoluble, that I venture a fresh point, in the hope it may offer a way out of the difficulty.

6 Ibid, p.2 7 Gender inequality, community attitudes towards women, financial pressures, alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness and social and economic exclusion. 14 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse

Not long ago, I fell over in the Yarra River, up Warburton way, and broke my hand. That event was a stroke of good fortune. Unable to drive for two months, I had to catch the bus to work. I had a bit of leisure. I could sit on the bus and look around. Since everybody gets on the 901, the trip along Yan Yean Road to Epping Plaza, is a sociological experience. The gum trees line the road and the kangaroos range away to Kinglake and beyond. Yan Yean Road was not always here. A short two hundred years ago, the Aboriginal people from hereabouts had the dreaming tracks. There were stories of the dreaming that were sacred to women. There were stories of the dreaming that were sacred to men. I was exposed to the latter (not, for obvious reasons, to the former) when I fell in among the Aboriginal people of the North a few years ago, working as a lawyer up there, for the Aboriginal Legal Services. I’d learned my craft as a barrister in Melbourne, after six years of which, I happened to accept an offer of work with the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Legal Service, in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the bush of the North, women do not trespass upon the dreaming places of the men and men do not trespass upon the dreaming places of the women. Dreaming stories, their own as women and their own as men, reveal to Aboriginal people not merely where to go, but also who they are and exactly what the heck they have to do in their relations with each other and the women learn in secret, the stuff with which they have to deal, and the men, in secret, learn the stuff they must also know. There are ceremonies also, that are shared by everyone, children too, and these hold sacred, all that must be shared. The dreaming lights the way, it seemed to me, in a world that is dark, and lets them find in the end, signs and tokens that will keep them safe. If we are skeptical about a sacred masculine, well, one time, I caught up with this woman doctor, at the hospital ball in Darwin. She told me she ran the

15 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse clinic at Maningrida. I knew that anyhow, because I’d noticed her on the plane when I went out there for bush court. The band was winding down and we got talking and told me she’d just come back from Melbourne from catching up with family. While she was down there, she drove out in the country and visited Hanging Rock and she felt bad while she was at Hanging Rock. ‘When I got back to Maningrida,’ she whispered to me, in our corner of the ballroom, ‘I told the old ladies that I was in this place and felt bad. “You should go away from that Hanging Rock when you feel that!” The old ladies scolded her. “You should know to get out. You are in a men’s dreaming place.”’ Who am I? What exactly the heck am I to do? And what of the men of Australia who bash up the women? What are they to do? In so far as it may help us, Aboriginal dreaming associated with Yan Yean Road in Watsonia North, can no longer do so. It is lost. By reason of the violence of our forebears. If police stats about family violence in our neighbourhood are anything to go by, the bitumen substitute, leading as it does to Epping Plaza and our Whittlesea Community Legal Service, offers help that is unsatisfactory. When I got back from the Territory, I ran the civil practice at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service in Fitzroy for three and a half years. Up in my office cubicle, I’d pick up the phone and no Aboriginal person on the other end spoke to me in their own language. Two hundred years with us and the sanction of our law, had wiped them out. Being a fan of maps, I wandered over one day, to check out this map on the wall of a meeting room at the Koorie Heritage Trust, during the lunch break of a meeting about victims of crime legislation, while enjoying my jam sandwiches. It turned out this map marked places of massacres of Aboriginal people in the State of Victoria. The ones white people know about anyhow. On this map,

16 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse each massacre of Aboriginal people was identified by a black dot. The map of Victoria was full of black dots. I have wondered since about the dreaming places that are lost by reason of the dots and I wonder why I never read a historical document written by an early settler, that went like this: ‘I went down the creek today with my rifle to shoot some Blackfellas so I could extend the boundary of my land but when I ran into some, we struck up a conversation about their dreaming. It is amazing that the Blackfellas use the word ‘dreaming’ because we Whitefellas dream and I wonder if there is a connection between the Aboriginal concept of dreamtime and the fact that we dream ourselves? Perhaps the connection is that the Blackfella dreaming and our own dreams are both royal roads to the unconscious. I wonder if Blackfellas have looked at dreams for so long that they have figured out the story of dreaming so that they can access its meaning collectively? Down the creek this arvo, that’s what they seem to say. That idea blew me away. So instead of shooting the Blackfellas, I thanked them for their insight and, resolving to be content with what land I had, went back to my hut and started to write down my dreams and quiz them, the better to get at their meaning and the better to understand myself.’ Margoungoun, a ceremony man with whom I worked at Katherine and in Darwin, told me once, that there’s a special place up North where the rivers meet the sea. Fresh water of the rivers flows off escarpment country and meets the salt water of the sea and there are animals who dwell in this place, who have adapted to live in both the fresh water and salt in this place where the two of them meet. Margoungoun reckoned that if Blackfellas and Whitefellas ever understand each other, it will be because the Blackfellas who come from inland from the fresh water country, and the Whitefella salt water immigrants who come from the sea, can adapt to each other’s worlds, while keeping the ability

17 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse to occupy their world of origin. In this way, loosing nothing of their respective cultures, they may inhabit this place of magic together, where the fresh water meets the salt water of the sea. Where in Melbourne, is this place of magic? To get to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service in Fitzroy, I’d get off the train at Clifton Hill and walk along the Merri Creek under the railway line through the yellow subway at Rushall Railway Station, climbing the steps up to the path where the jasmine blooms on the fence in the springtime. From there, I’d take a lazy track through the mist upon the parks and the bluestone laneways of Clifton Hill and walk in the door of the office at quarter to eight in the morning. There was a bathroom at the office and there’d be time to have a shower and I’d be sitting in my chair at 8:00 am, with a bowl of all-bran, a cup of coffee and an hour to myself before the work day begins. The phones would open at 9:00 am and I was expected to run files and be available at any time of the day, to any Aboriginal person who rang from anywhere in Victoria and advise them upon the civil law and take their case if need be. The stories were of strife and violence in the family and the hours of the day seemed few and full of trouble. My predecessor had ended up in a mental institution. I bought a blank-page artist’s book and took it in with me to work. Up in the Territory, I’d been exposed to the Aboriginal concept of the dreamtime and began to understand how, due to our lack of self-knowledge, Aboriginal people think we are insane. Paying attention though, to the countrymen, I’d thought about my own dreams and found them compelling as a road to better understand myself. So at eight o’clock each morning here in Melbourne, fresh from the walk along the creek and sitting up there alone in the cubicle office, I would type down the dream I had last night. Sitting at the computer, I’d investigate last night’s dream and immerse myself in the images from the

18 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse dream and the people and the weird objects and the feelings that showed up in there in the dream. Addressing any image from the dream as if it was a person with whom I could speak, I’d type down a question to pose to the image about what it meant and let my imagination supply the reply and I would type down that reply. Thus the images would respond with courtesy to me and I would type up the dialogue in the form of question and answer and print it up then and glue the transcript in my dreambook. And so amongst the pain and the strife and the violence of the practice at the legal service, with its roots in the actions of my forebears, there was yet this thing of beauty I could do. At home each night, I’d make a collage of the dream I had questioned and stick the collage in my dreambook as well. I was in a rush to discover what the common ground of our peoples might be, because to know that, would be to know the place where the river water meets the salt water of the sea. I had a dream about the yellow painted underpass which was the passage under the railway line at Rushall Station which I walk under in the morning on the way to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service. I dreamed that the trains were rushing up and down the railway track. The Whitefellas caught the train from Rushall Station and they were on board the train because the Whitefellas did not walk over the land but instead put steel rails over that land to travel from Rushall Station and the Whitefella train passengers moved over the land too fast on the train to understand the land and to think of the Aboriginal people who cared for it longer than the Whitefellas had been here with their trains in Victoria. I did not have to catch the train at Rushall Station. I could avoid the railway line by walking under the yellow painted underpass and climb the steps on the other side of it to the fence where the jasmine bloomed in the spring time and

19 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse take the time to pursue my dreams, before my day began. Maybe I should let the other wihtefellas ‘Rush-all’ on the train for a while. What have we done to the soul of humanity? Did men at the Foreign Office in London, the men around a table who drew up the boundaries of the colonies, mar and wound and imprison a wild feminine which might save us all, if only we could treasure it? Has our greed for property trespassed upon a sacred principle, of which we yet remain ignorant, our vision clouded by desire for other peoples’ land? In thirty-one years, no lawyer has posed such questions, in any court in which I have announced an appearance as counsel. The words on the pages of our law books, hostile to the spiritual and the psychological, offer unequal place to the feminine principle and thus deny a path to self-knowledge. The vacuum is inadequately filled by Cardinal Pell. Yet spirituality and law thrive intertwined in the Aboriginal culture of this country, and have done, for forty thousand years. Among its insights, might there lie an antidote to fury that we vent upon the feminine? In two hundred years, has any lawyer sat down and asked them? Has anybody at all? In Darwin, Fanny Bay Jail is a museum these days. Entry is a couple of bucks. Driving back to the office one day from court, I wasn’t in a hurry and dropped in to have a look. In the old days, a lot of Aboriginal people got locked up there. In Yolngu Country, old men still use the term ‘Fanny Bay’ for ‘jail’. Out of the car air-con, it was hot and humid, even in the corridor of the condemned cells, and I undid my tie. A display case caught my eye. It contained some pages, torn from an exercise book. In the 1950’s, according to the caption on the display case, one of the warders asked Aboriginal prisoners to do some drawings and he offered them his exercise book and some coloured pencils.

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I stood in front of the drawings for a while. They were animals. Animals drawn in ways no white person would ever draw. There were shell fish. A turtle. A barramundi. Kangaroos. Some alone, some in groups. Each a sister, a brother. Each one loved. From the bus, Yan Yean Road is beset by diggers, by graders and men with hard hats, to make way for duplication of the road. Single lanes can no longer cope with traffic. So there are works now, to double the size of Yan Yean Road. Warning signs are popping up along the area of the works. Yellow signs, with a black kangaroo on them. Crosses in red that the council blokes paint upon the kangaroos lying prone on the roadside, serve as obituaries. Putting down my paperback and gazing through the window of the bus, there is time to ponder the meaning of the signs. Yan Yean Road is home to the roos, by right of possession for a million years. Then we show up like a bunch of sugar plum fairies. We make a law giving right of way to vehicles that are swift and made of steel, thus abandoning the roos and their children, disoriented upon the bitumen, where they are inclined to misread the street signs. Say Senator Kim Carr had not confined the 2020 Senate Inquiry into Domestic Violence to a ‘scanty literature review’ Say his committee had opted to do its job. Say in the course of its deliberations, Senator Carr called a kangaroo. She hops into the witness box. The registrar closes the wooden gate, expression deadpan. ‘Place your right paw on the bible’ he enunciates, avoiding the gaze of her joey. ‘Do you solemnly swear, that the evidence you shall give to this inquiry, shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?’ At the bar table, counsel puts his first question: ‘What antidote can you offer, for the problem of fury in the City of Whittlesea, in the family violence

21 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse space?’ Sitting on the bus as we bounce along towards Epping Plaza, pondering what answer she might give, from Song of Myself, some words of Walt Whitman come to mind: I think I could turn and live a while, with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained I stand and look at them, sometimes, half the day long They do not sweat and whine about their condition They do not lie awake and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the Mania of owning things.

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