Every day in Australia our courts hear stories of murder, bribery, family feuds and business deals gone wrong.

ABC journalist Jamelle Wells has spent the past decade bearing witness to it all and has written about her experience in a new memoir, The Court Reporter.

But as she reveals, she was never alone sitting in the public galleries.

The following is an edited extract from her book.

Jamelle Wells has been a court reporter for more than a decade and has covered some of the country's biggest trials. ( ABC News )

Who are the court watchers?

Court watchers are a rare breed of mostly retirees or semi-retirees who, instead of kicking back at home, caravanning around Australia or becoming free babysitters for their grandchildren, come to court each day to see the justice system at work and be informed and entertained.

The regular court watchers are, in my mind, set apart from the occasional court drop-ins and excursion groups who come to cases from time to time.

It is not unusual for the more seasoned court watchers to sit through every single day of a long-running case.

It's not unusual for a court case to get a lot of public attention, as the Rebel Wilson defamation case shows. ( ABC News: Iskhandar Razak )

They know they have to turn their phones off, they don't talk when the court is in session, bar the occasional whisper to a companion beside them, and they hang off every word being said by the prosecutors, judges, defence lawyers and witnesses.

They often exchange knowing "I told you so" looks during a piece of evidence or huddle outside during the morning tea break to discuss what's just been heard in court.

The regular among them mostly know all the reporters in court from the various media outlets and they have their favourites and ones they aren't so fond of. They usually know some of the court officers and sheriffs by name too.

In all, there's a sense of community between most of the court watchers.

Finding soul mates at a murder trial

In my time, I came to regard Robin Gandevia and Denis Sullivan as the pre-eminent court watchers.

Robin and Denis met in the public gallery of Court 3 at the Darlinghurst Courthouse during the Gordon Wood murder trial in 2008.

They hit it off straight away and became the closest of friends and regulars together in court public galleries across Sydney.

A judge once remarked that Denis Sullivan had "kindness and mischief in his face". ( Supplied )

Robin is a walking encyclopaedia about murder trials, defamation cases, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and juries.

And as Denis would say, pausing and taking a breath for dramatic effect:

"Court is better than a movie or the theatre and it's free, so why would you want to be anywhere else?"

Over the years, they became characters in the scenes I saw played out each day.

As I got to know them, I learned little things about them, like how they planned their court day.

Over dinner at night they would look through lists of case names coming up on the Lawlink website together.

Denis would say to Robin, "Put that name in the dirt box", which was his way of saying "Google it" to find out if the case had the potential to be interesting to them.

Robin often spoke to me about the little things he noticed judges do.

One day he was appalled by a judge, who he said paid no attention to a victim impact statement at a sentencing hearing and just carried on with his paperwork.

He said he and Denis sat through so many of former supreme court Justice Roderick Howie's cases that when Justice Howie retired, he invited them to afternoon tea.

Denis was a true gentleman and a gentle soul who watched Supreme Court cases for almost 40 years and became known for his beautiful quality hats and scarves in winter. Yellow was his favourite colour.

He became gradually more frail until in March 2016, aged 87, he died.

In keeping with his wishes, Robin continues to go to court each day on his own.

Curiosity or obsession?

For some people who become court watchers, their obsession goes beyond curiosity — they have been involved in a legal matter themselves or have sat on a jury and become so fascinated with the court experience they want to keep observing it.

Court watcher Angela Thomas was once on a jury herself for a robbery trial.

After leaving her professional job in 2004 she is now always first in line to get into courtrooms and likes to sit in the front row of all the major criminal trials.

Her favourite cases are murder trials based on circumstantial evidence and she insists she can read jurors and work out their personalities. One day she told me:

"Some of them are really smart, some recalcitrant and some are just unhinged."

Some of the other regular court watchers I run into are Yvonne, a softly spoken woman who catches the bus from her independent-living village, and Luke who is nicknamed "Swanny" or "The Swan" because he is a huge Sydney Swans fan and is in court most days wearing red and white.

Regular court watcher Peter Rolfe runs the Homicide Survivors Support After Murder group which has about 600 members in Australia and overseas.

He started the group after his long-time partner Stephen Dempsey was killed with a bow and arrow by Richard William Leonard, who then dismembered his body and put it in a freezer at Narrabeen in 1994.

Peter now devotes his time to supporting families and loved ones of murder victims.

Sorry, this audio has expired The complexities of sentencing

There are also court watchers who I see a lot but know little about, such as the man in a suit with a French accent who can be found darting in and out of the courts at the Downing Centre Courts in Liverpool Street most days of the week to watch cases.

Then there was the man who sat with the media every day in 2008 while we waited for the jury to come back in a murder trial.

He always wore a 1970s style suit and a bright-coloured bow tie with little dots on it.

He could juggle three balls and do card tricks to entertain the reporters waiting patiently on the wooden benches.

That jury was out for eight days, which seemed like forever to those of us reporters sitting outside the court on jury watch.

He told me he used to be an entertainment director on a cruise ship and had sailed all around the world before he had retired and his wife had left him.

When the trial finished we never saw him again.

Most of the court watchers I have met over the years are intelligent and compassionate people and why they would want to sit through some of the disturbing evidence that I have to sit through as part of my job is something I often think about.

To me they are characters in some of the cases I cover.

There are the judges, the lawyers and prosecutors, the witnesses and the accused, the court staff… and in the public gallery with the media are the court watchers.