“We ought to stop talking of judicial stress and start calling it for what it is – anxiety, panic attack, insomnia, traumatic response, depression, PTSD, substance use disorder and the like," said David Heilpern. Credit:Alamy Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size On the afternoon of Tuesday March 14, former Victorian politician Joanne Duncan walked into a furniture shop in Geelong, an hour from Melbourne, and noticed some dining chairs which would be perfect for the beach house at nearby Ocean Grove that she and her magistrate husband Stephen Myall had just finished building. It had been a four-year project and Duncan was looking forward to Myall taking some of his accrued leave for a much-needed break there together. She reached for her phone to call him, then remembered that he would be at Sunshine Magistrates' Court in Melbourne's west, where he was presiding that day. She could tell him later. At 8.30pm their 21-year-old son, Stevo, called from the family property at Gisborne in the Macedon Ranges to say that his dad wasn't home yet. "That's okay," Duncan told him, "he's gone swimming, the pool shuts at 8.30. If he's gone to the supermarket he'll be home at 10 to nine." At 10.30pm she rang Myall's phone. There was no answer, so she left a message. As the night went on she tried a few more times, increasingly worried. By now it was too late to call his mother to see if, by chance, he'd stopped in there. The next day Stevo remembered that his dad had installed a Find My Phone app. They activated it and the phone started beeping. It – and presumably he – was two kilometres from home. "I found him! I found him!" said Stevo. Duncan could see on the map that the phone was located at a disused tip. "Right," she said, "we're going." Duncan, her sister and Stevo headed to the tip. On the way she called triple zero. She also texted her friend, Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville, who she knew from her time as the Labor state member for Macedon. (Duncan retired from politics in 2014.) "I didn't want us to get there first and find whatever we may have found," she says. They found Myall's body near his car, in which there was a short note. "He just told me he loved me," Duncan says. He was 59 years old. Joanne Duncan, widow of Stephen Myall, who was made a magistrate in 2005. “Over the last year, he’d get home and say, ‘I got smashed today,’” she says. Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen


Stephen Myall's death followed that last October of Jacinta Dwyer, who, after a career specialising in family violence matters, had been appointed to the Victorian Magistrates' Court in March that year. She was no longer a sitting magistrate when she died. Their deaths deeply shocked Victoria's legal community, those on the judicial bench in particular, prompting the fast-tracking of both an Australia-first study into the wellbeing of judicial officers, and changes in key elements of their working day. The stresses for those on the bench are myriad, ranging from massive – and growing – caseloads to disturbing subject matter in the lower courts, often involving children. As if that wasn't enough, there are regular and very public challenges from parts of the media aware that their "soft on crime" attacks are good clickbait. Appeals courts, meanwhile, can use some pretty tough language about judicial colleagues who've made errors. In 1995 Michael Kirby, the then president of the NSW Court of Appeal, delivered a paper noting that stress among judicial officers was regarded as an "unmentionable" topic. The mindset back then was that the judiciary was a privileged group who shouldn't complain; their task was an intellectual exercise with no place for feelings. Nearly two decades later, the former High Court judge addressed the subject again: "They are supposed to be paragons of virtue, industry, judgment, courtesy and efficiency," Kirby wrote in 2014. "So can we put judicial officers on such a high pedestal as to be completely out of account in a discussion about wellness?" Not any more. The days of judges and magistrates being regarded as immune to normal human emotions, somehow existing on a higher plane, unaffected by day after day of adjudicating on conflict and trauma, being exposed to verbal and photographic evidence of the most vile crimes imaginable, are ending. Judicial wellness programs have been introduced in recent years and, following the deaths of Dwyer and Myall, there's a growing sense of urgency about the need to ensure judges and magistrates, like the rest of us, have safe workplaces. Consider the caseload. According to the most recent figures, Victoria's 120 magistrates and registrars sat through more than 680,000 criminal hearings in the 2015-16 financial year. They can face a daily load of 50 cases, far exceeded in some courts, ranging from family violence and assault to driving offences. Rob Hulls, Victoria's attorney-general for 12 years and now director of the Centre for Innovative Justice at RMIT University, says already clogged courts have been further burdened by cases he believes should not be before them. He mentions, in particular, toll-road operators who send unpaid tolls to the justice department, many of which wind up in the Magistrates Court. "In what other jurisdiction do we have a private toll-road operator using our police force and publicly funded court system as a debt collection agency?" he asks. Hulls knows what he's talking about; his wife, Carolyn Burnside, is a magistrate. He appointed Myall to the Magistrates Court bench in 2005, and, on the Friday of the week of Myall's death, the two couples were to have dinner together.


He derides the notion that judicial officers live in an "ivory tower". "Judicial officers – in particular magistrates – are more in touch with what's happening in the real world than most of us," he says. "They see the family violence, the drug addiction, the mental health issues, the homelessness, the long-term unemployment, the sexual assault. They see that on a daily basis. That is the real world out there and most of us are sheltered from it. They take home with them the burdens of their daily work-life. They take home the anguish of the decisions they have to make … They take home the anguish of whether or not the decision they made in a case is going to make a positive difference to the life of that person and the community more generally." Now, finally, the judiciary is acknowledging this toll and speaking out. Last October, NSW local court magistrate David Heilpern gave a powerful address at the Federal Court in Sydney about life on the bench. Heilpern was delivering the Tristan Jepson Memorial Lecture, an annual address aimed at raising the profile of mental health issues in the legal profession. He spoke of waking in the night drenched in sweat, "screaming and panicking". It was 2005 and he'd been dealing with a string of horrific child pornography cases. "I started dreaming of these children and the torment perpetrated on them … I thought it would pass but it did not." He added: "I am convinced that it is time to lift the veil for the benefit of the judiciary, but also for the system of justice itself. We ought to stop talking of judicial stress, and start calling it for what it is – anxiety, panic attack, insomnia, traumatic response, depression, PTSD, substance-use disorder and the like." Carly Schrever is judicial wellbeing project adviser to the Judicial College of Victoria, which provides education programs for judges and magistrates. Her days are spent speaking with court leaders about matters affecting health within the courts. She is also increasingly called on to deliver wellbeing training to jurisdictions outside of Victoria. A lawyer and provisional clinical psychologist, Schrever is working on a research project involving a survey of 152 judicial officers from five jurisdictions and in-depth interviews with 60 of them, to try to understand the nature, prevalence and severity of work-related stress in the judiciary. The project stemmed from her research on a combined master's of psychology and PhD at Melbourne University, after the then Chief Judge of the County Court, Michael Rozenes, expressed concern at the lack of empirical research on judicial stress in Australia, and encouraged her to look into it. She will publish her report later this year. "A lot of research on lawyer stress both in Australia and America had revealed this consistent finding of alarmingly high rates of depression and mental illness within the legal profession," she says. "The logical question was, 'Well, no one's looked at the judiciary, to what extent might that extend to them?' With Jacinta Dwyer's death in October last year, I would say the issue was really catapulted to top priority within the Magistrates Court. This idea of judicial wellbeing is an idea whose time had come." The week after Dwyer died, Victoria's chief magistrate Peter Lauritsen convened a committee to advise him on judicial wellbeing, and asked the Judicial College to organise a daylong program on it. Held in March, Magistrates' Wellbeing: A Conversation about Change was designed to enable all 120 Victorian magistrates to engage in a facilitated conversation about the issues affecting their health. "There was a very strong level of engagement with the topic," says Schrever. “One judge said to me one day that it really saddened him that every time he saw an elderly man with a child, instead of thinking ‘loving grandfather’, he thought ‘paedophile’.” Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen


It's a Friday morning in July in the County Court of Victoria, and in her chambers Judge Susan Pullen is preparing to hear a sexual assault plea. This is nothing new – half the matters in the County Court are sex offences, and half of those involve child complainants. As sex offences are required to be dealt with quickly, they take priority. Pullen expects more of these cases following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which handed down its final report last December. "Sex-offence matters are really stressful not only for the complainants but for the judges who hear them," Pullen says. "The complainants are naturally very distressed, children are very distressed. It's an extremely delicate environment. It's very easy to take this stuff home, very difficult to just tune off at the end of the day." A sense of isolation contributes to the stress. "Who do you discuss it with?" she says. "It's very hard to go home and talk to my partner about these matters, and I question whether it's appropriate to, anyway. So I mainly rely upon a couple of judges here who I'll go and have a chat to if necessary … But I tend not to. It can be extremely lonely." Pullen is one of six judges and magistrates who agreed to talk to Good Weekend in the hope that the issue of judicial health becomes better understood. Fellow County Court Judge Felicity Hampel is another. After a career as a prominent barrister, president of Liberty Victoria and a commissioner of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, Hampel was appointed to the County Court bench in 2005. "It's been hidden, unspoken, unacknowledged and surrounded by taboo and shame for a long time," she says. "There's this sort of almost irreconcilable conflict between being an impartial decision-maker and being a human being who responds in a human way to what we're doing. "Because we've got to be tough [and] impartial, there's been a concern about 'Are you not intellectually rational enough to do the job, or are you too weak as a person if you're responding on a personal level to other people's trauma?' So [there's] the shame of saying, 'I'm struggling, I'm finding this hard … I'm finding it hard to reconcile the human part of me with my impassive, impartial demeanour.'" As with police, journalists and emergency service workers, a grim humour can be an effective coping mechanism. Hampel talks of "the black humour of judges saying, 'It's so nice to be doing a good old-fashioned armed robbery'.


"Which doesn't mean we're being insensitive to the plight of the people who were held up. It's because you're not dealing with having to listen to yet another child talk about sexual abuse that they suffered at the hands of an adult known to them," she says. "One judge said to me one day that it really saddened him that every time he saw an elderly man with a child, instead of thinking 'loving grandfather', he thought 'paedophile'. Judges will say things like that in asides over coffee, but we wouldn't say, 'Let's have a therapy session, how does it affect you?' It's often as an aside, rather than saying, 'I'm struggling, I want to come and talk to you about it.'" Hampel says most judges she knows who hear crime can't watch violent movies. "Violence as entertainment is just something that jars so much and physically reawakens the senses of what we're dealing with in a court context." Different judges deal with the pressure in different ways: a drink after work, going to the gym, that important transition between work and home. "I heard one magistrate talk about sitting in the car about to drive into his driveway and taking a few deep breaths before he got out, so that he went home having almost physically 'parked' the pressure." Most of the judicial officers I speak to mention the isolation of the job. Peter Kidd was 49 in 2015, when he was appointed Chief Judge of Victoria's County Court, the youngest appointee to that role. In his career as a barrister, he'd prosecuted international war crimes in Sarajevo and appeared in high-profile trials such as those involving the murder in 1997 of Bega schoolgirls Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins; and the prosecution of the murderers of police officers Gary Silk and Rodney Miller in 2002. Speaking over coffee in his Melbourne chambers, he says that as collegiate as judges and magistrates try to be, the job is a solitary one. "They come out onto that bench every day, alone. They are making the decision alone … It's their name which is going to be printed in the paper and appear on the judgment. It can be a very lonely profession … this can lead to isolation and we need to break that down." Kidd also mentions the toll that media coverage can take, while emphasising that he understands reporting is always limited by space and that the judiciary is open to criticism. In May, media reports took aim at County Court judge Barbara Cotterell after two women who bashed a paramedic had their jail sentences overturned, with Judge Cotterell saying it "would achieve little" by sending the two women to jail. "One cartoon suggested that Her Honour was responsible for the physical injury," Kidd told ABC Radio's Jon Faine. "Criticise the outcome, but some of the denigrating press is really unfortunate." Under pressure after this decision, the Victorian government announced it would introduce tough new laws upgrading the classification of any attack on emergency workers to the same level as murder or rape. Kidd points out that mitigating circumstances such as mental illness are often omitted in the reporting of sentences: "You see sometimes calls in the [letters] pages for the judge to be sacked. Now that judge has done nothing less and nothing more than apply the law diligently and conscientiously. Yet this article is portraying the judge as out of control, off on a frolic, and that's incredibly stressful."

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