The bush magistrate

Updated

In the heart of Australia, in some of the nation's most isolated Aboriginal communities, justice looks very different.

The first thing Sandra De Maio does when she enters the courtroom is check underneath the bench for wasps.

It's a habit the West Australian magistrate has developed during her visits to the Ngaanyatjarra Lands — an area almost twice the size of Tasmania and the nation's single largest determination of native title.

In Blackstone, a community of roughly 200 near the Northern Territory border, they can make for an unwelcome interruption during a sentencing hearing.

"We get lots of creepy crawlies," Ms De Maio grins. "It's hot now, so the wasps will be out and so will the snakes."

Ms De Maio, a former prosecutor from the state's south-west, is one of a handful of fly-in fly-out magistrates who work year-round across the country's sprawling interior.

Their purpose is to bring the machinery of the courts to the Aboriginal communities in some of the nation's most isolated areas.

Each day on a three-day "circuit", as it's known, Ms De Maio hears criminal matters ranging from assault to burglary and drug offences.

Although conducted in English, the travelling court is more flexible, less formal and is designed to foster greater access among Aboriginal people to WA's labyrinthine criminal justice system.

"Dogs will wander in, children will wander in, and I like that," Ms De Maio says.

"I mean, that's real life, isn't it?"

On each trip, Ms De Maio, who works the rest of the time in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, is joined on a small twin-engine Beechcraft B200 by a police prosecutor, defence lawyer, corrections officer and court staff.

When court is in session, she speaks calmly and methodically from the bench, smiling faintly as each new defendant takes their seat.

But outside of court, at lunchtimes, she chats easily to the court staff. How is your daughter? she asks someone. Do you think you'll take the new job?

Ms De Maio's interactions are unusual among magistrates. Many try to preserve the appearance of neutrality by keeping to themselves outside of court.

"As soon as we step out of that courtroom, our conversations just go off on all sorts of different tangents," says police prosecutor Phil Meatyard.

"We leave work at the bar table. We are all friends. The fact is that we've all got our roles to play."

At night, after court is done for the day, everyone on the plane returns to the dongas (portable accommodation normally reserved for mining workers) at the only roadhouse for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.

Early the next morning, they are awoken by the screeches from the dozens of peacocks that roam the roadhouse grounds.

Working long days and hearing cases that comb through upsetting detail can take a toll on the magistrate.

On some occasions it's been bad enough that she's needed to excuse herself from the courtroom.

Though today, the piercing screams of young girl who has locked herself in the bathroom — and the giggling group of her friends who have come to watch — are no distraction.

Nor is the chair that's launched violently across the room by a man she moments before sentenced to two years in prison, narrowly missing her head.

"It's understandable in the circumstances," says Ms De Maio, referring to the chair incident. "It was a mandatory term. There was nothing I could do."

To cope with trauma, she spends her spare evenings cooking and exercising where she can. She briefly tried origami, but soon gave up.

"[The gruesome details of cases over time] are now your memories. You might not have lived through the trauma, but you share it vicariously," she says.

For particularly harrowing days, the magistrate uses a simple mental technique she picked up during her time as a prosecutor.

It involves picturing the trauma in her head before manually pushing it into the distance of her field of imagination.

The picture is leeched colour and sound, and words fade until it reduces to a black dot.

"You need to know how to file it away, otherwise it will damage you," she says.

Most heartbreaking, though, are cases involving foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a lifelong condition caused in children by a mother's consumption of alcohol during pregnancy.

Its symptoms are not always readily apparent, but can include physical and mental impairments, as well as learning difficulties.

A formal diagnosis in a defendant, where available, can influence the sentence Ms De Maio chooses to mete out.

"One case was particularly poignant because at one point I realised that I'd lost this child," she says.

"That he was going down a path and I couldn't bring him back."

On the morning of the plane's arrival in Warburton — 10 hours west of Alice Springs — half a dozen young men are waiting patiently in the shade of the police station for their name to be called.

They haven't needed to travel far. The court is just five minutes' stroll from the centre of the community.

"They actually turn up for it and come to the court," says Debbie Watson, a local woman who has given two boys a lift to court.

"But when they're in [a bigger city] it's hard for them to go out there. They skip court. They're more comfortable in their own homelands."

In the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, the court runs on another schedule entirely. Each day of the circuit, hearings may not begin until midday and finish until sunset.

The courtroom floor is smudged by the red dirt that gives The Lands its characteristic deep ochre hue.

Mornings are spent pulling reams of paperwork from suitcases and testing IT systems while defence counsel — lawyers from the Aboriginal Legal Service or Legal Aid — is briefed by clients on the grass outside.

"Time doesn't really matter out here," court staff joke. "This is The Lands."

For many Aboriginal people in The Lands, access to speak face-to-face with a magistrate can in some cases mean the difference between jail time and a lesser sentence.

Where English is spoken as a second or third language and without proper legal representation, a guilty plea may be made by accident.

If needed, interpreters from the Aboriginal Interpreter Service fluent in Ngaanyatjarra and Pitjantjatjara are on hand to offer their help for free.

Interpreters are a reassuring presence in court. They sit directly beside defendants, leaning in periodically to translate in hushed tones.

Do you understand what's happening? an interpreter whispers in Ngaanyatjarra to a man, who nods. A few minutes later he appears to change his mind.

"They could be scared of what's happening to them and they could say yes to anything," says interpreter Grant Cooley.

The question of access to the state's justice system by Aboriginal people pushed to its margins is not about to be solved overnight, not least by a single magistrate.

Western Australia has the highest rate of Indigenous incarceration of any state or territory in the country.

"They're still doing the same thing over and over. Going to prison and coming back in," says Aboriginal interpreter Clayton Jackson, who has had his own brushes with the law.

"Next year they'll be still doing it. That's why they need help."

Ms De Maio is very aware that her presence in The Lands, in her words, represents what many Aboriginal people see as "white man's law".

"Sometimes people will go to jail. The biggest thing you can do is take away someone's freedom," she says. "I'm very conscious of that."

For her, there are inevitably cultural barriers she will never be able to surmount.

But for the Aboriginal communities she visits, there is a very real sense the travelling court is working. Locals say it has improved access to justice.

Even so, locals like Lance Peck, an Aboriginal elder in Blackstone, say there is some fine tuning to be done.

"We'd like a magistrate as a fully Aboriginal [person]," he says. "That way they know where we're coming from."

"That's the sort of thing we really, really need to look at."

The success of the travelling court depends on how it can mould itself to the demands of life in remote Australia.

"I like to think we're pretty robust," Ms De Maio says. "I don't think you could survive if you weren't."

Through the window of the courtroom, the magistrate watches as local children perform daring acrobatics.

When it's one of the boys' turn to appear before her on burglary charges, she breaks into a smile.

"I saw you doing your backflips," she says. "You should be really proud of that."

Topics: crime, courts-and-trials, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, wa

First posted