Any Ordinary Day

by Leigh Sales

  Societies have coroners for two important reasons. One is to ensure accurate death certificates and records. We need to know what kills people because, as I’ve mentioned, it informs government policy. The second reason is to assist the peace of mind of the living by improving the safety and quality of life. Events such as the sinking of a ferry or the collapse of a bridge require a reassurance to the public that similar tragedies will be avoided in future. If governments or other people have been negligent, a coroner will demand accountability for those directly affected and for the broader public. Allowing a coroner that power is a way for governments to signal to their citizens that they value individual lives.

  A coroner’s work is frequently fascinating, because it canvasses unusual and rare deaths around which there is a degree of mystery. There’s a high overlap with the types of random and cruel deaths that end up on the news.

  ‘Isn’t the job depressing?’ I ask Mary Jerram.

  ‘We always get asked here if it’s depressing,’ she says. ‘Actually it’s not depressing, it’s too interesting.’

  Mary makes me laugh by revealing that I’m asking the wrong question. Forget about depression, anxiety is the problem.

  ‘My husband is now seventy-three, so he coughs and I think, Oh shit, he has cancer,’ says Mary. ‘Or he’s in the garden for much longer than I expected and I think, I’d better have a look.’

  People going to the bathroom and never returning have also appeared often enough in cases before Mary for her to get a niggle when somebody disappears from the dining table for a little too long. And as for police reports on crime scenes, you’ll never leave your house in the same state again once you’ve read a few of those.

  ‘They always say things like “The house was quite tidy but there was an unwashed cup in the sink.” Every time I leave the house now, I think, What have I left unwashed today?’ She laughs.

  Mary’s first career was high school teaching but she figured out fairly quickly that it wasn’t for her, and so while her children were small she started studying law, staying up late and doing her coursework while they were in bed. After finishing her degree, she worked in industrial law and then in legal aid, and by the 1990s she was a full-time magistrate, ultimately rising to the role of New South Wales Deputy Chief Magistrate. In 2007, she was appointed State Coroner. The high-profile inquest into Jake Kovco’s death was the first major case she heard in that role and she remembers it well.

  ‘I think poor Mrs Kovco was so extreme when giving her evidence about her adoration of Jake that perhaps she became less credible,’ she recalls. ‘I think everyone felt for her grief, but she couldn’t accept or overcome the facts which the jury obviously accepted – that he was fooling around with his gun that evening.’

  ‘Did you feel that the inquest actually found out the truth of what happened?’ I ask.

  ‘I really did. There were eight weeks of evidence before a six-person jury and they were all dedicated and attentive the whole time. There was no other possible finding.’

  Another of the things that has stayed with me about the Kovco case is the gap between the court’s view of the outcome and the mother’s view. The court believed that justice had been served. Judy Kovco did not. In my experience, this disconnect between justice as lawyers see it and justice as the public sees it is not uncommon. Once you or somebody you love is a victim, the presumption of innocence seems a bit less straightforward. Sitting in a hearing, it can sometimes feel like everything is biased towards the accused. Somebody who appears guilty gets off due to a lack of evidence or a technicality. To non-lawyers, some legal rules can be maddening, such as the fact that a person’s prior convictions are inadmissible. The law says that just because somebody has committed violent acts in the past, for example, doesn’t mean they’re guilty of doing so now. But to the non-lawyer, common sense would dictate that if a person has a long track record of violent offences, they’re probably more likely to be guilty. If I were on a jury I would want that information about prior convictions, but I wouldn’t be allowed to have it.

  Sentencing is a particularly sore point, and a regular source of outrage on talkback radio or among politicians. Sometimes we can’t understand why the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. While many people do leave court feeling satisfied with the process, others can’t shake the feeling that they didn’t receive justice.

  ‘Why do you think there’s this disconnect?’ I ask Mary Jerram.

  ‘I think that when you’re talking about major things like murder and rape, there probably never is any justice. Of course, in a primitive society, it would be that you’d be allowed to go and thrust the culprit with a spear. Do we really want that sort of society?’ she asks. ‘I think some people do, or think they would. You hear often the next of kin after a trial where there’s been a murder, particularly, saying, “Our family’s wrecked, and he’s going to be out in twenty years and that’s not justice.” But what do they really mean? Do they think that person should have gone to the chair?’

  ‘I do think a lot of people feel that way,’ I say. ‘If it were my child, I would feel that way.’

  ‘But is it justice or vengeance?’ Mary asks. ‘I think it is the latter that is often voiced by distressed people.’

  ‘Isn’t it a problem that there’s this gap between what the public thinks of as justice and what lawyers think of as justice?’ I put to her.

  ‘Unfortunately, radio shock jocks and some newspapers don’t help in presenting facts truthfully, so there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the legal system. I think often people who think there hasn’t been justice are often not very aware of all the facts. There are many people who do believe that, generally, our system is as good as it can be.’

  When Mary Jerram was hearing the Kovco matter, Judy Kovco’s shattered demeanour was sadly familiar, as Mary herself had been blindsided by her own family tragedy just weeks before.

  ‘The first few months I was here, I had this brilliant niece who was just finishing her PhD in seismic engineering in Grenoble – she’d done it in French,’ Mary says.

  Her name was Jane Jerram and she was twenty-five.

  ‘She and her boyfriend and two other international students, early summer, decided to go to Mont Blanc because they’d all just finished. And they were hit by a terrible and unexpected storm and they all died. The worst part was that her boyfriend, who knew the most about mountaineering, died first and the others didn’t know how to work the emergency equipment. But they did have mobiles. Calls were recorded as they died one by one. I’ve never listened to those but I think my brother did.’

  Mary’s brother and sister-in-law, who were living in New Zealand, were so stricken with grief that they lost their senses for a time.

  ‘The interesting thing about general grief,’ Mary says, ‘is that my brother was a vet and his wife was a science teacher of many years and they both for a short while became quite irrational. They blamed the French police for not getting there fast enough. They blamed the boyfriend. But they weren’t really like that normally; they’re sensible, educated.’

  ‘Could they see they were being irrational?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t think so, but they did stop it once she’d been buried and there had been a memorial service, which took a month or two. I don’t know if they’ll ever get over it. My husband went with Pete, my brother, to take her ashes up onto the slopes behind Grenoble and he said Pete just wept the whole time.’

  ‘Did your professional experience give you any particular skills to cope with what occurred in your own family?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, it probably did. I do remember sitting there’ – she points to the large wooden desk that dominates the room – ‘and weeping badly the first day or two. It was more the other way around, it helped me to understand families better after that.’

  On the very day I’m here at the coroner’s court with Mary, staff at the morgue are dealing with an Iraqi family in the grip of terrible irrationality follo
wing the death of their eighteen-year-old daughter.

  ‘The family won’t agree to a post-mortem, but she’s got to have one because there’s no known cause of death, it was very sudden. But they truly think she’s going to rise again today, which is the seventh day,’ Mary tells me.

  This is a big problem, because the more time that elapses before an autopsy, the further the body decays, and the harder it is to discover the cause of death. The morgue staff are beside themselves because they can’t delay a moment longer, yet the family can’t be persuaded.

  (I email Mary Jerram a few days later to ask what happened and she replies that the family somehow came around to accepting they had to say goodbye and allow the autopsy. Their daughter’s death was found to be the result of a serious cardiac problem.)

  A coroner is meant to be impartial and dispassionate, and yet sometimes that’s very difficult. One of the cases that most affected Mary in her years as coroner was that of Raymond Cho, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who died of anaphylactic shock after eating a walnut biscuit in his school playground. The boy’s friend had baked the biscuit in cooking class. Raymond knew that he had a nut allergy and he also knew that the biscuit had walnuts in it, and yet he took a bite. Nobody could ever figure out why. One student gave evidence that Raymond thought it would probably be okay because the nuts weren’t peanuts. The student who shared the biscuit had to testify, as did the teachers who administered first aid. The family was asked at the end of the inquest if they would like to say anything.

  ‘And the older sister,’ Mary recalls, ‘who must have been about fifteen, a very articulate girl, stood up and read this beautiful thing about him and how lovely he was. But then she said, “We used to be a happy family. And now I hear my mother crying all night long through the wall and her hair is coming out.” And it was. I looked. Her mother had this great bald patch. Then the father almost threw himself to the floor and wept. And I thought, I’ve got to sit here and try and look professional. I looked around the court and almost every single person in the courtroom had tears rolling down their cheeks. In the end, I knew I had to wipe my eyes. But I don’t think it necessarily helps people for you to collapse.’

  Mary, too, hates the word ‘closure’. When you meet people like the Cho family, or Judy Kovco, you know there is never closure. The word is an insult. The best they can hope for is to learn to manage and adapt, and perhaps, over time, to once again wake up to a day on which the scales will tip more towards joy than pain.

  I’m spending five days alone in a flat at the beach, about an hour and a half south of Sydney. From my seat at the old wooden dining table, I can see the ocean through the window. The cloudless sky is cornflower blue and the sea glints as if a diamond merchant has spread his wares on it. A flock of surfers perches out past the breakers, waiting for the best waves on which to soar back in. On the sand, a couple of dogs chase each other back and forth, barking and frolicking in the water. A mother holds the hands of two children, their chubby bodies shielded from the sun by bucket hats and rashies. They stand at the edge of the water and when the foam surges forward and nibbles at their toes, the little one squeals and bounces in delight.

  I love to look at the ocean and listen to its roar but I never go in very far. The powerful push and pull makes me uneasy and the feeling of the sand sucking away beneath my feet unsettles me. I don’t like what I can’t see under the waves. In John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, Garp’s son, Walt, mishears the family discussing the undertow at the beach and comes to believe it’s called the Under Toad. He imagines a foul beast lurking under the waves, waiting to drag unsuspecting swimmers out. That’s how I feel too. I believe in the Under Toad.

  Perhaps my desire to stand back and observe from a distance rather than swim into the depths partly explains why I’m a journalist. Watching and reporting feels safer than participating. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works; you can find yourself out at sea whether you’re comfortable there or not. It is a collective delusion, as Louisa Hope pointed out, to imagine that the ground is firm under our feet or that the water around us will remain warm and calm. The weather can turn in an instant and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.

  These thoughts, and what I’ve heard from Stuart and the others, make me wonder again about how people cope after life suddenly changes. Could there be even more to the aftermath of a blindside than adaptation and re-evaluation? What if it actually changes you for the better in the long term? Can a survivor go beyond mere adjustment to tangible positive change? Or is that a lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to confront the thought that our suffering may be in vain?

  Two of the men out past the breakers have found the perfect wave and are riding it all the way into the shallows. A third glides sideways inside its barrel, the foam curling over his head as he races to stay ahead of it. Probably none of them gives a moment’s thought to the type of dark questions I’m pondering as I look on. Watching their graceful surfing causes me to think about another perfect day at the beach, just like this one, and a young man very much like them.

  No matter how miserable the weather or how cosy their bed, when the alarm went off at 5 am every Friday morning, there was nothing Hannah Richell could say to dissuade her husband Matt from going for his weekly pre-dawn surf at Freshwater, in Sydney’s northern suburbs.

  ‘It’s raining, it’s cold!’ Hannah would sometimes mumble. ‘What are you doing? Stay in bed!’

  But off Matt would go. When the couple moved to Australia from the UK in 2005, Matt was determined to learn to surf properly. He bought a sleek surfboard and took lessons for six months. Something in it appealed to his busy mind. Surfing compelled him to slow down, to observe the elements, to patiently wait for his moment. The sound of the waves and the rise and fall of the water was a meditation to him and it was the one place where Matt was free from the pressure of his job as publisher, and later CEO, at Hachette Australia. On the water, there were no demands from authors, no meetings, no need to think about how the digital age was revolutionising the book business. It was just Matt and the ocean. A Friday morning surf before work wasn’t just a hobby for him, it was a necessity.

  Matt and Hannah had met in their mid-twenties, when both applied for the same job in London. Matt had been working at Bloomsbury during the Harry Potter juggernaut and was exhausted from the wild ride. Then his mother died and it all became too much. He took a year off to recharge and went backpacking. When he returned, he applied for a job at Pan Macmillan, the firm where Hannah worked. Hannah had her eye on the same position, hoping for a promotion, but Matt beat her to it. She gave him the evil eye for a few weeks when he started, something they laughed about later.

  When Hannah was a girl, she had once asked her mother, ‘How do you know when you meet the right person?’ and her mother had replied with the infuriatingly cryptic ‘You just know.’ With Matt, Hannah learned that her mother was right: she did just know. They both knew. There were no doubts, no messy break-ups to initiate, no more partying that beckoned. It was as if the universe had orchestrated their best selves to meet at exactly the right time. Matt had a kindly, handsome face with twinkling eyes. Hannah was a writer, a stunning blonde who managed the rare feat of combining elegance with warmth and not haughtiness.

  In 2014, life was busy for Matt and Hannah. They had two young children, a boy and a girl, aged three and six. Hannah was writing a book and Matt was frantic at work, organising the company’s annual conference as well as training for a half-marathon to raise money for the Sydney Story Factory, a charity that helps disadvantaged children with literacy. He had squeezed in a quick trip to London and also had a slate of writers’ festivals to attend all over Australia.

  One Wednesday at the start of July that year, Matt and Hannah shared a morning coffee, kissed goodbye and went their separate ways, Hannah to a solitary day of writing and Matt to ponder a new company strategy he would soon present to the Hachette board. He had a plan to meet his friend
Adam for a quick lunchtime surf at Bronte in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

  Bronte Beach is a picturesque spot, nestled in an alcove at the bottom of a hill, and is popular with families. A wide grassy area dotted with wooden huts faces a small beach about 250 metres long. There’s a steep cliff at either end. Regardless of the time of year, there are always people sunbathing on the sand or grass, walking their dogs, or running in a state of partial undress to show off their buff, tanned bodies. On a clear day, the water is a striking azure blue, closer to aqua when you look down upon it from the cliff top.

  Surfers seem impervious to most moods of the weather and they can almost always be seen bobbing on the ocean at Bronte, or the next beach along, Tamarama. There’s a small rocky outcrop between the two beaches that local surfers refer to as The Twins, for its two large vertical rocks. It’s known to be a dangerous spot, with many rips and sharp rocky ledges under the water. If the swell on either side of The Twins is rough, it can push a surfer towards the cliffs where the waves unload. New waves pound the rocks as old ones draw back into the ocean, making it hard to get out of the malevolent churn.

  On this particular day, Matt and Adam met as planned at 1.30 pm on Bronte Beach. Not being cavalier men, they took time to study the conditions from the cliff top and to read the surf report. It looked okay and they decided to tackle a break at the northern end of Bronte, adjacent to The Twins. The surf report predicted waves of 2 to 4 feet, and as the friends paddled out, that’s exactly what they found. After they’d been surfing for no more than fifteen minutes, Adam tried to catch a wave and was washed close to The Twins. The chaotic and forceful eddies made it hard for him to escape from the rocky area, and once he was clear he warned Matt to be careful. Around the same time, another surfer near the two men, Leigh Jackson, noticed that the conditions had suddenly become a little rougher.