I was very pleased when, a little later in the day, another policeman arrived and ushered Josie in. She was happy to see me, but reticent in the court environment and police presence. We exchanged a few words, but because she was called almost immediately, we didn’t really have a chance to talk.
Once witnesses were called in to the courtroom, I had no idea what happened to them. I learned that there was another vestibule on the other side in which the defendant’s witnesses, family, character references and whoever else gathered, and that as long as I sat in my own vestibule and moved in and out of the court only under police escort, there’d be no chance of running into any of them. The police, I was told, were there to ensure that no interaction between potentially hostile groups occurred.
The examinations in the Supreme Court made those held in the Magistrate’s Courts feel like informal chats by comparison. I was nervous and edgy by the time we arrived at the court for the first hearing, and Mum had made me wear one of her only two good dresses, which was probably much too old-fashioned for a girl of my teenage years, so I didn’t feel comfortable either. Aunty Glad rented a stroller from somewhere so that I wouldn’t have to hold Russel all day, or lay him down on the wooden bench. Either Mum or Aunty Glad was to stay outside with the baby while I was giving my evidence. We were all very tense.
When finally I was called, the prosecutor made me go through my life history—where I’d gone to school, what sort of jobs I’d held—then asked me questions about the night of the assault. His questions were precisely phrased and I was only allowed to answer yes or no. I had thought that, at last, I would have an opportunity to tell my side of the story, so that the judge and jury would get a complete picture, but this wasn’t to be. After the prosecutor led me through the evidence which he needed, the defendant’s barrister was then allowed to ask me any questions he wanted. However, he, too, only asked me set questions to which my answers were to be yes or no.
‘Now, I put it to you that you put your arms around the defendant and kissed him before you even got into the car. Isn’t that so?’
‘No.’
And I put it to you that you whispered to him that you wanted to go off somewhere with him. Isn’t that right?’
‘No.’
I could see what he was trying to imply, and the romance he was inferring didn’t make any sense to me, but I was unable to say so in my answers.
I was relieved that, with the guilty verdict which was brought in, the accumulation of the defendant’s evidence didn’t add up for the jury either, even though I’d not had the chance to tell them so myself. They saw X-rays of the shattered bones in my face, and heard from others their descriptions of how I looked, where they had seen me and what I had said to them. From all these things they’d been able to deduce that this was no lover’s tryst which had got out of hand.
Once the first guilty verdict was in, Mum was obviously relieved and felt that her actions in notifying the police had been vindicated. I didn’t experience anything like the same relief, as my pressures were coming from different directions from hers. Nothing would be ‘normal’ for me ever again. Apart from this, I also knew I had three more gruelling interrogations to get through.
By the time the second case came up, Mum and Aunty Glad had already heard the evidence from the witnesses—which remained the same and was formally repeated at each trial—and they became more relaxed. Aunty Glad even left the court to go shopping, and Mum prowled around the place, going out occasionally to stand in the sunshine and fresh air. To my eyes, the building was enormous, with pillars and marble, some sort of slate or ceramic tiles on the floor, and large polished wooden panels, doors and staircases. I remained confined within its grandeur.
There seemed to be so many people involved in the cases that I lost track of their names almost as soon as they were introduced to me. They became just so many grey suits or brown suits or dark blue suits, with little to distinguish them. The second of the ‘lesser role’ defendants was also found guilty, with his barrister also putting very few real questions directly to me. They spent a lot of time with their suppositions with which they hoped to impress the jury, ‘I put it to you that on the night in question you . . .’ type of questions, and kept me sitting in the witness box for hours. Apart from the frustration I felt about the process denying me an opportunity to give my version of events, my fears were generally not increased through the activities in the court.
When there were two cases left to go, the detective told me to expect the worst. Both these ‘main players’ were looking at very long sentences, and their barristers would become low and dirty in their efforts to get their clients off the hook. But he also said that all I had to do was tell the truth, and that the truth hadn’t let me, or him, down so far, had it?
These two cases bothered me. The faces of the men bothered me. I hated the fact that the tall blond man had tried to look at my baby, confirming for me that he realised his guilt. Nevertheless, it was all the same to him because he was still happy to plead ‘not guilty’, and attempt to further destroy my life by having his barrister try to hack away at my respectability and credibility.
On the day the tall blond man’s trial began, Mum came into the vestibule from one of her jaunts out into the hallway with her eyes brimming with tears. The detective had given me some background as to what had already transpired in relation to this defendant. His girlfriend, to whom he’d been engaged, had called off the engagement when he’d been charged with rape and completely broken off her relationship with him. Her family had cut him off. He had never been in trouble before and his family were devastated. Then, in a bizarre stroke of fortune, he’d won a lottery, the Golden Casket, and with the money had hired a man reputed to be the best and toughest barrister in the business.
When Mum came in, I thought someone must have said or done something really untoward to upset her. But I was perplexed when she kept looking around and edging me towards the back of the vestibule so that no one would hear her when she spoke to me.
She’d been approached, she said, by the parents of the defendant, who had laid in wait around the hallways after our arrival, to see if either of us re-appeared. She said they had wept, that they were afraid this child of mine could be their grandchild, and that they were distraught that they would never have the opportunity to know him. They had made an offer to Mum to give me money to help bring him up, which she had refused on my behalf, and they were desperate to catch even a glimpse of him.
By the time she had finished telling me this tale, she too was weeping openly and patting her face with her handkerchief to stifle her sobs. Russel was sleeping by my side in the stroller, and Mum reached into it and lifted him out. I knew what she was about to do, and I knew it was wrong, but she seemed so overwrought and distressed that it was beyond me to stop her. She heaved him up onto her shoulder and stood up. Her expression of grief became mixed with pride, and she walked out of the vestibule to show him off and also to ease the grief of the possible other grandparents, who would never have what she had—the baby in her arms.
When she came back with him, she told me, ‘I couldn’t help it. Those poor, poor people, my heart goes out to them. They’re decent people. They did everything they could for their son, gave him a good education so he’d have a good job, and look how he’s repaid them!’
‘Did you let them touch him? Put their hands on him?’ I wanted to know if he’d been somehow sullied, had become contaminated by some source of evil.
No, they just looked at him and cried,’ she replied.
Perhaps she was thinking of her own son, my brother, who had taken off when I was one year old and had refused to contact her for all those years. Who knows?
Their son’s barrister, of whom I’d become quite fearful because of the detective’s warning, turned out to be only a little different from the others. He, too, implied that I had thrown myself at his client, even asked me if I thought his client was good-looking, and he tried to twist th
e words I’d answered to the prosecutor’s questions to his client’s advantage.
‘I understand that you said earlier that you asked my client to hold hands with you, isn’t that right?’
‘No. He said, “Give me your hands.’”
‘Objection, Your Honour.’
The judge cut in, ‘Yes, just answer the question, yes or no. You are not to elaborate on your answers unless directed to do so.’
The detective had previously told me that, with all the lottery money this defendant had to spend, the defence had most likely hired someone in Townsville to poke around and explore my background, find any old boyfriends, and would use anything to try to discredit me. The defence would try to sully my reputation in any way they could. There was pathetically little to find, but they weren’t to know that when they set out. I was afraid that, in the absence of real dirt, they might try to invent something, and I didn’t know how I could deal with that.
‘Tell me something about your previous boyfriends,’ the barrister asked me, implying that his client obviously fell into the category of a boyfriend of mine.
‘About who?’ I replied.
‘Oh, there’s been so many then? Well, just tell me about any one of them that comes into your mind.’
‘I don’t have a boyfriend. There is no boyfriend. There’s nothing to tell.’
‘You were a nurse, and you never had a boyfriend? That’s a bit far-fetched for the court to believe.’
‘Am I allowed to answer that, Your Honour?’
‘Yes, go ahead. There was a question in there.’
‘I was a nursing aide, in Charters Towers. There’s seven girls to every boy in that town. I didn’t stand a chance of having a boyfriend there.’
A twitter of laughter ran through the jury, but I didn’t feel they were laughing at me.
There were other questions, more personal in nature, about whether I thought there’d been enough blood around at the scene to verify whether I had been a virgin, and if not, why not? When I said I didn’t know, that I’d been unconscious and it had been dark in the shed, he nevertheless persisted with this line of questioning. Surely I would know whether I’d been ‘ruptured’, he asked me.
‘It’s not always possible to know about these things,’ I replied. It was really embarrassing to have to have this discussion in a courtroom overwhelmingly full of men, policemen, court attendants, the judge, barristers and solicitors, and an almost entirely male jury. The few women I could see in the seats at the back and in the balcony must have been friends or relatives of the defendant, as they weren’t known to me. So, I could draw very little comfort from looking at them.
‘Why isn’t it always possible to know?’
‘With people who wear tampons, it’s not always possible to know.’
‘And you—you wear tampons?’ He raised his voice as though wearing tampons was tantamount to harlotry.
‘Yes.’
‘And how old were you when you began wearing tampons?’
About fourteen. I had to wear them. I was a swimmer in Townsville and we had to train every day.’
In the end, his efforts to embarrass me did neither him nor his client’s case any good, and actually ended up embarrassing him. He had tried to make me admit that I had witnessed the police making an arrest without giving a caution and that, later, police officers had coached me in my evidence. Unfortunately for him, I was able to recite the police caution word for word.
‘You have that down very pat,’ he said. ‘Did the police tell you to say that?’
‘No. I’ve heard it before.’
‘Oh, you’ve heard it before? How many times have you been arrested, that you’ve heard it so often?’
I’ve never been arrested. I heard it on Aunty Glad’s television.’
‘You did? And just what program did you hear it on?’
‘I heard it on “Perry Mason”.’
The irony of the situation was not lost on the jury, some of whom burst out laughing. I glanced at the judge and he, too, was having difficulty keeping a smile off his face.
The grilling, though, went on for ages. The clothes I’d been wearing on the night in question were beyond reproach. The barrister, however, posed questions which implied that perhaps these weren’t the type of clothes I normally wore; that I must have had some fairly seductive items in my wardrobe. My morals, and whether or not I went to church regularly, whether or not I drank alcohol, even the type of films I went to see, all became the focus of his questioning. The jury sat forward, attentively throughout, although I was afraid to look at them. The detective had told me that I was not to smile back if anyone smiled at me, in case it seemed as if I was frivolous or even over-friendly. So, it was easier for me not to look at them.
When I was at last excused from the witness box, I went back to the vestibule, and told Mum and Aunty Glad that I didn’t think the barrister was as great as the police had told me he was, and that I’d be surprised if he managed to win a not-guilty verdict.
Although the jury was out for longer than before, they came in with the same verdict as they had for the previous defendants: Guilty.
Fortunately for me, the man who had defended himself in the Magistrate’s Court allowed a public defender to appear for him at his Supreme Court hearing. This meant that I only had to look at him when the court ordered me to point directly at the person I was alleging was my assailant.
His friends in the upstairs gallery hissed and made noises during my evidence, either as a means of threatening me, or to distract the proceedings. The judge cautioned them a few times, but I didn’t look up towards them even then.
The line of questioning taken during this hearing didn’t include anything about this man’s release on remand, as the jury was not allowed to know about his prior record. Nor of how the police had had to guard my life against him during that time.
During each case, when the hearings had been completed and the jury retired to make their deliberations, everyone wandered off in different directions to wait. We had to tell the police or court officers where we were going if we wanted to be notified when the jury was returning. These were difficult and extremely stressful times, during which I was in a state of limbo, wondering whether I had been believed. It was made even more stressful because I had no idea of what other people may have said in the court. Although the process of excluding the victim from the hearing may be to avoid evidence contamination in case the person is called back, and be part of an effort to enable a fair trial for the defendant, it adds enormously to the pressures experienced by the person who has already been devastated by having been attacked.
I was also not allowed into the court even when juries returned with their verdicts, and news of the outcomes were relayed to me only in the sparsest manner. Neither Mum, Aunty Glad nor any of the police, who were permitted to remain in the court throughout, ever discussed with me what had been said by other witnesses, solicitors or barristers, or even the judge. I felt that I had been almost completely left out of a process which was supposed to be of assistance to me.
However, when the fourth of the hearings was over and the jury returned, I heard an explosion of commotion from inside the court. A woman’s voice, which police later said came from the defendant’s girlfriend, who was up in the balcony, screamed loud and long, although I couldn’t hear her words. Closer to me, I heard the sounds of scuffling and bumping on wood, which police also later told me had been caused by the defendant who tried to fight off his police escort and escape. The defendant called out, ‘What the hell! She’s an Abo! She’s just a fucking boong!’ He continued to scream these words over and over, as though to explain his outrage at the verdict to the judge and jury, while he was being dragged, kicking and struggling, down into the holding cells under the courtroom.
When I’d heard the first muffled sounds of the commotion I’d become afraid and snatched Russel out of the stroller, ready, if necessary, to run. Usually the door to the courtroom was ke
pt firmly closed and no sound escaped into the vestibules or foyer, so the door must have been being held ajar for me to have heard anything.
When Aunty Glad and the police filed back out of court, none of them volunteered any information about what had happened inside, and it wasn’t until I asked about the screaming that I was given even a brief explanation. No one wanted to repeat the words they’d heard, but their silence compounded for me the importance of what had been yelled. The words burned into my brain and, in my continuing depression, became a mantra of evil in my head. ‘Abo. Abo. lust a fucking boong!’
Epilogue
The court hearings had taken a year. The criminals received sentences of five, seven, ten and fourteen years. I had not a twinge of sympathy about their removal from society for these periods. The main assailant received the longest sentence, half of which was to be served concurrent with his seven-year sentence for shooting at a police officer. The menace which he’d projected at me throughout—not only in person but in my nightmares—was such that I felt he would surely come after me and kill me on his release, and that I had only the fourteen years of his sentence left to live. Fortunately, I’d never heard of remissions for good behaviour or my panic would have increased. If any of these cowards appealed against their sentences I was not informed of it.
During that year I was able to earn very little, was not entitled to government support, and my efforts to apply either for unemployment benefits or jobs were hampered by the fact that I often had to travel to Brisbane to attend the court.
On my eighteenth birthday, Mum had encouraged me to take stock of my life, and I did. I had no job nor job prospects, a baby three months old, no husband or confidante, nowhere to live except in a remote house with my mother and under her domination, kindly though her intentions obviously were, no close friends, no access to a phone, no vehicle. My stocktake plunged me into a different level of depression. Until then my nightmares had mainly been centred on the past, exacerbated from time to time by things happening around me. None of these things had ever been talked about or resolved. Now I faced a bleak future and saw no break in the horror of it, no relief, and no hope.
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