In Chris Nyst’s game, the stakes are just about as high as they get. It’s not quite life or death, but as one of Queensland’s top criminal lawyers, his skills can mean the difference between liberty and a potential long stretch behind bars.

Nyst has been defending crooks, alleged and actual, for the better part of five decades, plying his trade on the always colourful, sometimes seedy Gold Coast.

He’s renowned as something of a celebrity solicitor, he and his firm having acted for the likes of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, tennis bad boy Bernard Tomic, serial conman Peter Foster, tobacco tycoon Travers ‘The Candyman’ Beynon and ‘Postcard Bandit’ Brenden Abbott, among others.

In between courtroom appearances, he’s forged a successful side hustle as an award-winning crime novelist and filmmaker whose first movie, Gettin’ Square – the 2003 cult classic starring Sam Worthington and David Wenham – is about to spawn a sequel, Spit.

In the film, Wenham reprises the role of hapless but loveable junkie character Johnny ‘Spit’ Spitieri, and shooting ended on the Gold Coast earlier this year.

“It’ll come out some time next year,” Nyst tells High Steaks over medium rare eye fillets and beers (zero alcohol for him) at Cavill’s Steakhouse at Runaway Bay.

Exactly when, he says, will depend on whether one of the major film festivals (think Cannes, Sundance, Berlin or South by Southwest in Texas) picks it up for a world premiere.

“It’s all up to the distributors,” he says, between mouthfuls of tender beef.

“It’ll depend on what, if any, of the festivals we’re in. Because usually if you’re in a festival, they like to leave it (a film’s release) til after, and then it’ll depend on what else is around. If the next bloody Batman is coming out the following week, then you try not to bring your little Australian comedy out at the same time.”

The last time we lunched together at Cav’s, we muse, it was at its original location on the Gold Coast Highway at Labrador, with its famous herd of life-size faux cows out the front. Owner Richard Cavill relocated to Runaway Bay after the Labrador site was sold in 2019 for a yet-to-eventuate high-rise, and greets us as we arrive.

Nyst is dressed trademark sharply in a slim-fitting dark suit that accentuates the 70-year-old’s still lean and fit-looking surfer’s body. It was a love of the surf that helped lure Blackall-born, Ipswich-raised Nyst to the Gold Coast in the early 1980s to hang out his solicitor’s shingle.

He studied law at the University of Queensland alongside none other than his father Eddie, a former builder who went on to become a Supreme Court and High Court barrister.

Eddie Nyst, who fought for the French Resistance in WWII when he was just 17 and served in the Dutch Army fighting the Japanese in Borneo, was something of a Renaissance man, with passions including painting, cinema and listening to orators in the City Domain.

Those orators included renowned criminal barrister Dan Casey, whom Eddie would take his sons Chris, Phillip and Malcolm (who both went on to become doctors) to see in action at the Brisbane Law Courts.

It helped instil in Chris a love of the law and after completing his articles in Brisbane – and taking the obligatory Kombi surf trip through Europe with now-wife Julie – he set up a firm on the Coast with old high school mate Steve Amundsen and another young gun lawyer, John Witheriff.

When national law firm Minter Ellison took over Witheriff Nyst in the late 1990s, there were rumblings from head office in Melbourne about Nyst’s criminal clientele – especially his pro bono work for Brenden Abbott at a time when Minter’s major clients included banks the Postcard Bandit had robbed.

So Nyst ended up striking out on his own, forming Nyst Legal in which his lawyer sons Brendan, 40, and Jonathan, 32, are now also directors.

Chris’ eldest daughter, Carly, 41, a human rights lawyer, is Australia’s Privacy Commissioner, while his youngest child, Annabelle, 35, is a New York-based digital marketer and content strategist.

While Nyst these days often defers to his sons and the firm’s other younger lawyers, he’s very much still on the tools as he nears 71, with six grandkids and counting.

His current clients include a man charged with raping an OnlyFans content creator, he says – a far cry from his early days representing Johnny Spit-style heroin addicts and other down-and-outs.

Nyst acted for both cops and crooks at the 1980s Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption and for the National Freedom Council in an investigation into the infamous 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub bombing in Brisbane in which 15 people died.

I mention a profile penned on Nyst in 2017, when he said he thought everyone was “inherently good”.

Does he really believe that? Because there sure as hell seems to be a lot of evil out there in the world.

“After nearly 50 years of doing the job, I still think that’s true,” he says.

“I think people are basically good. They get distracted, they get derailed, they get diverted, and sometimes they do some pretty horrible things. I don’t know if I’ve seen the worst of the worst, but I have been in contact with people that have been charged with doing some awful things – and that have done some awful things.

“But there’s always a backstory, and that’s what you’ve got to drill down into.”

On the topic of crime and punishment, I ask Nyst for his take on the state election campaign, where both Labor and the LNP are talking tough on youth justice.

“I mean, look, none of this is new; law and order is always a big factor in any election,” he says. “It’s an easy one for the politicians to get on to and make promises about. And that’s fair enough, that’s legitimate. It’s good that people try to do what they can to make the country safer.

“One of the problems is that when you have these kinds of political bursts of energy, often you end up with bad law. Because politicians, in an attempt to show how tough they can be with criminals, end up putting forward legislation – and sometimes passing legislation – that just oversteps the mark.”

He says some laws introduced by the former Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Campbell Newman regimes were classic examples of legislative “kneejerk and strongarm overreach”.

“I think politics is all about tough talk, but what you do in terms of implementation, you have to be sensitive about it. You have to be smart because very few things in life are completely black and white,” Nyst says.

“I mean, youth crime’s a classic example. All this talk about, ‘well, we should throw the kids into custody and throw away the key’. That has an attraction to many people who sort of see kids running riot in the streets and stealing cars and all the rest of it.

“But you’ve got to look at what is the solution that’s being offered up – what impacts does that have? For example, to have a whole kind of generation of young people that are going into custody early and are raised in custody. Almost inevitably, you are going to end up with some seriously damaged people who will come out of custody eventually.

“I’m not saying there’s an easy answer to that one way or the other. I’m just saying that people need to think it all through and look at it sensibly and seriously and come to conclusions on the basis of really rational and reasoned thought.”

Having given the pollies and punters some fodder to chew over, Nyst and I both give our steaks 10/10.