‘The kids deserve to have their stories told’

In the 1990s, one of Cathy McLennan’s most vulnerable clients was an 11-year-old indigenous girl, Olivia.

‘I know lots of Olivias’: Cathy McLennan. Picture: Anna Rogers

In the 1990s, when Innisfail magistrate Cathy McLennan was a stressed, junior lawyer working for Townsville’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal aid service, one of her youngest and most vulnerable clients was an 11-year-old indigenous girl, Olivia.

Olivia (a pseudonym) looked no more than five or six: she had been born with fetal alcohol spectrum syndrome and had one working lung. Her father was in jail for stabbing her mother, who was an alcoholic. The child was such a compulsive thief that she was at one point described in state parliament as a “one-person crime wave’’ – accused of 100 thefts in two months in Queensland’s Upper Ross region.

Olivia had links with Palm Island, a troubled North Queensland indigenous community, and Ms McLennan was horrified to discover that despite her tender age and tiny stature, Olivia ­exchanged sex for alcohol or drugs with adult men on the ­island. Yet at one point a magistrate insisted she should live there, to spare the mainland community from her repeated thefts.

Ms McLennan was able to get Olivia off the island, but only after the child had allegedly been pack-raped.

Asked whether Olivia’s story was rare, Ms McLennan told The Weekend Australian: “I know lots of Olivias.’’

Her story is one of several horrific cases involving mostly Aboriginal young offenders and victims that Ms McLennan writes about in her memoir Saltwater: An Epic Fight For Justice In The Tropics, which was released this week. The book is based on real-life cases that Ms McLennan was involved with, first as a legal aid lawyer and then as a barrister, in North Queensland in the 1990s.

Ms McLennan’s book is timely, given the pending royal commission sparked by disturbing images from the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth detention centre broadcast by the ABC’s Four Corners program.

She said detention was often a “haven’’ for neglected or abused youth offenders.

“I was very saddened to watch that program,’’ she said. “My experience as a barrister is that children who end up in detention have been hurt, abused and broken long before they end up in detention, and they often see youth detention as a safe haven.’’

Ms McLennan recalled a front-page newspaper story about how children in detention were denied Christmas dinner to teach them a lesson about poor behaviour. “I thought they (the journalists) just don’t understand. The kids in detention would never have had Santa come to them … or special lunches. In fact, being in detention for them is probably the best Christmas they’ve ever had, because they have a safe bed to sleep in. It might be sandwiches, but they have three meals to eat (a day) and they don’t have anyone getting drunk and bashing them up on Christmas Day. So probably that Christmas in detention was the best Christmas they ever had.’’

It is highly unusual for lawyers to write so candidly about cases. Ms McLennan records that “the problems in writing a book of this nature were vast’’ (she has changed the names of clients to protect legal privilege). Yet her motivation was ­simple: “The kids deserve to have their stories told … and to have them heard.

“I’ve been in the law for 20-something years (and) I just don’t see changes. I think it’s time people knew the real story of what is happening in these children’s lives.’’

She stressed that “the stories are all from my own experience’’ before she became a magistrate 18 months ago.

“I know this happened because I lived through it. I remember it.’’ Her book is threaded with authentic reports of the cases she depicts because “I thought, ‘People aren’t gonna believe this’. (But) this is what happened. This isn’t made up.”

One case she writes about involved children intentionally setting other sleeping children alight — one victim, aged 13, died, and another is scarred for life. In another case, Ms McLennan was held at knifepoint by a schizophrenic Aboriginal client who was not receiving the psychiatric help he needed. At the time, she was 22.

Saltwater has already garnered a Queensland literary award. The magistrate revealed she wrote the memoir’s second half in just three days, partly to meet a deadline, partly because she had already delayed finishing it because “I couldn’t emotionally cope with writing it. I knew it would be very, very traumatic to do.’’

Asked whether children still suffered the same kind of abuse and neglect as Olivia before becoming ensnared in the justice system, she said: “Yes. Children who are recidivist offenders in the criminal justice system — and particularly, I think, girls in the criminal justice system, based on my experience — have generally been sexually abused. With the boys, I think it can be severe neglect or physical abuse.’’

While the memoir’s main case deals with Ms McLennan’s ­attempts to defend a 13-year-old Aboriginal boy falsely accused of murder, another key character, Adam, was a former client of hers.

An 18-year-old would-be comedian of Aboriginal descent, Adam fell in with a bad crowd. After he gave police information about their burglaries, the offenders sought revenge.

In 1995 in Townsville, the child offenders broke into the bedroom shared by Adam and his 13-year-old nephew, doused the sleeping boys with lighter fluid and set them alight. The 13-year-old, a promising student, died in hospital; Adam was horribly scarred.

Why didn’t such a gruesome case come to national attention?

The magistrate and author replied: “In my experience, there are horrific things that happen that don’t seem to create any sort of nat­ional wave of concern at all. I really wanted the story told. I wanted it to mean something because it haunts me still.”

Asked about solutions to the cycle of youth crime and detention, Ms McLennan pointed to the importance of stable home lives.

“I think solutions are to be found in giving all Australian children, white and black, a safe home, basic food and medical care from an early age. Just the basic necessities of life for all children; that would reduce crime, because we know the children who are at risk of becoming recidivist offenders, often from the moment they’re born.

“They’re the baby brothers and baby sisters of kids currently in detention centres; they’re the babies born with drug addiction, to alcoholic or drug-addicted parents, or from homes with prolific domestic violence.

“Those babies are the ones most likely to grow up and end up in a detention centre. If we can give them safe homes, basic food and medical care, we can give them and ourselves, as a society, a better chance of a future.’’

Finally, on the issue of whether her written account of damaged children and the justice system has raised eyebrows in the legal profession, the magistrate said: “I think I’m probably about to.’’