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High ideals and dysfunction

The complex history of the ‘helping court’
by
October 2021, no. 436

Broken: Children, parents and family courts by Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby

La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 297 pp

High ideals and dysfunction

The complex history of the ‘helping court’
by
October 2021, no. 436

During the early 1980s, in a series of attacks on the Family Court in Sydney, a judge was shot dead outside his home, while bombs killed another judge’s wife and injured a third judge and his children as they slept. The man behind these and other attacks, Leonard Warwick, was involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife over the care of their young daughter, but it would be thirty-five years before the crimes were solved and he was convicted of three murders and the bombings. Media commentators, meanwhile, wondered what had driven the culprit to such violence. Elizabeth Evatt, the court’s then chief justice, described the media’s response: ‘They said, “The Court has been bombed, what’s wrong with the Court?”’

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