A Stolen Life

by Antonio Buti

  ‘You criticise him for not mentioning alcohol abuse.’

  ‘He uses the word “dependence” and dependence is a different diagnosis from abuse.’

  ‘You criticised him for not posing post-traumatic stress disorder in this report and if you look at page fourteen, “History of post-traumatic stress disorder”——’

  ‘Yes, but what he hasn’t done is actually go through the specific symptoms and articulate his argument. He has simply made assertions without a discussion of the symptoms. I mean, as you will note, I went through the primary files with some attempt at distilling what I saw as the relevant clinical information and I can’t see that Professor Goldney has done that and equally, he had access to my report where he could have at least extracted the history and specifically discussed the points that I’d raised. He may not have agreed with them but at least he could have discussed them.’

  Walsh’s cross-examination is now over. Burnside re-examines and the court stands Professor McFarlane down. It does not yet release him, because Burnside has reserved the option of recalling him after he has finished with his other experts.

  If nothing else, Justice Gray is now well aware of the level of ill will that exists between McFarlane and Goldney. For his part, Burnside is glad that he has saved what His Honour might see in cricketing terms as ‘the third umpire’, Dr Keith Le Page, for last.

  Dr Le Page, a psychiatrist, worked at the Child Guidance Clinic in Adelaide between 1960 and 1967. He is an important witness because, although he has never interviewed Bruce, he was there, on the ground, where child psychiatry met the reality of children suffering post-traumatic stress. He worked closely with Dr Moffatt—who will be an expert witness for the State—when they were establishing the clinic. He understands attachment theory and its four stages of development. He has specialist knowledge of the patterns of attachment during those stages and of what can happen when anything ruptures carer–child attachment. What is important in this trial is Dr Le Page’s special insight and professional qualification to give evidence of those times and the psychiatric views of the time.

  As has been common practice with the other expert witnesses for the plaintiff, Le Page will present his evidence in chief through a written report; this one is dated November 2005. Burnside and his team have reasoned that this approach has material advantages. First, it means that Justice Gray, when considering the importance of the expert testimony, will have a concise and accurate record of the doctor’s opinion. Second, it lessens the chance of oral slip-ups during examination in chief, which might offer opportunistic openings for an astute cross-examiner to exploit. In any event, Burnside knows that Walsh’s cross-examination will be fierce. So he will serve his witness’s interests better if he simply clears up any points in the written report that might trouble the court and leaves Le Page with a fresh, uncluttered mind to answer cross-examination challenges by speaking directly to his report.

  Walsh’s cross-examination will be as long as it will be intense. It will outlast the court’s sitting day and run over into the next. It begins with Walsh seeking to discredit or cast doubt on Le Page’s evidence by pointing to the doctor’s admission that he had little time to prepare for the report and that he based his opinion on insufficient documentation. Le Page doesn’t argue that point but simply bounces off Walsh’s loaded questions and by his answers demonstrates his expertise and knowledge.

  Nor does he refute the criticism that during a 1960 press interview he used the term ‘Stone Age’ to describe the standard of prevention and cure of mental illness in children in Australia during the 1950s. Yes, he concedes, he also described as ‘sadistic’ Martha Davies’ practice of sending Bruce to bed without dinner when he misbehaved. The first was hyperbole, which any reasonable journalist would have understood. The second was less hyperbolic but deliberately combative to express a child psychiatrist’s despair that, in the mid-twentieth century, anyone would still see this kind of punishment as anything other than heartless and cruel.

  Stephen Walsh also wants to plant in His Honour’s mind that schoolyard bullying might have caused Bruce’s emotional trauma. The point clearly interests Justice Gray, who asks, ‘Were there any problems coming to your attention in regard to racial discrimination in particular against Aboriginal children within an essentially white school?’

  Le Page acknowledges the problem. ‘We did have experiences when some Aborigines would be ridiculed and picked on. In those days, in the playground there weren’t teachers on what they call yard duty. They are on duty now and tend to supervise the interaction between students.’

  Walsh wants to move on to his main task as he sees it: to cast doubt on the acceptance of attachment theory and of the concept of maternal deprivation during the 1950s and 1960s. He begins his attack with the dissenting writings of Dr Rutter in his 1972 book, Maternal Deprivation Re-assessed, in which he suggests that Bowlby might have oversimplified the concept of maternal deprivation.

  Le Page swats the question away. This, he says, was never an argument about principle, only a quarrel about semantics. ‘He felt the word “maternal” was redundant and what should replace it was an empathetic process by a carer. I don’t really know what his fundamental objection to “maternal” was because the implication in all of Doctor Bowlby’s work was that it was a mother and infant. But Doctor Rutter then said that there could be other caregivers in addition to the mother who were nourishing the child and therefore the term “maternal” should be redundant.’

  He goes on with an observation that will more than satisfy Bruce’s legal team. ‘But what he did say was that the fundamental process was exactly the same, irrespective of whether it was maternal or other nourishing figures, and the essential thing was that if there was a rupture in that empathetic process, there could be consequences exactly the same as Doctor Bowlby had predicted or had stated. There were only semantic differences. They agreed on the fundamental processes involved in the caregiver and child. The empathetic process is the capacity of the parent figure to feel inside the developing child and the child in turn developing a reciprocal understanding of what the parent’s feelings et cetera are towards the child.’

  Walsh peppers the witness with questions on attachment theory and Bruce’s inability to form an attachment with anyone. But the doctor does not so much answer Walsh as deliver to the court a lecture on a topic in which he is well informed. ‘The evidence suggests that his attachment after he went to the Davies family was never properly established. He remained insecure; certain behaviours were regressed. He became overdependent on Mrs Davies; he wanted to sleep with her, well beyond the time that infants are prepared to separate and begin to live independent lives. The problem has continued throughout his life so his infantile dependence, which became manifest when he went with the Davies, based on the history that the foster mother has provided, that basic insecurity which occurred during the first three years of his life has never been resolved, nor has the separation anxiety and the depression that developed at that time.’

  Burnside is glad he did not smother his expert’s spontaneity with a surfeit of questions during examination in chief. He listens intently as Le Page continues. Justice Gray, too, is absorbed. He feels that Dr Le Page is resolving his concerns about the conflicting testimony of the feuding professors, McFarlane and Goldney.

  ‘When he was cut off by being told who he was and was going to be sent back to his own mother, he was cut off from the foundations that he had established with the Davies family and his identification with that family unit and everything that went with it. He was then placed with his own family a short time afterwards, couldn’t establish bonds with them and then from about eleven to eighteen he was in institutions. So that once that was cut off, there was very little, if any, contact with the foster family after that. He did not have any attachments to any significant person whatever until maybe in his married life.

  ‘Nevertheless, during the remainder of his formative years he was without
attachments, he didn’t belong anywhere, to any people; he couldn’t establish any bonds with his own biological family. Didn’t belong to a house. There was no place he could call “home”. No culture that he could really identify with strongly, although I guess certain cultural attributes remained the stronger attachments of all. But the weaker ones were the absence of any attachments to the people or a particular place to give him a sense of belonging. And that intensified the insecurities that he had manifested since shortly after his placement with the Davies family. It also intensified the protest because his needs were not being met in the Davies family. The protest then was directed towards institutions and other people and he got into trouble et cetera.’

  Walsh, although listening as attentively as anyone in the courtroom, is also wondering where his next question will come from. Or, more urgently, where it will go when Dr Le Page gets it. Being an astute and intelligent advocate, he reasons that he needs to convince the court that what caused Bruce’s problems in life was his biological mother’s failure to secure emotional attachment with Bruce when he was in her care.

  ‘Doctor Le Page, you told His Honour, I think, in one of your answers just now that you thought that Bruce had not been able to form an attachment with Mrs Davies.’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that. He formed an incomplete attachment.’

  ‘He formed an incomplete attachment? One of the reasons for that might be if he had formed an incomplete attachment with his natural mother——’

  ‘That’s one possibility. If I could make another comment on that very briefly, the fact that he was able to make an attachment to his foster mother means that the attachment processes were active prior to him being fostered. If he had not identified with anybody in the original family, those processes would have atrophied and he could not have established the type of bonds that he did establish with the Davies family. One can’t go beyond that except to say that the attachment processes had been activated, but we don’t know how good or how strong they were, but he was able to transfer the attachment processes over to Mrs Davies, but what he had to cope with in addition to this was probably the belief about being cut off from his natural family group.’

  Then, for Burnside, he makes an essential point. ‘He was taken from his mother when he was still in great need of her personal and psychological presence to nurture him. If he never bonded with his mother or some other parent figure, the attachment processes within Bruce would have atrophied and he would not have had the attachment foundations to bond with anyone else.

  ‘Subsequent events proved beyond doubt that bonding had occurred prior to fostering because he was able to transfer his attachment needs onto his foster mother with attachment processes which had already developed, but were traumatically interrupted by his hospitalisation and subsequent fostering.’

  Dr Le Page’s evidence is not painting a pretty picture of Bruce’s life. He reiterates that the Davies, Martha and Frank, were unable to provide security for Bruce who, by the age of nine, was suffering from an identity crisis, separation anxiety and depression. He also was exhibiting aggressive behaviour. Coupled with emotional isolation, alienation and anger by the time he was eleven years old, Bruce was always going to struggle with institutional life, to which he was increasingly subjected.

  ‘His physical and mental health has deteriorated during adult life. Throughout his life he has progressed from wanting to belong to a family unit which rejected him, caused him to become alienated, to ultimately wanting to terminate his life. It has left him with markedly diminished emotional and social resources to cope with life.’

  He sums up Bruce’s decline: ‘When one examines the whole of Bruce’s life, the traumas to which he has been exposed and the consequences, I believe he would have been better off had he been returned to his biological mother after he recovered from the bowel infection. The extent to which he became attached to the foster mother and other females is, in my opinion, proof that attachment processes had developed with his biological mother before they were severed. He has, in fact, been looking for an accepting and nourishing mother figure ever since and has often used illness to gain access to a matron or nursing staff.

  ‘Had he remained with his biological mother, I believe that his emotional foundations would have been more secure, but I am not able to express an opinion as to the quality of his life or general nurturing during subsequent years. An evaluation of the mental health and level of adjustment of his mother’s other children would provide some guide.’

  With that summing up, the task for Walsh decidedly has become more difficult.

  Burnside’s experts have almost finished. But before the final curtain of today’s performance, Burnside will call forensic psychiatrist Dr Andrew Czechowicz, who should have preceded Le Page but had been delayed. Dr Czechowicz will tell the court that, in his opinion, Bruce suffered from depressive symptoms connected with his early life development. He believes that, when he examined Bruce in the mid-1980s, he was suffering from unresolved grief because the Aborigines Department had removed him from his biological family. What is more, they had arbitrarily placed him with a foster family some distance away, and with a foster mother who Czechowicz understood was emotionally unstable. This, he asserted, ‘was more than likely harmful to his capacity to establish as a citizen of South Australia.’

  Dr Czechowicz finishes with a scathing indictment. ‘I guess the Department of Community Welfare and its agents may have been acting in what they believed to be the “best interest” of the child. However, even in 1967/8 there were established methods of at least helping people more intensively, especially with learning disability, than seem to have been used in this man’s case. It seemed that events took their toll and in general he was “punished” rather than being steered towards some logical “treatment plan”. The Department did not seem to seek any further medical opinions or psychological opinions, which would have helped at the time.’

  Burnside likes what he hears. If he and his team have proved causation, Dr Czechowicz has pointed to the bureaucratic source. Now there is just one more thing that Burnside needs to wrap up the plaintiff’s case: a coda that encapsulates all that has gone before.

  ‘Your Honour, for the plaintiff, I recall Professor McFarlane.’

  In McFarlane’s first appearance, Burnside felt that Walsh had not given him sufficient opportunity to rebut the assertion that Bruce had lied about the Pentridge stabbing to strengthen his claim for compensation. McFarlane had said under cross-examination, ‘The issue is that people who have been traumatised, their memory is, in fact, much more fallible than we might like to believe … It is because this part of the brain is vulnerable to the effects of stress. And, see, one possibility with Mr Trevorrow is that he falsely believed that he had witnessed this event but he did that on the basis of a retrospective reconstruction. He was having nightmares of seeing somebody being stabbed and obviously, according to his account, intense nightmares about that matter.’

  In re-examination, Burnside goes straight to that issue. ‘On your assessment of his intellectual capability, is he a person who would be able to maintain a complex and coherent set of lies?’

  Walsh objects.

  His Honour asks, ‘Why?’

  ‘On the basis that if my learned friend has had the answer and the witness has already said that he is going to have difficulty with complex questions, he has answered the question.’

  ‘What inference can I draw from that in regard to this topic?’

  ‘If my learned friend had wanted to go down that path he should have asked it in chief.’

  ‘I think in cross-examination you developed the whole area of the lies and significance of them and I think it is an area of ambiguity and I’d be assisted,’ His Honour replies.

  ‘I can’t say more.’ Walsh is displeased.

  His Honour snuffs out further argument about the objection. ‘I think this topic has been left up in the air and I’d be assisted by hearing the professor�
�s views.’

  And he does hear those views—at length.

  The essence of them is that Bruce is not well equipped to create a complex and sophisticated alibi. He has a ‘very confused narrative’ about his life. He could not give a coherent account of the various significant milestones in his life and he struggled to develop any continuity in his personal history. The professor sums up: ‘As I commented on the history I obtained from him, I was struck by its disconnectedness. There were various things that he had said to me which weren’t in keeping with the information from other sources. So it appeared that the sort of factual constraints by which he saw his life were really not substantiated by a variety of other documentation and that suggested that he just was not a man who is reflective and organised in his thinking.’

  Burnside feels confident that he has forestalled any defence attempt to exploit the matter of ‘the Pentridge affair’ and does not see a need to detain Professor McFarlane any longer.

  So the final curtain falls on today’s performance and on the recital of his team’s narrative of the case. Burnside as key author is content. All his lead characters have been true to their principles and have never fluffed their lines. He thinks his production team—Bruce’s complete legal team, that is—have contributed splendidly to presenting a cogent narrative of their case to Justice Gray. Unless, of course, Stephen Walsh for the State can convince him otherwise. They will soon know. It is now his turn to take centre stage.

  Chapter 17

  WALSH OPENS FOR THE STATE

  It is a quarter to ten. In fifteen minutes, one of Justice Gray’s Associates will tell him that the court is ready for him. And his day will begin.

  He knows it will be a trying day, a testing day, physically and mentally. From the moment he agreed to hear this case, he has tried to keep it moving. More than anything, documentation has been the speed bump in the road. Because the events in issue happened so long ago, many key witnesses are no longer available—either no longer living or too old to remember or care. In many instances, marks on paper are the only signs that these people passed through Bruce’s life and redirected its course in their passing.