Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  We won our way through the regional rounds of an inter-school debating competition and in 1979 came second to a Sydney private school in an Apex state-wide debating competition at the Opera House.

  Travelling to Sydney for that was a big adventure. It was scarier than any courtroom I’ve ever been in. It was my first taste of the city and it opened my eyes to what lay outside my little home town. I remember looking around the Concert Hall, mesmerised by the size of the venue and the crowds walking around the forecourt outside.

  The other thing I was lucky enough to have to focus on in Cobar, was horses, and I would get up early to train before school to compete in horse shows. My parents didn’t really get the appeal of the debating, but they would beam with pride when I came home from horse shows with champion ribbons and when I made it through to compete in the Sydney Royal Easter Show.

  That was a big deal in itself for a kid from the bush, because the showground, which was then at Moore Park, was a small community where each year you would meet up with friends from other towns for the duration of the event. I used to sleep in a loft above my horse and one night I fell out landing on the straw below. The horse just looked at me as if to say what are you doing?

  As a kid I was always good with animals and earned a reputation as someone who could calm and educate ‘difficult’ horses that other people could do nothing with. To me it never seemed like rocket science because I worked out pretty quickly that they had a different body language to humans and were usually only difficult because of the way they had been treated.

  I moved away from Cobar after high school to pursue further study. I finished a BA and an MA at the University of New South Wales while working part time, then thought about a doctorate but didn’t get very far with it because I had had enough of studying. (I keep saying one day I’ll do it.) It wasn’t long before I got my first taste of a real newsroom and my life moved in a whole new direction.

  3

  Journey to the ABC

  MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WORKING in news was when I helped set up a service for community radio station 2RDJ at Burwood in Sydney’s inner west. There I met and worked closely with two journalist colleagues, Michael Pachi and Derek Peterson. We were all starting out in the media and we considered ourselves news junkies.

  Our jobs were to compile and present news bulletins each morning and we took it way to seriously — I’m sure we drove the volunteer music program presenters nuts with our obsession. They were indulging in more gentle pursuits such as country music, rock ‘n’ roll shows and classic car club programs, but they tolerated us.

  We’d be in the studios early in the morning before going off to our ‘real jobs’ and we’d sometimes go back again at night or on weekends to do phone interviews, write and cut up stories and put news bulletins together and present them.

  At the time my ‘real job’ was managing the Bondi Pavilion Theatre and I was also directing theatre productions and writing and reviewing for arts magazines. In 1991 I directed an outdoor production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Art School (formerly Darlinghurst Gaol) using the sandstone buildings as a backdrop. I never imagined that years later I’d be reporting on cases in the court buildings that are on the same grounds. The stage manager swore there was a ghost around because lights mysteriously flickered on and off and props mysteriously disappeared. When I sit in the Darlinghurst Courthouse now covering trials, I think of all the criminals who might have been hanged there when it was a jail in the 1800s and early 1900s and that there are probably many ghosts watching the proceedings.

  Not long after, Michael Pachi, Derek Peterson and I did a radio news course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School together and we all got jobs in separate commercial newsrooms out of Sydney, then worked our way back to the city again.

  It used to be an industry ‘given’ that you got your start at smaller out-of-town radio, television stations or newspapers, then worked your way up to a capital city market. But with so much news networked now, many of those out-of-town opportunities have vanished. We had all been out in the ‘real world’ for a couple of years before getting into newsrooms full-time; we weren’t straight out of university or a cadetship. There are many roads into a media career and if you want it badly enough, you just make it work.

  One of my first news-reading jobs was at Wave FM in Wollongong. I was working one Saturday in June 1998 when former Wollongong Mayor Frank Arkell was found murdered in his home. I was working on my own when the police radio scanner in the newsroom started buzzing with activity and a listener called in to ask why multiple squad cars had suddenly showed up in West Wollongong.

  Frank Arkell had been named in the Wood Royal Commission report into paedophile networks in New South Wales and was found dead with pins stuck in his eyes and cheeks and a power cord around his neck. He had been bashed around the head with a lamp. The man who murdered him, Mark Valera (who changed his name from Mark van Krevel), had just a fortnight earlier beheaded another man, David O’Hearn, whose body was found in his home at Albion Park.

  Mark Valera, who was just nineteen at the time, said that David O’Hearn had propositioned him and that he had murdered him and Frank Arkell because they both triggered flashbacks to the sexual abuse that he had suffered as a child.

  Before Mark Valera was identified as the killer, I remember pulling up outside the station one morning at 4 a.m. to start a solo shift and running from the car to the front door with the door keys ready in my hand, thinking there was a killer on the loose. Valera is now in jail for life for the murders.1

  I also worked at 2GO in Gosford and 2WS when it was in the Sydney suburb of Seven Hills.

  Although my aim was always to get back into a Sydney commercial radio newsroom full-time, an unexpected opportunity that came my way in the late 1990s ended up cementing my multi-media skills, which you now need to survive in the industry.

  Channel Seven presenter David Koch, one the founders of consumer finance in Australia, offered me a position with his company which was then called Australian Financial Press. Highly innovative for its time and doing what has now become the norm for most media organisations, the company took content, in this case business and finance news, and reported it across all platforms: radio, print, television and online. I was editing a national business magazine and doing daily live crosses on market and business news for various media outlets. It was great experience and it taught me to distil and present difficult complex information in a consumer-friendly way for broadcast.

  At the same time I was doing weekend newsreading at 2GB when the station was in Sussex Street in the city and was later asked to join the newsroom there full time. The 2GB newsroom as I knew it, was a switched-on workplace with only a small number of staff who did everything. We were proud of the tradition the newsroom had of being everywhere and getting things first, and there was fierce rivalry with the other main commercial station in Sydney at the time, 2UE.

  I read the news on all sorts of shifts at 2GB and some days would read and edit the breakfast news starting at 3 a.m. and then go out on stories afterwards.

  Journalists tend to have memories about some of the big stories from every newsroom they’ve worked in. After presenting the night bulletins at 2GB in September 2001, I was packing up to go home when news broke of the two planes hitting the World Trade Center’s north and south towers, another plane hitting the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. I got it to air straightaway. All through the night and into the next morning I sat in the news booth doing bulletins every half hour with live crosses to reporters. A colleague, Paul Richards, was updating my news feed screen from outside the booth and there was so much information coming in that the words were changing as I read them. As my other 2GB colleagues trickled into the newsroom throughout the night, some just froze as they stared at the carnage being shown on our newsroom televisions. Then news and program director Chris Smith came in and asked me five times about the attack. Ever
yone was trying to get their heads around it.

  I had been walking around the World Trade Center just a few months earlier on an overseas trip. When I got out of the 2GB newsroom the next afternoon, I went home to the Leichhardt terrace house where I was living at the time. A very senior mixed-breed female dog called George from down the road who used to visit each day was waiting when I got out of my car. When I opened my front door she followed me inside and sat next to me on the floor as I curled up on the couch to get some sleep. Animals seem to sense when something is up and all that day I saw the dog paying similar visits to other neighbours in the street who were leaning over their front fences talking and trying to come to terms with what had happened.

  In 2001 the bushfires that became known as the Black Christmas bushfires became a massive emergency, burning in areas that included the Blue Mountains, the Royal National Park and Lane Cove Park on the outskirts of Sydney for weeks. I was working in the 2GB newsroom the day the fire started in the Blue Mountains when the phone rang. It was broadcaster Ray Hadley who had just moved across to 2GB from rival station 2UE.

  ‘It’s Ray Hadley here,’ he said. ‘Who have we got going out to that mountains fire?’

  We were on skeleton staff because everyone was away for the usually quiet Christmas break and the reporter I had called to come in early to help me out was on his way back from holidays on the south coast so he was a good couple of hours away. It was a minute to bulletin time and without thinking I said to Ray: ‘I have to read the news. There’s no one to go right now unless you go yourself.’

  A program producer who had heard the conversation looked worried and after I finished reading the news and came out of the booth, he spoke to me.

  ‘Hadley will go off at you for saying something like that to him,’ he said. ‘You’re gone.’

  About an hour later the phone rang again.

  It was Ray Hadley.

  He had driven up to the bushfire, filed news reports and did brilliant live program crosses all afternoon. Ray stayed at the fire for hours and worked hard doing a great job as part of a small team.

  From 2GB I moved across to ABC NewsRadio, which had begun in 1994 under the name Parliamentary and News Network (PNN) by radio general manager Ian Wolfe and news editor Lissa McMillan. Launched with a small team of senior journalists, it was Australia’s first continuous news network. NewsRadio had a similar buzz to 2GB where we had been producing and presenting live bulletins every half hour. At NewsRadio it was rolling news, which meant there was barely time to move from your keyboard or presenting screen during an eight-hour shift. I was presenting and producing news bulletins, presenting a weekend program and even filled in, presenting programs such as a science show called Starstuff.

  That’s what is so addictive about doing news: you get insights into a huge variety of disciplines you might not normally be exposed to and you get to be around history in the making on an almost daily basis.

  I moved into the main ABC newsroom two years later to do some presenting and a twelve-month backfill for a national finance reporter who went on long-service leave.

  When that role came to an end in around 2008, I was in the Sydney newsroom wondering what to do next. But then an opportunity presented itself and I went to the courts.

  4

  Getting the job

  I HAD NEVER ASPIRED to be a court reporter. By 2008, I had already worked in the media for more than fifteen years, mostly in commercial newsrooms and across every medium: radio, print, online and television.

  One day in the ABC newsroom around February 2008, I came across a press release for an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry into Wollongong Council. I took it to the news executive producer at the time who said it didn’t look very interesting for a Sydney audience and if the Wollongong newsroom was interested, they could send their own reporter to Sydney cover it.

  ‘Probably more council workers nicking pens,’ the EP said.

  I had a sentimental association with Wollongong because I got my first radio newsreading job there at Wave FM years earlier and my mother spent a large part of her youth there. I visited Wollongong often. One of my uncles had worked on the wharves there and run a nightclub, and another was a premier league soccer coach. Apart from being a friendly beach-side community that I had visited for childhood holidays, I also knew Wollongong had an underbelly of crime.

  I persuaded the EP to let me go to ICAC, which at that time held its public inquiries on level twenty-one of 133 Castlereagh Street in the city. I was instructed to come back to the newsroom straightaway if the inquiry was boring.

  The inquiry into the leaking of council information and accepting of bribes for building projects turned out to be the story of the day and of the following few weeks with repercussions long after that.

  With high drama, low farce and gobsmacking corruption allegations, the ‘Sex for Development’ inquiry, as it became known, led to the sacking of the council due to systemic corruption.1

  Other councils have been sacked in New South Wales, but this particular inquiry had all the ingredients of a soap opera. On the strength of the first radio reports I filed, reporters and other ABC staff were dispatched to ICAC from Ultimo to help cover it.

  The inquiry revealed that glamorous, blonde council town planner Beth Morgan was sacked from her job for serious misconduct in assessing or approving four big developments in Wollongong worth more than $135 million between 2004– 2007. She was accused of leaking council information and giving preferential treatment to developers she was sleeping with and of accepting bribes from them. The inquiry heard she had intended to set up her own consulting business when she left the council.2

  There was even a bizarre subplot to the inquiry, with two convicted conmen trying to blackmail key witnesses by posing as corrupt ICAC investigators who could shut the inquiry down and destroy incriminating evidence. The conmen Ray Younan and Gerald Carroll, who first met in jail, were accused of trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from some of the witnesses. The inquiry heard allegations that Gerald Carroll sent a developer threatening text messages, and after a secretly recorded phone call was played of him demanding money from the man, Carroll told the inquiry that the conversation was simply talking about ‘a loan’.

  You could have heard a pin drop in the public gallery the day Beth Morgan found out that her wealthy developer lover Frank Vellar had in fact been in secret talks with conman Ray Younan. Ms Morgan said she had planned to pay Younan a bribe of $100,000 after he approached her claiming to be an ICAC officer who had information about her. Beth Morgan said she didn’t have that much money so she approached Frank Vellar to help her. She alleged that Frank Vellar told her he had ‘talked to’ Younan on her behalf and that the conman had agreed to accept the reduced fee of $50,000 on the condition that she would have sex with him, which she refused to do.

  Frank Vellar was accused of having colluded with Younan to get him to threaten Beth Morgan because Vellar feared she might roll over to ICAC investigators.

  Beth Morgan, who wore signature black sunglasses to the inquiry each day, learned in the witness box that Frank Vellar had betrayed her.

  She sobbed with her head in her hands saying, ‘I don’t know what to think any more.’3

  Frank Vellar, who was also upset in the witness box, denied trying to harm his lover Beth Morgan and said that he only wanted Ray Younan to ‘calm her down’. He alleged that he too was a victim of Ray Younan who had made threats to his family.

  A string of highly personal emails between Beth Morgan and Frank Vellar were presented to the inquiry and it was uncomfortable to sit through them.

  One read: ‘Hey Frankie, I must leave council for my own sanity . . . I’m in love with you.’

  Frank Vellar dumped Morgan just before the inquiry started and his wife was in the public gallery for some of his evidence.

  You couldn’t get more soap opera than all of that.

  During the inquiry we we
re played phone taps of key witnesses chuckling like schoolboys about the secret codenames, such as ‘Gatto’, that they used for each other to try to cover their tracks.

  One day at the ICAC inquiry, some former Wollongong councillors couldn’t recall meeting with Frank Vellar over political donations. The next day they did remember the meeting at the local Flame Tree café and the inquiry was also played a phone tap of Vellar telling his wife about the meeting.

  One official told the inquiry he accepted a gold watch from a developer not as a bribe, but to cheer him up because he was depressed and anxious over sexual harassment allegations made against him by a council employee. Other ‘gifts’ we heard about officials receiving, included designer handbags and there was a video of someone accepting a $500 case of whisky.

  On the very last day of the inquiry there were women in the front of the public gallery pulling faces at conman Gerald Carroll and they were told they would have to leave the room if they didn’t stop. When the inquiry ended and he got into the lift to go downstairs, a man ran up and belted him across the face. The media aren’t allowed to approach witnesses in the ICAC building so we crammed into the next lift to race downstairs to see what the drama was all about. The attacker said he was the husband of a woman conned out of money by Gerald Carroll at the Burwood RSL Club in Sydney’s inner west. But to get that information we had to chase him through the nearby David Jones store in the CBD and into Hyde Park.4

  My mother’s Wollongong friends would phone me at night with great excitement in their voices.

  ‘We saw Beth Morgan at the shops today.’

  ‘Frank Vellar lives down the road from here and we saw him getting out of his car.’

  Although ICAC made corrupt conduct findings against a number of people after the inquiry, only a few of them were charged. The court cases and subsequent appeals of the few who were charged would eventually keep me occupied for years after I took over the court round.