Goodwill hunting
Adelaide Advertiser, Page: 6. Saturday, 27 June, 2009
Frances Nelson loves nothing more than to ride with the hounds in the Adelaide Hills. But her real hobby horse is helping those who end up on the wrong side of the law.
The mist is rising from the meadows on a damp autumn morning. Caged hounds leap against the mesh, baying to get out. Horses wait patiently as they are saddled, breathing steam into the crisp air. A woman appears, dressed in a red frockcoat, peaked velvet helmet, boots and breeches. She mounts one of the horses, settles comfortably into the saddle, sounds her hunting horn and gives the traditional cry, “Away!” The hounds explode from their cages and head out over the countryside, with the riders not far behind.
It could be a scene from rural England but this is the rolling Adelaide Hills. The woman is Frances Nelson QC and she is master of the Rombilla Hunt, a private group which hunts by invitation on her extensive property at Woodside. She is also a pioneering lawyer, head of South Australia’s Parole Board, and a professional irritant to the State Government.
Today, Nelson, Scottish-born but raised in Malaysia, is riding her favourite hunter, a grey named Iceberg. Horses and dogs both run for pleasure and there can be no doubting their combined joy at the prospect of a 20km cross-country dash over fences and ditches, hills and fields. It is early in the season and today’s run is more of a fitness exercise than a full-blown hunt. The hard summer ground has been softened by the autumn rains and the animals can sprint over the paddocks without risk of injury. “I don’t run my horses or hounds until the ground has started to soften,” Nelson says. “I won’t ruin an animal running them on hard ground.”
Fox hunting is banned in South Australia, so the hounds chase a scent laid by a horse with a piece of lamb’s wool soaked in aniseed tied to its hoof. For the next couple of hours, the horses follow the hounds through the countryside in a disciplined hunt formation. They are visible sometimes from the nearby road and, even in this horse-friendly part of the Adelaide Hills, they make an odd sight.
It is all something of an anachronism, a throwback to a time when hunting to hounds was an aristocratic sport indulged in by the rich. At Nelson’s hunt, port is served on horseback from a silver tray, but the event is more about skill and enjoyment than a display of privilege. Nelson, who prides herself on the lack of social barriers in the group, rides today alongside a plastic surgeon, an SA Jockey Club barrier attendant, a former mounted policeman and her farm manager.
Rombilla, 81 ha of land at Woodside, is her private haven. It is an indulgence on a scale a barrister can afford, and her enjoyment is obvious although you suspect it would be even greater if they were hunting a fox. “The ban on fox hunting is misguided,” she says later. “They are now in large proportions, even in the city. There was one in Government House when [Dame] Roma [Mitchell] was Governor. They wreak havoc with lambs and poultry, and farmers are now forced to poison, which is a very slow and painful and nasty death, instead.” The problem, she thinks, is that society has lost touch with the natural world. “The trouble with the increasing urbanisation and the emphasis on electronic amusement is that the closest a lot of people get to an animal is buying a litre of milk. They have no understanding of the cycle of nature.”
This may not be politically correct but Nelson has never been shy of saying what she thinks. She is a professional thorn in the Rann government’s side, the woman they love to hate. She is the voice of authority at the top of the South Australian Parole Board who speaks with more than two decades of experience. Since she was appointed by the Bannon Government 26 years ago, parole practices of various persuasions have come and gone. A decade ago prisoners were automatically released after serving a proportion of their sentence. Then came “truth in sentencing”, where some prisoners got out automatically while others had to convince the Parole Board they were fit to be let go. Today, the Rann Government has given itself final say on the release of prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment.
“I have been through a variety of governments and had more ministers than I can count on my digits,” Nelson says in a slow drawl that seems to hint at comic timing. She has been a regular critic of some aspects of this Government’s prison policies and has not been afraid to speak her mind, particularly on its intervention in some parole decisions. “I think there is a reason for the separation of powers and I think that making some sort of executive decision about who is paroled and who isn’t, is not a decision that should come from a politician,” she says.
This outspokenness has not won her friends in high places. Five years ago, when Nelson and Rann were on opposing sides of a poker-machine compensation debate, Rann made his bias against her clear: “I have seen many reports by Frances Nelson and this is another one I disagree with,” he said.
But the war of words has not gone all the Government’s way. Earlier this year a deranged man on parole killed his son and seriously injured his partner and baby daughter before killing himself. Nelson went on ABC radio to say, in effect, that the Parole Board saw the tragedy brewing and may have prevented it if the Government had listened to her earlier. She had been worried about the man’s deteriorating mental state he had a serious drug habit and suffered from drug-induced psychosis but the Parole Board’s powers to deal with mental health issues were limited. She said she had raised this limitation with the Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson, but nothing was done. Atkinson denied this, but later in the day made a correction. “Frances Nelson is right and I am wrong,” he said after finding her letters in his files. She shrugs it off they are politicians after all, she says.
Getting up just before sunrise to ride with the horses and the hounds helps her to stay calm. Nelson, whose daughter Roma lives in another house on the property, treasures these early starts to her day. “It’s just a great feeling on a misty morning when the air is fresh and there is no one around and the telephone isn’t ringing,” she says. “It’s a wonderful thing. And I get really stroppy on mornings when I can’t do it; it makes me stroppy for the rest of the day. I suppose I’m addicted, but it’s a lovely thing.” Nelson’s love of horses began in Malaysia where her father was in the colonial service. They lived in a village in the north where Nelson was home-schooled. “It was a nice lifestyle, the last gasp of the British Raj,” she says. “But in fairness, my parents didn’t live that lifestyle and didn’t like it.” She played happily with the local Chinese and Malay children until racial segregation policies suddenly drove them apart, sowing in her the seeds of hatred of unfairness and inequality.
After completing secondary school at Adelaide Girls’ High, Nelson had to choose between becoming a lawyer or taking to the opera stage. She settled for becoming a barrister who used her vocal training to good effect. “I had a voice. It’s got a bit scratchy with age,” Nelson says. “It would have been nice to pursue it but I wasn’t a coloratura soprano. They always get the good roles, unless you are Delilah or Carmen. So I knew that my options would be limited and it would take me a good many years to get there and I didn’t have the financial backing to do it. My need to make a living overcame that.”
Nelson, a pioneer of women in the law in this state, was admitted to the Bar in 1967, shortly after the trailblazing Queen’s Counsel Roma Mitchell was appointed to the Supreme Court Bench. Nelson did her first criminal trial before Mitchell, a woman she says had a talent for friendship. Nelson named her daughter after her. “I thought I’d give my daughter something to look up to. Why not?” she says.
Women lawyers were rare in Adelaide in the 1960s and Nelson applied unsuccessfully to join a number of firms. Finally, she gave up and opened her own office. She resisted family law, which was a worthy field, but one that was seen as “women’s work”, and sought out commercial litigation, partly to prove she could do it. “I really took offence at the suggestion that somehow a woman’s brain was incapable of dealing with big important stuff,” says Nelson, who became Australia’s fourth female QC. “I think it was hard if you wanted to take that road. And I’m glad to say it is so much easier for women now. No one thinks twice if they go into those areas.”
Nelson regrets there are not more women in senior positions at the Bar and on the Bench. The problem today is not prejudice, she says, but the demands of working at the top of the legal profession. “If a case is set down, it’s set down and you have to be available. You can’t turn work down, because people don’t send you a brief next time. So that is probably quite hard on women who do want to have families.”
With the support of her late husband, Dr Earle Williams, she raised two children who, she says dryly, seem to have survived. Roma Williams is a lawyer and horse trainer, and Bill Williams is a prominent jockey who last month won the Grand Annual Steeplechase. “I was very strong on the idea of not pushing my children into doing anything,” she says. “When I think what Bill’s education cost and he’s a jumps jockey, you do wonder. But he’s there because he loves it and he is very disciplined in what he does.”
From her office on Victoria Square Nelson has maintained a general legal practice, working mainly in commercial law. Her public profile started growing in the early 1980s when she was invited to become head of the Parole Board at a time when the system was in chaos and prisoners had burnt down part of Yatala Prison. “The way it was put to me it didn’t sound too difficult,” Nelson chortles. “I have always said since then, you lied, you lied’. It’s really quite hard.”
The job has made her think long and hard about what happens in prisons and why people are there in the first place. She believes the community is in denial over the pathways into crime. Many criminals are from deprived homes and have known nothing in their lives other than anger and conflict. Often their backgrounds are entrenched unemployment and drug and alcohol abuse.
“If you come from a nurturing background where you have proper parenting and you have confidence and self-esteem and a home that is stable, it is very hard to get into the mindset of someone who has never had any of that, who has learnt survival skills but not social skills,” she says. “And because they don’t value themselves, they don’t value other people and they offend against our rules.”
Nelson believes intervention must happen earlier. It makes no sense, she says, to wait until a crime is committed then locking up the offender and throwing away the key. “I quite understand governments don’t like to embark on this because it is really hard and it’s a big problem,” she says. “We have families with five children from different fathers, people who are third-generation unemployed, children who are born with a drug habit ... we need to tackle it on that level.”
The occasional wins keep her in the job, she says, and the fact she has managed to avoid presiding over any major parole blunders by releasing a prisoner who commits a horrendous crime. “We actually work very closely with someone who is on parole. We are probably one of the few boards which do that,” she says. “I don’t think there is much point in saying, yes, you can go out,’ unless you continue to monitor, and if things don’t look as though they are going as well as they should be, we bring them back in and we interview them and we reinforce it.”
Nelson says her concern with the Government’s preference for punishing criminals by sending them into overcrowded prisons famously presented by acting premier Kevin Foley as rack em, stack em and pack em’ is that it fails to provide rehabilitation as well as punishment. “There is an unwillingness to engage in anything that smacks of rehabilitation because it might look as though you were being, to use that disgusting phrase, soft on crime,” she says. “Now I think that is very shod-sighted.” Yet, Nelson says, there is “endless research” that shows that locking prisoners up does not stop them from reoffending. “It doesn’t deter them, it doesn’t deter the next person. Twenty years ago America was going down this path. Now they are trying to parole as many people and introduce rehabilitation as much as possible,” she says. “So I say, while we’ve got them locked up, can’t we do something with them? We really want to make SA a safe place, we really want in the longer term to reduce crime.”
The Government may criticise Nelson, but it listens. The new Minister for Correctional Services, Tom Koutsantonis, says the Cabinet respects Nelson and the occasional disagreements are not serious. “She has a pretty thick skin,” Koutsantonis says. “She is a very strong woman in a man’s world in the legal fraternity and she has done well. I would be stunned if those things really hurt her.”
Koutsantonis, whose first meeting with Nelson over-ran by an hour, is interested in her strong ideas on rehabilitation and has asked for regular monthly meetings. “She is a very big believer in programs that work and these programs are vital, I believe, in making sure prisoners don’t re-offend when they are out,” he says. “The point she made is, once they have got out of prison, once they have served their punishment, they are neighbours, they are shopping at Woolworths, they are living among us.”
Koutsantonis says this interest is not new but admits it is not something the Government has talked about much. “I am very proud of what this Government has done in rehabilitation. We have the second-lowest recidivism rate in the country, so I think we have done a good job.” he says. “What we have done is a bad job of selling it.”
Nelson’s experience in the area is so broad one of her earliest parole cases was that of Rupert Maxwell Stuart, an Aborigine convicted of the 1958 rape and murder of a young girl near Ceduna. Stuart, an itinerant carnival worker whose conviction and death sentence provoked a campaign led by Rupert Murdoch, then publisher of The News in Adelaide, that saw a death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, regularly breached parole because of alcoholism. Nelson, who was at school when the murder occurred, says the Board persevered until a solution was found.
“Ultimately, someone suggested a program that involved him going to an isolated community where we were absolutely confident that it was dry,” Nelson says. “We paroled him there and he completed his parole without incident.”
She has been approached more than once to go on to the Bench, the logical advancement for a senior person at the Bar. She declined, she says, for a variety of reasons. “When I did entertain it latterly, I’d really moved past that, I think,” she says. “The way my life has been, it wasn’t for a number of reasons the right choice for me at that time. I couldn’t take advantage of it at the various times that it was offered.”
When Nelson retires she will stay in the Adelaide Hills. She occasionally hunts in Scotland where she has friends and family, but says SA is the only place where she can be surrounded by animals while just 40 minutes from the Festival Centre. She was a former racehorse trainer but now keeps mainly jumpers. In the midst of the controversy over the future of jumps racing, Nelson says horses love to jump and could not be persuaded to unless they enjoyed it. “They jump from paddock to paddock whether you are there or not,” she says.
Nelson, whose farm is dotted with retired hounds lying under rose bushes because she refuses to shoot them, says the moment of jumping a fence on a horse is unsurpassed; it is the moment when all else is forgotten. “I just think the bond of horse and rider in a steeplechase is the closest thing to magic,” she says. “You come down the hill and when you meet the fence right and you’re flying, it’s fabulous.”
Home > Media monitoring > 2009 > Goodwill hunting