Des Sturgess QC: Queensland’s Conscience

Des Sturgess was the leading criminal barrister of his time, a fearless advocate for the poor and rich, the hoi polloi and the plutocrat, the politician and the police, the indigenous and the industrialist. As a member of a divided profession, which made national representation difficult, he was a colossus in Queensland but still an eminent figure across the country. In short, he had no peer.

For three decades, he defended whoever came to him, sometimes for no fee but every time with the determination and dedication that he felt his profession demanded of him. The police were not his foe, despite the countless cops he cross-examined with forensic brilliance. In fact, he was retained by the Queensland Police Union to represent those few who were charged. Sturgess’s foe was the “verbal”—a systemic state police practice of falsifying a confession to obtain a conviction. His mission to address this injustice was eventually achieved with the introduction of tape-recorded interviews. The last half-decade of his legal career was his appointment as the first Director of Public Prosecutions. It may have looked as if the champion of the poacher had become the ally of the gamekeeper but he simply saw it as an abiding obligation to his profession, the law and the state. He, and his one-time pupil and long-time friend Ian Callinan, also had the distinction of recommending the appointment in 1987 of Gerald (Tony) Fitzgerald QC to lead the inquiry which put an end to much that was then rotten in the state of Queensland.

Desmond Gordon Sturgess was the younger of two sons of Arthur Sturgess and his wife, Alice née Buchanan. The couple were from large country families—there were fifteen aunts and uncles. The men were all dark-haired, tall, with strong opinions and fierce intellects.

Arthur was a postmaster who took his family from Southport, where Des was born, to Longreach and Monto, before settling in Brisbane as Des and his brother reached secondary school. The Sturgesses were strong Protestants with values typical of the day—frugal, industrious, modest, honest. Des idolised his father, and his parents managed to instil all of their values in their second son, apart from one—their Christian faith. Although in every respect he lived by the tenets of the New Testament, he was a resolute atheist, even as his end was imminent and obvious to him.

They made considerable sacrifices to send their sons to the Church of England Grammar School. While Des was always slightly embarrassed at the elitism, his mother regarded the day she walked her boys into the gates of Churchie as the proudest day of her life. Des was a good but not a brilliant student but did well enough to enter the University of Queensland from where he graduated in Arts and Law.

On university holidays he worked as a jackaroo and, at Christmas, as a postman. Pedalling up the steep hills of his home suburb in Queensland’s December heat to deliver a mountain of Christmas mail, he vowed never to send a Christmas card. And, apparently, he never did.

He was admitted to practice as a barrister in December 1952. The practice of law as a barrister is one of the most competitive of all activities while the art of advocacy is, like actors and boxers, such a public one. Only the very best reach and remain at the top. But getting the opportunity to demonstrate talent, especially in 1953 when he was ready to realise his long-held ambition, was especially difficult. Lacking professional connections, he ventured north to Papua New Guinea where he honed his skills for four years earning £20 a week as an advocate. His first trial was a charge of rape; his third was murder. His return to Brisbane was bitter-sweet. He had contracted malaria but he also wed the only love of his life, Thelma, who would sustain and support him for sixty-two years. Des commenced practice in the old Inns of Court in Brisbane.

His career as a barrister bridged two generations and styles of advocacy. The legendary Dan Casey had been the undisputed leader of the criminal bar for many years. No one doubted his legal ability, but his style of advocacy, flamboyant and emotional, was passing.

Sturgess, although as capable of highly charged advocacy as anyone—even Dan Casey—generally adopted a more measured, cerebral style. Insightfully, Casey appreciated this, and in his late professional days often chose young Des as his junior to share the presentation of the defence case. Individually, and with Casey, Sturgess had many early successes.

Wigged and gowned, with commanding height and a fine voice, he would be hunched over the bar table, looking through glasses halfway down his nose, and use his index finger to make a point. That finger, more schoolmasterly than threatening, appeared to reach right across the court room either making a point to the jury or scoring one for his client against a witness. He was completely without airs or graces either in or outside the court. No one could talk more confidentially and confidently to a jury. Widely read, literate, well informed on human and public affairs, a master of the rules of evidence and the criminal law generally, and intellectually resourceful, he was the bane of prosecutors’ lives.

One former prosecutor spoke of a strong case of criminal recklessness by a driver resulting in the death of another motorist, in which Sturgess led evidence for the defence from an ergonomist. The jury was all male. Sturgess began his final speech to the jury with a short but graphic exposition upon the Spitfire aircraft, pointing out how its deployment led to the new and important discipline of ergonomics, which was the key to the verdict they should give. The prosecutor said that at that point he knew that the verdict would be “not guilty”. No one understood or managed better, to the advantage of his clients, expert evidence, often of a complicated and technical kind.

He successfully defended literally hundreds of accused persons, from wives who were alleged to have shot their husbands, to rock stars on drug charges. A colleague once remonstrated that his success with acquitting vengeful or victimised wives was making the world an unsafe one for husbands. Thoroughly conscientious, he conducted conferences in chambers and at his home in Brisbane’s western suburbs.

From there, over the decades, Thelma Sturgess dispensed an ocean of tea to a host of guests seeking her husband’s counsel: crooks, pimps, jockeys, Jesuits, judges, politicians, reporters. One day Bob Hawke dropped him home. Ever discreet, all Des would say to his inquisitive family was, “He was short.”

For almost four decades he went to war against the “verbal”—police fabrication of evidence against the accused. He would say the fraud, designed to boost crime clear-up rates, was “rampant” in Queensland for decades. “At one stage, there was not a case without it. You couldn’t go to court unless there’d be a challenge to the police regarding their confessional evidence.”

This practice had flourished under Frank Bischof, the state’s Police Commissioner throughout the 1960s. (Ironically, Sturgess would later successfully represent the ailing Bischof, who was charged with but never prosecuted for shoplifting four years before his death.) Bischof believed that any decent police officer should be able to recite an interview from memory. “He used to drive a lot of police officers just about mad and their wives as well who’d be kept awake while the person was walking around the room trying to learn the stuff like a piece of poetry.” And what poetry it was. The defendant never got out of the car, he “alighted from the vehicle”.

Sturgess was a tribunal member of the Lucas Inquiry into police powers in 1976-77, led by the stately, distinguished Mr Justice Geoffrey Arthur George Lucas. The panel recommended the tape-recording of police interrogations, and yet, twelve years later, the Fitzgerald Inquiry reported that nothing had been done.

It was not until 1997 that the Police Powers and Responsibilities Act decreed questioning must, where practicable, be electronically recorded. Sturgess had even sacrificed a seat on the state’s Supreme Court in the early 1980s: “I refused and said I had a bit of unfinished business. I wanted to see something done about the bloody verbal.” But honestly, with his dogged independence, he would never have sat comfortably on any bench. As it was, when, in 1998, he was called out of retirement, as Chairman of the Queensland Community Corrections Board, he resigned within months, disagreeing with his colleagues’ view on a prisoner’s right to apply for probation after a fixed period of time. “That right ought to be earned; not automatic.”

In 1979 he defended Alwyn Peter, charged with the murder of his de facto wife. His defence was the inevitability of what had happened, given the wretched circumstances of the lives of people like Peter in north Queensland Aboriginal communities. The research took months and although he was then at the peak of his earning power, he took the brief on a meagre Public Defence fee and waived that when costs threatened to blow out the Public Defender’s budget.

In 1980, he represented, for no fee, a Family Court Judge and Father of the Year, Peter Underhill, on a charge of indecent dealing with a sixteen-year-old youth outside a Sunshine Coast public lavatory. In a masterly defence, based essentially on mistaken identity, Sturgess secured an acquittal.

He was counsel assisting the coroner in the first inquest into the death of Azaria Chamberlain. He was not always right and although the evidence of her innocence eventually emerged, he firmly believed Lindy Chamberlain to be guilty.

By the mid-1980s he was tiring of his role as the state’s leading defence counsel: “There was no pleasure in the work at all. And I appeared for some good people and innocent people. I also appeared for an awful lot of bastards and the bastards were getting bigger and badder as time went on.”

He recalled a case of a client charged with shop-breaking in the town of Roma. Just after midnight, the accused was seen by a patrolling police officer stepping through a broken shop window, the glass of which had just been replaced. He was apprehended and charged but insisted on pleading “not guilty” on the basis that the police were “bloody liars”. He admitted to his counsel that he had spent the whole night removing every piece of fresh putty from his trousers. The police took the trousers from the defendant the next morning. When they were exhibited at the trial, putty had been ingeniously reapplied to the trousers. Of course, he was convicted. Nonetheless, at the end of the trial he pulled out paper and pencil, asking his counsel’s name. Why? He cheerfully told Sturgess, “Oh, next time I’ll get you too.” 

So, the time was ripe for change. When the conservative Attorney-General of Queensland decided to establish an independent Office of Public Prosecutions, he was anxious to ensure that its first director be an experienced and reputable criminal law practitioner from private practice. He was surprised and delighted when Sturgess agreed to take the position. It took months to persuade him to take silk. Of course, Sturgess believed it was simply an excuse to charge clients more and was only persuaded on the basis that it would be beneficial for the new office. Although administration was not one of his strengths, he established and built that office, and he conducted an inquiry into sexual offences involving children, which led to important reforms in the criminal law, especially with respect to the protection of children in making complaints and giving evidence.

Sturgess was a person of the highest integrity. His ability and diligence in any area of the law could have made him rich. But he chose to specialise in jury cases, and as a matter of principle to charge modest fees. As one colleague lamented, he was the cause of a prolonged recession at the criminal bar, not only because he was the best, but also because he was the cheapest senior criminal barrister. They assumed (wrongly) that he was a man of independent means. Interestingly, but typically, he was either never offered, nor ever accepted, an imperial or national honour; yet he was a monarchist, saying it was better that there be “one role or position which no politician or self-serving egotist of any kind from anywhere could aspire to or hold”.

The Sturgesses were blessed with a compatible, contented, unclouded family life and two daughters, Jennifer and Ann, both of whom joined the law and, with their mother and three grandchildren, survive him. A friend recalled finding Des on the roof of his family home late one Christmas Eve when his daughters were young. He was making footprints with white powder on the roof to show that Santa had made his visit.

Des retired in his sixtieth year, which was young for a successful man of such intellectual energy. But both his father and elder brother had died young of heart disease and he had received a similar prognosis. He was also anxious to travel, not having ever left Australia apart from his time in Papua New Guinea. Des and his wife then spent a few months each year travelling across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, for much of the time in a Kombi van he had adapted for camping and kept in England.

In March 2014 he was photographed at a police function with Terry Lewis, religiously described in the Queensland press as “former disgraced Police Commissioner”. Far from apologetic, Sturgess expressed sympathy for Lewis, who on his release from jail, had lost his wife and his home and had battled prostate cancer. He went on to describe Lewis’s trial as “an abomination”, with inadmissible evidence, pre-trial publicity and a heroin-addicted lawyer representing him on appeal. “He didn’t stand a chance … I don’t express a view on his guilt or innocence but I do express a view on the quality of his trial. It was a travesty.”

When, during the final fifteen years of his retirement, he was not travelling, he was writing a book—seven volumes of some 2000 pages, spanning the period from white settlement to the end of the Second World War. The Australians is a work of fiction but set with historical accuracy; said by a friend and fellow novelist who has read it to be eminently publishable. Of course, it was not published during his lifetime because he refused to make what seemed like inconsequential changes to the text at his editor’s suggestion. This saga, when published, may bring posthumous fame as a novelist to an already fabled lawyer.

Into his last years, he publicly lamented what he saw as the loss of reverence for the profession to which he had felt privileged to belong. He was, at his death, the second-most senior barrister, in terms of admission, in Queensland; his illustrious colleague Sir Gerard Brennan having been admitted the year before. He lamented, “It’s not a profession any more. It’s just a get-richer sort of organisation.” But he added, “maybe this is just an old man who looks back and thinks there’s nothing like the good old days. I hope that’s the true situation.”

Dogmatic, outspoken, controversial, contrary, yet sure and shrewd to the end, Des Sturgess was a remarkable Queenslander.

Mark McGinness, a noted obituarist, is a regular contributor.