In Conversation with Author and Former Criminal Barrister Jock Serong - Transcript

Jock Serong Interview Transcript

Claudia (00:04)

Hey there. Welcome to the FAME Law Students Association's podcast, The Brief. For the uninitiated, FAME stands for film, arts, media and entertainment. The FAME LSA is a group of law students at Melbourne Law School who are passionate about arts and culture. In this series, we chat to creative people who have had or have careers in the law. Today we're speaking with Jock Serong. Jock is, among many things, a former criminal barrister and now decorated author. We spoke about his amazing and varied career trajectory, a mysterious wave break in Port Phillip Bay, sheep stealing in Western Victoria, and the importance of creativity in whatever one chooses to do. Enjoy!

Claudia (01:01)

Hello, Jock. So you're a former criminal barrister, you've worked on native title claims with the Martu people in Western Australia, contributed to the Bringing Them Home Inquiry, you've represented asylum seekers in the Federal Court, you've written eight books, which have won many awards, and also written for surf magazines and several publications from Meanjin to The Guardian, and even helped judges and magistrates with their writing at the Victorian and Federal judicial colleges. Jock, thank you so much for coming to speak with me and FAME. I'm resisting the urge to ask: what haven't you done?

Jock (01:39)

That makes me sound a lot busier than I really am. But it's nice to be here!

Claudia (01:44)

Okay, I guess we'll just jump right into it then. Because we're a law students' organisation, and we've all got very bright and shiny careers ahead of us, I thought I'd just first ask what were you like in law school and how did you get there? What was your experience like?

Jock (02:02)

I was extremely uncertain about the whole business and I really fell into law a little bit by accident in that I had other plans in mind. I only ever wanted to be a writer and I had in fact enrolled in journalism out of school and got a very, very late offer to law school and you know, there was kind of a conversation with my parents about, well, you can still be a writer, it’s just you'll have a law degree. So I thought, okay, that seems reasonable, and I enrolled. But up to that point I had never thought about being a lawyer for five minutes in my whole life. And I can remember being on the train going home from the day when they in those days, you know, obviously you were given massive folders full of printed material, going home with all these folders and reading what was inside and thinking, this is just completely alien to me. And that feeling of being an outsider to it lasted for quite a long while. I reckon for at least the first two or three years of the degree, where I felt like the people around me had a very clear sense of their destinies and I didn't. It took a while to shake that off.

Claudia (03:07)

I think that is actually a common experience now. And I feel like it's really interesting because the jump from like an undergrad discipline to law, for me anyway, for arts, it was insane. Going from school to law must be a whole different kettle of fish. I know that you were studying arts alongside law. What was that like and sort of what stuck with you from that?

Jock (03:35)

Arts was even more random than the law was. When I went to enrol in law, I was actually enrolled in straight law, but they said, you've got to take a few arts subjects, it's a requirement. And they sort of threw a handbook at me and said, pick a subject. And it opened at A and I said, archaeology, because I'd just seen the Indiana Jones films. And I thought that sounds like fun. So I wound up doing years of archaeology for that reason alone. But then I got a bit smarter about it as I went along and I realised that law is a hard slog and it can be very analytical and very dry, and that the weirder and sillier I made my arts, the more likely I was to survive the whole experience. So I did Latin, I did Russian literature, I tried to make it as interesting and strange as I could, and I think that was a big factor in getting through the whole experience.

Claudia (04:28)

Yeah, absolutely. I love the archaeology of it all. That's great. And so after you left you did your articles, I think it's now called PLT, at Dunhill Madden Butler. Can you tell me a bit about your time there? It sounds as though you weren't really headed for this commercial law firm life, but what did it teach you and what was it like?

Jock (04:52)

Well, it's interesting, I imagine this is still the case, that the way it came about was that every year going through law school, there was a slight increment in the pressure. And, you know, after a couple of years you found yourself looking for clerkships, then you found yourself looking for a graduate year, looking for the PLT or whatever it is now. And you never really stopped and thought about what am I actually trying to do here? You just kept trying to jump the hurdle that was in front of you. And I can remember applying for those gigs and getting the one at Dunhill Madden Butler. And Dunhill Madden Butler was kind of a medium-sized general commercial firm in the city, which has since been gobbled up by much bigger fish. So I think it's now Norton Rose. And the people there were great and they were really encouraging and they wanted to teach what they were doing. Some of what they were doing fell very, very far outside my particular moral and professional boundaries, but they were passionate about what they were doing and they wanted to teach it and they were good people. And I had a really good year. It was really social and I didn't find the work particularly crushing. Maybe I wasn't doing it right. But at the end of that year, you know, you get given your permanent designation within the firm and I forget what mine was. I think it was like shopping centre leases or something fantastic like that and I worked out within a few weeks this is a dead end. I'm not doing this for the rest of my life. And I had this fabulous boss called Craig Pentonkin who's since died, but he was a really nice guy and he was working far too hard. And I went into his office and I shut the door. And he just looked up from his desk and he said, shit, you've shut the door and I said, yeah, it's one of those talks and he said, why? Anyway, that was the end for me.

Claudia (06:33)

Yeah, wow. I think yeah, it is such a different world. And I wonder actually, having read Cherrywood now, if some of that informed your writing in that novel.

Jock (06:46)

Yeah, there is a particular thing to explain there, which was it wasn't really so much that year, but a couple of years later, after I had been in the country and then deep in the desert, I came back to Melbourne and I had six months to kill before I did the barrister's reading course. And I wrote letters to all the really big firms in Melbourne and I said, Look, I'm just I'm looking for a job in stapling. I just need to kill six months. What have you got? Hole punching, don't mind. And a very big firm took me on and they put me in the dungeon somewhere doing I don't know what alligator clips. And I was down there quite happy, just thinking all I've gotta do is live out six months and I'll be right. And the waterfront dispute exploded in Melbourne, which at the time was a really big, vicious industrial dispute that pitted left against right. It was extremely political. And all of a sudden someone comes running in screaming, saying, Has anybody in this room got a practising certificate? And I said, actually, yeah, I've got one. And they said, Right, come upstairs. And they put me on the 41st floor with a view of the entirety of the city. And suddenly I was a solicitor working for the bad guys. And that was where I had a lot of the professional experiences that went into Cherrywood. It was like, Jesus, these people are awful.

Claudia (08:02)

Wow, it's so interesting to hear about that. It seems a bit rock and roll for want of a better term.

Jock (08:10)

I think it only is when you look back at it. You know, you're a young person and you haven't worked out where it's all heading and you're just making it up as you go along.

Claudia (08:18)

Absolutely. I think a lot of us are in that position right now, even.

Jock (08:22)

Yeah. And fair enough.

Claudia (08:24)

Going back to after you did your articles, so you said I'm out, pretty much, and then as I understand it, you just tipped everything on its head. And you moved to rugged windswept Port Fairy, or South Hamilton. As my parents call it.

Jock (08:40)

Yes.

Claudia (08:43)

Definitely not a risk-averse move. But what kind of pivot did this cause in your career? And was the experience vastly different?

Jock (08:54)

Yeah, yeah, it was. And that came about because, you know, I'm making light of my departure from Dunhill Madden Butler, but at the time I was pretty confused and pretty distressed, I think. I suddenly thought all of this enormous hard work, and I was a really hard-working student. It's come to this point where I can't see the next bit and I guess my attitude to that then, and this changes as you get older, but my attitude to it was I'm not gonna sit here and take this. I'm just gonna, as you said, tip it on its head and see what happens. So I got out a map and I thought I'll go and practise law somewhere on the coast and go surfing a whole lot and have some fun. And if that doesn't work, then I need a new career. And so I got the map out and picked Port Fairy pretty much at random. I went down there with my then girlfriend now wife and we spent a weekend down there and had an enormous amount of fun. So I just stayed there. And it wasn't that hard to get a rental, it wasn't that hard to get a job. And the work was a thousand miles away from what I was doing in the city. So it had the desired effect, it disrupted everything and it gave me a reset and it kind of got me going again.

Claudia (10:06)

Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone's listening and hasn't been to Port Fairy, it's actually very, very beautiful. It is Definitely not South Hamilton.

Jock (10:15)

Yeah.

Claudia (10:18)

I have heard before that you love surfing. Well, I know that you love surfing. And that was born from an elusive Port Phillip Bay break, I believe.

Jock (10:30)

God, you've done your homework.

Claudia (10:32)

No, it really stuck with me because I feel like there's no waves in Port Phillip Bay. How is that the case?

Jock (10:39)

Because I grew up in Brighton and Brighton, if you look at it on a map. Diagonally across Port Phillip Bay, the longest fetch on the bay is from southwest towards Brighton. So if you get a southwesterly that blows for long enough, it will build up a kind of—it's a crappy wind wave to be honest, but when you're thirteen you don't care. So yeah, I used to wait for these big storms and go trundling down there on my bike and get fish and chips afterwards. Great fun.

Claudia (11:06)

It sounds absolutely idyllic. Your next move after a bit of time in Warrnambool, working at a local firm there, was it?

Jock (11:17)

Yeah, so it was a local firm that was a good successful firm and in the country way it was a general practice. So there were people there doing bits and pieces of everything and what they needed was a young person to go along to the Magistrates' Court and really just do the guilty pleas because they wanted to have cases in the paper every day as a form of advertising. So really my work didn't even have to be profitable. All I had to do was go down to court and plead up the guy who'd been caught drink driving or whatever it was. Or stealing sheep and the firm would be happy. So that in its earliest incarnation was a pretty cruisy gig. And you get to know the magistrate and you get to know the coppers and you even get to know some of the local hoodlums. And the whole thing just becomes a very, very entertaining game.

Claudia (12:03)

Stealing sheep is so deliciously Western Victorian, I can't even deal with it. And so after you were there, your next move is to WA to work on native title with the Martu people. But you found that job rather unconventionally. Could you tell me a bit about that and what led you there?

Jock (12:25)

Well, to compare, you know, that previous move, which was really driven by unhappiness, the next move was driven by intrigue. I was living in an old cottage in Port Fairy and it was freezing cold, and I was making a fire in the fireplace, scrunching up newspaper, and here was an ad in the paper that just literally came up under my eyes, wanting a native title solicitor in the desert. And this was 1997. So the Mabo judgment was 1992, Native Title Act was 1993, and the Wik judgment was 1996. So native title was really, really in its infancy, and nobody had much idea how to do it day to day. And I thought, God, it's a job in the desert and it's this fascinating new field of law that no one knows anything about. And they were offering a really big salary. And I thought, God, this is just an amazing adventure. And what's more, when I rang them, they said they'd fly me over to Western Australia for an interview. And I thought, well, it's a free trip to Western Australia. So I went and did that interview, and I think I might have been the only applicant and got the job accordingly. And it was easily the most fascinating and powerful thing that ever happened to me in practising law. It was enormously life-altering.

Claudia (13:42)

I think you'd spoken before around like this is foreshadowing into your future career a little bit, but writing responsibly as an Australian writer, did this sort of frame that concept or that idea at all for you?

Jock (13:59)

Yeah, it did. And I think to come back a step from that, the other thing that it did to me as a person rather than a writer is that it turned me from a conservative with a very, very poorly informed understanding of colonialism and race and what we've done on this continent. Into somebody who started to understand the impacts. And that's a lifelong process, and you don't become an expert on it one day. It's a thing that you keep learning about. But I hope that was the point at which I started to go, shit, I've never understood any of this. And so, yeah, much later on that started to inform the way I go about writing. But at the time it was more about changing me as a person.

Claudia (14:44)

Yeah, so it was a really profound experience then.

Jock (14:48)

Yeah, the Martu people occupy the deserts in the centre of Western Australia and they are deeply traditional, very, very successful Aboriginal people who still initiate their young people, who still practise ritual, who have retained language. A lot of the impacts of the colony that have wiped out other forms of cultural practice in other parts of Australia didn't take out the Martu. They have remained very, very strong and very certain of their own identity and country. And that meant that the native title claim was always going to work. And it meant also that there were old people there who had an enormous amount to teach and the immersion in all of that world in their country—just going out in a Toyota for weeks on end on no road, just driving over spinifex while they pointed out sites and paths and other things. Yeah, that was an enormous privilege.

Claudia (15:50)

Absolutely. How amazing. So going back to the story of Jock's career, you move back to Melbourne after this and begin work as a criminal barrister, as well as doing some pro bono work with asylum seekers too. From what I gather, this was a time where the Migration Act was in serious flux. And going through several amendments as well. I'm paraphrasing a comment you've made before about administrative law, but something to the effect of there's a lot that goes into a decision made by a decision maker, but ultimately they really throw out this binary yes or no. You can have a visa or you can't. You went on to write On the Java Ridge, which explores some of these themes. I feel like you really explore the real human consequences of these decisions made. And I was wondering if this experience informed much of your writing or what you've learnt, maybe like working between that binary as well, that binary yes or no.

Jock (17:01)

Yeah, yeah. It's one of the things I think you learn about yourself as a lawyer when you go into practice is what kind of lawyer you are. Some of the people I studied with and people I've worked with over the years are exceptionally good at maintaining a level emotional keel and analysing a framework of rules, basically, a matrix of interacting regulations. And they're able to pick their way through this complex circuitry and say, the problem is here, and here's how you fix it. And none of it keeps them up at night. They're just extremely good analysts. And to those people I salute you, but I'm not one of them. And what I discovered in practice, particularly as a barrister, was that I loved doing criminal work because it felt human and it felt emotional and it felt like there were kinds of personal intuition that would guide you through situations. You didn't have to understand all the circuitry. And that meant that was sort of my natural field. I wanted to do the pro bono work with asylum seekers because I believed in what I was doing. But the problem with it was, as you say, it was admin law and it was extremely technical. And the key to success in any given situation was the circuitry. You had to know all of these extraordinarily complex ins and outs. At the time, the Migration Act was the, I think, second most amended piece of legislation in Australia after the Tax Act. And that meant that if I went into a criminal case, I could whip out the tiny little violin and kind of try and tug at the heartstrings and say, ‘My poor misunderstood client,’ and sometimes that would work. Particularly with juries. But to do that in the Federal Court in administrative law against absolute experts was never going to work. And so you'd get up there and you'd sing and dance and you'd try everything you could think of, but the answer was no because of something you hadn't even seen. And it was kind of heartbreaking. And to then turn around to somebody who had got in a boat and risked their lives and doesn't speak English and try to explain to them through an interpreter why they've been refused. I found that process enormously confounding.

Claudia (19:14)

Yeah, absolutely. It's insane to wrap your head around it. It really is. You write a lot about criminal law as well, or you have written books that sort of centre around criminal activity. What do you think is the difference between writing fiction around criminal law as a broad context and true crime?

Jock (19:41)

Well, as a reader, I sometimes struggle with the notion of true crime because I feel like it has this exploitative tone to it that I struggle to get around. Someone's died, someone's family has been devastated, and I don't understand why that's entertainment. And I'm pretty suspicious of people who think it's spine tingling and good fun. Criminal fiction, on the other hand, you can be constructing worlds and analysing why we do the things we do and how we react in given situations, but none of it's actually feeding off somebody's family's tragedy. So I think I feel a little more inclined in that direction as a reader and a writer. For the same reasons that I feel deeply suspicious of podcast culture, other than this one. Because, yeah, I don't want someone's horrors as my entertainment. But you know the great criminal fiction, the artisans who create that stuff, they're such clever people. And it's actually writing crime, although I have dabbled in it, it's probably not my strongest suit. I do struggle with how people put it together, you know, so cleverly so that it unfolds in unexpected ways and does the thrilling bits.

Claudia (20:59)

After you're in Melbourne as a criminal barrister and doing this pro bono work, you moved back to Port Fairy, is that correct?

Jock (21:10)

Yeah. I spent six years as a barrister and the crime was the main part of it and then there was the asylum seeker work and some native title work and Little bits of other things around the sides. And the crime had divided into two streams for me. Everybody kind of approaches these things differently as barristers, but in my case I was defending in the lower court, in the Magistrates' Court. And I was prosecuting as a junior in the Supreme Court and the County Court, generally, with some overlap. And it was a really good practice and I was having a lot of fun. And I think, again, each time I've made big shifts in my career, it's for differing reasons. So going back, that first move was out of restlessness, second move was out of curiosity. This time around I was married to Lil and we had a baby and a second baby on the way, and we had an unusually grown-up talk about who the hell are we and where's all this going? And how many kids do we want to have, how do we want them to grow up, how hard do we want to work, all of these sorts of big questions, which really neither of us normally indulge in. And the conclusion was we both wanted to live in the country. We wanted to have a few kids. And that really meant that what we were doing at the time, and Lil was doing a pretty heavy nursing job in one of the major hospitals. We thought all of this has got to go. We should get out while the going's good. So I think it was a strange time to do it because everything was going brilliantly, and I was really enjoying my work. And we up and left.

Claudia (22:46)

Back to Port Fairy, is it safe to say that this is where your writing started to take off eventually with surf magazines and the like?

Jock (22:56)

Yeah, it's interesting, Claudia. The two things almost coincide, but in my head that wasn't what I was trying to do. We moved back to Port Fairy in 2004, and I think the first piece of writing I had published was probably 2008. What I think did do it was we wound up having a tribe of kids, and at night, you know, there's these weird nights when everyone's wandering around the house making weird noises. And your sleep becomes so disrupted and often I'd be sitting wandering around with my head in the fridge at 2 am and I started thinking of that time as productive time and I started jotting things down and I worked out I was surfing with a guy who published a magazine and I kind of hit him up and said, Could I publish some stuff in your mag? And then that led to other magazines and it started to get a bit of momentum. And I started writing fiction and I wrote a film. I wrote a whole novel and the novel got rejected over and over again. But one day somebody said, Yeah, we'll take it. And then the thing that sort of tipped it was I was approached to edit a magazine. And I suddenly thought, God, I've got all this stuff on the go here. I'm using every weekend, I'm using every night, I'm using all of my annual leave. And things are going to explode if I don't work this out because we had four kids. So it's like, does the family go? I was a partner in the firm. Does the firm go? Or do I stop doing this and just be a good little lawyer and, you know, stick to the job? And so I really had to think about, okay, this is again not sustainable, which of these things is going? And I think my partners thought either the family was gonna go or the writing was going. They didn't think it was them. But that was the outcome.

Claudia (24:40)

It seems there is a theme in the broader trajectory of your career of taking chances. And I really appreciate that, like asking to contribute to the surf magazine and that potentially having a follow-on effect. I think that's really inspiring.

Jock (24:59)

I think about this a lot, Claudia. Because I have utter respect for anybody who stays in the chair. Often there are really good reasons to stay in the chair. I mean, A, you might be perfectly happy for starters. B, you may feel that you have a sense that other people are depending on you to stay in that chair. And that's reasonable. It's just in my case, I think I came to a point where I thought about, you know, everybody's parents start out saying to you, follow your dreams. But then somewhere along the way there is this countervailing influence, which is don't be stupid, don't be reckless. And I really felt like if we were having kids and if they grew up, I would say to them, follow your dreams. But there's some kind of hypocrisy in saying that to your own child when you've just kept working for the man the whole time. If you're gonna tell a kid that then live the example.

Claudia (25:48)

Absolutely. In a similar vein, you speak about like a clear moment where you threw in your practising certificate. And was it clear to you at that moment or how did you know that it was writing that you ultimately wanted to pursue? Because it feels like such a massive thing, I guess.

Jock (26:10)

Yeah, it's interesting. I look at it now and I think, if I had known what the next however long it's been, thirteen years, if I'd known what these thirteen years were going to bring, would I have jumped? Because I was definitely under informed. And Lil, God bless her, had said no to me a number of times. I'd said, you know, you get frustrated at times with your job. But the job paid really well. And at times I'd say, Look, I'm sick of a lot of them. I want to bail, what do you reckon? And she'd say, No, you know, for A, B, and C good reasons. You need to stay where you are. And so that was fair enough. And then I must have said it once too often. And she turned around and said, Yeah, jump, go on. And all of a sudden you're like the dog that caught the car. You're like, Jesus, what do I do now? And the day that I bailed out, I think was when I received the payment, which was the advance for my first novel. That was three and a half thousand dollars. And that was probably one mortgage payment. And I didn't even have a plan for the second mortgage payment. So yeah, that one was maybe a little undercooked. But I still feel happy that's the way it went. And I still have a lot of connections to the legal community in the work that I do, you know, month to month. So maybe I found the right relationship with being a lawyer.

Claudia (27:25)

Do you think that balance is something that you have to chip away at to find or did it sort of just happen harmoniously, I guess, in the sense of marrying the two?

Jock (27:39)

Yeah, it's a good question. I think that people who grow up in family environments where law is a way of being, you know, the kind of dynasty thing, have a much more mature understanding of the stakes. I don't have any relatives who are lawyers. I have very few friends who are lawyers and accordingly I wasn't acculturated to what being a lawyer was about. And maybe that's why I treated it a little too flippantly along the way. Or with a little bit too much awe. I don't know. I look around the lawyers I know now and I think, God, you know, we're all just people and these people are not bereft of human emotions and they have their worries and insecurities and their loves and hates and so do I. And I think at the start, you know, when I was a graduate and a law student, I think I thought lawyers were a special breed of people and that was why I felt like such an outsider. I couldn't get the hang of being one.

Claudia (28:39)

I am similar. I come from a similar background of not much lawyering heritage.

Jock (28:44)

Yeah. Yeah.

Claudia (28:46)

And it does feel like a foreign place sometimes. But I guess what I really take from that is it's about making choices that align with your values, perhaps.

Jock (28:59)

Good way of putting it, yes.

Claudia (29:00)

Yeah.

Jock (29:01)

And the other bit, which is the bit about notwithstanding boredom and tedium and pressure, that's an individual choice. I think that's for everybody to figure out in their own way, as we talked about before. But yes, I think you're right.

Claudia (29:17)

Yeah, I guess boredom is a highly subjective thing in a way. Perhaps. Yeah.

Jock (29:22)

Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah.

Claudia (29:26)

So I wanted to like talk a little bit about how law and authoring or narrative and stories coincide. I think personally that on the face of it, there's a lot of ways in which the law and narrative interact. You've got the facts, and I guess that amounts to like a key issue or tension. Then you've got things like place or environment that can inform jurisdiction, and I guess a legal personality is also a characterisation of sorts, I might be getting a bit too abstract here. But what do you think is the most profound connection between law and stories or novels?

Jock (30:11)

I think you've identified it there, Claudia, that in both instances what you're trying to do is to convey a dilemma and a solution to an audience. I always found that making guilty pleas was the most storytelling version of law that I could get at. And you stand up and you're saying to a magistrate, a judge, we're not contesting this, we did this. But we want you to understand this person and the reasons they did it and the creative solution to what we should do next. You know, here's how you should sentence because this is what's gonna work. And that's an exercise in narrative. That's an exercise in building a world and a character for an audience. And it's true too of talking to juries. Juries really respond to being told a story. And the fascinating thing about that story is that it has to be as compelling as possible, but it can't be dishonest. It must fall within certain ethical boundary lines. And it's storytelling, and it's a really challenging species of storytelling. That to me is the commonality. It's also interesting. The other day I was preparing a chronology for a novel that I'm doing. And I have, you know, a list of dates down the left margin and then a list of events. And I do it with almost every large project that I write. I make a chronology. So that I understand the logic of the sequence of events. And that's a thing that I was actually taught as an article clerk, as a graduate lawyer, by a senior lawyer. And they said, you know, here's a file, and they whack it down on the table. And they say, right, the first thing you have to do in order to understand this file is make a chronology. You need to understand the temporal logic between events. That is a connection between storytelling and legal practice. And really, no matter how arcane and obscure the example is, I think almost all legal work has those characteristics of building a narrative out of a set of sometimes random and unassociated data, coming up with a convincing narrative and finding a way to package and deliver it for an audience so that you convince them. And when you look at it in those terms, the two careers are not that different.

Claudia (32:30)

That's so insightful. I was actually going to ask you whether you were a plotter or a pantser, as I believe the writing community calls it, but I think you just answered it there. It's really interesting to see that translates.

Jock (32:45)

Yeah, I think it does. And in fact, for anybody who likes nerding out on this stuff, and I really do, there's a huge body of literature that revolves around the law, and law that revolves around the literature. The two things culturally have been hanging out together for centuries. So you can go way back deep into this stuff. And one of the great examples is Charles Dickens. Dickens is really readable and loved writing about lawyers. You can go back past him to Samuel Johnson. And of course, the modern stuff is full of it, and people seem so intrigued by legal drama and realistic representations of what lawyers do.

Claudia (33:25)

The two are very connected and I guess like it's ultimately how we make sense of the world; that's the thing that binds them. So when I read the law as a student, I am, yes, enamoured by it delivering justice and being this great thing that promotes fairness or equality, but I think it can also be really boring and ruthless and even a bit clinical. You, as we've discussed, not only write about legal context, but I've noticed you write with a real viscerality. Like when I've read your work it really engages the senses. There are great descriptions of sounds or smells, and it's really evocative, I think, especially in establishing the Australian context in a lot of your novels. And also in Cherrywood, your most recent novel, you actually write with a tenderness too about things that the law doesn't include. So love and a bit of magical realism, even, which I really enjoyed. I wonder—we've sort of already touched on it, but moving from one discipline to the other, how do you actually reconcile the two when you're writing?

Jock (34:45)

Well, I think one of the things I really battled with for a long time was the notion that I'm a lawyer and therefore I'm not a creative person. A lot of people now, it's a reasonably recent phenomenon, but a lot of people use creative as a noun and they'll talk about getting the creatives in, like, okay, we really need to come up with something imaginative for this festival, let's talk to the creatives. And I hate the term so much because to me the supposition that some people are creative and some people aren't is so incredibly limiting. Human beings are by their very nature creative. And the only difference that's going on here is a difference of degree, not fact. So you can either choose to tap into the creative side of yourself or leave it alone, which is perfectly fine. But it's there. Everybody's got it. And I went through years and years of telling myself, geez, you know, I'd love to try and write a novel one day, but I'm not a creative person. I'm a lawyer. I analyse things and I deconstruct them. I don't construct them. My job is to pick society apart and analyse the broken bits. I'm not there to build worlds. And you can see when I say that how fallacious that thinking is, but it's really, really persuasive. You come to believe it over time. And it took a long, long time to allow myself the space to say, I'm an artist and I'm gonna work as an artist, and that's gonna be the rest of my life. To me, it sounded indulgent, it even sounded egotistical, and I didn't want to draw attention to myself. And so I think when you talk about, you know, the grind, everybody experiences the grind and some people are better or worse at withstanding the grind and finding stimulation in it, finding creative joy in it and finding intellectual satisfaction. If it's not there, then I think it's immensely important to us as human beings that we foster our creative side. Even while you're, you know, practising law at an extremely high level in some extraordinarily rarefied environment. To let go of your creative side is to do yourself, I think, active harm.

Claudia (37:00)

Absolutely. I think that is really pertinent and you voiced that so well. I have to say I really agree and have noticed about the use of ‘creative’ as a noun. And I've also felt some dissatisfaction toward it and I've wondered if it's because I really want to naively and innocently perhaps reject like the idea that creativity is synonymous with like economics and commercialisation. But I think that's how the world works to a certain degree. But I think that's so true. I think we're all creative and speaking today, it's actually quite clear that it is important to have a degree of creativity as a lawyer.

Jock (37:52)

Yeah, and I think we're very good at looking at all of these welfare aspects for professional people, for lawyers or doctors or whomever else, and we talk about not overdoing it on the booze, getting enough sleep, meditating, looking after your diet, whatever the case may be, what you used to be called work-life balance back in the day. But all of these wellness factors that we focus on so much, I think the one that we miss is feeding and nurturing your creativity. I think that's up there with all of them. And concomitantly there is a degree of harm that comes with not doing that. But yeah, the thing about, you know, creatives and not creatives, I used to think creative people wore groovier clothes and had better hair and their houses were more interesting. It's just stuff you just talk yourself into, you know.

Claudia (38:47)

Absolutely. So my penultimate question for you. You've got a new book coming out, A Suitable Man, The Eccentric Empire of Fletcher Jones. Could you tell us a bit about that? It's really interesting to me as someone from Western Victoria, but I think what I've heard about the general story it sounds fascinating.

Jock (39:08)

Thanks, Claudia. Yeah, it is a biography. So it's the first time I've published nonfiction. And it's the story of Fletcher Jones, who was a guy in the mid-twentieth century who built a clothing empire based in Warrnambool. And that in itself is not that interesting. But what's interesting is that Fletcher was an incredibly good person who had some kind of revolutionary ideas about work, about how people work, how bosses operate, how people make money and what they do with it. And the ideas were really big. And he was studying a Japanese philosopher in between the wars and trying to apply this guy's philosophy to a factory making trousers in Warrnambool. And if you look at it now in the context of Bezos, of Musk, of any of these bastards, you get a really strong sense that we're not trapped helplessly in the labour relations of 2026. There are other ways to do it, fuelled by other things, you know, not just fuelled by profit. And that we had a local Australian example in our backyard of how we could do this thing. And we seem to have forgotten him. And I really wanted to unpack the guy and think about, okay, you know, there are all these letters and diaries and memos that I had access to and living people who worked with him still. And to be able to tap into that resource and think about, okay, can you run a business purely on the fuel of decency? Can you just run a business because you want people to have a satisfying place to work? That's a pretty revolutionary idea when you boil it down to that. Fletcher had zero interest in making money, although it turned out he made a stack of it, but he gave it all away. It's nice to think about capitalism and labour in ways that are unexpected, and that's sort of what the book does. And also he was funny. He was just funny.

Claudia (41:04)

I love that. That will be an excellent read, I think. Especially interesting too in the wake of fast fashion. And what that means for our impact on the environment and everything like that.

Jock (41:18)

Yeah, you're so right.

Claudia (41:21)

Our final question, Jock. I was wondering if you have any advice for any creative law students who might be listening, or just law students in general.

Jock (41:31)

Well, yeah, lots. I think the first bit is if I've said anything negative about the career, don't listen to me because there's so many fantastic opportunities to be had in legal practice. And I guess advice item number one is ignore the rails that people are trying to put you on. There are so many weird and wonderful ways to be a lawyer. It's really up to you to look sideways. Don't just stay on the rails that people are trying to put you on. I think that's really important. I think looking after your creative side and not letting it wither is really important. And treat it like it's an item of health, you know. And I think what you're doing, Claudia, and what I assume people around you are doing is incredibly important, which is always build community wherever it is that you're practising. Always look for the ways that you can gather the people around you and share ideas and look after each other in your insecurities. Because I think this conversation illustrates, you know, that all of us are in our own little world thinking, God, am I the weird one here? Am I the only person who feels this way? And sharing ideas, sharing worries in community ways as you go through your career. And law's really good for that. If I look back—and I wasn't the world's most willing protégé—but there were so many senior lawyers who took me under the wing and said, Come on, I'll show you how to do this. You can do this, and you're doing the next one, right? I'll show you once and you're doing the next one. And that process of tutelage of people having their doors open for you to come in and ask the dumb question is such a sacred thing. And law is a really good culture for that. So take advantage of it as a young lawyer and make sure you practise it as an older lawyer.

Claudia (43:17)

That is fantastic advice, especially as we are in week one right now, and many people are applying for clerkships as well. So really, thank you so much for that. Jock, thank you so much for talking with us. It's been an absolute pleasure and we're so grateful at FAME for you coming to speak with us and giving us all this wisdom.

Jock (43:44)

Claudia, that was so much fun. I hope some of it's useful. It's great to talk to you anyway.