Dame Augusta Wallace

Judge a no-nonsense role model

QUIET ACHIEVER: Dame Augusta Wallace didn't like publicity or being in the limelight.

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Dame Georgina Catriona Pamela (Augusta) Wallace, District Court judge, DBE 1993, NZ 1990 medal LLB, Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal 1977. Born Auckland, October 11, 1929; married 1955 Neville Alan Wallace (deceased), 1 daughter; died Auckland, April 12, 2008.
Dame Augusta Wallace was New Zealand's first woman district court judge, appointed in 1975 and serving on the bench for 18 years.

Her other considerable achievements included chairing the Abortion Supervisory Committee (1977-79) and membership of the Waitangi Tribunal for three years from 1996. She chaired several charitable trusts, including the At Risk Kids Trust. The welfare of children always concerned her. She was a Papatoetoe City Councillor for a term from 1970.

She was, in an era of women's libbers who looked as if they wanted to take over the world, a particularly capable and high-achieving woman. But Dame Augusta, a quiet and intensely private achiever, pointedly rejected extremism.

She was clever, she had passed her exams, she had reached an elevated position because she had wanted to and had the wits to. It even disturbed her that she might be held up as some feminist icon. When she became the country's first woman magistrate, an appointment made in International Women's Year, she said she was aware that her achievement might "become a point for extreme women's liberationists, which I find personally distasteful. If this is not a blow for women but an encouragement, then it is worthwhile".

For her the real test in law, "whether you are male or female, and any shape or size . . . is your ability to compete with your fellow practitioners".

Even 30 years later there would be many women lawyers, given the statistics in the profession, who would argue with her on that point but still accept that Dame Augusta's career was a no- nonsense role model.

Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias, who entered the legal profession in 1972, saw her appointment as the first woman judge as an important affirmation of the contribution women could make to law. Dame Sian considered her a mentor and regarded her as a very strong person who, as a judge, commanded her courtroom with great control and whose brisk manner belied personal warmth and twinkle.

Dame Augusta was strong, and so private, both professionally and personally, that the greatest publicity she received, and that certainly not of her making, was when she was nearly killed in her Otahuhu courtroom in 1990 by a machete blow. The 16-year-old who lunged with a sharpened weapon he had concealed in his trousers was later deemed insane.

Dame Augusta's life was probably saved by a quick-acting police sergeant who eventually received a bravery award for tackling the youth as he was about to strike again.

She recovered and returned to work, staying on till 1993, partly as an act of defiance. She was not going to let the attack drive her out. Paying tribute to her, Chief District Court Judge Russell Johnson said she was afraid of no one, "not even a machete-wielding thug". Very firmly, she hoped she would be remembered for what she had achieved in law, rather than for the attack.

Dame Augusta was educated at Howick School, Epsom Girls' Grammar School and Auckland University, from which she graduated in 1954. She was admitted to the Bar the same year. For 11 years before she became a magistrate she practised on her own account in Papatoetoe. When she closed her door there, she saw her new role pragmatically as less of a great achievement than a change of direction. She wanted a change. She saw it as "a natural consequence of events".

She sat at the Auckland District Court for nearly 15 years, then transferred to the Otahuhu District Court for a short time before spending her last years based in Papakura District Court.

Dame Augusta met her husband, Neville Wallace, when he was a career army officer. He retired from the army in the early 1970s and qualified as a lawyer in 1976. She kept her marriage quite separate from her career. They were not, she maintained, in competition with one another and, had they been, she felt she could have done neither well.

In a rare glimpse she allowed into her soft side and home life, she admitted she loved going over the hill and home to the family spread at Whitford, where it was as if she was "shedding one side of me and I become Mrs Wallace, the one with all those crazy ducks". She cooked and sewed, did tapestry and enjoyed music.

But she generally kept control of her privacy and of any expression in court, where she maintained a deliberately inscrutable mien. She called it a grim, even dragon image. It could help, in her chosen profession, she believed, to look forbidding.

Long before the machete attack, and even after, her doings and views on all but the most inescapable issues were not for public consumption. In a rare interview for a profile in her earlier years she told the interviewer, possibly not expecting it to be recorded, that she really had not wanted to see her. She reckoned that she had already been over-exposed – after her record-making appointment as a judge and reports on the Abortion committee – "and I don't like publicity or being in the limelight. I don't like television appearances, nor seeing my photo in the paper".

After the attack, of which she retained no memory, she made the headlines she tried to avoid. Some related to her understandable views on slack court security and the positive outcome was the formation of the Courts Security Act, focusing on court security and followed by rising numbers of security officers.

In 1993 she was made a Dame, but even then the attack vied with the honour for newsworthiness.

Dame Augusta embraced each decade of her life in the same highly intelligent, quietly competitive and uncompromising manner. A few years ago – and still twinkling – when she had become involved with Age Concern and was invited to speak at the organisation's annual conference, she talked about the assumptions people often wrongly made about others.

She – small, wrinkled and white- haired – had found herself, several times, lined up at the lights with young men who were revving to go and almost certainly assumed she was a doddery driver. In such situations, she said, she always felt obliged to take the advantage herself.

Of course, she told a questioner, she had beaten the young men off the mark. No one should have been surprised. She had been doing it all her life.

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