Wyong Local Court, the building, was too small when it was built and has become more crowded and in need of space over the years. So let me talk about the physical space. The part of the court seen by the casual observer begins at the front. You enter through two main, black-glass doors in the middle of the front of the building. Outside there is a wheelchair ramp along the front of one (or is it both?) wall/s and wide stairs flanked by stone ramparts or planting boxes directly in front, leading to the door. The ramparts are the only place to sit. Despite the fact that the court is one of the most populated areas in the town there are no seats and no covered areas for people waiting outside. People mill around in front of the door without direction and in a state of confusion and discomfort while they wait court or if they feel the need to escape the presence of some person within. They are chilled by wind in winter and boiled by the sun and wet by the rain in summer. There is a seat over the road but it too is swept by weather.
There are fifteen-minute parking places up the street in front of the court although parking of any kind other than that can be difficult to find if you are not a local. There has been no attempt to create parking information or maps.
The court is next to the once mighty Wyong Community Centre and over the road from the old Wyong RSL club and I always think it looks run-down. The trees have grown larger over the years and brought some freshness back
On entering the doors people are met by body scanning machines in a tight little foyer. Most of the time the machines are off but if they are used on a busy day the queue is forced down the stairs and into the street while those who need entry are forced to almost undress in order to divest themselves of any metal. If it is not in use the waiting room is through two glass doors a couple of metres beyond the scanners. The area after the scanners is small and with no seating. Those with a lot of jewellery or other metal have to race to get out of the way of those who did not carry much and want to get by. It is all very polite of course but ridiculous! Insulting!
The court lists are out of the way on the wall in the foyer by the door leading to the offices of the court registrar and staff. If you do not know where to look, or even that they are there to be seen, the court lists of who is before the courts are in the correct position to be overlooked. They appear to have been placed so the court staff would not have to walk an extra two metres to load the sheets rather than any attempt being made to place them where they could be seen as one entered the main areas used by the general public.
It may be that at this time in our history we could move to electronic court lists that are typed up in the office and transmitted to screens placed in more than the worst possible position. Other information could also be scrolled across the bottom.
The first thing a person may notice as they enter the waiting room is the high roof and light entering through the glass sides and across the rim of the roof. There are cameras and lights and speakers along the rim of the roof. The seating is plain plastic chairs in groups of four or so. There is no way to escape being seen. No way to get away from the other side of whatever tragedy has brought your life to this point. The seats are ringed around an imaginary central point and some run along the walls. On a normal court morning there are never enough seats and people again stand in uncomfortable groups outside or alone down the stairs and on the street with no cover and nowhere convenient to sit. If you are disabled at this point you know you are in hell and the people who created the place intended for you to suffer.
The guy next to you shudders through withdrawal. The lawyers shuffle back and forward pushing past you repeatedly to find their meal tickets in the crowd. There are only a few of them and for the most part they live in each other’s pockets in that small building. Police stare at the ground or glare at somebody they can stand facing. Alternatively they might form groups so their eyes can be involved with each other rather than the people who may hate them with bitter passion or need them with soul-searing urgency. Another couple are clinging to each other and whispering. You wish that you could buy them a shower or that they would move away. An old man coughs and hawks and you wish you had access to a mask in case he is contagious. You look at his grey colour and wonder if he will die before court. You would not be surprised to find he was thinking the same thing. There is no “other” court for the sick or handicapped. All of the despair and indignity and physical travail this court places on the well it also places on the unwell. If you die in here they say oops and blame something else. It is not new. Crushed into the waiting room in the morning you are in a lucky dip for lice, influenza and a bunch of other things.
For me the problem was that I needed to pee. It is the diabetes and the crushed pelvis demanding attention. If you leave the seat at this point you lose it unless you have someone to keep it. The waiting room empties over the day and it is safe to leave your seat in the afternoon sessions. The toilets are on each side of a low, narrow, hallway in-between the actual court rooms. The men’s toilet is narrow and low-roofed. The door is heavy and requires some force to open. There are very few stalls or standing spaces and they are close together so that two men would be pressed against each other if they both peed at the same time. The place always seems to stink and you cannot put anything down on the shelves without wondering what diseases you are likely to pick up. It seems to be a part of the general attitude towards the people who face court. It feels like an afterthought that didn’t quite fit or that was left off the original plans and had to be pencilled into a space after the building started
To the right after you enter the waiting room and beyond the huge glass walls is a little waiting area that is open to the weather. It has enough seating for about three people (if I remember) and no cover. There is a sign on the wall by the door but it is too small to be read casually and no one does. The area is used rarely by lawyers who are unable to find an empty office. A few regular court goers know it is there for the use of the general public but almost nobody else knows of it. The doors that lead to it are heavy and often left locked. The only time I ever saw extensive use of them was by a staff member. In the plus forty degree centigrade heat of the hottest day on record somebody decided their office was too cold and so a woman stood with the doors open releasing all the cool air from the air-conditioning while she chatted on her mobile phone for almost forty minutes. The waiting room became unbearable and everyone sat in perspiration soaked clothes and a few needed help for heat prostration but somebody’s office was the temperature they preferred. Nobody wanted to risk their defence by upsetting a court worker so she was left to do her worst.
The main thing to look at in the room apart from the people is the television. In my apartment it would be an enormous screen but in front of a room large enough to be a squash court it is not. After a certain row of seats nobody with less than good sight can see much of what is on it. What is on it is a commercial channel that runs advertisements and moronic prattle at a machine gun rate. If there are more than a few people in the waiting room the television just adds strident nonsensical background noise to all it’s other unpleasantness. It is the mean calculated minimum that the court could place in the room and still say they had done anything at all. It is in keeping with the general air of the place.
At the front of the room on each corner are the machines for dispensing food and drink. They would be the most welcome things in the room but they are at the front! Up to two hundred bored people will watch every move and every mistake and judge every bite or sip you buy. Not very many people feel like putting themselves on show like that while they are in a court room situation and possibly facing the scariest or most embarrassing moments of their lives. The machines should be in the foyer where the lists are or at least at the back of the room so people who wish to skulk in private can still get a drink.
Along the far wall, in between the drink and food dispensers are the offices. They are in an area protected by columns and a low roof that creates a hallway in front of the seated crowd. Here is the place the lawyers pace and drag their clients. It is the entry to the court rooms proper and the offices. It is kept clear by force if necessary. It gives the crowd another centre of activity to watch. They sit facing the people entering and leaving. They can see the pleas or the anger in their eyes. There is no privacy here and not much dignity. The lawyers develop strategies to deal with the bank of eyes they face each time they open a door. They cannot leave a door open while they are interviewing lest the secrets escape as they will if a hundred people watch the faces of their clients as they tell their stories.
I think I remember that to the left of the hallway containing the toilets is the door to Court Room 2 and there is an office either side of that. The offices contain little more than filing cabinets, a desk and a couple of chairs. They are absolutely tiny and primitive. There is one more on the other side of the toilet hallway and that is matched across the door to Court Room 1 by an office for the representative of The Salvation Army. That is it. That is the public space at Wyong Local Court. A mingy undersized and inadequate building when it was new and which has become worse in time! It could compete with any building in the country for inadequacy and bad planning.
Entry to the court rooms proper sees one struck by a number of facts. First there are not enough court rooms to serve the crush of people being dragged in by minor Police matters. Then, in the morning, with the public seated in the individual courtrooms there is less than half of the seating that is needed. There are two racks of public seating squeezed together on either side of a wide aisle. The seats are close together in all directions and you can be sure that unless you are sitting by the wall you are going to get a face full of arse every time someone stands to move about. There is nowhere to work on your papers or study your notes and if you were to dare you might find yourself charged with contempt. This part of the world belongs to magistrates and is about their comfort.
There is a fancy wooden railing in front of the seating. It is the first sign of affluence and the first thing that is not an insulting minimalist effort. The room opens out from here. The desk for lawyers is of good quality and has very fancy plastic decanters with water in them. I can remember when they were glass. It has a few microphones and is of wood like the railing. When the courts first opened the lawyers were neatly and comfortably spaced along the rear of the table and there was enough seating. It is still that way in the afternoon. Quite often, in the morning, the lawyers line up like a squad of stuffed black jackets that overflow the desk in both directions. Their mountains of files crush each other into uselessness and so the morning is spent urgently trying to get them out of the room.
On either side of the lawyer’s desk are the witness boxes. Very few of us could afford elegant wooden structures like these so you know they are there to please the magistrate’s eyes rather than serving the accused although they may do both. Between the lawyers desk and the witness boxes are the standing microphones. I have stood before them despite the fact that I could barely stand at all.
The room continues to open and continues to become more affluent as though the whole reason for any of this is to keep the magistrates in well paid and comfortable state. They sit like kings surrounded by space and dispensing a desperate emergency rationing of law in the face of the overwhelming numbers that are placed before them. They process in an industrial conveyor belt style that allows almost no analysis of matters and encourages a kind of tyranny that destroys the souls of the people who enforce it and is carried by contagion to the people who are trapped in its maw.
After you have been chewed up in the system you turn to leave the building. Leaving the waiting room sets you back in the foyer. On the left is a single door with a glass pane that says something like Registrar’s Office. If you need to get a bond or pay a fine this is the door you need. It enters into a small space with a counter along the back. Behind the counter there is a deep space filled with a few desks spread about. If you stand at the counter and watch the desks it is difficult to see why they are laid out the way they are. The counter has signs on it although when there is more then one person at the counter everyone ignores them. There are four seats squeezed together along the wall closest to the foyer. They hold two comfortably. On a busy day there may be as many as twenty standing. Having obtained your papers a person heads through the small door with the glass pane, into the foyer and out the front door. Well no. There is a secondary door off to the left which is disguised as a pane of black glass. If you are looking there is a handwritten sign on a sheet of A4 paper that asks you to exit that way. It has been thus almost since the building opened