A former professional ballerina and daughter of a British World War II tank commander, Gillian Triggs is an unusual blend of poise and power, as Immigration Minister Scott Morrison is discovering.
In her own impeccably polite way, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission this week more or less called Morrison a liar, insisting his claim that children in detention received daily care was not true and that he needed to be "better advised". With her polished vowels and perfect diction, the 68-year-old Triggs is shaping up as perhaps the Minister's most powerful foe, a woman of formidable intellect whose unlikely career and personal tribulations have honed an instinct for human suffering and the rights of the neglected.
"When I was younger, I thought one could build on the past," says Triggs, who worked in the 1960s at the Dallas Police Department, where she advised the Chief of Police on civil rights legislation. "But I have learned that we need to be eternally vigilant in ensuring human rights in a modern democracy."
Triggs was born in London, in 1945. Her parents had been in the war, her mother in the Royal Navy, and her father, Richard, as a tank commander in North Africa ("he was personally responsible for destroying Rommel's army," Triggs says). After the war, Richard returned to his family's jewellery business, but life in London was grim: TB was rife, and so in 1958, they migrated, with Gillian's younger sister, Carol, to Melbourne.
"I was furious," Triggs says. "I didn't want to come at all, because I was a professional ballet student. That was my whole life - every afternoon and all weekend I was at ballet. To come to Australia was an appalling idea, and I thought my parents were dreadful."
Despite being "dragged, kicking and screaming" onto the passenger ship, the journey to Australia proved unexpectedly formative. "We passed through the Suez Canal, just after the French and English had taken it over, and there were guns everywhere, and then through the poverty in Aden and Cairo and Colombo. As a girl, I was just amazed by this."
The family settled in Melbourne, a city whose isolation could have been proved terminal. And yet Triggs never saw it that way. "As a result of the exposure I'd had on the trip out, I was much less frightened by the prospect of going overseas, to the US, say, because to me, the world was there to be in. I didn't see my world as tiny little Melbourne; I always saw myself as part of this much bigger world."
Triggs went to university – the first in her family to do so - studying law at the University of Melbourne. "Out of 350 students, there were only 15 or 20 women," she says. "So we sat in the front row in twin sets and pearls and wrote everything down and never said anything."
Even after graduation, women were regarded as "pretty frivolous," Triggs says. "It was assumed that you would do it for a few years then have children and go away. But of course, that didn't happen in my generation; we all said, 'Right, now we are in it, we are going to make it work.' "
Because of her disillusionment with the law as it was then practised – "nasty, fault based divorce and that kind of stuff" - Triggs chose to specialise in international law, a subject regarded as peripheral at best. "The core stuff was company and tax and constitutional law," she says. "But there I was studying the UN and offshore oil and gas and who owned Antarctica."
As the years went on, however, Triggs' choice came to seem prescient. "What happened was that as the world became globalised and the UN became more powerful, international law became central to everything. International treaties were being negotiated in the thousands - bilateral and regional treaties, trade treaties. There was the WTO, human rights law, international environmental law, climate change, you name it. The whole game changed."
Compared to say, commercial law, such a career was hardly a road to riches ("Gillian has never been motivated by money," her sister Carol Johnston says), but it certainly landed her in some strange places, like the Dallas Police Department. She had won a scholarship to study in Texas, where she intended to do her masters in international trade and human rights law. But the scholarship money didn't go very far, so she got a summer internship at the department.
"Back then, there weren't that many young Texan lawyers who wanted to take a job with the police," she explains. "Most college graduates wanted to go into big commercial firms, and so it wasn't hard getting the clerkship."
Because of the attention brought by President Kennedy's killing, six years before, Dallas's Police Department was squeaky clean. But it was hardly a paragon of diversity. "There was one woman and two blacks working there," Triggs says. "The Chief of Police wanted to change that, especially in light of the civil rights legislation that had been passed in 1964. But he needed someone to interpret that legislation, which was federal, as it applied to his department."
Enter Triggs, whose reading of the legislation so impressed the chief that he took her on permanently, even securing federal money to pay her salary for the next two years.
After returning from Dallas in 1976, Triggs completed a PhD in territorial sovereignty at Melbourne University, before spending nine weeks in Antarctica as part of the Australian government's Antarctic Science Advisory Council, where she helped cut up old oil pipelines and was reprimanded by the station chief for taking an unauthorised walk into the wilds.
Later she worked as a barrister and in commercial law in Asia, and in London and Paris (where she was accompanying her second husband, Alan Brown, the then Australian Ambassador to France). She has written five books, mostly on international law and human rights, and headed up some frightfully august legal bodies, including the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, where she directed social justice projects in Iran and Africa, and the Sydney University Law School, where she was dean until 2012.
"Gillian has a unique blend of experience," says Professor Peter Cashman, who worked with Triggs at Sydney University. "It's part academic, practical and managerial. She also helped us raise funds, which isn't always easy, and to modernise our social justice programs."
The first thing you notice about Triggs, aside from her pale honey coloured hair and pearl earrings, are her manners, which are mesmerising and create a force field of niceness, a form of very agreeable mind control. After half an hour with Triggs, it's possible to imagine doing virtually anything for her, which is another way of saying she is a natural born leader
Such charm, if you can call it that, has come in handy at the Australian Human Rights Commission. Established in 1986 as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the AHRC is a statutory body that promotes and protects human rights in Australia through advocacy and awareness programs, and by resolving individual complaints. (Before going to court, all complaints under anti-discrimination law must come to the Commission, where an attempt is made at conciliation.) The Commission receives about 17,000 such complaints a year, everything from Facebook name-calling to over-70s upset at having to pay more for their trshavel insurance to the most offensive kinds of race hatred. It's the Commission's job to stand in the middle, like the grown-up in the playground, trying to get everyone to make up and play nice.
Triggs only took up the job in 2012, and soon drew criticism, most notably over freedom of speech, an area that conservatives claim the Commission has all but abandoned. Of particular concern was the debate over the draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, which defines racial discrimination as conduct that "offends" or "insults." Triggs offered qualified support for the bill's "offence" and "insult" provision, seeing it as a kind of speed bump that prevents an escalation into outright vilification. But her stance enraged conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, who found it "extraordinary that [the Commission] is cheering on restrictions while it should be fighting for liberty." Attorney General Senator George Brandis is less inflammatory, claiming the Commission has a left wing ideological bias "in choosing some rights over others," while Simon Breheny, from the Institute of Public Affairs, says Triggs has quite simply "failed... The trouble with the Human Rights Commission," Breheny says, "is that it picks and chooses particular victim groups, from racial minorities to the aged. But everyone is entitled to human rights; it shouldn't matter if you come from a particular group."
In a sense, Brandis and Breheny are right: the Commission does pick and choose, but only because it has to. As a taxpayer-funded body it has limited resources, and must therefore focus on the areas of greatest need, of which freedom of speech is not one. (Out of 17,000 complaints to the Commission in 2012, just four concerned freedom of speech.)
A more pressing concern, as far as Triggs is concerned, is mandatory detention. "This goes all the way back to the Magna Carta principle, in 1215, that a man may not be detained arbitrarily without charge or trial by his peers," she says.
Triggs finds children in detention "particularly distressing". In late 2012, Triggs visited Villawood Detention Centre, where she met with a 33-year-old Sri Lankan mother of three called Ranjini. "[Ranjini] had been in the community, working and shopping and living like anyone else, and then she was suddenly arrested because ASIO judged her to be a security risk," Triggs says. "That may be true, but she can't go to court to challenge that, so she is consigned to detention without end, along with her children. When I first met her, she burst into tears the minute I said hello, and she cried all the way through our interview. Her boys, they have to go to school each day through the security gates. Nobody," she says, "can see that and not be affected."
Triggs keeps her failures, if there are any, well hidden, and it seems all but impossible to find anyone willing to say a bad word about her. Her sister describes her as being "incredibly focussed", "fashion conscious" to boot (she was Miss Melbourne University in 1965), and almost serenely poised. When I ask if she has ever seen her sister lose her cool, Johnston pauses: "No, actually, I don't think I ever have."
But not everything has gone to plan. Triggs's first marriage, to Melbourne senior counsel Prof Sandy Clark, ended in 1989. They had three children; James, who is 34 and working as a commercial lawyer in Paris, Alexandra, 32, who is an art/design teacher in Melbourne, and Victoria, who was born in 1984, profoundly disabled, with a rare chromosomal disorder known as Edwards Syndrome. "Victoria was as severely retarded as anyone who is still alive can be," Triggs says. "Her condition usually results in the death of the baby before or shortly after birth. In fact, the doctors kept saying, 'Just leave her in the corner and she'll die.' So, it sounds terrible, but I'd look at Victoria and think, 'Well, you're going to die, so I'm not going to invest too much in you.' But she didn't die. She had this inner rod of determination, and she simply refused to die."
At about six months of age, Triggs and Clark took Victoria home, and, with the help of the Uniting Church, found a family who took over her primary care. (Victoria died eight years ago, at the age of 21.) When I ask Triggs if this arrangement bothered her, she says: "Yes, because you have child and you expect to look after her. But in the end I simply made the judgement that I would rather put my time into my other children and family, because I also never believed she would live to that age."
People tend to think of international law, and to an extent, human rights law, as abstract and conceptual. Triggs is aware of this: she acknowledges that the Commission must do better at stressing the relevance of its own work, which goes beyond principle and deep into our everyday lives. "There are all kinds of discrimination that we've dug up that are built into the system," she says. "Like the fact that employers say to over 50s, look, you're CV is terrific but we're really looking for a younger girl who is a bit more nifty. Or that fact that in Queensland 17-year-old can be put in adult prisons or the fact that there are still people getting abused at work for wearing the hijab."
Triggs remains opaque about her politics, describing herself as "a small l liberal" but also a "swinging voter depending on the competence to govern." She says she "deeply believes in human rights, and in a rule of law approach": as part of the Law Council of Australia she has given advice on the illegality of holding people without trial at Guantanamo, and also on the invalidity of the "Coalition of the Willing's" invasion of Iraq. And yet there are those, such as Senator George Brandis, who would hope to second guess her. "My sense is that she's more conservative than her predecessor, and therefore more open to cultural change at the Commission," Brandis said last year.
Triggs sees her current role as a chance to fight the good fight. But it's also personal. "Australia has been fantastic to me, and to my family. I still remember the first day I woke up here as a 12-year-old. I looked out the window and saw orange trees and kookaburras and brilliant sunshine. The promise of this country was real for us... This job," she says, "is one way to give back some of that."
A version of this profile originally appeared in the Sydney Magazine in April 2013.
