This is a true story but in accordance with the Family Court rules any identifying information such as names and locations have been changed.

So I waited.  Not a day going by without thinking about the daughter to be.

About 10 weeks later I get a phone call from a mate – “Hi Mike.  Congratulations!!” “Um what for?” – I replied.  “Oh don’t tell me you don’t know yet!  I just met your baby daughter – Andrea was showing her off at work!”

No I didn’t know.  Around the same time I got an email from another friend who had also met my daughter saying I must be proud to have such a healthy and gorgeous looking baby.  It seemed I was going to be the last one told about the arrival.  A couple of days later I got an email with a couple of photo’s attached from Andrea with details of weight, time and date of birth.  I replied asking when I could see her and was told not yet as she was “too young.”  I bit my tongue and didn’t say “well she is old enough to travel 100km and see everyone in town!”  I was also told her name which wasn’t any of the ones we had discussed when Andrea and I were together.

This type of communication was a portend of what was to come.

Two months after Maxine was born Andrea finally agreed to me seeing her as long as it was in a public place.  I was told to meet in a cafe close to where she lived and about 50km up the Coast from where I was living.  That first meeting with Maxine I will never forget.  I held her in my arms and one of my favourite pictures of Maxine and I was of that scene.  She fell asleep in my arms with her little hand clamped around one of my fingers and that was captured in the photo.

There is an endless debate about nature and nurture and maybe it is a little trick of baby girls but she looked at me with and inquisitive look chewing the inside of her left cheek a mannerism that I often display.  Looking back at pictures of her and I as babies and you would swear we were twins.  This observation wasn’t lost on her mother!  The colour of her hair was also the similar to mine when I was a baby.

The meeting last for just under an hour.  I asked when I could see my daughter again and was told that she would “let me know.”

Over the next couple of weeks I asked and asked to see my daughter again to no avail and so, sadly although not unexpected, I went back to the lawyer.  By this stage I had taken the time to avail myself of the intricacies of the Family Court and had read the Care of Children Act 2004 from cover to cover and back again.  I had even digested “most” of the Family Court rules.  When I say “most” well nearly all but the Family Court rule book (basically a procedure manual for the court) has thousands of rules many out of date and irrelevant.

So off to the lawyer.  Remember the moment you have signed the engagement contract with a lawyer the meter starts running in normally 6 minute increments.  The lawyer (hereafter referred to as LawyerA) I had been referred to was supposedly the best and her hourly rate reflected that.

“Well,” said LawyerA, “we need to establish first that you are a legal guardian and if not apply to the court to make you one.”

Having read the Act I immediately told LawyerA that according to Section 17 (2) (b) the mother and I were living together in a de facto relationhip when the child was conceived and for the first 7 months of the pregnancy.  Also according to Section 18 I am identifed as the father on the birth certificate.  I only needed to meet one of those conditions to be classified as a “legal guardian.”

The year this conversation took place was 2006 and the Act had been in place already for two years.  LawyerA said she had to check what I said and reached for the Act to read it.  An alarm bell went off immediately – top lawyer needs to check Act for something as simple as this? 

This was the first sign of one of the issues with the Family Court.  COCA 2004 was a significant change in approach to how the guardianship rights of both children and parents were established.  Prior to that the Guardianship Act 1968 was the governing legislation.  Children under the Guardianship Act were viewed as the “property of the parents” and the key terms were “custody and access to the child.”  COCA changed this viewpoint to one of where the “rights of the child were paramount” i.e. the child came first and a child was entitled to have “care and contact” with both parents.  Unfortunately, as I was to learn over the next 14 years, many of the “actors” in the Family Justice system were stuck in the 1968 Act.  Lawyers, Judges, Registrars, Case Managers and Court staff.

Back to LawyerA now that we had established I was a legal guardian.  “Well”, she said, “this is how things will proceed.  We will write to the mother’s lawyers requesting that we negotiate a care and contract arrangement.  Given the type of lawyers the mother has chosen we will expect an aggressive negative response.  They will make claims that you are unsuitable to have care and contact with your daughter and well it will become an expensive moving feast.  It will be a long and stressful journey.  Are you prepared for that?” 

OF COURSE I WAS!  I had a beautiful daughter and I wanted to play an active part in her life!  Not only did I want to be involved I wanted “shared care.”

So LawyerA wrote to the other Lawyers and sure enough an aggressive response came back.  They were accusing me of domestic violence (remember the father-in-law shove – well that was now a beating) and severe mental illness (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) therefore I was “totally unsuitable to have any care and contact with my daughter” let alone shared care.  Pretty strong stuff but in their defence they were only working on behalf of their client and the information they were getting. 

What followed was another couple of letters and phone discussions between Lawyers.  A couple of weeks passed and it was apparent that the only course open to me was to apply to the Family Court for a Parenting Order.  I got my next bill from LawyerA – $2,300 – now up to $3,000 in legal expenses and hadn’t even got off base!  I started to look at LawyerA a little differently as there was no way I could afford what was looking like a full on legal battle.  The clincher was when she told me that this could go on for months and months before I got to see my daughter and it was very very unlikely that I would get “shared care.”  It was at this point I made the decision to represent myself.  I had now become the Self Litigant Respondent!  

Cost to Date:  $3,000
Contact time with Daughter: 1 hour