The boy from the west recounts to Cameron Tait some of his biggest and most cherished victories as a lawyer.
PETER Gordon has come a long way since, as a teenage schoolboy, was almost expelled for writing a satirical essay about his teachers.
Today, he sits high above Collins Street in his legal firm’s office, where windows offer views across the city. He peers over to the western suburbs, not only his childhood home, but where he launched what would become a highly decorated legal career.
Memorabilia highlighting one of his great loves, the Footscray Football Club, sits proudly on the wall.
Since conducting the first successful asbestos-related cancer claim in 1984, Gordon has become internationally renowned for his work on landmark legal cases, including Australia’s first successful litigation over medically acquired HIV/AIDS. Damages were awarded to 470 people who contracted the disease as a result of blood transfusions in the early 1980s.
A lawyer then partner at Slater and Gordon for 30 years, Gordon helped fight the OK Tedi environmental case against BHP and, in 2001, concluded a world-first settlement over 3000 Dow Corning breast implant claims.
He acted on behalf of a class action against a German drug manufacturer over the sale of thalidomide, with a multi-million settlement last month to more than 100 Australian survivors.
Gordon drove the Fightback campaign, which saved Footscray from a proposed merger with Fitzroy in 1989. Then 32, he remains one of the youngest ever VFL/AFL club presidents.
He led the club until October 1996, when a group of businessmen led by current chairman David Smorgon took control.
Born in West Footscray, he grew up in a modest three-bedroom weatherboard house in Palmerston Street, a few drop punts from the Western Oval. A dyed-in-the-wool Bulldog, Gordon and his mates were regular fixtures in the outer — rain, hail or shine.
‘‘On Saturday mornings, I would pride myself on being the first one into the ground.
‘‘I was only about 10 or 11, but we would go to Moorabbin, Windy Hill and Glenferrie Oval and watch our team get smashed week after week.’’
His father worked as a clerk at the Tottenham RAAF base and his mother a sales assistant at Footscray department store Waltons.
At Braybrook’s St John’s College, Gordon met Rob Stary. They became firm friends and in 1978 started the Western Suburbs Legal Service while studying law at Melbourne University.
‘‘He [Stary] was always a bit politicised,’’ Gordon says, ‘‘but I became quite radical as a left-winger, resentful of the kids who went to Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar and what I perceived as the way they looked down on kids like us [from the western suburbs].
‘‘There were some [volunteer-based] legal services around at the time, but they were in ‘trendy’ places like Fitzroy, being run by the cool kids who smoked dope and ran the student union.
‘‘Our view was the real need for legal services was for the poor, in areas such as Newport and Footscray.’’
But there was resistance from local solicitors.
‘‘For them, the idea of people coming in giving free legal advice was somehow a threat to the integrity of the profession.’’
Gordon had hoped to get a scholarship to study teaching, but it was not to be.
‘‘Neither myself nor my sister ever aspired to the idea of becoming a doctor or a lawyer because it wasn’t something kids from West Footscray did,” he says.
‘‘It wasn’t until a teacher at St John’s, Rowan McIndoe, who came from Scotch and went on to be a magistrate, said: ‘You’re not somebody who has to limit their aspirations, you can do law’.
By the time he completed his law degree, Gordon had been giving pro-bono advice via the legal service for two years.
‘‘I was arrogant enough to think I was in a much better position to give competent advice than lawyers twice my age,” he recalls.
‘‘But when it came to getting a job, I held the view that I was from the wrong side of tracks and no reputable firm would employ a kid from St John’s College, Braybrook.’’
Without his father’s intervention, Gordon’s career with Slater and Gordon may never have happened.
‘‘I wrote applications to law firms, going through the Yellow Pages, starting at A and by the end of the day I had reached R.
‘‘My dad, who had been watching me, got a copy of my standard letter and did R to W, so he did S, including Slater and Gordon.
‘‘They were one of only two firms to give me an interview and my only job offer.
‘‘They turned out to be this radical, left-wing firm doing workers’ compensation claims and populated almost entirely by people who were covertly members of the Communist Party.
‘‘We were trained by leaders of that firm that there was a legal dimension to law, but also a political dimension. We were struggling for poor and disenfranchised people against the big end of town.’’
In the mid-1980s, Gordon, Stary and Paul Grant — now president of the Victorian Children’s Court — ran a Slater and Gordon office in Footscray.
‘‘It went gangbusters,’’ he says.
‘‘We had no airs or graces and quickly developed a reputation in the local community as guys to talk to who didn’t have tickets on themselves and who you could just come and talk to.’’
Gordon admits his views on the rich-poor divide have mellowed.
‘‘Growing up, I had the idea that we lived in the ‘deprived west’ and that somehow people had it better elsewhere.
‘‘But, as you get older, travel and experience other cultures, you realise the differences in kids from one suburb to the next are not as great as you once thought.
‘‘I’m glad I don’t have the parochial ‘us against them’ attitude that I once did, because I think that was immature’’.
While taking on the likes of the James Hardie, CSR and British American Tobacco, would be enough to send most lawyers ducking for cover — not Gordon.
But he still had moments of trepidation.
‘‘If somebody is genuinely not intimidated at taking on a federal government, the tobacco industry or Dow Corning, they need psychiatric help.
‘‘It’s daunting to go up against people with unlimited resources. Not every case has a happy ending and my career has been peppered with outcomes I don’t feel good about.’’
While splitting his time across three states as part of an absestos claim against CSR and starting work on the HIV/AIDS case, Gordon was running Save the Dogs, a group dedicated to ensuring Footscray stayed at the Western Oval.
One night in October 1989, he received a call from Bulldogs chief executive Dennis Galimberti, who dropped a bombshell.
‘‘He told me: ‘You need to know that tomorrow they’re going to announce the destruction of the Footscray Football Club’,’’ Gordon recalls.
Following a hastily convened meeting, Gordon gathered together a group of supporters, including Tim Guinnane — now a County Court judge — and they set about trying to save their beloved Bulldogs.
Taking the Victorian Football League to court, they were given 21 days to raise $1.8 million and prove the club could be solvent.
A supporters’ rally was organised for the Western Oval two days later — Sunday, October 8.
‘‘The line from the VFL was: ‘We’re going to give you [the club] just enough rope to hang yourselves’.
‘‘On the day of the rally, it was drizzling with rain and at 6am I picked up the Sunday Age and they had published a letter from [VFL chief executive] Ross Oakley saying rather than $1.8 million we now had to raise $5 million.
‘‘It was a deliberately crafted piece of propaganda designed to make people not come to the rally.
‘‘Fifteen minutes before it started there was almost nobody there — it looked catastrophic. But, in the blink of an eye, we had somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 there.’’
Gordon’s rousing speech to the crowd has become legendary.
‘‘I started with a line from a Midnight Oil song: ‘It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees’.
‘‘I announced the board, the new coach and I remember the wall of sound that hit me when I welcomed out the Footscray team for 1990.
‘‘I didn’t think twice to stick it to those blokes [the VFL] to get the result we needed.
‘‘I didn’t always think it was possible [to save the club] but was determined to give it my absolute best shot. If we were going down, I wanted to go down swinging.’’
Asked whether he would ever rejoin the club in an official capacity, Gordon leans back and pauses — deep in thought. ‘‘If ever I thought its existence was threatened … I would do it.’’
