Who is Virginia Bell, the prospective royal commissioner?

2 months ago 16

Former High Court justice Virginia Bell is in the frame to lead the widely expected federal royal commission into the Bondi killings, but who is this eminent legal figure, and why does she have a profile on the entertainment database IMDB?

Bell, 74, has had a long and respected career in the law, including for more than a decade as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She got her start at the Redfern Legal Centre in the 1970s, became a public defender and was appointed as a judge on the NSW Supreme Court and Court of Appeal in March 1999.

Virginia Bell has been flagged by Labor figures as in the frame to lead a potential federal royal commission into the Bondi Beach massacre.

Along the way, she put her independent theatre school training to use and dabbled in television and radio, most notably as a guest on the ’80s nostalgia program, The Golden Years of Television, as alter-ego Ginger de Winter, president of the New South Wales Barrel Girls Association.

Dressed as her comedy character Ginger De Winter the barrel girl on the Channel Nine The Golden Years Television/

She also briefly hosted ABC’s Late Night Live.

Her unconventional broadcast dalliance has received plenty of attention since as she scaled the heights of the legal profession, as has what a long-term friend – journalist and author David Marr – calls a “ferocious sense of humour”.

The Winter 2009 edition of the NSW Bar Association’s newsletter, Bar News, commemorated Bell’s appointment to the High Court by admiring her distinguished career while paying homage to her colourful character, noting “she is rumoured to still be the artistic director of the Glebe Supper Club”, and recounting an anecdote of her Honour being carried into her 50th birthday, where a chorus of people dressed as cans of Sirena Tuna sang “I’m in the mornay”, referencing her favourite dish.

Marr profiled Bell for this masthead in 2012 when she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia, writing “she brought to the search for justice that drove both her career and her causes, a ferocious sense of humour and scorn for moral grandstanding”.

Her time at the Redfern Legal Centre was spent “representing the poor, campaigning for prison reform, marching against injustice while remaining, somehow, the most respectable demonstrator in the crowd,” he said.

A University of Wollongong profile of Bell said she represented the dozens of people arrested at the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1978 and prepared a video for the following year’s march advising people how to avoid arrest.

The daughter of a navy captain, Bell grew up in part on the Garden Island naval base in Sydney. John Bell told The Australian that as a child she was “a bit impetuous and very much of an inquiring mind, always”.

Bell became the fourth woman to be appointed to the High Court in 2009, and the court’s 48th judge.

She later quipped that entering the legal profession at a time when the bench lacked female representation “had the capacity to make women advocates feel somewhat exotic, even if they weren’t rumoured to be go-go dancers”.

Her reputation as having a strong sense of social justice made her an appropriate replacement to the High Court for Justice Michael Kirby, who was known for his interest in human rights, professor George Williams of the University of NSW said at the time. She was “one of the most experienced and well-regarded criminal lawyers,” he said.

Bell served on the High Court for 12 years, and she is no stranger to royal commissions, government inquiries, or presiding over the case of a religiously motivated attack.

Bell assisted as counsel to the Wood Royal Commission into NSW police corruption between 1994 and 1997, and in 2022 led the inquiry into former prime minister Scott Morrison’s scandalous self-appointment to several ministries, after which she said his actions were “corrosive of trust in government”.

Virginia Bell addressing an abortion rights rally in 1994, before she became a judge.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said she was “an eminent individual with an extensive and diverse legal career” when he appointed her to head that inquiry.

In 2014, Bell was on the bench when the High Court rejected an appeal made by two men who planned to shoot as many Australian soldiers as possible on a Sydney army base because they believed Islam was under attack from the West.

Justice Virginia Bell at the official farewell ceremony when she left the NSW Court of Appeal for the High Court.

The pair had been convicted in the Victorian Supreme Court of conspiring to commit a terrorist attack, SBS reported at the time.

Bell and then chief justice Robert French, who has publicly called for a royal commission following the Bondi killings, upheld the decision, despite lawyers appealing it should have been open to the jury to find that one of the men had only been reckless when he asked a sheikh whether the planned attack would be in line with Islamic teaching.