Kevin Anderson was appointed magistrate and coroner in 1964 and deputy chief magistrate from 1979 until his retirement in 1987.

He was one of the most sensible and intelligent magistrates I ever appeared before as a solicitor, and he made significant contributions to public policy over the course of his career. Post retirement he forged a life across Greece, Switzerland and Australia.

Kevin’s sense of justice went back quite a way. Very early in his career, he was one of the few judicial officers who exercised his statutory right to visit a prison, in this case Grafton, because he had heard disturbing rumours of the screws terrible brutality towards prisoners. His visit may well have been a rare day when those prisoners were saved from the regular bashings.

Kevin grew up in a small house in Duke Street, East Balmain, which runs off Darling Street opposite what is now the East Village Hotel, formerly the Commercial Hotel. That was the pub that Kevin’s father, Sid, was barred from for fighting the one person you should never fight in a pub: the publican.

Kevin survived the rigours of a Catholic schooling, firstly at Christian Brothers Lewisham, which was next door to the nursing home that cared so well for him in the last few years.

At Christian Brothers, he won a bursary to board at St Stanislaus’ College, Bathurst. Fellow retired beak Rex Butler, who attended St Stanislaus at the same time, told me recently that Kevin was a very good rugby union player and had played in the school’s first XV when he was in fourth and fifth year.

When Kevin used to watch rugby with me on TV, he never mentioned his fine rugby history. This was very Kevin: enjoy, accomplish, move on.

After leaving school, he decided to study law and did what many impecunious Catholic boys did and joined the Attorney General’s Department.

He worked as a court clerk in Sydney and in various country local courts while studying the non-university route to a legal qualification.

He became a very efficient deps clerk with fast typing speeds. These were the clerks who directly transcribed the evidence given in court on a clunky typewriter.

He took the deps in the 1960 committal proceedings against Stephen Leslie Bradley, who infamously kidnapped and murdered schoolboy Graeme Thorne; this included recording what Kevin believed were ‘verbals’ in the evidence of the extraditing police (Bradley had been caught in Sri Lanka), as well as pioneering expert scientific evidence about the origin of a rug that connected Bradley to the victim’s body.

Kevin married and raised six interesting children, with whom he always remained very close.

In 1965, shortly after being appointed to the bench, Kevin arrived at work at Sydney’s Central Court in Liverpool Street only to be sent to the Coroners’ Court, then situated in George Street in The Rocks.

He was to fill in for the coroner, John Loomes, who had unexpectedly called in sick.

That day was the opening of the inquest into the death of underworld figure Ducky O’Connor at Sydney’s Latin Quarter nightclub.

On the night of his death, the deceased had been in the club, sitting near notorious gangster Lennie McPherson, known in the media as “Mr Big”, and the two had been exchanging verbal abuse.

Two detectives were seated nearby. The lights went out, shots were fired, and a gun was found near O’Connor’s corpse.

At the inquest, the police pressed the coroner for a bizarre determination that O’Connor had shot himself while trying to kill McPherson.

Although forensically inexperienced, Kevin soon realised that the fix was in. Getting no assistance from the police prosecutor appointed to assist him, it was only through his own cross-examination of witnesses that he was able to make an open finding, no doubt to the chagrin of the coppers and McPherson.

Being an honest beak in those days was not for the faint-hearted.

Committal proceedings relating to the famous Bottom of the Harbour tax evasion scheme went on for a very long time. One of the defendants, accountant John Wynyard, had terminal cancer and was representing himself.

After an adjournment of some weeks, the prosecutor informed the court that Wynyard had died and withdrew the charges against him. In an unusually gracious response from the bench, Kevin commended the deceased on the way he had conducted himself in very difficult circumstances.

Kevin presided over the committal proceedings in the famous Bounty Oil case brought against colourful barrister Laurence Gruzman QC and businessmen Alexander and Thomas Barton, which ended up in the High Court.

He also presided over the long-running and controversial inquest into the Ghost Train fire at Luna Park in 1979, where he made an open finding.

In 2021, an ABC documentary made wide-ranging allegations of corruption, criminality and conspiracy against many prominent people. Kevin had the good sense to decline to participate in the program, but he thought the TV series was particularly exploitative of the still grieving parents as well as the decent but ageing retired police prosecutor who had assisted his inquest.

He was also unimpressed by the reliance on uncorroborated evidence from a gangster’s moll. As a result of the program, the current coroner had police conduct a full and detailed reinvestigation, which I am reliably informed was critical of the program.

That report has now been with the current coroner for over three years, with no decision about reopening the inquest, something Kevin was very interested to know, but now never will.

Artist Martin Sharp had taken a close interest in the fire and had his own eccentric religious and numerological conspiracy theories about it.

After the inquest concluded, Sharp met with Kevin and, agreeing to disagree about the fire, they struck up a friendship and occasionally kept in touch.

In 2010, ABC Radio broadcast an hour-long program about Martin’s strange spirituality, which included a generous interview with Kevin.

Kevin Anderson presided over the criminal fraud proceedings against famous media agent Harry M. Miller in 1980, who was ultimately gaoled.

A striking journalist and trade unionist had a happier outcome. While on a picket line, he was charged with offensive behaviour over what was said to a non-unionist who crossed the picket line as a strike breaker.

Kevin told me: “I found that it was not ‘unseemly words’ to call a scab ‘a bloody scab’.”

Over the years, he became increasingly concerned about injustices to the powerless.

In 1978, he was horrified to read in the Nagle report into NSW prisons of the routine injustices to prisoners who were charged with prison discipline offences – the maximum penalty for these was 14 days’ solitary confinement in their cell.

This could be doubled to 28 days if two justices conducted a hearing. Some dubious magistrates were getting a deps clerk (there to record the evidence) who was also a justice of the peace to co-preside in order to double the penalty.

Kevin interceded to take over the conduct of these hearings, and justice without cruelty prevailed.

As a magistrate, he participated in an important pilot scheme with the Public Solicitor’s office to provide legal representation for mentally ill patients whose doctors sought to detain them against their will. These proceedings had a sorry history of injustices.

The success of legal representation in each of these projects facilitated the establishment of the Mental Health Advocacy Service and the Prisoners’ Legal Service within the Legal Aid Commission.

These initiatives have successfully provided specialised representation to patients in all the state’s psychiatric hospitals and to prisoners for the last 40 years.

Kevin’s magisterial career was quite varied and took him to jurisdictions where few magistrates ventured.

From 1969 to 1974, he was Chief Mining Warden. This involved granting or refusing mining leases, a task more important than it may now sound, as there were often disputes about serious environmental issues and many millions of dollars involved, with representation by top silks who were on their way to the Supreme or High courts.

I am not aware he was ever overturned in any appeal.

In the 1970s, he became increasingly interested in civil liberties issues. He attended functions held by the Council for Civil Liberties, and it was at one of their barbecues in the mid 1970s that I first met him.

At the time, the CCL was a very important agitator against police perjury, bashings and perversions of justice. Many of its activist members became judges.

Kevin also discovered the Criterion Hotel on Friday evenings, where an interesting collection of civil libertarians, left-wing trade unionists, lawyers, academics and journalists, as well as a group of free thinkers called the Sydney Push, gathered to drink and talk.

He attended most Friday evenings and became friendly with various patrons who appealed to his long-standing curiosity and thirst for ideas. Eventually, we each owned many bricks in that pub.

From 1981 to 1983, he was the chair of NCOSS, the NSW Council of Social Services, which was then a significant lobbying and social policy organisation that agitated in support of the disadvantaged.

Kevin also exerted an active and positive influence in gaining statutory independence for the magistracy and ensuring that the worst of the old-style public service magistrates were not appointed to the new independent Local Court in 1983.

He also mentored and encouraged meritorious lawyers from outside the Local Court system, especially women, to consider applying for appointment as magistrates. He was implacably opposed to magistrates wearing robes, which he regarded as likely to encourage magisterial pomposity.

As a magistrate, Kevin had little difficulty in finding a reasonable doubt where one existed, and saw little utility in imprisonment, especially given the less serious matters magistrates then dealt with.

Unlike a lot of the conservative beaks, who regularly drank with the coppers, Kevin preferred the company of defence lawyers, particularly those working in Legal Aid, which they especially appreciated given the antagonism towards them from influential private solicitors who were often close to the coppers.

After his mother died, Kevin was shocked to find a very old court document among some family papers. It was a court order imprisoning his father Sid, then a young child, in the notorious prison ship for children, The Sabroan, which was moored in Sydney Harbour. Sid had been convicted of the crime of vagrancy for riding at night in the garbage truck with the Balmain garbos, whom he had befriended.

Sid escaped from this prison ship and took off to Queensland. This may give a clue to Kevin’s long-term interest in swimming.

He said his father, like many working-class Balmain men, used to say: “Once a policeman, never a man!”

It may be no coincidence that Kevin’s older brother, the late Jack Anderson, who was also a magistrate, performed his judicial functions in a similarly humane way to Kevin.

It was during the time of the Wran government that Kevin’s broader public policy talents were called upon, giving him some positive influence in the state’s social justice system.

In 1976, Attorney General Frank Walker established an inquiry into the NSW bail laws following the murder of a bank manager by Phillip Weston, who had absconded while on bail (and was subsequently shot dead by Roger Rogerson). 

The inquiry was conducted by Kevin and legal academic Susan Armstrong. The recommendations in their groundbreaking report, which included a presumption in favour of bail, were adopted and legislated.

For some years, NSW had the most sensible and liberal bail laws in the country, with no adverse consequences, and reduced the growth of the prison population. These reforms were repealed by the Greiner government.

He became a member of the statutory NSW Corrective Services Advisory Council from 1979 to 1986, and was also its Acting Chair.

When the Community Justice Centres were set up as a free service to mediate disputes, Kevin was appointed the inaugural chair, serving from 1979 to 1984, and steered the organisation through some rough political waters to get the centres established, particularly given the hostility of some solicitors to the concept.

For over 40 years, this initiative was able to head off much unnecessary litigation to the satisfaction of the parties in dispute. The CJCs were truncated by state government parsimony in 2025.

In 1985, he became an influential member of the Women in Prisons Task Force within the Premier’s Department, which was concerned with better treatment of women prisoners.

In 1975, Kevin’s career was almost totally reinvented. On November 12, the Whitlam cabinet was scheduled to consider a number of initial appointments to the new Family Court of Australia, and his name was among them.

However, the Governor General sacked Whitlam the day before, and that was the end of that new career.

Kevin retired after 23 years as a magistrate. He was not afforded a formal retirement ceremony in the Court, so he organised a great big party at Central Court one Friday night and invited all his friends. It was the antithesis of the building’s usual daytime forensic activity.

He used to say that when he retired he would go and live on a Greek Island, which his friends regarded as a worthy fantasy. He had long been inspired by the writing and lives of George Johnson and Charmian Clift, and was reinforced by his later friendship with their son, the poet Martin Johnson.

He certainly had a lust for travelling to exotic places. Upon retiring, he took off to participate in a work brigade in Nicaragua. Two friends, Rod Madgwick and Professor Tony Broe, were undertaking a much more comfortable private trip there at the time, and they found the farm where he was working, picking beans.

He had lost much weight. When asked what his food was like, he replied that eating beans for every meal was very limiting but added positively, “Sometimes we get some tinned sardines to add to them, which makes them taste much better”.

Around this time, Kevin also spent seven weeks travelling around India with me.

Thereafter, he started seriously looking for a suitable Greek island, and checked out quite a few, finally deciding on Sifnos in the Cyclades, which many Australian friends were to visit over the years.

He bought a fabulous traditional Greek fishing boat, the Kapitan Georgio, which became his seventh child. It had a fine diesel engine as well as two sails and two bunks. He took many of us on wonderful voyages around Sifnos and to nearby islands. As a former crew member, I can attest to the excellence of his captaincy.

He was a keen swimmer, and he put all the swimming practice he got at Sydney’s Northbridge Baths to very good use on Sifnos. He also meticulously renovated two houses, each hundreds of years old – one from rubble.

On Sifnos, he met and fell in love with a Swiss social worker, Margarita Windlin, who became his partner for almost four decades.

Henceforth, he divided his time between Sifnos, Luzern and Sydney, while also exploring many corners of continental Europe with the multilingual Margarita.

On Sifnos, I met some of his intriguing local friends, including a retired Greek ambassador; a retired UN interpreter; a prominent New York architect; and Jeanne Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyle, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and ex-wife of Norman Mailer.

He became fluent in Greek, liked to drink retsina, and eventually became accepted by the locals as one of them. This old beak went very Greek.

It has been said that a eulogy is written from the same template as a plea of guilty, the only difference being that one should not conclude by saying “don’t send him to prison”.

So I will end by saying: This Renaissance man, with his amazing capacity to reinvent himself, had a very long life, and lived it so very well.

Kevin Sidney Anderson, OAM, 1929-2026

Tom Kelly is the former Public Solicitor for New South Wales