The Australian Women's Register

Born at Belele Station, near Meekatharra, Western Australia in 1943, Sue Gordon was separated from her mother and family at the age of four and raised at Sister Kate’s home in Queens Park, Western Australia. After leaving school, she joined the army as a full-time soldier. Between 1961 and 1964 she was a full-time member of the Women’s Royal Australian Army Corps (WRAAC) based mostly in the eastern states, where she worked as a cipher operator. After leaving the army she worked in various administrative positions around Australia, including as Teltype operator at Carnarvon Tracking Station. This led to more administrative work in the Pilbara region, where she worked mostly in Aboriginal Affairs with both urban and traditional people. In 1977 she was awarded a National Aboriginal Overseas Study Award to survey employment programs with a number of Native American communities in the United States.

Gordon moved back to Perth when her eldest son was about to start university and her second one was in year 12, taking on the role of Commissioner for Aboriginal Planning in 1986, and in so doing, becoming the first Aboriginal person to head a government department in Western Australia. In 1988, despite her lack of formal legal training, she was appointed the first full-time and first Aboriginal magistrate in the state’s history. Appointed to the Perth Children’s Court, a court of limited jurisdiction served by lay, as well a legally trained, magistrates, Gordon served for twenty years before mandatory retirement in 2008 at the age of 65.

While working full time at the court, Gordon completed a law degree part-time. She started it when she was 50, it took eight years, and there were times when she wondered what she had let herself in for. Fortunately, her two sons did not allow her to give up, reminding her that there was ‘a rule at our house since we were kids, ‘If you started, you have to finish it.”

Completing the degree gave her ‘the polish that she needed’. Besides, the discipline of the law reinforced a way of life for her that she had always valued. ‘I had discipline in my early life…I had discipline in the army and discipline in Aboriginal Affairs …I’d come from a disciplined background. I think that’s what I really appreciated at the court,’ she says. What’s more, it’s a place where ‘every decision is going to impact on somebody.’