For Kate Part One

Many years ago, when my beautiful daughter, Kate was about fifteen, she dropped a hint that I hadn't fully explained what it was that I did to support us. I made a silly off hand joke about making money out of rich lawyers and forgot about it. Tonight, dear Kate, I will answer that question. I hope you will forgive it being late and on Facebook like this, but here goes. Our state of Queensland in the mid eighties was in political and legal turmoil. There was corruption from the highest levels of government and the Police Force was literally a joke. That was what they called the corrupt ring of police officers, the 'Joke', there wasn't much you couldn't get done or not done, for the right money. There was one occasion where the front page of a leading newspaper, had on the front page, a headline quote from the minister for Police "There is no illegal gambling in Queensland" Much of the rest of the page was taken by a picture of a full sized roulette table, being craned into a building in the seedy part of town. Traffic was being controlled by an on duty, uniformed, policeman. There I was recently graduated in Industrial Relations, Psychology and English, with a minor foray into law. My friend Michael Forde, now a retired Judge, knew I was struggling financially, with only a half time job at Actor's Equity (Go on someone, ask me about Judith Durham!) and a couple of kids on my own. I had done a deal with my Ex in exchange for foregoing her contribution to their upkeep she gave me a substantial sum of money to enable me to buy a house for us. But even so, things were tight. Michael was a trial lawyer, called a 'barrister' here. One day Michael was landed with a very big case indeed. Bjelke Petersen and Cabinet v Warburton. We were talking while training to work one day and he was telling me how for this case he had 8000 documents to sort, file and keyword. I said "Well Michael, for that you need a computer." "Would you help me?" Said Michael. "Sure, whatever I can do, I will. " I replied Now, some may say that my answer was a perfectly reasonable assessment of the situation. However you might want to consider that my entire experience with computing was that once, I saw a mainframe computer. And my father had given me an Amstrad 64 a few months earlier. You should know, that I wore that 64k with pride any time I met anyone who also had a computer. Which wasn't often. So basically, I knew nothing, had no experience