bulldog spirit
The boy from the west recounts to Cameron Tait some of his biggest and most cherished victorie victories as a lawyer.
[ 18 ] WEEKLY – YOUR COMMUNITY VOICE
September 26, 2012
PICTURE: DARREN JAMES
P
eter Gordon has come a long way since, as a teenage schoolboy, he 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 asbestosrelated 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 dollar settlement last month to more than 100 Australian survivors. At 32 he drove the Fightback campaign, which saved Footscray from a proposed merger with Fitzroy in 1989. Gordon 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,” he says. ‘‘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. Stary would go on to become a high-profile criminal defence lawyer. ‘‘He [Rob] was always a bit politicised,’’ Gordon says, ‘‘but I became quite radical as a leftwinger, resentful of the kids who went to Scotch