I started with the AFP in 1999 as a crime scene investigator. Having absolutely no forensic experience, I had no idea what to expect. Truthfully, I was terrified – but excited at the same time. I remember someone saying, “Why do you want to do forensics, with all those dead bodies and stuff?” And I thought to myself, “It’s Canberra – there aren’t that many dead bodies! People don’t die in Canberra!” At this time I associated ‘dead bodies’ with murders – of which there are fortunately very few in Canberra. Yet five months after starting, I attended my first death scene, a suicidal hanging of a young man. At the scene, it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be – your mind can switch out of an emotional state and into a professional mindset. It becomes a problem to solve – piecing together, stepbystep, what has happened at the scene and, in the case of a suicide, ensuring that the evidence at the scene indicates the person took their own life and that it wasn’t a murder.

Week after week there were more deaths and soon I realised that investigations weren’t confined to murder. There were suicides, drug overdoses, autoerotic asphyxiation, industrial accidents, domestic accidents, motor vehicle accidents, cot deaths and the simply weird unexplainable deaths. A lot of people seem to think that the job must have been draining – and it is draining, but after a while you get a different perspective, on life and on death. As a trainee I made a few mistakes – they weren’t detrimental to the cases, but were incredibly damaging to my self-esteem. I eventually learnt to laugh at myself – and to understand that you can’t take things too seriously.

As part of the job I had the opportunity to travel abroad, to assist in investigations of crimes against the Commonwealth such as people smuggling. I went to Cocos-Keeling Island to examine a suspected illegal entry vessel. Vessels such as these aren’t known for their aromatic delights or cleanliness and this was no different. As such, to make it a more comfortable work environment, we decided to throw all the offending, odorous items overboard, without much thought of the consequences. About half an hour later, I looked over the rail and noticed quite a large school of Tiger sharks surrounding the vessel. I then became acutely aware of several issues relating to the buoyancy of the vessel we were on, including a substantial hole in the hull, which is why the people smugglers risked arrest to pull into Cocos in the first place.

I was still working with the AFP when the Bali bombing occurred in 2002, and was involved in the subsequent disaster victim identification and forensic investigation. During the investigation, we had to do quite a bit of travel within Indonesia. One particular situation involved flying from Bali to Surabaya on Java. This was my first experience with a domestic Indonesian airline, a harrowing experience for a nervous flyer like me. In reality, it was equivalent to a trip from Sydney to Canberra, but it felt more like a trip from Sydney to London. As we approached the runway, I noticed the air hostesses had mysteriously disappeared. “Where have they gone,” I asked, and the man next to me replied, “Praying for a safe landing!” I turned and look toward the back of the plane, and sure enough, there they were – praying. “Do they do this for every flight?” I asked. “Yes,” was the answer, although it didn’t make me feel any better. I closed my eyes, put my head in my hands, and did my own little special prayer.

From my experiences as a crime scene investigator, I have learned to laugh at life. I would tell anyone interested in forensics that the job will definitely, irreversibly alter your perspective. It is all too easy to just focus on the negative aspects, so you must really concentrate on finding and amplifying the positives in life. I have carried this outlook through to my current position as an educator at CIT, and I try to communicate to the students that forensics can be a life changing profession. I feel I bring to the classroom a realistic view of what it means to be a crime scene investigator. I’ve only had a couple of students withdraw from the course, finding it isn’t really what CSI portrays it to be.