Kumi: I knew she was the chief investigator on the Peter Falconio backpacker mystery, with British woman Joanne Lees surviving the attack. It was the biggest story then, and Colleen was at the forefront.

Colleen: Everything around that case.

Colleen: Captured everyone's attention.

Kumi: Colleen went on to become the territory's Children's commissioner. One of her roles was to report on the Don Dale Youth Detention centre.

Colleen: What I were to find as a result of that has been well documented, particularly the, the torturing and the treatment of 4 young men. Down to

Kumi: earth and tough, she was top of mind for another chat, and I was so happy, she said yes.

Kumi: Colleen, it's so great to see you again. Thank you so much for popping in. It's good to see you too, Kimi. You grew up in a seaside town in South Australia. How were the police in your town viewed back then?

Colleen: I remember once they pulled me over on my bike for not wearing my helmet and said they were going to tell my mum. I was absolutely devastated and frightened, and I, in fact, I cried.

Colleen: Um, that was my only real interaction as a potential offender, if I can say. But they were, the, the cops used to come over and drink a stubby out the back with my father, come and have a cup of tea with my mom. You would see them down the beach. They would be part of the local football team. They were just part of the community. Uh, you didn't really see them as police. In fact, I thought they weren't police until they put their uniform on.

Kumi: What attracted you to policing?

Colleen: Just a noble profession, and I grew up in a domestic violence household. My father was an alcoholic, very violent. Life, even though with my, my 7 siblings and most amazing mother, my life was OK, but you know, it was that part of it where my father,

Colleen: He would go on these benders where he would be quite often intoxicated and extremely violent and unfortunately my mum became the subject of that violence, as did my my brothers and my sister at one point.

Colleen: So I guess I had, my background had been, it was quite a mixture with being in these small communities that I loved. I really loved these communities where you, the cops were everything to everyone. And, but one thing that I didn't understand is why didn't they ever help when my mom was being bashed.

Colleen: And I always said that one day I would make a difference, and I would change how we deal with domestic violence and how we deal with families that are really struggling because of the alcoholism that exists behind closed doors. But, of course, now, Kumi, I know why the police didn't do anything because they didn't know, because it does happen behind closed doors.

Colleen: But that's why I wanted to be a cop, because I actually thought I'd be a really good cop and what happened to me during my childhood and, and to my siblings is I thought we, there's got to be a better way.

Kumi: And you saw being a police officer as a way to make that better way, to make it different for others?

Colleen: Yeah, I did. That wasn't the only reason I thought policing, you would, every day would be different. I couldn't see myself in a role where you go to work and you do the same thing on a Monday as what you would do on a Wednesday or Friday. I wanted to be a little bit surprised, and I love the kind of being on, on the edge a little bit.

Colleen: And it delivered. Joining the Northern Territory Police Force was, I'd never had so much fun in my life. And being able to help people, particularly really vulnerable people in the Northern Territory, I, I just, it was rewarding. But I was to learn a lot more, Kumi, as I got older and wiser and understood the world a bit better, that

Colleen: With people that are struggling in the community, policing or law enforcement is, is so important, but as a cop, you can't do much on your own. You really rely on bringing in everyone else to help you.

Kumi: I get the sense that you're really values driven. You know, how were those values shaped and did you bring them into your work and career?

Colleen: My values were shaped by my mother. I could talk about my mum for hours. She's just 93 now, just remarkable woman, but she instilled in us, all of us in a very early age that respect.

Colleen: And fairness and empathy, they were more important than anything.

Colleen: And if you think about the circumstances of my mother at the time having to deal with my father and bring up 8 children on her own, the fact that she can instil those values in all of us, which remain today throughout all my siblings, that's pretty remarkable. And it was reinforced, but it was reinforced in ways that weren't quite always obvious. We had a kind of freedom as kids, because my mom and dad were always working. But my mom had kind of built this informal intelligence network in the small town that we grew up in where we would, there would be sightings of us at different times of the day, and it would somehow in this complex sort of network of reports, find a way back to my mom, and she would know everything we'd done that day. Wow. The reports would come in thick and fast from the butcher, from the guy at the corner store.

Colleen: And it would be this network of phone calls. Have you seen Colleen? Oh, actually she was just over here and I saw her through.

Colleen: We had enormous freedom, but we were brought up by the community and mom's network of whistleblowers.

NEWS ANCHOR: The outback ambush on July 14, 2001 was headline news in Australia and England.

Colleen: Joanne escaped, but her boyfriend Peter Falconio has not been seen since. What happened to him remains a mystery. She managed to escape the gunman and hid in bushes for five hours before flagging down passing truckies, and although she was the only witness to the attack, Joanne Lees was remarkably reluctant to make any kind of public appeal for help.

Colleen: I've got a problem with press that distort the truth and doubt my story. Attention started to focus on Joanne Lees herself, and in particular, the story of her miraculous escape.

Kumi: You led the investigation into Peter Falconio's case in 2001. This is the British tourist who disappeared in a remote part of the Northern Territory. He was travelling with his girlfriend Joanne Lees. Four years later, Bradley John Murdoch was convicted of the backpacker's murder. What was it about the Peter Falconio case that captured the world's attention?

Colleen: Everything around that case captured everyone's attention. The surviving victim, Joanne Lees, she has a way about her that people listen, they're intrigued by Joanne. She didn't follow the script, if I can put it that way, in terms of how people expect someone to act.

Colleen: The location of where the crime occurred, it doesn't get more remote than out there in the middle of Australia.

Colleen: And that always attracts interest not only here in Australia but internationally. People are fascinated with Australia, particularly those very remote areas. And I guess the characters that were built around the case in terms of the truck drivers that found Joanne, the account of what occurred, some people thought that that was just a little bit unbelievable.

Colleen: So it was already for a book in the 1st 24 hours that what had occurred is, it was mysterious. It was, it had everything.

Kumi: Following the British backpacker's disappearance, his girlfriend Joanne Lees quickly became the focus of the media. She was the key witness. Were you comfortable with how she was dealt with by both the police and the media?

Colleen: I think I've been on record saying I was a bystander at that time. I was running the operational side of the response to the crime, and I really couldn't believe.

Colleen: There were so many things that they got wrong in the initial handling. And one of the things that you have to be mindful is how you handle the victim. That person that was there, the only person that can tell you what actually occurred on that night. And I think that there was no method in how they did that. There was no strategy, and that then equated to people thinking they had no clue.

Colleen: They let Joanne down. They portrayed her as someone that was flippant cold when they took her shopping to buy some replacement clothes because everything had gone in the combi van, and so she only had the clothes on her back.

Colleen: She chose a shirt that said Cheeky Monkey, which went viral. It went all over the world. Now, if you were advising Joanne, that would be a shirt you would say not suitable. And unfortunately, we judge people on those things and those words cheeky monkey, it portrayed her.

Colleen: In a way that was so far from who Joanne really is,

Kumi: isn't it extraordinary because this is pre-social media, pre-images getting out to the world on however many platforms. You can only imagine an image like that, how it would be perceived now in this kind of second by second judgement space really that we have.

Colleen: Oh, that would be everywhere, wouldn't it be tick tock. It would be.

Colleen: Oh, no, my kids use all sorts of things that I don't even know what they are anymore. Snapchat, you know, and that would be a completely different scenario now, but it, it was enough to cause a significant damage. And one of the things you have to do as an investigator, as a team, is you've got to build trust in your victim, those people that have a, a direct interest in the investigation, of course, the community. If you don't build trust with the community, then you don't get

Colleen: The right information. And what you do is you get misinformation and misguided information, and in the absence of a good narrative, something gets put in its place, and it's often something that doesn't assist you in your investigation. And that's what happened in the Falconio case.

Colleen: And that's why there were so many problems in the first few months in terms of trying to organise information because so much of it was rubbish information.

Kumi: How do you think the NT police were viewed at the time?

Colleen: They seemed like they were completely out of their depth, that they were used to dealing with public drunkenness, and this was something that was well outside their scope and level of competency.

Kumi: How did that make you feel as a cop, as a representative of the police?

Colleen: Oh, look, it was hard. The Northern Territory Police was an organisation I was absolutely proud of, and I wore my uniform with pride. I was proud to tell people I was a member of the Northern Territory Police. A fantastic organisation. It was a community police force. We were everything to everyone, and what we dealt with mostly were social issues.

Colleen: And that was why I joined the police. So, I was frustrated. I was embarrassed, and I just tried to distance myself. It's the, well, my first reaction was, I'm nothing to do with this. I'm one of the, I'm one of the good cops over here trying to help the community with some of their problems. And I could see it unravelling.

Colleen: So fast as so many people juggled to take charge of it and to try and be that spokesperson in what was the most high profile case that the organisation had dealt with, probably on par with the Chamberlain case, but it was certainly the big time.

Kumi: Do you think about Joanne? Does she pop into your mind every now and then, or did you ever have contact with her in later years?

Colleen: I do think about Joanne a lot and I have had contact with her. She asked me at one point whether I would assist her with doing some media. She wanted to put a statue to commemorate Peter.

Colleen: And she was trying to raise money for that. And so I did some media with her. Every now and again she might pop up and send me a message or vice versa. So I do think about, not, not so much Joanne, I think about the case. It would be weekly. It probably was daily for a long time, but I often are thinking about the family and how they are, Joan and Luciano and how their lives are, and

Colleen: I guess how they're coping with the ongoing distress that that would have had caused to lose a son under those circumstances.

Kumi: And for so many of us it's a news story that has a certain beginning and end, and then we all move on, but of course it doesn't matter how many years pass, there's birthdays that haven't been celebrated. There's grandkids that haven't been born. There's so much unravelling for people ongoing, right?

Colleen: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most powerful parts of the case came from Peter's mother Joan when she provided a victim impact statement.

Colleen: To the court.

Colleen: That in itself was so powerful and gave you an insight of what life was like for her, and in that statement.

Colleen: She describes the grief and how debilitating it was, and that there were times where she just couldn't get out of bed, and it gives you a real sense of what that's like for a family, particularly when we still have not been able to find Peter's remains. And so no doubt that's a daily anguish for, for Joan and the family.

NEWS ANCHOR: The country is reeling after the release of footage showing the shocking treatment of children in Northern Territory detention centres.

NEWS ANCHOR:: The events at the Don Dale centre that were set out on Four Corners came as a shocked and appalled Australians, and we are dealing with it with a royal commission.

Kumi: You went on to become the territory's Children's commissioner. One of your roles was to report on the Don Dale Youth Detention centre. What had been going on there?

Colleen: The interesting part of these statutory roles is you go in there and you decide what you need to report on, where you need to put your resources. Now, when I walked into that office and I found a, an old folder there, which was the beginnings of the Don Da report, which became a Four Corners programme, which then led to a royal commission.

Colleen: And I started flicking through that. There were things in there that alarmed me.

Colleen: Now it was the probably the beginnings of what could be a good thorough investigation, but it was far from anything that you could present to a government to demonstrate that we had serious problems with the way that we were doing with dealing with young people.

Colleen: So, immediately it became apparent that I had to get onto that, and I had to get onto it quickly. And what I were to find as a result of that has been well documented and well reported throughout Australia.

Kumi: Images of a child being restrained became national headlines. How was it for you as a mother, seeing those images, and how did you handle that?

Colleen: Oh, look, I think when you're, you've been a cop, you do become very good at separating the emotion from the facts. Not saying they don't come back to you and haunt you a little bit later, but when it became apparent what was happening in the behavioural management unit and the solitary confinement of young people for 23 out of 24 hours, I was shocked. I just thought, how is this happening?

Colleen: In Australia in this day and age, just the images that it brought up were just, I didn't think anything would shock me. I thought I'd seen a lot in life, but that had shocked me more than anything. Then speaking to these young people and hearing their words about what had happened to them and how they felt when they had been locked away, they were telling me that they'd lost all sense of time. They had lost all sense of hope.

Colleen: And then as I was sitting there in my office, going through pages and pages and pages of running sheets, I came across the, what is now known as the restraint chair image. And I was in complete disbelief that this was happening. And, uh, I think it was 10 o'clock at night that I found that, and I immediately rang the minister to report what I'd found.

Kumi: I can't even imagine your head even trying to get around what you'd seen.

Colleen: Yeah, you know, trying to make sense of it. I didn't know if it was real. Yeah, I was looking at it and thinking, this can't be right, this can't be real. To then realise that it, it absolutely was. I was trying to work out where it was and find out it was in, it was actually in Alice Springs. The young man we all know now was Dylan Voller.

Colleen: These things had been happening and happening for a while and there had been no circuit breaker.

Colleen: But I had to be the circuit breaker and it had to happen immediately.

Kumi: The Royal Commission made recommendations including around police operating procedures. Was there blowback on you as someone who was formerly of the police

Colleen: ranks? Yeah, it was difficult for me. Policing have this thing where they, they're never kind to their ex-officers.

Colleen: It's always harder. Once you've left, it's like, you've left the ship and you're, you're not allowed back on. I had actually established the Child Abuse Task Force when I was in the Northern Territory Police, and it was something I was most proud of, more so than the Falconio case and other major projects I'd been involved in. This was the thing that I thought, I've done good here. This is a good framework. This will make a difference to those communities where there are

Colleen: Multiple victims, multiple offenders, we can actually change this. And yeah, that I, I became a target because of that.

Kumi: Why do you think the police went after you?

Colleen: So I think it was the more the senior bureaucrats that took umbrage to what I had to say, because they took it as a personal affront that I was being critical of their departments. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that gave me a pretty big target on my back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Sky News can reveal the Northern Territory Children's Commissioner will seek compensation over a failed prosecution attempt made against her that included police bugging her phone and office and accessing her bank accounts. Colleen

spk_8: Gwynn has in fact been on leave for almost 3 years, while the Northern Territory is dealing with some pretty highly publicised issues in the child protection space.

Kumi: While you were the NT Children's Commissioner, there was an investigation into your hiring of a friend as your assistant. You were cleared of any intentional wrongdoing. Was that the end of it?

Colleen: There's something I haven't really spoken about. This is, um, really 3.5 years of my life where I was accused of something that they and charged criminally with abuse of my office. I think the charge was, and it was all to do with not declaring a conflict.

Colleen: Unfortunately in those 3 years, I never got to give my side of what actually occurred, which was very much far from the facts that were presented.

Colleen: And 3 years later, the, it gets thrown out of court even before it gets a start. So that was probably the darkest days of my life and for my family, and probably naive a little bit back then, Kumi, in terms of trying to raise awareness about things that were occurring. And, yeah, little did I know that that would be my undoing.

Kumi: The NT police were looking into this as a criminal investigation. You were once one of them and then it's like, you're the enemy. What was that like for you?

Colleen: Oh, completely humiliating on so many levels. The damage that they had done to me and my family, my reputation was really significant. And if you'd asked me, probably even 12 months ago, I would have said that the damage from that is, is lifelong and it'll be with me forever. But it's amazing how, with the love of your family and your friends and how things you can get yourself back on track. But they were dark years and if there's anything I can do in the future.

Colleen: It would be to make sure that that never happens to anyone else.

Kumi: You ended up moving back to Victoria, where you were born. Do you ever return to the Northern Territory?

Colleen: I have a love for the territory. I have an affiliation with the territory. I do return. It gets easier every time I go. There were times I couldn't, I just couldn't set foot in the territory. Uh, it had a profound effect on my wellbeing. Every time I would step foot on the tarmac there.

Colleen: But now that's become easier. Enormous support from the Territory people around what happened.

Colleen: And back in Victoria, where I was born, we're happy in Victoria, but, you know, I miss the territory every day. I miss the uniqueness. There's so much about it, you know, I miss having a good laksa too. I really miss a good laksa. They're the best. Oh, aren't they? Aren't they?

Kumi: Is it hard to unwind a brain which has been dedicated to public service?

Colleen: One of my.

Colleen: I wouldn't know if it's a failing, but one of the areas that I have to work hard at is winding down.

Colleen: My mind doesn't stop. I'm always thinking of how do we fix that? How can we change that? How can we make that better?

Colleen: And that doesn't stop now. Just, just because I'm removed from social justice, if it were, it doesn't mean I don't think about it every day. I think about it constantly.

Colleen: How do we help young people…

Colleen: Who are really struggling with life, mental health, the issues around that, what are we going to do with kids that are constantly dropping out of school? It goes around in my mind constantly. It never stops.

Kumi: Yeah, and you want to make it better and fix it.

Colleen: Yeah, and, and I'm not sure if it's a bad thing that it does.

Colleen: We asked my family and I think maybe I need to think less at times.

Colleen: But I, I think having been on the other side and having had such an injustice brought against me has given me.

Colleen: An understanding, a better understanding of what it's like.

Colleen: To be in a position where you have no control over the trajectory of your life and what is going on. And that is what's happening to so many of our young people. They don't have any control. People think they do, but it's very difficult when you don't have that person there to lean on. They can tell you right from wrong. You know, that has their intel network like my mother did. That stuff is priceless. That's how you raise children. But to have no control and to feel like there's no justice in life.

Colleen: That makes life pretty tough.

ANCHOR NEWS: It is a dark day for the Northern Territory to be going steps backwards in time.

Kumi: The NT parliament has lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10 years old. What are your

Colleen: thoughts on that? Oh, just, I can see the frustration in people in the territory, and not only in the territory, this is not a territory problem. This is a national problem. It's a worldwide problem, but

Colleen: Lowering the age doesn't work. That's not where the focus needs to be.

Colleen: The only positive around that is you need to bring these young people out of their current environment. If they are committing crimes, the environment they're in is not right for them. It's clearly dysfunctional. There are exceptions to this, but it is rare. If you can then bring them into a system that is well structured, where there are wraparound services.

Colleen: To support these young people in a whole range of ways, you will see changes. What worries me is we lower the age of criminal responsibility. We have younger people in detention. Everything is adversarial. There's nothing proactive and preventative about it. There are no programs that are culturally appropriate, that are targeted towards the needs of these young people.

Colleen: Then we are building a cohort of future offenders, and the crime will not go down, it will go up. I think that the knee-jerk reaction to do that was misguided, and I think it'll come back and bite them. It is the programs they need to concentrate on, diversionary programs.

Colleen: are by far more successful than any detention program has ever been. They are just harder. That's where we need to have our focus.

Kumi: I feel like injustice has been such a big driver for you. How do you feel about the concept of justice now?

Colleen: The first word that comes to mind is fairness. If you receive justice, then you've been, it's, it's a fairness measure.

Kumi: Colleen, it's just such a pleasure to see you again. Thank you so much.

Colleen: No, thank you.