August 2001 Volume 82 Number 8 "serving the protectors"
From High Fashion to Dead Bodies
By Brett Williams

Most knew that, through her police career, Senior Constable Trish Walkley was not a woman with whom to trifle. Just two weeks before she retired last month, she spoke with her trademark frankness of her life as a cop.

No one has ever convinced Senior Constable Trish Walkley she should tone down her up-front approach to life. Through her 37-and-half-year police career, many suggested she “hold back a bit”. But all through those years, Walkley steadfastly refused to hide any aspect of her highly outgoing and, at times, confronting manner.

She saw no sense in standing back and existing simply as “a wallflower”. “You’ve got to stand up and be counted in this world,” she insists. “It’s no good being a shy, retiring type because it won’t get you anywhere.”

Not even the threat of retribution that hangs guillotine-like over all outspoken cops ever silenced her. Says her former Coronial Investigation Section boss, Senior Sergeant Peter Cooling (ret): “She has never really got herself into bother (because) I don’t think anyone was game to take her on.

“I think she has been respected because she’d say what she thought, whereas many don’t say what they think.”

But, best known for her 14 years as a corpse collector and coronial investigator, Walkley has an equally compelling soft side. She could never bring herself to hurt someone’s feelings with a caustic remark; and just the sight of an injured child leaves her openly weeping.

Cooling speaks of the family perspective in which she saw her colleagues and says few will ever know how much she helped others.

“She has helped literally scores of police in one way or another,” he explains, “whether they’ve gone through a rocky marriage, a divorce or been down over something. Tricia was always there for them.”

Nonetheless, Walkley’s equal dose of emotional toughness served her well in the cut and thrust of police work. Once, attached to the Drug Squad in the mid-’70s, she joined her colleagues in a raid on a suburban motel room.

Her nerve-racking task was to lure one of two drug-addicted armed robbers to the door so detectives could burst inside. The then suspects had committed a string of pharmacy hold-ups.

Terrified, Walkley knocked on the door. One of the robbers - in a heroin-induced, zombie-like state - opened it and stared out with eyes “like organ stops”. In an instant, the detectives and a police dog charged inside, pushing Walkley aside as if she were “a sack of wheat”.

“The other crook was laying on the bed and had a rifle,” she remembers. “I was just standing there thinking: ‘Oh, my God, you can be shot at any time!’ ”

Walkley faced great danger and has never forgotten the incident. But, as she undertook such risk-filled jobs, she revelled in the associated excitement.

Now, the single 55-year-old is just days into her retirement from the job she stresses has “been my entire adult life”. But her career journey really began at the age of nine, when she first boldly announced her intention to be a police officer. The stories of police life from a family friend in training had inspired her, and she never swayed from her childhood announcement.

Her back-door neighbour, the late former commissioner, John McKinna, encouraged her to join. And, as a teenager, she constantly pestered SAPOL’s personnel department about scoring a job when she left school.

Finally, in late 1963, she joined SAPOL as a 17-year-old “woman police auxiliary”. The rules of the day prevented her from joining a police cadet course before the age of 21. In her auxiliary role, she worked only as a shorthand typist.

After a stint at Criminal Records, she served at Thebarton police barracks and, later, the then new Holden Hill police station. There, she remembers watching TV coverage of the first moon landing in 1969. But an earlier, more intense experience at Thebarton barracks left her “wobbly at the knees” - her first sight of policemen in jodhpurs.

And Walkley relished the strong social network long associated with policing.

“Pay nights were just unbelievable,” she says. “We used to come over to the Police Club, and Fiesta Villa was the big thing then. We used to go from the club down to Fiesta Villa and absolutely run amok.

“I can remember drinking at the Police Club when I was 18 - and you were supposed to be 21. I probably paid for a quarter of the back wall, or at least half the bar.”

Concerned that shiftwork might cut into her vigorous social life, Walkley postponed her foray into police training.

But as a 25-year-old in 1971, she began a 17-week training course at Fort Largs. She had survived the collapse of marriage plans three years earlier, but stayed true to the goal she had set herself in her pre-pubescence.

“A 17-week ‘wonder’ course,” she exclaims, “that’s what we were called. It was like being in school: a lot of fun, but I hated being in the classroom.”

When Walkley graduated in October ’71, women officers took no part in operational work and did not wear uniforms. Her post was the long defunct Women Police Office, where hats and gloves formed part of a strict dress code.

Women police found themselves in deep trouble if they ever left the office without their hats and gloves. Walkley was “forever being called back” for appearing outdoors without her hat.

“And this was not uniform,” she stresses, “this was civilian clothes! It was like a fashion parade. All these tall, beautiful women just looked like fashion models, and there’s dear old me waddling along behind - miles out in the beauty department.”

By 1973, women had joined their male counterparts in front-line police work. Walkley accepted an offer to work with the Drug Squad, but first had to complete a training course at the Manly police college in NSW.

She returned in 1974 to join the squad, with which she stayed for three-and-a-half years. She remembers that time as the most exciting of her career.

Walkley next served a five-and-a-half-year term in the police communications centre. When that term ended in 1983, she applied to work in the Coronial Investigation Section. No female officer had ever opted to work among the dead, but the transfer of one of Walkley’s friends to the post had sparked her interest.

“I used to go over to the mortuary in my lunch breaks and watch post mortems,” she says. “I was just fascinated by the inside of the body. I couldn’t get enough. It was just unbelievable.”

Walkley won the position she had so eagerly sought and stayed in the coronial field for 14-and-a-half years. The job required her to collect dead bodies for storage at the mortuary and assist pathologists with autopsies. She also had to investigate deaths with the potential to implicate hospital procedures and institutions.

Most cops know the job involves plenty of gore and tragedy: tiny babies’ bodies lying dead in cots, or teenage suicide victims disemboweled on train tracks. But, never put off by the continually gruesome sights, the mentally tough Walkley remained committed to her job.

Says Cooling: “It can be pretty harrowing work, especially when you’re dealing with the death of children, or an allegation of some medical malpractice. Something like that has very serious consequences on families.

“Trish could tread the fine line. She knew how to familiarize herself with those families, yet not cross the line and become unprofessional. She could feel for them and understand what they were going through, but keep in focus as far as her investigation was concerned. She would pursue it mercilessly.”

And Cooling still notes Walkley’s ability to “see issues” in the earliest stages of investigations. He rates her as “a damn fine investigator”.

But how did Walkley’s friends and colleagues see her unceasing love of working with cadavers? “They all thought I had a real problem,” she says with a chuckle. “I loved the fascination, particularly what the cause of death might be.

“I used to guess, and talk it over with the forensic pathologist after he’d done the post mortem. He’d say: ‘Yeah, you were right’, but that’s only from (my) years of experience.”

Walkley served her final four years as a cop at Crimestoppers. Toward the end of those years, she began to struggle with arthritis. As well, permanent indoor work at Crimestoppers was not her preference, but she loved her time there, nonetheless.

She says of retiring: “I made the decision and thought: ‘Well, I’ve just had enough’. I’ve worked 37-and-a-half years - it’s enough.”

Walkley sees women’s current-day access to patrol work as the most significant change in her time. And, of her long police life, she says she had the “best fun”, loved every minute and would change “absolutely nothing”.

“Out in the other world, as I refer to it,” she says, “you have friends, but they come and go. (In) the police force, you just make the greatest friends - and you have them for life.”

In retirement, she plans - without the dictates of shiftwork - to spend time with friends, tend to a “mountain of gardening” and complete some painting jobs. But how will she speak of police work to prospective young officers?

“I will tell them straight out: ‘It’s the best job in the world’,” she says. “Rarely do you get a pat on the back - from anyone - but I’ve never expected that, anyway.

“It (police work) makes you what you are.”

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