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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1784 ..

perhaps discouraging a witness from giving evidence on a key matter. Debate may prejudice a coronial inquiry by influencing witness behaviour.

These are my concerns, Mr Speaker, and I urge members to give them serious consideration.

I have given a great deal of thought, of course, to the nature of memory in recent days. Until this incident I have always prided myself on my memory. That is why, even when I made unqualified statements about contact with officials, I was confident I had it right. I have had a capacity to retain in my memory a great deal of detail about a broad range of issues. But I have obviously had cause to reflect on that capacity now. In seeking to understand my lapse in memory, in seeking to find some rational explanation for it, I have undertaken a deal of research.

With no sense of false modesty it seems obvious to me that on the morning of Saturday, 18 January 2003, having a few days earlier gone through a most traumatic experience—namely, dragging a dead body from a dam—I was unknowingly a couple of hours away from probably the most dramatic experience of my life. The second phone call, the one from Tim Keady at 12.40 pm asking me to come to the Emergency Services headquarters, was the start of that experience. It was therefore factored into the experience. The 10.00 am call was not considered relevant at the time, as it was not linked to that major experience. (Further extension of time granted.)

My understanding now of how these things work is that, under normal circumstances, the memory filters information to avoid the brain becoming cluttered. The brain stores implicit and explicit memories. Implicit memories are stored but the person does not realise that they are there. They can be retrieved but if they are not accessed they degrade over time. Explicit memories are those that a person knows they have. They have been indexed and they can be retrieved.

Lots of phone calls are not remembered because they are not indexed. The memory of the 10.00 am phone call could have been retrieved, perhaps, within a couple of months with appropriate cues, but cannot be retrieved after more than a year, I am advised, probably even under hypnosis. The brain works differently in the state of emergency arousal. It focuses on the information crucial to the task at hand. Anything that is peripheral to that task is discarded.

I don’t profess to be an expert on these matters, but I have sought to understand the process, and this is some of the understanding that I have gleaned. Whether or not it is of any use or interest to members, I pass it on. It does not in any way excuse the mistakes I made, but it is, however, my own personal attempt at explaining them.

As I say, I have prided myself in my memory. But on this occasion my memory was apparently overwhelmed by the volume of material it confronted during the height of the bushfire emergency, just as the bushfire itself overwhelmed our firefighting resources. The situation was complicated by my confidence in my memory—a confidence such that I did not ask to have telephone records checked. I concede that those records could have been checked earlier and I now, of course, regret that they were not, but I cast no blame for the oversight.

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