Obituary — Peta Murphy

Peta Murphy the advocate was originally forged during her time at Robert Stary and Associates where she began her career as a solicitor-advocate in 2002.  She joined the Victorian Bar in 2008 and read with Peter Morrissey SC. She was a member of Crockett Chambers, VLA Chambers and David Ross Chambers.

The best criminal lawyers exercise a simultaneous gravitational pull on the planets of forensic instinct, capacity for abstract legal reasoning, facility with dense factual material and a finely tuned understanding of people. Juries and witnesses sensed her authenticity.  Peta had all of it, with an additional, extra something which is hard to name precisely but hunger for justice comes close. She worked hard and was brilliant.

Peta was disagreeable in the best sense of that word; she possessed an independence of intellect that compelled her to insist, plainly and without fear, on what she understood to be the real question in any problem, legal or otherwise. She did this even when, or particularly when, the tide of opinion or practice or experience was flowing in another direction.

Peta’s character was remarkably consistent. She spoke the same way to a friend, a client, a Supreme Court Judge, or a Labrador.

Peta’s courage was infectious. She was extremely funny. Her colleagues respected and adored her. Her clients could sense her trueness to their cause.

This is the second time the Victorian Bar has lost Peta; she left first in 2016 to pursue a career in federal politics, where her fearless advocacy was given a bigger field of view. No one who was present will ever forget how her courage filled the chamber with a kind of electricity on the occasion she rose to give her first speech as the member for Dunkley, just two weeks after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. 

Peta was loved by her friends and family, and by her husband Rod Glover, who supported Peta’s brilliance at close range for 24 years.