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INTRODUCTION1
Sociolinguistics is the study of the way that languages are used in social contexts.2 One of the major contributions made by sociolinguists to the understanding of society in the latter half of the twentieth century has been in the explanation of the role that cultural differences play in intercultural communication and miscommunication. The aim of this Article is to show how this kind of sociolinguistics can contribute to the area of lawyer-client communication.3 To do this, I will relate the true story of an Australian Aboriginal woman named Robyn Kina. Her story is a compelling tale of lawyer-client miscommunication, which points to a range of sociolinguistic issues that are important in legal contexts.
I. ROBYN KINA'S STORY: PART 1
Robyn Kina was born in 1959 and grew up in an Aboriginal environment in southeast Queensland.4 As with most Aboriginal people in this part of the country, Kina is of mixed descent and speaks a kind of English that will be discussed later in the Article. One of fourteen children who lived in difficult family circumstances, which included an alcoholic father, Kina left school at the age of twelve to look after her three younger brothers and sisters. Her teenage years were characterized by sexual abuse, prostitution, alcoholism, and trouble with the police. By the time she was twenty, Kina had been charged with a number of the offenses characteristic of the criminal record of many Aboriginal people: obscene language, assault of a police officer, resisting arrest, and willful and unlawful destruction of police property, in the form of police documents.5 She had also served twenty months in prison for her role in an attack on a person during a pub brawl.
In her mid-twenties, Kina stopped prostituting herself, stopped using alcohol, and started a relationship with Tony Black, a non-Aboriginal man. Almost from the beginning of their relationship, Black had bouts of extreme violence towards Kina, particularly when he was drunk. During the three years of their relationship Kina was subjected to frequent punching, pulling of hair, kicking with steel capped boots, and anal rape. During an argument one morning early in 1988, in which Black threatened to rape her fourteen-year-old niece who was living in the house at the time, Kina stabbed...