Peter Gordon, Gordon Legal

Sometimes, as a lawyer, you have the privilege of the opportunity to change a clients’ life for the better.  But even more rarely, a client and their story will change you.  I wish that observation was my inspiration but I first heard it spoken by my U.S, co-counsel Kay Reeves.  She was talking about Stephanie and Marie Browitt, the Browitt family, and her words captured precisely how I felt when she said them, in the hotel lobby in Miami, on the day we all flew out after eight weeks on the other side of the world chasing some measure of justice of the Browitt family.  It had been nearly five years since I first met Marie and Steph.

I first heard of the Browitt family in June 2020, when Marie telephoned me. I had watched the Whakaari/White Island disaster unfold on television six months earlier, but it was not until Marie rang that it took my focus. Coming to know her and her daughter Stephanie, I most wished I had met them a few months earlier.

In December 2019 the Browitts – Paul, his wife Marie and their daughters Stephanie and Krystal – were aboard Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas, which had sailed from Sydney on 4 December. A couple of days out they decided to take the day excursion to Whakaari, the active volcanic island off the north coast of the North Island. They made that decision at sea, with limited internet and even more limited information from Royal Caribbean.

The marketing made the tour sound exotic, picturesque and exciting, but above all safe – a safe and trusted environment. It did not say that the volcano had been in escalating unrest for weeks, that tremor and gas emissions were at their highest in years, or that on 18 November 2019 GeoNet had raised the Volcanic Alert Level to 2 – the highest level short of eruption.

Paul, Stephanie and Krystal took the tour. Marie did not; her multiple sclerosis meant the walking sounded too rough for her.

What happened next is well known. There were 47 people on the island when it erupted on 9 December 2019. Twenty-two died, and the rest were left with horrifying injuries. Krystal, who was 21, died that day. In the desperate minutes after the volcano’s acidic steam and rubble turned the island into a scorching acid pit, Paul fought a heroic struggle to get his daughters to safety. Critically injured himself, he died at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne about four weeks later.

Stephanie, with third-degree burns to some 70 per cent of her body, somehow survived. She was in a coma at the Alfred for some time and has since had more than twenty operations. Marie was left without her husband and her youngest daughter, carrying her own unimaginable grief while managing Stephanie’s care and a horrified world that had no idea what to do.

When she rang me, Marie told me why. Years earlier she and Paul had been watching the news and I had been on it. Paul had said to her: if we ever get into real trouble, we should go to that bloke – he’s president of the Bulldogs, and he even fought like a bulldog.

A number of law firms had been circling the family; one offered to pay Marie money if she would let them act. But the advice she kept hearing was that because the accident had happened in New Zealand, which allows its citizens no common law rights to sue for personal injury, little or nothing could be done. I have run a good many international tort cases, and in all of them the New Zealanders fared worst, because of a much-lauded no-fault scheme which has disadvantaged seriously injured New Zealanders every time.

I also knew that the choice of law rules in Australia and most comparable jurisdictions provide that the law governing a wrong is the law of the place where the gist of the wrongdoing occurred. The eruption and the injuries were in New Zealand. But the decision to put one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes on the itinerary in the first place, and the decisions about how volcanic warnings were read and passed on, were made somewhere else.

I reached out to Kay Reeves, because I had run international tort cases with her before. Between us we concluded there was a plausible case that Royal Caribbean’s decision to be the only cruise line in the world offering day excursions to Whakaari was the negligent act, and that the gist of the wrongdoing lay in downtown Miami, where that decision was made and where oversight of the warnings sat. Mike Kaeske of the Kaeske Law Firm later joined the trial team.

In December 2020 we commenced proceedings in the Circuit Court in Miami-Dade County. Royal Caribbean responded almost immediately, bringing proceedings in the Australian Federal Court to stop the American case – what lawyers call an anti-suit injunction.

We fought it before Justice Stewart, and Royal Caribbean fought hard. Marie was cross-examined about what she remembered of the day, of buying the tickets, and of a page of a brochure in the Flight Centre shop at Craigieburn. It was brutal. Because it was 2021, a year of COVID, she gave that evidence from the front room of my house in Hawthorn, by video link to the Federal Court in Sydney.

We had to show that the cruise contract did not prevent the Browitts suing the American parent company in negligence. In June 2021 Justice Stewart found for them. Royal Caribbean had earlier told the Florida court that everyone should abide by the Australian decision as final; when it went against them, their lawyers urged the American court to ignore it. That was the next battle.

Then came the evidence – witnesses to be found, interviewed and deposed, which took me to the USA, New Zealand and Hawaii. All up the case occupied the courts of three countries. My wife, Kerri, who has worked with me for thirty years, managed much of the litigation, and flew to Florida twice with Stephanie and a nurse because…. Royal Caribbean insisted Stephanie attend there for examination by its doctors.

The case came on before Judge Arzola in September 2024. Three weeks of pre-trial and summary judgment motions followed, as Royal Caribbean threw everything at keeping the matter from a jury. Royal Caribbean failed. We spent two or three days empanelling that jury before the case settled, on terms favourable to Stephanie and her mother.

Stephanie and Marie’s lives will never be what they were. But they never wavered, and in the end they felt like me, that there was some accountability, and their story was told.

It was a privilege to act for them.

Written by Peter Gordon, Senior Partner. Last updated 04 September 2026.