By day, Morag McDowell investigates death. And by night, well, she sings about it. The full-time Auckland coroner and part-time opera singer talks to Rebecca Barry.
For someone who spends a lot of time contemplating death, Morag McDowell packs a lot into life. She is one of Auckland's three coroners, a job that comes with a hefty workload - the grim reaper does a long shift too. She's also a professional singer with the
New Zealand Opera company, with a choral part in the company's production of Macbeth. It's one of Shakespeare's - and Verdi's - most bloodthirsty works.
"I couldn't do this role without the singing," she says from behind a desk in her plain coroner's office, decorated with a single photograph of her on stage in The Magic Flute.
"The singing is my passion and I can't imagine living without it. It's my therapy, my way for me to temporarily escape the realities of my day job."
Her office might be drab but her figure-hugging outfit hints at someone who enjoys dressing up after hours. She has an expressive face, piercing blue eyes that light up at the prospect of slipping into peasant-garb to bring to life several characters, including one of the Bard's scheming witches, an aristocrat and a Scottish refugee. Macbeth is highly charged, dramatic stuff, and while it would be tempting to suggest her day job is equally so, McDowell says they're worlds apart.
She describes the coronial gig as "intensely interesting". She strives to maintain a professional distance but it would take a hard soul not to feel something for the families affected by sudden or unexplained deaths, of which it is McDowell's job to investigate. It is this sensitivity that stops her from talking about specific cases, although she will say they can be "tremendously sad and tragic: the young men that get into their cars full of alcohol and drive, and die needlessly. Sudden, unexplained death in infancy. It's terrible for the parents but we can try to examine patterns and causes and hopefully some good will come out of looking at these things."
Part of her role is to decide, with advice from a pathologist, whether a post-mortem is warranted and to look at ways of preventing similar deaths in the future. Car accidents, for example, can provide an opportunity to examine road safety.
"I like the notion of a system where you inquire into the truth of a certain event rather than the adversarial - people arguing in court. I'm intrigued by the notion that you could get something positive out of tragic events. There could be a real focus on the lessons that could be learned. That really appeals to me."
She used to work as a Crown prosecutor, where her favourite part was giving the closing address to the judge and jury. She says it's because of the analytical nature of pulling together information to support her case. But it could also allude to enjoying a moment in the courtroom spotlight. "She's a bit of a performer," says New Zealand Opera choral group conductor John Rosser, who has known McDowell for 25 years. "She does love being on stage. She's also passionate about law in a way I can't understand."
Growing up in Taupo, McDowell wanted to be a Broadway star. After she had attended a singing group for a while, the teacher encouraged her to stay behind for private lessons. McDowell's parents discovered the depths of her talent only when the bill for the secret tuition turned up in the mail.
Her love affair with opera began much later, when she attended Mercury Theatre performances while studying law at the University of Auckland.
"I was blown away by the fact that it's the amalgam of everything. It's the orchestra, it's the principals, it's the chorus, this beautiful en masse singing. It's the drama, the acting, the telling of a story, the design, costumes, lighting ...
"And when you're performing, there's something about when you're standing there in front of a whole group of people and getting that fantastic adrenalin buzz - you're getting the applause and you feel you've done a good job."
Her frequent transformations from lawyer to goddess of the stage may seem slightly absurd - "the singing coroner" doesn't exactly have a ring to it - but for McDowell, her double life is simply the combination of her two disparate passions.
Among other roles she has stepped in as understudy for the soprano leads in Lucia di Lammermoor and The Magic Flute, played Adina in The Elixir of Love and Belinda in Dido and Aeneas.
She is also a member of Rosser's Auckland chamber choir, Viva Voce, and a resident artist with the New Zealand Opera company who occasionally performs solo.
Rosser says McDowell has a "freakishly high" voice, a high soprano known as coloratura (coloured), capable of the high trills and virtuoso passages that don't tend to go to the fat lady. Her clear, bright timbre means she's not suited to the resonant Italianate voices of romantic music but to the classical, baroque and contemporary eras.
One of her most difficult performances was when she was 39 weeks pregnant and singing Allegri's Miserere, a piece of church music that required she reach the elusive high-C. She also pushed herself to great heights as the understudy to the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute in 2006.
"It was one of the best moments of my life. I had worked really hard to learn the role and to be the best I could be for it. I got the phone call in the morning to say the principal was ill for dress rehearsal, which was to be a public performance. It was that sense of 'yes, I'm ready to do this, I really, really, really want to do this'. It was fantastic."
Of all the musical genres, opera is the most likely to be associated with death. At the heart of Macbeth is the murder of Banquo. Rosser is used to joking with McDowell over the morbid nature of her two roles but says it's coincidence.
"She is fascinated by the process [of her coronial work] but she's not fascinated by death in the ghoulish way and she's not squeamish about it."
McDowell, too, had never pictured herself as a coroner but had come to accept the fact she wouldn't support herself with music alone. She'd met her husband, a forensic psychiatrist, in her first year at university, and it was through him she became interested in the medical side of law.
After gaining her masters in this area she worked as a Crown prosecutor and later as director of proceedings with the Health and Disability Commissioner's office, deciphering health professional standards and those who had breached them.
She spotted an opportunity to become a coroner just as the opportunities were drying up.
A new act was passed in 2007 that would cut the number of New Zealand coroners from up to 70 part-timers to 15 full-time positions. There are now just three, including McDowell, in Auckland.
"She's a vibrant woman but she's not a drama queen," says Katherine Greig, one of McDowell's fellow Auckland coroners. "She brings a really good, clear legal brain and a lot of humanity to the role. I think she's very brave."
Many people mistakenly equate the role with pathology and picture McDowell working in a morgue, surrounded by cadavers.
While some coroners are qualified to carry out the medical examinations, in McDowell's case, she is not required to see the bodies in situ, although she will often visit a scene of death if she deems it important, the site of a road accident once it's been cleared away, for example.
"I don't think that before this job I'd truly reflected on death that much. You're too busy living. But being within it makes you appreciate the importance of relationships you have with people and what you've got."
She credits her family's support for allowing her to juggle her double life. She has two musical teenage sons. Her husband, Jeremy Skipworth, is the clinical director of the Mason Clinic, which deals with criminals with mental illness, those found guilty by reason of insanity or unfit for trial.
The family's dinner table discussions often revolve around ethical and social issues, "whether people are competent to consent to their own medical treatment, things like that". She says this as though it's the most normal thing in the world.
Despite their differences, empathy provides the common ground between McDowell's two roles.
As an opera singer, she is essentially an actor too. As a coroner, she frequently deals with grieving families. Different customs can impact on her job - Muslim families often want to get bodies back quickly so they can be buried at spiritually significant times. Maori families cloak death in ritual. Some families, whether or not for cultural reasons, refuse to consent to post-mortems.
The hardest decisions are those in which McDowell must try to balance a family's wishes against the public interest. She must make judgments that would put many of us in an emotional tailspin, such as determining whether someone killed themselves intentionally.
"I'm not squeamish when it comes to that side of things and I think that's because I worked as a prosecutor as well, working with homicides. Or with cases involving significant injury, part of a case is to look at photographs. You develop a professional, clinical way of dealing with that.
"With any job where tragedy is involved, you need to maintain professional distance to do the job properly. Having said that, you wouldn't be human if you didn't empathise and have the odd case really get to you. In that case it's important to step back. That's where singing comes in. It's a chance to take your mind out of the death arena, which is where we work."
But she's not immune. Rosser says she unloads to her friends if things start to get to her.
"I imagine eventually you develop something of a hide but I think it takes a while. The workload gets to her sometimes. Obviously when she's in the middle of a lot of music she gets incredibly busy." Is there any conflict of interest holding down a job with a high degree of responsibility then getting dressed up at night and entertaining the public?
"It hasn't been a problem for me," she says. "Because I do it in my own time. I don't let it intrude into my job. If there are any clashes I'll either take leave to do something for singing or I won't do the singing.
"I feel it's so important to be focused when I'm here and I try very hard to be. [My workmates] accept it as part of me, they know how important it is. If I come in humming a tune or reciting words, trying to remember the next line when getting a cup of tea, they're really accepting and supportive.
"I couldn't do the singing without a measure of support from my workmates."
