Vanessa Amorosi wins court battle against her mother
By Karl Quinn
As birthday presents go, it was a doozy.
On the day she turned 43, Vanessa Amorosi was handed victory in the bitter and long-running property dispute that has pitted her against, and estranged her from (almost) absolutely everybody in her family – her mother, her stepfather and her siblings.
The bitter property dispute between Vanessa Amorosi and her mother has finally concluded.Credit: Kristen Burns
Nine months after the five-day trial concluded in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Justice Steven Moore ruled that the Narre Warren property at the centre of the dispute belongs to a trust established to protect the interests of the singer alone, and not also of her mother, Joyleen Robinson.
Moore ruled that Robinson had failed in her claim that the property belonged to her and her husband Peter, either by way of a verbal agreement struck in the kitchen of their former home (known during the five-day trial last year as “the kitchen agreement”, and referred to by Moore in his 66-page judgment as “the Narre Warren Agreement”), or alternatively through adverse possession.
The eight-hectare property on the outskirts of Melbourne is held in the names of Joy Robinson and Vanessa Amorosi as tenants in common. Amorosi lived there until 2005, and the Robinsons have lived there since it was purchased for $650,000 in April 2001.
However, the decision did not go entirely the way of the California-based singer, who broke through internationally when she sang Absolutely Everybody at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Moore ruled that Amorosi must pay her mother $650,000. He also decreed that she is liable for penalty interest on that sum of 10 per cent per annum, backdated to the start of legal proceedings on March 25, 2021.
“This equates to an amount of $219,486.33,” he wrote.
At dispute in the case was the rightful ownership of two properties purchased through trusts established by the women at the height of Amorosi’s first burst of fame when, Moore noted, she earned “in excess of $2 million in income in the 2000-2001 financial year”.
The singer lives at one of those properties, a 1920s house in California. Her mother lives at the other, the large timber ranch house in Narre Warren in Melbourne’s south-east that she had described as her “dream home”.
Also at issue was whether the trusts were established solely to benefit Amorosi, and whether Amorosi had in 2001 promised the Narre Warren house to her mother as a gift.
In his lengthy judgment, Moore addressed assertions made by legal teams for both sides that the warring parties were “unreliable” witnesses.
Of Amorosi’s sometimes sketchy recall, he was relatively forgiving.
“It is entirely unsurprising that some of Ms Amorosi’s evidence about conversations she had with her mother more than 20 years ago when she was an 18-year-old touring the world as an international pop star was general and non-specific,” he wrote.
He noted that her mother should also “be afforded a similar allowance” with respect to her own testimony. Nonetheless, he noted, her evidence regarding the central issue of the verbal agreement about ownership of the property, allegedly struck in the kitchen of the Robinsons’ former home shortly before settlement on the new property, was “vague, changeable and inconsistent”, he wrote.
“The shifting and inconsistent course of Mrs Robinson’s evidence leaves me entirely unconvinced that there existed a Narre Warren agreement as alleged. I did not find Mrs Robinson to be a reliable witness in her evidence to the court.”
Moore added that it was “striking” that no mention was made of this alleged agreement prior to November 2015, about a year after a falling out between mother and daughter over financial matters.
“This was more than 14 years after the alleged conversation in the kitchen in McKenzie Lane and occurred after the relationship between mother and daughter began to sour in late 2014,” he wrote. “This delay is consistent with the variable character of Mrs Robinson’s evidence about key matters.”
Moore ruled that Robinson had failed to honour the intention of the trust established to look after Amorosi’s financial matters, and that the singer should be installed as the trustee of the trust, so long as she accepts responsibility for all outstanding loans associated with it and relating to the Narre Warren property and her home in California.
No determination on costs has been made, though Moore conceded in court that this was likely to be an issue of “some controversy”.
The legal bills for a dispute that dates back three years are likely to run to a couple of hundred thousand dollars for each side. As one supporter of Team Vanessa wryly noted before the judgment was handed down, “in legal matters, sometimes you can win and not win at the same time”.
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