It was a nice suit but it hadn’t exactly been tailored to fit me properly. Thanks to her, I walked into class with confidence

• Read more in the Kindness of strangers series

I started law school in 1976. Gough Whitlam had abolished university fees, which meant a lot of older women who previously wouldn’t have been able to afford to study were arriving at uni for the first time.

I was 17 and nursing an otherness of my own. One day in class, our lecturer asked everyone who had attended a private high school to raise their hand. The sea of arms that shot up revealed that, in a class of 30 people, I was the only one who’d come from a state school. The lecturer didn’t do this cruelly – he was making a point about lawyers being privileged people, and how that affects the legal system. But I nonetheless felt very confronted by the different world my peers came from.

Anita Lester’s distinctive mushroom murder trial portraits show someone she perceived to be ‘consistently sad’

The first time Anita Lester drew Erin Patterson, she made the mistake of trying to be too accurate. Lester, a courtroom artist, had just two minutes to sketch the triple murderer during her brief pre-trial hearing and spent it trying to perfectly illustrate “a little head behind a glass screen in Morwell”. What she later realised is that it’s more important to capture the mood of the accused than the exact lines of their face.

“What makes a good courtroom artist is being able to bring the public into the courtroom to witness the emotion of the person on trial,” she says. “You’re actually trying to just capture a feeling or a gesture that might resonate. It’s not about being the best artist in the world.”