WHEN IT COMES to Gold Coast icons, they don’t come better credentialled than Jason Murakami. His family’s links to the region can be traced back to the early 1900s, with the Murakami name woven deeply into the fabric of the city ever since. “My great grandfather, Junzo, came to Australia from Japan in 1882,” Jason explains. “He worked in the cane fields in Mackay as an indentured immigrant and by 1901 he had bought a plot of land in Brisbane and went on to establish a very successful dry cleaning business. “He fell in love with a Danish woman but under the White Australia Policy that was in place at the time he was not allowed to marry an Anglo-Saxon woman in a public house because he was Asian. “Junzo being Junzo said ‘I’m not having that, I’m going to buy a pub so I can have my wedding. “So he bought the Scottish Princess, which is now the Angler’s Arms, in Southport and held the ceremony there.” The Gold Coast has essentially been the holiday place, then home base, for the Murakami family ever since. “My grandfather, Albury, followed in his father’s footsteps and had dry cleaning businesses on the Gold Coast and in Beenleigh,” Jason explains. “He developed the whole ridge behind Biggera Waters shopping centre and Thelma Avenue at Biggera Waters is named after my grandmother. “So starting from Junzo and down to my niece Natasha’s children we are now 6th generation Gold Coasters.” Which brings us to Jason. Growing up on the northern end of the Coast, Jason attended Aquinas College where he excelled at drawing and painting and was College Captain and Football Captain in his final year of high school. “In 1987 I was Dux of Art and that was the first year they did an all-schools seniors art exhibition at the old Arts Centre [now HOTA],” Jason recalls. “Four of my works were exhibited and I sold all four.

“When you are 17 that gives you the impetus to follow a path so I started out on the basis that I was going to be an artist. “I was enrolled in Queensland College of Art, and as an undergrad I moved to Melbourne to be in residence with a group of artists down there. “That Bohemian existence was an amazing experience intellectually but there was little revenue coming in so I left the professional art world and came back to the Coast with the intention of studying law.” However, fate stepped in when Jason was offered a Journalism cadetship with the Gold Coast Bulletin in October 1988.

“I get immense satisfaction practicing in family law because in 95 per cent of my matters I also affect really positive change in my clients’ lives.” – Jason Murakami

While he admits he enjoyed his time there, Jason also remembers the exact moment when he decided he was going to follow his original plan to study Law. “It was around the time of the Mabo Case, and I knocked on the editor’s door and said I’ve got a story for you, ‘there’s going to be a decision and it it’s going to have massive ramifications in Australia because there’s going to be an acknowledgement of ownership by Indigenous peoples’. “He said something along the lines of ‘we aren’t interested in that, it’s too high brow’.

“And I realised at that point that whilst I loved journalism, I want to be involved in affecting the agenda as opposed to reporting on it.” In order to achieve this objective, Jason moved to Brisbane to complete his law degree, before starting his career on the Gold Coast in 1996. “I was very fortunate in my legal career to have acted in some of Queensland’s biggest and most high-profile matters including being lead solicitor on the Pauline Hanson appeal, the successful defence of the prosecution of former Mayor Gary Baildon and former Deputy Mayor David Power and the $30-million legal action for Palm Island residents against the Queensland Police Service, “ Jason recalls. So how did he end up as the family law partner in one of the Gold Coast’s leading boutique litigation firms? “In the early days I did not view myself as a family lawyer … I simply had a reputation as a fixer and family law matters came my way because clients wanted definitive action. “Clients would say ‘I want Jason in my family law matter’ and as a result, my reputation as a family lawyer was consolidated really without intention. These days Jason gets immense satisfaction from being one of the city’s go-to family lawyers. “I continue to get great pleasure for being part of a person’s solution to their problem,” he says. “In 95 per cent of my matters I also affect really positive change in my clients’ lives.” An extremely deep thinker, Jason takes a very holistic and emotionally intelligent approach to his cases. “What a lot of people don’t understand is that Family Law is an exercise in psychology,” he explains. “A client’s legal position is but only one accoutrement to a solution to their problem. “A psychiatrist called Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor, wrote an amazing book called Man’s Search for Meaning. “He came up with a simple premise, where he said ‘In life all of us have certain stimulus, and if you think of yourself as a circle, the stimulus are arrows hitting the circle.

Most of us respond immediately to the arrow hitting the circle’. “His idea is that if we all put a gap between the stimulus and our response – the arrows hitting the circle – it’s in that gap we all grow for the better as people. “The way to explain that to clients in practical terms is … ‘you’ve been in a relationship for 20 years and your partner is late home for dinner and you remonstrate with them for being late. “In this example, the stimulus is your partner’s act of being late and your response is the remonstrations. “All Frankl is saying is that between the stimulus and the response insert a gap of time which will allow you to think about your response. “I’ve adopted this for over a decade in relation to my family law practice and because of it I’ve been pleasantly successful in not only getting legal outcomes for my clients but also achieving outcomes for them on a personal and emotional level which essentially makes them a better person, which in turn makes them better business people, better partners, better parents.” Now, with the walls of the Behlau Murakami Grant’s chic industrial offices in Southport lined with striking original artworks, including some of his own pieces, Jason’s love of law and the arts has come full circle. The practice is sponsoring a portrait prize through his old alma mater, Queensland College of Art, with the finalist being announced in November. “Fine art has been really suffering because of Covid and burgeoning artists have just been decimated so this is the perfect opportunity to offer some support,” Jason says. “This is one of the biggest portraiture prizes for undergrads in the State and we have asked the entrants to do a portrait in relation to issues pertaining to wrongful convictions.” The inaugural portrait prize coincides with the 20-year-anniversary of Jason’s establishment of the internationally renowned Griffith University Innocence Project. When Jason is not working, painting or mentoring up and coming artists and lawyers, you will most likely find him on the Gold Coast waterways, indulging his passion for old boats. “About five years ago my wife Melizia and I brought a lovely 30-foot former world champion yacht from Sydney called Kirribilli,” Jason says. “We completely refurbished her and she is just one of those stunning old world boats in the sense of all the old craftmanship and boatbuilding techniques. “There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of sailing, and when you see her, you don’t think of speed, you think of going slow and just being in a peaceful moment.”