Waiting on the corner of Beaufort and Brisbane Streets in Northbridge, I see Danny Estrin whiz past me in a little black Fiat. It’s almost as small as my Mini, but a lot cleaner. Not a single stray Jacaranda flower stuck in the windscreen wipers. He gives me a wave before parking, then bounces out of the car to greet me.
I am a stranger to Danny, but I feel like I know him already. Ever since his band Voyager burst onto the Eurovision stage in 2023, I have had a mild obsession. Who is this person? How can he be a sensible lawyer AND a synth-metal rock star? Is he really as buoyant, upbeat and charismatic as he comes across in the media?
I especially wonder this given that, in 2023, shortly after performing in the Eurovision grand final to 180 million people across the globe, Danny was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. It seemed unbearably cruel: this talented musician, a founding partner at immigration firm Estrin Saul, husband, father of two young kids, and on the cusp of global musical success was now facing the battle of his life.
I joke to Danny that I thought he would have brought the Bentley to such an auspicious interview with his local Law Society rag. But the prized Bentley is parked safely in a warehouse with his growing collection of vintage cars – his other love – which now numbers in the double digits.
We wander into a café and, within seconds, he runs into a client who needs help with an urgent immigration issue. Danny is very well known in Perth, first as a lawyer and then as a musician. He’s a bona fide Perthonality, if you will.
Coffee in hand, I ask him how he’s going these days and whether he is still practising, wondering if he will be open to chatting about his illness. He is disarmingly candid.
“I’ve had to take quite a back step since 2023, since the diagnosis,” he says. “Unfortunately, it was really, really bad. Last year, they basically said, ‘You don’t have long’. Then you start treatment, it gets better, then worse, then a different type of treatment, and you go on. The tricky part is knowing how long it will last until it doesn’t work anymore. Your body becomes chemo-resistant, therapy-resistant. Now I’m at this crossroads where I think, ‘Do I plunge back into work when I feel good, or should I really focus on health?’ Because if you push yourself too hard and the next scan is bad …”.
Ten years ago, Danny set up his own firm with good friend Reuben Saul, and it has now grown to a business of more than 50 employees. Stepping back from full-time practice has been difficult, but he’s been left with little choice.
“The firm is my baby, you know? So it’s a balancing act between enjoying life and listening to my body. The fatigue is real. There is a lot of cell death happening, without getting too medical. But you just have to listen to your body: ‘I need a rest now’. And that, unfortunately, is not reconcilable with being a full-time lawyer.”
Of logic and creativity
Danny is unapologetically an immigration law obsessive; an administrative law nerd with a strange love and appreciation for the web of what he calls “unnecessary bureaucracy” that often surrounds immigration cases. He has worked across the gamut of immigration law, practising at the Australian Government Solicitor after a stint at the Australian Embassy in Germany (where he was born) then moving into private practice. Administrative law is, he says, the perfect forum for using both logic and creativity.
“The left brain is all about the structure – understanding the [immigration] points test and that there is a very strict regulatory system with certain laws, secondary legislation, gazettes, all these kinds of things,” he explains. “And then there’s these wonderful exceptional circumstances. You can really dig into your creative right brain and say, ‘I’m going to create a really compelling argument that will hopefully convince a case officer or a judge’. There’s great satisfaction in doing that.”
In 2018, his legal creativity earned him and Reuben notoriety in Canberra – and the ire of then-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton – when they took up the case of 1,600 asylum seekers who had landed on Ashmore Reef, off the coast of Broome and Darwin.
The firm challenged the designation of a “port” at Ashmore Reef and therefore the government’s policy of transferring boat arrivals onto Navy vessels and entering the “port” to restrict their visa and appeal pathways.
The Minister for Home Affairs had already conceded one case, finding evidence – after five and a half years – that the asylum seeker never actually entered the port, which also affected 90 other people on that boat.
The Full Federal Court ruled in favour of Estrin Saul’s clients, finding that the designated area at Ashmore Reef was not a “port” within the meaning of the Act. Danny is rightly proud of this win.
“The government had a policy of towing asylum seeker boats to the ‘port’ of Ashmore Reef, saying they had now arrived in a port and therefore were prevented from lodging certain visa applications on shore. We said, hang on, there’s no port on Ashmore. There’s nothing there! And the court agreed with us,” he recalls. “The Administrative Review Tribunal hated us for a long time. In fact, I think Peter Dutton mentioned us, either directly or indirectly, in Hansard as being ‘those pesky immigration lawyers’.”
The Ashmore Reef case was significant, but Danny finds equal joy in the quieter wins. “There are individual cases where you’re helping a family with a disabled child who hasn’t been able to get permanent residence because the child has severe health issues. After 10 years of fighting, suddenly you can make that call and say, ‘You are now permanent residents’. It’s incredible,” he says.
“I still get calls from clients. There’s a gentleman up in Broome who still sends me mangoes every single year. In the office it’s like, ‘When are the mangoes coming?’ These are wonderful moments where you’ve actually changed people’s lives.”
A star is born
In May 2023, Danny and his Voyager bandmates headed to Liverpool in the UK to perform their hit song ‘Promise’ on the Eurovision stage. Just before landing in Liverpool, the band attended a Eurovision event hosted by the Australian Embassy in the Hague. They performed in front of a crowd of heavy metal music aficionados, diplomats, lawyers, dignitaries and international politicians.
“I felt like I could meaningfully speak to everyone, and my heart was full,” says Danny. “Someone from the Norwegian Embassy came up to me during the event and said, ‘Your Eurovision song – it’s like it was written for the current Zeitgeist: Promise me it’s gonna be alright’.”
Astoundingly, they won their semi-final and finished ninth overall in the final. It was an incredible moment for Danny and propelled the band to international stardom. He was a pig in mud.
“I was born for that, man. I was born for doing that. And I was born for doing the diplomacy and the political campaign in the leadup to the finals and being Miss Congeniality. It is all the public vote, so you’ve got to connect with people,” he says.
If you’ve seen the performance (and if you haven’t, who even are you?), it’s impossible to disagree. The band brought pure theatre to stage, and Danny even flew over his first ever car – a Toyota MR2 – as the main stage prop. The result was Eurovision pageantry at its finest, and the world was there for it. So was Danny.
“I was doing all the interviews and speaking different languages and making connections all around Europe. I find it easy to talk to people from different cultures, and immigration law has assisted with that. I’m used to speaking to people from all different countries all the time, and I love it,” he says.
“I love countries, I love accents, I love dialects, I love capital cities. I’m the perfect nerd for this. And I’m also in this metal band. It culminated in this incredible coming together of everything I loved about music and entertainment and being European in Australia, but also being very proudly Australian in Europe and representing Australia, particularly Western Australia.
“There was nothing negative about it. It was pure joy and positivity from everywhere. And the support from WA and the rest of the country was just incredible. You cannot imagine what it’s like standing up on this world stage and thinking, ‘We’ve made it into the final, the lights are going down … shit, I’m just gonna have fun!’”
After the band’s Eurovision success, Danny’s life necessarily changed. The first time he realised it, he was about to bite into a burrito in Perth when someone asked him for a selfie. “I thought, ‘Is this where I’m at now?’,” he laughs.
“It was kind of hilarious, too, because people were getting really confused. I remember getting an email from a guy saying, ‘So here I am cutting my vegetables, a big Voyager fan. I’m listening to Voyager, and I’m looking at the TV and I see this guy who looks like the singer from Voyager talking about immigration law and the Novak Djokovic visa issue. Please tell me that was not you?’”
Seen better days
These days, Danny is focussed on finding joy in every moment. This is the gift, he says, if there is one, that being diagnosed with terminal cancer gives you.
“As cheesy as it sounds, you’ve got to seize the day, every single moment. One thing this sort of a diagnosis teaches you is that you don’t know how long you’ve got. Every single moment counts,” he says.
“You also become less tolerant of nonsense and just say, nah, I don’t need that in my life. It’s an incredible luxury to have, but when you sit there and get told you have terminal cancer and that you should write a letter to your children, you start thinking very differently.”
Even though he has taken a step back from practice and is having to rest between fortnightly chemo sessions, he laughs that his friends tell him he’s still doing more than they ever do, even without cancer. He’s just back from performing with Voyager in Germany, and the band has released a new song about Danny’s battle, ‘Seen Better Days’. It’s an incredibly moving song – and if you listen to it and watch the clip you will understand why.
There’s also a television program in the works with an Australian network in 2026 about unusual cars and people’s attachment to them. In a recent media interview, Danny said part of the reason for doing the show is to try to understand his own obsession with cars.
He is still also very involved with the firm, taking on cases when he can and mentoring the next generation of administrative law nerds. He is intent on inspiring others to be as obsessed about immigration law as him and reminding them that the most important part of it – aside from having an unnatural passion for regulatory change and red tape – is to be positive and, above all, human.
“I think in immigration law you do need positivity, especially when you’re telling someone it is going to be a long journey, it’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be an uphill battle,” he says. “I remember one story where a young man had come to see me, and he wanted me to take on his case. At the end of the consultation, he said, ‘Daniel, I really like your music. I listened to your album, and I realised that you had the emotional capability to be able to understand my case for a protection visa’. That’s why he picked me as his lawyer.”
As we wrap up our chat and head back to our cars, my questions are well and truly answered. Danny really is as buoyant, upbeat and charismatic as he comes across in the media. And probably even more so. He’s doing it tough, yes, but he’s not letting the battle defeat him. F*ck cancer, as he says often.
He stops to check out my Mini. Apparently, it’s quite a rare model – and he would know. He tells me it needs a good clean, which it does. There are Jacaranda flowers stuck in the wipers. We both zoom off with a toot of the horn. Both hoping he will, very soon, see better days.
This article originally appeared in Issue 52, December 2025, of the Brief magazine, produced by the Law Society.
Issue 53 is due to be published and posted to Law Society members in late June 2026.
