The Australian of the Year Award is often referred to as an honour, recipients always thank the Australia Day Council for giving them the award, but perhaps it should be the other way round. In 2014 Adam Goodes brought racism and Aboriginal issues to the forefront of national consciousness, and paid a heavy price for it. Patrick McGorry did outstanding work changing our understanding and awareness of mental illness in 2010, and in 2015 we had Rosie Batty, who worked tirelessly on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of victims of domestic violence.
I’ve spoken to police, politicians, front line service workers, paramedics, doctors, activists, journalists, magistrates and therapists about domestic violence, and the work they do fighting it. All of them said their work has changed this year and Rosie was the lynchpin of that change. Her advocacy has irrevocably altered the way Australia understands and responds to domestic violence.
Magistrates told me that they used to try to talk to government ministers about the desperate needs victims had in the court system, and they’d be fobbed off to low level flunkies. Now they get meetings with Premiers and police chiefs. Front line services crying out for funding were ignored and dismissed, now they make front page headlines and federal government minsters are forced to explain their position. Police, struggling to find support in their own organisations to do better by domestic violence victims, are finally getting the resources they need.
Most importantly of all, Rosie gave a voice to the voiceless. The victims, once isolated and blamed for their own abuse have had a giant walk amongst us, and show the world that domestic violence is heartbreakingly real. Rosie’s grief and grace gave voice to all the women who suffer as she suffered, and made them unalterably visible. We can never thank her enough for what she did this year, for the lives she saved, the lives she changed and the immutable difference she made to the national understanding of what used to be a silent epidemic.
We may also never know what it has cost her, under the weight of such sorrow, to put that effort into the sorrow of others. Taking on the pain of everyone who wanted to share with her stories too familiar to bear, but she listened to all of them with such empathy, and told her own story again and again with unimaginable strength. The abuse she got from people so threatened by unpalatable truths that traducing a bereaved mother seemed justified was horrific, it hurt to watch her move through all that, how she did it with such dignity is incomprehensible.
I don’t know what Rosie has planned for next year, she may continue her advocacy, she might just rest quietly for a while, she might want to finally draw breath and scream unendingly at the brutal injustice of a world where small boys die at the hands of a man who loves them. Whatever she needs to do, I hope she does it and finds some measure of comfort in it.
But I know that we, as a nation, owe her a debt we can never repay and thanks we can never truly put into words.
The one thing we can do though, for her and for all the women and children she spoke for, is to keep her message and her work in the forefront of public discussion.
The federal government is still ignoring the needs of front line services, refuges are still turning away terrified women and their children because they don’t have the funding they need. The institutions of power – government, police and media – are still struggling to change the mindset that abused women are not important. Public understanding of how viciously wrong it is to blame victims, and all the insidious ways that blame creeps into the way we talk about them and help them has certainly improved, but there is more work to do.
We cannot allow all Rosie’s work to fade into the background if she is no longer there to force us to confront it. We owe her, and all the women she spoke for, far better than that.
But for now, perhaps we should just take a moment to say thank you for the service she has done us all. Rosie, we will not forget you, we will not forget Luke, and we will not forget all the other women and children you gave your voice and your heart to. Thank you.