Rosie Batty's Hope
Finding hope for the future by looking at the past.
(From left to right: Fiona McCormack, Rosie Batty, Ken Lay, Daniel Andrews)
How, after her abusive ex killed her son, could Rosie Batty write a book called Hope? It bewilders me.
I watched Rosie at the event for her new book in Melbourne yesterday, as I’ve watched her at so many events over the last ten years. Her humour and fun, her generosity and honesty and grace (no matter how much she denies it) and my bewilderment never goes away. How has she had the strength to be such a powerful advocate for all these years? How was she not simply crushed into nothingness by grief? Hope answers those questions, as much as anything can. Mostly, it seems, she did it because she could, and because she couldn’t not.
I remember the morning in 2014 when Rosie did her first press conference the day after Luke was murdered. I remember the involuntary tears that burst out of me and whole body shock when she told the entire country that her son’s murder was family violence, and it could happen to anyone.
It’s too easy to forget how far we’ve come since then. Now, when an abusive man murders his child, of courseits family violence, what else could it be? Ten years ago, it was anything else. It was that he “just snapped”, he was a “loving dad” and a “caring father”, he was a victim of feminist-infested courts, he was mentally ill, he might even have been a monster, but no one back then called him an abusive man or a man who was committing family violence. Until Rosie did.
Respect Victoria organised the event and when they asked Rosie who she wanted on the panel with her, she chose people who were there with her back in 2014, Fiona McCormack (then CEO of DV Vic) Ken Lay (then Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police) and Daniel Andrews (then opposition leader in Victoria). So many people have worked with Rosie over the years but those were the three were she chose to talk about the change that’s happened in the ten years since Luke was murdered.
Fiona told me afterwards that when she was first asked to be on the panel, her immediate response was that they should get “someone new”, someone who is doing the work now. Who knew I’d ever be so glad no one listened to Fiona McCormack?
In what often feels like a dark and despairing time, nothing could have given more hope than listening to those four people remind us how far we’ve come and how much we can achieve.
I’d forgotten the impact Ken Lay had back then. The Chief Commissioner of Police, a powerful white man who publicly recognised the ground-breaking work of the woman who came before him, Christine Nixon. She was the first woman to become Chief Commissioner of Victoria police and she began the (yet to be completed) work of changing police culture to something that might be able to understand and respond to men’s violence against women. Ken Lay continued that work and it’s impossible to overstate how much it mattered when he pointed back at men – all men – and told them that they may not all be part of the problem, but they all had to be part of the solution.
I am no fan of Dan Andrews, but I remember how, while he was still in opposition, he promised a royal commission into family violence because he knew we needed structure change not, as he called it, “tinkering”. He won an election and kept his promise. Fiona reminded the room how apprehensive the sector was back then – why are we spending millions on a talkfest when we already know what needs to be done? Why isn’t that money going to the desperate front line services that can’t pay their phone bills? What we got in 2016 wasa report from the Royal Commission that is still one of the world’s most comprehensive investigations of the causes, effects, and possible preventions of family violence. The implementation of all the recommendations was far from perfect. There is still more work to be done. But it had to start somewhere and the Royal Commission was – still is – a road map for the structural changes we must make to save lives and futures.
Fiona McCormack is now the Victims of Crime Commissioner and is still one of the most respected authorities on family violence. She is the expert who speaks in plain language, the relentless advocate who never sought fame, the calm voice of reason who knows everyone’s rage. Back in the wilderness years, before the Royal Commission, before the Rosie Effect, when family violence was still a personal matter and a single incident, she was one of the people holding the sector together, dragging funding (in the thousands not millions) out of governments, and advocating for women and children who were never allowed a voice.
Hope. It’s so had to find. It’s even harder to hold on to. So often it feels like we’re stuck in a hamster wheel of wounded women and announcable inaction and the banality of daily horrors. But hope lives, as it always has, outside the present. It’s in the past, when we look back and see how far we’ve come. It’s in the future, when people like Rosie Batty, Ken Lay, Fiona McCormack, and even Dan Andrews, remind us of what can be done when enough people simply decide to do something. Hindsight can tell us it’s not perfect (because it isn’t) and it’s not finished (because it’s not) but it reminds us that it starts with imperfect, unfinished people who are determined to make change.
In the book, Rosie says that every year on Luke’s birthday she buys him a card and writes a message for him. She still has all those cards. There is no one to give them to.
If Rosie, with her unimaginable grief and her inhuman strength and her deeply human frailties can hold on to hope and keep making the world a better, safer place, the rest of us can, if nothing else, see the hope in her and believe it’s enough to keep all of us going.
Disclaimer: I worked for DV Vic for a year when Fiona McCormack was CEO and I have done paid consulting for Respect Victoria.