Rosie Batty has been to Canberra more times than she can remember over the past decade for a reason she wishes didn’t exist.
“I always think, ‘Oh, I’m going to go for a walk around the lake’, but I never do,” says the once anonymous suburban mum who was catapulted to tragic national prominence when her estranged partner Greg Anderson murdered their son Luke, 11, at cricket practise in 2014.
But today Batty, 62, Australia’s foremost awareness campaigner about male violence against women and children, takes that stroll. Straight after a Parliament House meeting with Anthony Albanese, we head for Lake Burley Griffin’s nearby shore.
The national capital’s palette is typically resplendent in seasonally segueing hues of russet and gold. But for a day that dawned autumnally crisp, at lunchtime when we walk it’s breezeless and hot.
Batty is a dedicated walker, at home and on holiday. Her notable treks include the Larapinta Trail in the Northern Territory and the Coast to Coast Walk in the UK where she was born in rural Nottinghamshire. Meanwhile, at home in Tyabb on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, her dogs – the “very disobedient” cocker spaniel Spencer and the “very obedient” black labrador Nelson – ensure she walks daily. But campaigning, which took on unanticipated dimensions with her naming as the 2015 Australian of the Year, can challenge routine, let alone the desire for escape, calm and tranquility.
“I’ve realised walking is a really good opportunity to get in touch … to sit with any uncomfortable feelings you might have,” she says. “But on the same token you are in this most amazing scenery, pushing yourself physically, and I feel that’s a really therapeutic thing for me.”
She walks with her dogs on the beach. Sometimes, too, at the local oval where Luke died. The cricket nets where he was murdered have been transformed into a peaceful memorial garden. “And it’s never seemed weird. I don’t feel a sense of horror or dread. I feel like that space was created out of love from the community and made it a nice space that Luke would be pretty stoked about.”
Batty is physically diminutive. But her smile, big laugh, direct eye contact and a natural warmth render her a large presence. She loves to talk. She does so freely, with nothing seemingly off the table. We walk a while then take shade (she’s forgotten a hat; her fair English skin burns easily) by a picnic table.
She is starting a promo tour for her second book, Hope. Her first, A Mother’s Story, was published in 2016. Hope chronicles the accidental campaigner’s life over the decade since Luke’s murder. It’s been a momentous decade of irredeemable loss, personal reconstruction, intense grief and inspiring new friendships; of relentless pain, trauma (hers and many others’) and, yes, hope. Hope, that campaigners are making a difference even though one Australian woman still dies every nine days at the hands of a current or former partner.
Ten years?
“What does 10 years feel like?” she says. “In some ways you feel tired that you are still saying the same things – still the same messaging and the same frustrations around the work that I do.
“But on the same token it’s kind of like, how can 10 years have gone so fast? And then you realise it has. And you ask, ‘Was Luke ever here at all? And was I ever that mum? And did that ever really happen?’”
But life does go on, she says, so that “you’re not consumed every moment of every day with, you know, what’s happened”.
“But there are those periods of intense sadness that you never lose,” Batty says. “And, I guess, 10 years on you realise you have been able to navigate a life for yourself – that you couldn’t see, that you could never have imagined.
“And look, there has been a lot of structural and policy and legislative change. And I think sometimes you have to look back at where things were to note if any change has happened because, you know, we are still talking about family violence, we are still seeing, very sadly, about one woman a week being murdered.”
She points to a shift in awareness around the socially and economically undiscriminating prevalence of men’s murder of often estranged partners and children. While victim-blaming – often around the ill-informed question Why didn’t she just leave? – is less common, she says it still needs to be countered.
She says victim-blamers “don’t realise that that one woman a week who’s being murdered has almost certainly either been making plans to leave, has recently left or was about to leave”.
“And that is the most dangerous time where a fatality is most likely,” she says. “When I look back 10 years it was very difficult [then] to suggest that it is men who are perpetrators of this type of violence. I think we are beyond that now. I think men totally understand that there are men who are capable [of] and committing these acts. It doesn’t mean that all men are violent. That is shifting but it needs to shift further.”
Batty was victim-blamed after Luke was murdered by his father, who soon after died of police gunshot wounds and self-inflicted knife wounds. While the father had a history of actual and threatened violence against Batty, he’d never harmed Luke and was not, authorities determined, a likely threat to him.
The day after Luke’s murder, Batty, who had never lived with or married Luke’s father, fronted the media, poised and articulate, perplexingly for some critics, to say: “No one loved Luke more than Greg. No one loved Luke more than me. What triggered this was his dad having mental health issues. If anything comes of this, I want it to be a lesson to everybody – no matter how nice your house is or how intelligent you are, family violence can happen to anyone.”
In Hope, she writes: “With the benefit of a decade to think about those words, I wouldn’t change them.”
She reflects further on the terrible day, saying: “What gave me some kind of degree of safety for Luke [was], because I knew Greg loved him and I knew he’d never harmed him, he’d never laid a hand on him, he was incredibly protective. So I thought that those men that do those things are abusive and cruel to their children. I never anticipated it could be a father that had actually cared for and loved his child.
“But my understanding now is … the desire for power, control and the ultimate act of revenge is the most powerful, and I don’t think we can relate to that.”
Luke would now be 22. Does she imagine Luke, the man?
“He’s pretty much still frozen in memory as an 11-year-old,” she says. “But I do imagine a very tall man. I have no doubt he would be taller than his father because that seems to happen in generations of men. He would very definitely be a handsome young man.”
If he’d grown up to be like her – “pushing boundaries” with occasional risky behaviour – she says “he’d be giving me grey hairs”.
She laughs.
“I think he would have become a builder. Yeah … I think I would have struggled to have kept him on [at school] ‘til 18. He was quite conscientious. He was academically quite good. But like me he didn’t like studying. So I think he’d have left school at the first opportunity. But … I think he’d be quite entrepreneurial and business oriented.’’
On the 10th anniversary of Luke’s murder she had a quiet dinner at home with supportive friends. She lit a candle privately.
“With the anniversary of Luke’s death I don’t always realise how affected I am on its approach. But it’s later where you go, ‘I’ve been a bit shut down, a bit more reclusive, a bit less social and maybe a bit more abrupt or something’. Then it passes through.”
We head back into the intense sunshine and wander by the lake.
So, what of hope?
“Hope isn’t a constant state of being, is it?” she says. “You have moments of hope and enthusiasm and inspiration, and something else the following day or half an hour later might make you feel despairing.”
Sometimes a woman will approach after one of her many public speeches and will explain that, inspired by Batty, she has “left”, found safety with the children out of the home or had some satisfaction through the family law system.
“And you go, wow – can I bottle that?”
That is hope.
For now, there’s an Australian book tour and then a holiday to the UK to visit her 91-year-old dad. Which means time away from the sanctuary of her recently renovated home where she keeps Luke’s ashes. It is set on three acres – room for pet dogs and donkeys.
She gets anxious being away from her animals.
“I’ve got some animals that are older than Luke was – they lived to be older than Luke! I do find it really hard that some of my animals lived longer than the son who I had, I now realise, for such a brief time in my whole life.”
