[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am.

Ten years ago, Schwartz Media launched its weekly independent newspaper, The Saturday Paper.

On page three of its first edition was a story about a woman who had just become a household name: Rosie Batty.

Thrust into the spotlight while grieving the murder of her son Luke at the hands of his father, Rosie Batty used the worst moment of her life to put domestic violence on the national agenda.

Today, Associate Editor for The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie Murray, on what he learnt about grief after following Rosie Batty’s story for a decade.

It’s Friday, March 1st.

[Theme Music Ends]

ANGE:

Marty, it’s the tenth anniversary of The Saturday Paper tomorrow. You wrote your first story in the first edition of the paper about Rosie Batty. I'm wondering, where were you when you first learned about her?

MARTIN:

I was in the back of a police car. I just left Victoria Police myself. So now working with The Saturday Paper I wanted to do a piece on domestic violence. And I've been doing a lot of work on domestic violence at Victoria Police. So I joined a special domestic violence unit, and did a ride along with them. So I just sat in the back and they did a lot of follow ups at homes and I think it was in the back of that car the day that the news came through.

Audio Excerpt – Reporter 1:

"A community in Victoria is struggling to understand the events that occurred last night at a suburban sports ground outside Melbourne."

Audio Excerpt – Reporter 2:

"The death of 11 year old Luke Batty on a Tyabb sports oval at the hands of his father has devastated the community in outer southeast Melbourne."

Audio Excerpt – Reporter 3:

"The incident happened in Tyabb, Victoria in Australia as parents and children watched on in horror."

MARTIN:

And I remember this might seem a bit mawkish, but I remember it very precisely. Like part of that ride along, going past an oval and looking at a young child playing cricket with his father. And of course Luke Batty had been murdered by his father in cricket nets.

And then that evening or the next evening I saw what became, it's a weird, I don't know if this word is kind of appropriate, an iconic media conference that Rosie Batty gave impromptu at the front of her home, I think within 24 hours of the murder of her young son.

Audio Excerpt – Rosie Batty:

"Luke was at cricket practice and it was allowed from the intervention order. It was a public place. I believed he was safe. It was just a little cricket practice. There's people there…"

MARTIN:

And it's, it's really, ten years later it seems strange to kind of keep invoking this media conference, right? But it was, like it, there was such a strange feeling about it. It felt like, you know, I don't want to overstate this, and I hate the portentousness of journos talking about their work and going but you know, everyone was seized by the moment, but that truly sincerely there was something so haunting and distinctive about Rosie's speech that night.

Audio Excerpt – Rosie Batty:

"And so as a sane person, or as a caring parent, you trust that the very person that killed him loved him and they did love him. They loved him more than anyone else. The only two people that love their son as much as anyone is their mother and father."

MARTIN:

There was this unusual marriage of articulacy, precision.

Audio Excerpt – Rosie Batty:

"I'm still dealing with disbelief. I'm here right now because I know you have a job to do, and I want to tell everybody that family violence happens to everybody, no matter how nice your house is, or how intelligent you are. It happens to anyone and everyone, and this has been an 11 year battle."

MARTIN:

Rosie has quite a sophisticated language for grief and suffering. A function of her therapy, she once told me. It didn't sound like a grief and a trauma that we might be used to. And I think simultaneously, that's what a lot of people found impressive and others considered suspicious that she was suspiciously articulate.

Audio Excerpt – Mark Latham:

"There's a demonisation of men here where if you listen to Rosie Batty, every man is a potential wife basher. Every woman is potentially at risk."

MARTIN:

It didn't match our conceptions or expectations for how people might grieve. It upset them, and I think people felt, I mean there was a lot of public commentary about this, a lot of intemperate and quite cruel commentary making assumptions about Rosie Batty. And they began that evening with that press conference. And so for some, they thought they saw in the articulacy something suspicious, a concealment of guilt that she couldn't protect her son from her father. But it still seems unusual ten years later to be talking about this kind of impromptu moment, at the front of her house.

ANGE:

So after that press conference she gave, when did you meet Rosie Batty face to face? Can you tell me about that?

MARTIN:

Yeah. I did something that is not impossible now, but much harder or unlikelier. Which is, I looked up her name and number in white pages.

ANGE:

Oh my gosh.

MARTIN:

And called a landline.

ANGE:

What year was this?

MARTIN:

I left a message on an answering machine. Yeah. I had just left the office of the chief commissioner, and I had the issue of improving certain parts of the system as they pertained to domestic violence was pretty important to me. That was probably included in my appeal on the answering machine.

ANGE:

Right. So you didn't get through to her on the phone?

MARTIN:

No, no, I got the answering machine and a call back from her, surprisingly. And she invited me out to a property in Tyabb, near the Mornington Peninsula I guess on the east side of the Port Phillip Bay, So it's kind of rural or semi-rural and I took the train out there. And in kind of thinking about this and writing some of my pieces for the first time in many years before speaking to you, I realised that it was just ten days after the murder of Luke, that I met Rosie at her home.

I remember very distinctly a strong smell of flowers because so many had been, you know, bouquets of flowers had been given to her. A lot of people always ask me like, and not just of Rosie but like, why the fuck would she want to speak to you in this state, in this circumstance, a complete stranger?

ANGE:

Yeah but what was she going to get out of that?

MARTIN:

What do people get out of this? You know, and, you know, I can't answer this with huge authority, this is really a question for Rosie, but for those moments when you're not unconscious, you don't know what to do with yourself. And I think company is useful, even if it's not engaged, you might not be speaking, but you need to be doing things chain smoking, drinking, maybe chatting or gesturing or, but just stuff like some pre occupancy.

ANGE:

Busyness…

MARTIN:

Some kind of busyness yeah, I really understand that phrase, which seems really empty and hackneyed and kind of denuded of any meaning, which is, I don't know what to do with myself. Like, Rosie Batty was in that period, she did not know what to do with herself. And I offered I think, and again this is a question for Rosie really, something to do, an ear there. We had kept contact after that February, and the story runs at the start of March. But I think the next time I saw her in person was November of that year, 2014, and that was the coronial inquest, and I was there on for a few days. But there was one particular day that I wrote of, I think it was day six of the of the inquest, and it was that evening that Rosie Batty was announced as Victorian of the year. Thus also making her a candidate for Australian of the year, which a couple of months later she wins. And so now in January of 2015, it's like 11 months since the murder of her son, this kind of large crown is placed on her head.

There was a kind of a lionization of Rosie as well, and put enormous pressure upon her to kind of fulfil this sense that she had become, in the eyes of some, a saint. And she was neither of those things. Right? She was neither a saint nor a villain, but a fairly ordinary woman to whom the obscene had happened. And from that she sought meaning and purpose and part of that was a kind of public role.

Helen Garner interviewed Rosie that year as well, 2014, and Rosie said to Helen I've got to be careful. You know, she said this wryly of course with self-awareness, I must be careful that my halo doesn't slip and strangle me.

ANGE:

After the break - what we can learn from Rosie Batty’s time in the spotlight.

[Advertisement]

Audio Excerpt – Rosie Batty:

"I am truly honoured. I would like to dedicate this award to my beautiful son Luke. He is the reason I have found my voice and I'm able to be heard."

MARTIN:

It's sort of upon the recipient to define Australian of the year I think.

It's not necessarily a responsibility. It could simply be an acknowledgement. It often is.

ANGE:

It could be a trophy and off you go.

MARTIN:

You don't do much with it, and that's fine. There are no strictures. You know, there's no obligations to it. Celebrity seems the wrong word, so profile. But she was ever nervous that that celebrity would evaporate, It surely couldn't last, She thought. So she had this window, and she was kind of zealous, almost manic in her determination to use it. I think there are about 250 events that year across the country. She was kind of permanently at the airport. Like the catapulting into that publicity and scrutiny where the most profound and intimate things about you, the death of your son and your response to it, your alleged complicity and the most intimate things and sort of scandalous imputations are constantly being discussed publicly by strangers, you know.

ANGE:

And they define you. It became her identity. Everyone knew who she was because of the worst day.

MARTIN:

It's interesting you bring that up because that was part, she had this, in that year and maybe beyond a sense of fraudulence that she was unfit and unworthy for the title of Australian of the Year. And one of those reasons was the one you just raised, which was that like it's what a strange thing to be known for, my son was murdered. You know that there was something, obviously it goes without saying, profound in that tragedy and loss to her but something unusual about that being the thing to anoint her this public saint. You know there were times when she would sort of go, oh my God, like how? Like you could drive a truck through the space between, you know, the public's conception of me and then her own conceptions of her where she gets to see the actual, the mess of trauma, the mess of PTSD.

ANGE:

And Marty, when did you meet with Rosie after her very busy year as Australian of the year?

MARTIN:

Yeah, we sort of kept quite a bit of contact in the first couple of years and then that slowed, diminished. And then there was like a day before what would have been Luke's 17th birthday, so this is in 2019, I asked her if she might like to be profiled again. You know, I thought sufficient time had passed, And really I had that question like, what the hell was it like to be Australian of the year while suffering PTSD and kind of being manically committed to using that opportunity? Like it just seemed nuts to me and I don't think anyone had asked the question or thought about it, like what does it mean? And what do you get? And what do you do as Australian of the year, you know? And it turns out it was this kind of largely this desperate improvisation.

ANGE:

How did she talk about her public persona and how she felt about it at that time, having dealt with it for a few years?

MARTIN:

I think I recall one frustration which was dissent from those who were suspicious about her articulacy, or if at times she seemed suspiciously poised, like shouldn't a grieving mother be hysterical? And to be otherwise is suspicious, it’s concealing some unspoken guilt, right? And Rosie's frustration with that, you know, these various gulfs, there's various discrepancies between the private and the public perception was like, but I am frequently without poise and inarticulate and babbling and enraged and embittered and, you know, but that is largely expressed privately. It's not that I'm not grieving in very obvious and demonstrable and ugly ways. I am.

ANGE:

You can't see it.

MARTIN:

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not happening. Yeah.

ANGE:

So all these years after this has happened, ten years after you've covered Rosie's story extensively, you've also covered other stories involving tragedy and grief. What is it that Rosie Batty's story taught you about how Australia publicly engages with tragedy and loss? What can we learn from that?

MARTIN:

I think we are very narrow minded and mean spirited when contemplating how others should think or act or say or express their grief. I mean it seems almost like a casual form of savagery, to be honest, to make these assumptions about how people might express grief. Like, that's, it seems very small and mean spirited to me, and rather ignorant of the capacities of multitudes of human psychology as well the variety of expressions of it. And there's some difficulties here, like with no one teaches you how to grieve, and no one teaches you how to help others who are grieving. Some are intuitively good at it.

I think when there's the annihilation of a child involved, people obviously become fierce in their judgements. There's a vicarious protectiveness there, I think, that comes out in strangers when the thought of a murdered child exists. That's all really super understandable. But the problem with it is that I think that sense of protectiveness, however distantly, felt right. So felt by strangers, means that the surviving victim here, Rosie Batty, is judged with a vicious scrutiny, so I think that's another part of it that that that kind of the more vicious parts or suspicious parts of the public scrutiny of Rosie Batty, I think, is tied to this understandable protectiveness of children and this obvious outrage at the thought of a murdered child. But the problem with that is that that kind of sum or that surplus of emotion can express itself in ways that fucking punish a woman who's already been obscenely punished. So, yeah, that's one thing I think about it.

ANGE:

Marty, thanks so much for your time today.

MARTIN:

Thank you.

ANGE:

If you or someone you know needs support with domestic violence, you can call 1800 RESPECT.

Tomorrow, The Saturday Paper celebrates ten years of powerful, award-winning, and independent journalism from Australia’s best writers. To mark its tenth birthday, for the next month, you can get two years for the price of one when you buy a digital subscription at thesaturdaypaper.com.au.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has rejected calls for ASIO to name a former politician who has been accused of selling out Australia and being cultivated by foreign spies.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess said the agency would not name the former politician, and gave no details about their age, gender, or when they left politics. Richard Marles said he respected ASIO’s decision to not identify them.

And Greens Senator Janet Rice staged a protest in the House of Representative yesterday, during an address by the President of the Philippines, Marcos Jr.

Senator Rice held a sign that read ‘stop the human rights abuses’, and in a statement later, said corruption was rife in the Philippines, and questioned the country’s justice system.

In welcoming the President to the Australian Parliament, Anthony Albanese said the Philippines and Australia shared a “determination to navigate the challenges of our time” including climate change and regional security.

7am is a daily show from The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Zoltan Fecso and Cheyne Anderson.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Our editor is Scott Mitchell. Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio.

Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Andy Elston, Travis Evans, and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again next week.

[Theme Music Ends]