A Mother's Story

by Rosie Batty

  And this was the problem with the court system. There was no continuity. Magistrate Holzer may not have known the particulars of Greg’s violence towards me and Luke because he had not been presiding on the previous occasions when they were revealed. With each new magistrate, I felt as if I had to start from scratch. I had to get them to understand all over again the danger I was in and the level of violence to which Greg could stoop.

  I asked for permission to speak and stood up. ‘Greg has a history of violence,’ I said. ‘Scouts is unsupervised, the car park is pitch-black. It’s not safe for me to drop Luke off there. There are not as many people around. It’s not like cricket or football at all!’ I had started to become emotional – my voice rose and began to quaver. I went on to inform the magistrate of the child pornography charges, the knife threat, the involvement of Child Protection and Greg’s long history of violence.

  Magistrate Holzer instructed me to sit down. Prosecutor Davidson turned around and motioned at me to sit back down, indicating my outburst was not helping my cause. But I was too far gone. I picked up my handbag, wiped the tears from my face and walked out of the courtroom.

  Minutes later, I was in the foyer trying to compose myself when Prosecutor Davidson emerged. ‘There you are!’ she said. ‘You got what you wanted. He’s changed the wording on the IVO. You just had to stay.’

  I looked at her, dumbfounded. She seemed to me to be implying that I had overreacted. No matter how well-intentioned she was, this woman knew little of my history. Because of a system that means she deals with possibly fifty cases a day, she could never be across the full details of them all. She probably had little appreciation of the journey I had been on to get to this point – to be sobbing uncontrollably in the foyer of a courtroom. Was she really thinking I had overreacted?

  ‘What’s the point?’ I spat back at her. ‘I mean, honestly. What is the point of all of this? It’s not going to make a scrap of difference. I’ve been through all of this before and it doesn’t change a thing. I might as well throw myself under a bus.’

  ‘You keep speaking like that, Rosie, and I’ll have to report it to the mental health team,’ the prosecutor said.

  ‘You cannot be serious,’ I replied. ‘I’m angry, and I have every reason to be angry. In fifteen minutes I’ll be calm again. I’m not the one that needs mental health intervention. This is ludicrous.’

  But the prosecutor was only doing her job in accordance with the law. So she went to find a police officer, who returned to speak with me to determine my mental state.

  When he was done, I gathered my things and walked out of the courthouse.

  In the car on the way home, I reflected on the catch 22 in which I found myself. If I downplayed the violence and threats, no one took them seriously. But if I became hysterical, I was written off as a melodramatic – or mad – woman. Decades of exposure to family violence had muted the official response to it, and I was suffering for that.

  22

  Holding Pattern

  Winter turned gradually to spring, in that lazy, sometimes reluctant way it does in southern Victoria. I loved the beauty of the Mornington Peninsula. Those winding roads along dramatic coastline, the thundering surf on the ocean side, the quaint beaches on the bay side and the vineyards and rolling hills in between – it truly was a stunning part of the world in which I found myself. Moving to Tyabb had given me the taste of country that I needed to stay sane. After being raised on a farm, I needed that sense of space more than I was even properly aware.

  As we started to shuck our winter gear and prepare for what can often be a searingly hot summer, I signed Luke up for cricket again. Luke was good at sport but not always the best. He loved to win and be noticed. He was proficient with a ball, had decent hand-to-eye co-ordination, for sure. But he was probably not going to be a prodigy, and when I thought about his future, I didn’t see him walking out onto the pitch at Lords representing his country.

  For that reason, I’d also enrolled him in a local, after-school drama course. He’d always shown a talent for performing. At his age, it was easy to confuse being a ham or a class clown with any actual acting or performing talent, but I figured it was good for him to know that there were other things in life than sport.

  Luke took to the classes like a duck to water. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had found his calling, but certainly his weekly excursions into the world of the arts were an unexpected hit. Luke liked the stage and the stage seemed to like him back.

  *

  Dissatisfied with and distressed by the recent court ruling around Greg’s access to Luke, I rang Child Protection to ask if they could help me take out a protective order for Luke. But they said they were unable to help me. They’d determined that I was a suitable protector of Luke’s wellbeing and they were satisfied Luke was not in danger and therefore they had decided to close his file. Once again, I had turned to an agency for support, and once again they had left me stranded.

  Because I was relatively sane (though my sanity was being sorely tested), and able to provide for Luke and give him a stable home environment (of sorts), I was being left to deal with the Greg situation by myself. I felt terribly isolated and that I was being unfairly punished because I wasn’t a complete mess. I didn’t want to be the one to confront Greg and tell him that he couldn’t see his son anymore. I knew the violence of which he was capable: I didn’t wish to be the brunt of it again. I wanted the directives to come from judges or police or child protection officers.

  Also, and perhaps without being aware of it, I wanted validation from a third party – an authoritative third party – that Greg was dangerous, that he was a potentially damaging influence in Luke’s life, and therefore, after eleven years of supporting his relationship with Luke, it was time to shut the door.

  I received a letter from the family violence service in which they offered to arrange more counselling sessions should Luke or I feel the need for them. But I didn’t want any more counselling sessions, I just wanted Greg out of my life. I could lie on a couch until the cows came home, pouring out my heart, but it wasn’t going to remove the cancer that had taken hold in our lives. I just wanted someone to step in and excise it.

  I felt that Greg had lived a really tormented life, and that everything he had ever loved or cared for was slowly being taken away from him. He was homeless, jobless and pursued by police. He had a serious marijuana habit, which was not only expensive to maintain but was messing with the little mental clarity he was holding on to. What shreds of dignity he had left were all predicated on an increasingly jumbled grab bag of religious zealotry, and even they were starting to look more frayed by the day as his mental state continued to unravel.

  At the back of my mind, I harboured a faint hope that something untoward would happen to him. Not out of malice – because despite having every reason to despise him, I didn’t – but rather out of pity. He was living rough in and around St Kilda, and the people he spent time with in hostels or on the streets were unsavoury to say the least: the chances of him encountering misadventure, I thought, were better than average. I never wanted him to feel any pain, but I felt it would have been a small mercy. It would have put him out of his misery.

  He used to talk to Luke about how he was going to get an apartment and a job and how Luke would come to live with him. He would paint a picture of domestic harmony to which Luke had always been susceptible. But as Luke grew older, he began to understand – as I had from the outset – that it was never going to happen.

  And it began to worry me how life was going to be for Luke when his dad was old and Luke was left to care for him. I couldn’t even see how it was going to work when Luke was a teenager and Greg’s mental state had deteriorated even further. The teenage years are when you traditionally push away from your parents, and I couldn’t see how Greg would ever let Luke do that.

  I remember around this time I went to a professional photographer and had a beautiful photo taken of Luke, and the photograp
her at the time remarked on how handsome he was. Like any mother, I loved my child no matter what: but also like any mother, I thought my boy was the most handsome young man around. And I was gratified by that in a strange way. The object of Luke’s affection at Flinders College, a pretty little girl in his year, had done some modelling, and Luke – emboldened by the photographer’s comments – began to entertain the idea of perhaps doing some modelling himself.

  Greg shot down the idea immediately, telling him it was stupid. Likewise, when Luke had mentioned in passing that he might be interested in becoming a policeman, Greg launched into a rant against the constabulary, telling Luke no son of his would ever enter the police force. Greg always felt the need to control Luke and the direction of his life. There was no doubt, I remember thinking, they were going to clash when Luke got older.

  Whenever Luke was really torn about his dad being unhappy – which was happening more frequently – I would say, ‘You love your dad and your dad loves you. You’ll always love your dad, but you may not always like what he does. And that’s okay.’

  If the letter from Child Protection had left me feeling abandoned once again, at least my opponent was starting to play by the rules. For the latter part of 2013, as spring turned to summer, Greg began attending football and cricket matches, in keeping with the parameters of the IVO. I was never sure where he had come from or where he would disappear to afterwards. We barely made eye contact, much less spoke to one another.

  Greg would also occasionally show up to training mid-week. Because I hadn’t stayed in Magistrate Holzer’s courtroom long enough to hear his ruling, I wasn’t aware that Greg was not supposed to be attending cricket practice. Any contact with Luke mid-week was technically in violation of the IVO. But I wouldn’t find that out until many months later.

  Still, for a good three months, I lived free from Greg’s power games, without feeling as if I was constantly on guard or having to juggle his irrational behaviour. And it was such a relief. After all of the fear and pressure I had felt going into the court process, here at last was a sense that life could in fact be Greg-free. My strategy of holding him to account, of maintaining boundaries and pulling him up each time he crossed them, seemed to finally be working. I began to wonder why I hadn’t tried it earlier. For the first time since Luke was born I felt free, and I even began to believe there was an opportunity for me and Luke to build lives that didn’t have Greg’s shadow permanently hanging over them.

  We both benefited from that lack of stress in our lives. Luke began to excel at school. The stress of the previous twelve months had showed via behavioural problems at school. He seemed to be semi-permanently in the principal’s office for being disruptive in class. But now, as the year drew to a close, he appeared to have turned a corner. Friends commented to me on what a difference they had seen in Luke and how much he had matured. I too had noticed a change in him. Like any mother-son relationship, ours was hardly all roses. We were exposed to one another almost constantly, and while we were very close, we had our disagreements. Like any eleven-year-old, he could at times be rude or arrogant towards me, or demanding or impatient, and he knew which buttons to press to upset me. But that was part and parcel of our relationship: I knew our ability to annoy one another was mostly because we were the closest people in one another’s lives.

  Overall, Luke was such a kind, sensitive boy he was always able to say: ‘I’m sorry Mum, I shouldn’t have done that – I was out of line.’ And I was really proud of him for that. It showed a maturity beyond his years, and I always made a point of commending him on it.

  I’d always feared that, as a single mother of an only child, I’d been too indulgent throughout Luke’s life – and certainly plenty of people had offered up unsolicited advice to that effect – but as long as he was socially well-adjusted, I was simply happy that he was happy. That was, after all, the essence of my job as his mother.

  Which is why, every single day, multiple times a day, I would tell him how much I loved him – how beautiful he was and how perfect he was to me. Not once in my life had my parents told me they loved me. I knew they did, on a fundamental level, but I’d never heard the words.

  I knew I must have been doing something right as a mother when Luke started to talk about me one day becoming a grandmother. When I was younger, I had never even envisioned getting married, much less having a life with children in it. But Luke had a very clear sense that in his life there would eventually be a wife and children. And it was a massive comfort to know that, despite his unconventional upbringing, he hadn’t been sufficiently damaged to believe that sort of normal life was unattainable. Certainly, looking back, the trauma I experienced as a young girl and the attachment issues I had subsequently developed had had a huge impact on my life (and the expectations I had of it). But this, apparently, was not going to be the case for my boy. Maybe I hadn’t been such a rubbish mother after all.

  Luke loved the company of girls and was really loyal in his affections. One of his friends found herself on the receiving end of most of Luke’s attentions. I remember taking him to deliver a beautiful Christmas card he had made. I marvelled as he marched in and handed the card over to his blushing (but clearly very pleased) friend. Who was this child so in touch with his emotions and so ready to put them out on display? I couldn’t have been more proud.

  He also wrote her a letter that was a masterstroke of innocent childish seduction. I know, because he asked me to proofread it. He addressed his letter to her parents, telling them that there were three boys at school who were all interested in their daughter, but that he was by far the best prospect because he could do better cartwheels than the other two. He added that he had a particular advantage over one of his rivals, who spent ‘far too much time brushing his hair’. He never did deliver the letter, and I still have it. Here is an excerpt:

  Hello T–– or Mrs or Mr W––

  I have loved you or your daughter for some time now and it turns out two other boys I know like her maybe three … I’m an active funny guy who can do a perfect cartwheel for a boy. I would take care of T–– as long as I live … So there you have it I am the one. Please send back.

  From Luke

  Greg, to his credit, had taken extra special care to make Luke as worldly as possible. He spoke to him as an adult, chatted about life’s big issues and spent hours with Luke in public libraries poring over encyclopaedias together. There were a lot of positives to their relationship. Even so, I knew that the best possible outcome at this point was for Luke to be removed from Greg’s sphere of influence – and so I began to make enquiries about sending Luke to boarding school.

  I had been kicking the idea around for a while and had even been in contact with a school in Sale, some 200 kilometres away. I reasoned that perhaps they could enforce the discipline that I had not been able to – and also keep Luke at arm’s length from his father. Of course, when I mentioned the idea to Luke, he almost had a fit. He had no desire to move schools, or indeed move away from home. It became a moot point anyway: when I scanned the fee schedule, it became clear pretty quickly that it was an idea well beyond my means.

  In the interests of continuing to expand Luke’s horizons – and also just to take a break after a long and stressful year – I started planning for Luke and me to take a trip back to the UK for Christmas. I’d had a tough year and I craved the unconditional love and comfort that only family can give you.

  Constable Topham and a few others had said to me in the previous few months that I ought to think about returning to England permanently – irrespective of Greg’s wishes. And though I had no desire to break the law and live in the UK as fugitives, I was starting to accept I was going to have no peace from Greg as long as he was alive. And so England was firming up as a definite option. When I booked the holiday, I booked a five-week break. I wanted to have a comfortable period of time there to get a sense of what our lives might be like if we moved back to England. I also wanted Luke to spend Christmas with
my family. I had a new little niece whom I barely knew, Luke had a lovely connection with my brother Terry, and I just thought it would be a good way to end what had been a tumultuous year.

  It was during the flight booking process that I discovered Luke’s passport had expired. And to apply for a new one, I would need Greg’s signature. Spying an opportunity to once again exert influence over our lives, Greg steadfastly refused to sign the document. It wasn’t so much an outright denial as a dragging out of the process in the full knowledge that the longer he could inconvenience me, the longer he could make me sweat. I made repeated requests for him to sign the form, to no avail. He would either not respond or give some vague reply about not yet having gotten around to it.

  Luke, bless him, saw my distress and once again sought to shoulder some of the stress. ‘Mum, you should just go without me,’ he said one night, almost breaking my heart.

  I told him I had no intention of doing that, and that I was sure his father would see sense and finally sign the form.

  As the weeks ticked by and Greg showed no signs of cooperating, I contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to enquire about securing an emergency passport. I was told they would consider it, but time was running out and I would need to submit the application straight away.

  Another couple of weeks passed without any news. With tensions rising, I left multiple messages with the passport issuing office, but received no reply. Finally, when I got through to someone, I explained the situation and offered to send through the IVO to justify why I needed a passport to be issued without Greg’s signature. I was told the application would need to be referred to Canberra for closer examination. Attempts were made by the passport officials to contact Greg – to no avail.