Grace, I was thrilled when your name was announced as Australian of the Year. Thrilled, but filled with worry. I wanted to share with you my concerns because we have more in common than you may realise. You are young and beautiful. When I became Australian of the Year in 2015, I was 53. The year before my beloved son Luke was murdered in front of me by my former partner and I became an advocate.
I am writing this from one Australian of the Year to another to help you in times to come. There is untold pressure and it comes from the least expected places.I dearly hope you won’t have to deal with the kind of abuse I had, but I fear you will. At first, everyone is delighted for you but as your messages gain impact and momentum, the backlash grows and directs back towards you with an ugliness you can never anticipate.
You will also be besieged by every community-based organisation, business and institution. You offer hope and inspiration to everyone, including the most fragile, but it becomes a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week role. Hard to say no yet hard to manage the thousands of demands on your time. After the announcement, I remember standing on that stage looking around, filled with competing emotions: sadness at what brought me there, swirling excitement, the possibilities for change. To make that happen, ensure you have the right people around you, people you can trust, people who will hold you when you are at your worst. My parents flew out from Britain and that was a blessing. I had my close friends, but you need more than that.
Rosie Batty is a class act.
Thank you Rosie Batty. And courage and congratulations to Grace Tame. politiciansgetoutoftheway listentoher whenweshareweheal
Remember that it's a two way street in life either gender is capable of being a perpetrator in domestic violence situations.....
Thank you beautiful Rosie ❤️
Look closely.
JaneCaro Curious to why Rosie Batty chose an open letter via a newspaper and not a private letter. Perhaps she didn’t know Grace’s email address. Or I’m probably missing something.
Beautiful and powerful. Captures the utter strangeness of being a public person, and the intense pressure on victims to meet the demands of making change and being a voice for the voiceless. Where are the perpetrators? Resting in anonymity.
Grace will have a busy year running around Oz ripping down photos of Geoffrey Rush, Craig McLachlan, Jeff Jarrett etc
Why are they always from ethnic European community of Australians? And they never mention their ethnicity unlike the ethnicity of Australian born Asians such as the Chinese, Indians, and the Caucasians!