by Helen Garner
‘My guess,’ the psychiatrist told the court, ‘is that if Karen’s mother hadn’t come in and found the baby, Karen would have just left him there. Even to try to hide him would be to face that it had happened.’
When the court resumed that afternoon for sentencing, the girl sat in the dock, frozen faced.
‘Karen,’ said the judge. ‘Would you stand up? I am not going to send you to jail.’ A tremor passed along her lips. ‘You know that jails are nasty, violent places. All of the purposes of punishment can be achieved without putting you in jail.’ He gave her a three-year good behaviour bond on condition that she continue to see a counsellor. ‘But if you fall foul of the law, you’ll be brought back here and sentenced to imprisonment. Do you understand?’
She opened her mouth and uttered a tiny, strangled squeak of assent.
‘Come down here, Karen, and sign the undertaking.’ She obeyed, then made as if to return to the dock.
‘You don’t have to go back there,’ said the judge gently. ‘Go and sit with your mother.’
As the court rose, Karen’s father put one arm around her and held her close against his side.
Scarcely out of childhood, the girl had gone through an ordeal so unimaginable that even the thought that she had killed a helpless infant with her fists could not make people want to punish her. She left the court shielded by her parents, with her sister and friends clustering behind. They crossed William Street in a tight phalanx. Cameramen backed away in front of them. Karen kept her head low, but later, on the TV news, one could discern in her face, through the screen of her hair, the faintest trace of softening, though nothing as free as a smile.
2005
The Singular Rosie
ONE hot afternoon in February 2014, in the pleasant Victorian township of Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne, an eleven-year-old boy called Luke Batty was playing in the nets after cricket practice with his father, Greg Anderson. Without warning, Anderson swung the bat and dealt the child a colossal blow to the back of his head, then crouched over him where he lay, and attacked him with a knife. The police shot Anderson and he died in hospital the following morning.
Rosie Batty, the young boy’s mother, came out her front gate to address the media. Her thick fair hair was tangled, her face stripped raw. ‘I want to tell everybody,’ she said to camera, in a low, clear voice with a Midlands accent, ‘that family violence happens to everybody. No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone. This has been an eleven-year battle. You do the best you can. You’re a victim, and you’re helpless. An intervention order doesn’t stop anything like this from happening.’
It wasn’t so much what she said as her demeanour that stopped people in their tracks. There was something splendid about her, in her quiet devastation. Everyone who saw her was moved, and fascinated. People talked about her with a kind of awe.
The night before I visited Rosie Batty, in July, I had a dream. I found myself in a house with her and several other Englishwomen, broad-browed and composed, like characters in a George Eliot novel. Their faces were swollen and stark, as if they had been swimming in grief for an eternity. But there was at the same time a gentleness in the room, a mysterious patience—a sense that the women’s pain was not the only thing that existed in their world; that they knew this, and that they were prepared to trust the knowledge. By the time I had spent a day with the real Rosie, the singular Rosie, I understood that the quality people found so impressive in her was not merely the authority of the brutally bereaved, but also this wisdom, this trust.
Rosie Batty lives on a small green acreage on the outskirts of Tyabb. In her paddocks goats wander. Donkeys utter their strange cries. We sat by her living room fire all afternoon with a young dog lying on the mat between us. Rosie is lively company: a straight-talking, irreverent and very funny woman of fifty, a self-mocking mimic who really knows how to tell a story.
The care she was offered during the time after Luke’s death was very taxing to the independent soul of someone who lost her mother when she was six, and who had lived as a single mother for years.
‘I spent two days on the couch,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I even got changed. I didn’t want to go into my bed because Luke used to sleep with me there. I was basically comatose on the couch. A lot of wonderful people came to help me, but soon they started trying to make decisions for me. “Oh, Rosie, you can’t go out to the media! You mustn’t!” I had to keep saying, “If I need your help, I won’t have any problem asking.” One hug’s all right, but I had to say, “Do not keep touching me! Do not keep trying to embrace me!” And somebody was always vacuuming or blowing leaves around. The noise! It got into my brain and I lost it—“What the fuck are you doing?”’
More to her taste was the old and dear friend who phoned her after she had appeared on TV looking slightly unkempt. ‘He said, “Clean yourself up, woman. You look like shit.”’
Then a Homicide detective came round to tell her that somebody really important wanted to call her that evening.
‘Bruce Springsteen was touring,’ Rosie told me, ‘and I’d been supposed to go to his concert. It’s low of me, isn’t it, but I thought to myself, I love Bruce Springsteen. Maybe he might get to know my story and give me a call.’
The very important caller, announced the detective, was the prime minister, Tony Abbott.
‘I went, “Ahhh!”, but inside I was thinking, Oh, damn.’
In the months since Luke was murdered, Rosie Batty has become an advocate for victims of domestic violence, speaking publicly about her frustrating experiences with the government bodies whose job it is to protect women and children. She did not scruple to shout at a callow TV presenter who made sanctimonious pronouncements about mandatory reporting. She is working hard with the lawyers who are preparing a brief for the coronial inquest into Luke’s death, slated for mid-October. When the Commission for Children and Young People announced at a directions hearing in August that its report would not be ready in time for the inquest, she spat the dummy outside the Coroner’s Court. Bureaucrats ducked for cover. Like many a bereaved mother, she has lost all fear of people in power. She has an unerring bullshit detector, which she applies equally to her own public persona. ‘I have to be careful,’ she said to me, with her wry grin, ‘that my little halo doesn’t slip down and strangle me.’
Rosie had never intended to have a child. But when she found herself pregnant at nearly forty, during a brief rekindling of an affair with her former workmate Greg Anderson, she went ahead. Anderson was an intelligent but prickly and rather rigid man with a lot of peculiar religious and philosophical ideas that he liked to argue about, but he could be fun, and she had always liked the way he was not intimidated by her. By the time Luke was born they had parted for good, but Anderson was keen to have some involvement with the child, and when he came round, Rosie was grateful for his practical help. Photos of him holding Luke show the baby’s tiny fist locked around the tall man’s forefinger, the father gazing down, rapt.
Throughout Luke’s childhood, Anderson came and went. ‘Every time I relaxed my boundaries,’ said Rosie, ‘I’d bloody pay for it. There was always a trigger. Something would happen that made him feel inadequate, and he’d start again with his character assassination of me. He was a big, proud man who couldn’t have his own way.’
Anderson’s life began to fall apart. He became abusive and impossible in work situations, and could not keep even a manual job. He thought he was too clever for other people: he was possessed by a warped vanity, a tendency to contempt and scorn. He wound up jobless and unemployable, at times even living in his car. Once or twice he asked Rosie if he could store stuff in her shed, and she agreed, because she pitied him. He would send her the occasional offensive email or text, talking about dark energy and telling her how evil she was, but in the end she got irritated and bored. ‘I would just think, Oh, fuck off. Over the years I got used to him being odd and saying ridiculous things
. I’d say, “You know what? You’re not dragging me into your world.” The only thing I could control was how I let him affect me. People would say, “He’s going to ruin your life,” and I’d say, “No, he’s not. Ultimately he’s in it, because he’s Luke’s dad, and I can’t do anything about that. But I have quality of life.” Back then I hadn’t understood that there are different forms of violence.’
Rosie began to think she had Anderson figured out, that she knew how to handle his weird, aggressive behaviour, which was always aimed at her, never at their son. She let it roll over her, and carried on. Despite this tedious black cloud, she and Luke lived the peaceful rural life she had always wanted to provide for him, with neighbours and friends, a happy school, sporting clubs, all their animals.
Through his misfortunes, Anderson’s love for Luke never wavered. On his visits he was kind and patient with the little boy, and they loved to play together. But one day Luke came home from an outing and told Rosie that in the car his father had said he was tired of this life, and wished he could go into the next one. He had shown Luke a knife and said, ‘It could all end with this.’ A court order stopped his access to the boy. Anderson challenged the order. Under pressure, Rosie compromised: the court decided that Anderson would be allowed to see Luke only in public places, when he was playing sport. Soon after this, the Victorian Child Protection Service effectively closed Luke’s case.
Rosie took Luke to England for Christmas 2013 with her family. By the time they got back to Australia, there were four police warrants out for Anderson’s arrest. Rosie knew nothing of this. Information that might have been a red flag for her, as Anderson’s mental state darkened, was withheld from her on privacy grounds. No one told her that he had been taken in for looking at child pornography at a public library, or that he had threatened to cut off the head of a fellow resident of his share house. So on the afternoon of 12 February 2014, when she and Luke arrived at the local cricket ground for practice and Anderson came towards them ‘with a big smile’, warning bells did not go off. When Luke ran up to her at the end of the session and asked if he could have a few extra minutes of play at the nets with his dad, because they were having so much fun, she was glad to give permission, and off he ran.
The architecture of Rosie Batty’s face may be monumental, but the air around her is so clear that one can ask her anything.
‘Are you religious?’
‘I was raised in the Church of England,’ she said. ‘But in my early twenties I started to read books. I didn’t read fiction for years. I started with people like Deepak Chopra and Louise L. Hay. Then I found stuff about spirituality and Buddhism.’
‘Do you find those things any use to you now?’
‘Yes, I do. Taking responsibility. We’re here on our own individual journey…’
She sounded vague. Perhaps she was getting tired. She changed position on the couch and tried again, leaving very long pauses, sometimes holding her breath and letting it out in soft, voiceless gasps.
‘I believe that we’re here to be tested. To have life lessons. To enhance all the qualities of compassion and empathy and love. To grow. The only other choice is—if you can’t grow, you’re gonna shrivel. So there isn’t a choice, really. You seek to grow, no matter what happens that may debilitate you for a time. But it’s in you to keep growing. To keep rising up, and learning something from it. And surging forward. Some people can’t. Or won’t. They stay bitter, or angry. Or try to dull their pain. They stay blaming other people.’
‘Where’s Luke now?’ I said. ‘What’s Luke, now?’
She drew a vast sigh, and said with great firmness and certainty, ‘If there is an afterlife, he will be in a blessed place.’
‘Where’s his father, then?’
‘I have to remind myself,’ she said, choosing her words delicately, ‘that Greg died too. I didn’t ever want him to suffer. The best thing that could happen was for him to be…removed. He was such a tormented man. He believed the worst of everybody. It was exhausting. I don’t think of him a lot. He’s just dropped away. All my thoughts and emotions are consumed with Luke. With losing him. With what I’m not going to be able to share with him.’ She took several long breaths. ‘Or see.’
We sat there in silence. The dog slept on between us. Rosie rested her forearms across her thighs and turned her grand, weary face up to me.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it gets so quiet. And I think, what’s missing?’ Her voice weakened and trembled. ‘I know what’s missing. What’s missing is Luke. Was he ever here?’
2014
The City at Night
THE rooftop bar was buzzing, late on a warm Friday afternoon. My friend and I found a spot under an umbrella and ordered up. Each of us was secretly longing to talk about the fact that the cops had charged a man with the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, but before we could get to it, five youngish blokes strode into the bar, disposed themselves grandly around the next table, and began to roar and bellow. People turned to them, brows creasing but faces carefully blank. The men were throwing back lurid cocktails. The sonic level soared. My friend and I moved closer together.
‘Did you see that Burmese asylum seeker on the news last night,’ I shouted, ‘chucking a mental in a detention centre?’
‘Laying about him with a pool cue!’ cried my friend. ‘TV sets exploded! Computers!’
To converse we had to shape our hands into trumpets, and yell straight into each other’s faces. How did the cops find the Brunswick guy? That hoodie was an unusual colour. I bet someone dobbed him in. What was he doing, wandering around at that hour? Thank God they had CCTV in that bridal shop. Did you go to the march? I was worried that it would be too peaceful, not enough about how women aren’t safe to walk home alone. I was more worried that people would start screeching about civil rights violations. How can the streets ever be made safe? There’s evil in the world. The place where she was dumped is out near Vanessa’s. Would you go there? No way. It looked beautiful on TV. Soft. Long grass blowing in the wind. And in the foreground you could see a disturbed patch. Imagine being a cop and walking towards that shallow grave. It was shallow. He must have just scraped some dirt over her and bolted. Do you think he thought it was worth it? Does a bloke like that think? Would he have been trying for years to keep a grip? Did you hear that on the CCTV tape he puts out his hand as if to touch her cheek? And she rears back? I heard that another woman came forward with a story from a year ago. Some guy had tried to persuade her to get into his car. She got away. But she said he had a pitch. A pitch? What’s that mean? It’s when they sound plausible enough to make you pause in your stride and pay attention. Just long enough for them to gain a psychological advantage. I nearly went down to the court. But I thought it would be too horrible. In the police car, when he was doubled over with his hands clasped behind his neck, you could see he was wearing a wedding ring. No, he had a ring on every finger. What about the poor guy, her workmate, who offered to walk her home? And she said no, she’d be all right? I feel so bad for him. All the women he’s ever known would be feminists. He would have learnt not to patronise them with his protectiveness. God, how many times have I walked home feeling invincible. In the ’60s Evie used to stroll across Fawkner Park at midnight. She said she was never scared. Yeah, but she was tall. So? I wish I’d gone to the march. Do you think the flowers and candles in Sydney Road were a bit melodramatic? I saw some women crossing themselves. As if it was a shrine. Well, it was, and at least the flowers were fresh, and not wrapped in horrible plastic like the ones people left in London for Princess Di. It’s spring, I suppose, flowers everywhere. Princess Di happened in summer. I was on a train in France a few days after the crash. A Frenchwoman saw me reading about it in the paper. She said, ‘Can you explain to me this immoderate mourning?’ Do you think the Jill Meagher demo was immoderate? That idea keeps coming to me, but I scotch it—I hate the way it makes me feel cynical and ironic. Why didn’t you go? I tried. Someone said it was at noon on Sat
urday. I stuck some rosemary in my buttonhole and drove up to the corner of Moreland Road. I thought there’d be fifty or a hundred people but there was nobody. Only a few women in headscarves doing their shopping. There was a cold wind. Everything was grey and desolate. I hung around for a while, and went home. Then on Sunday night I saw it on the news. I couldn’t believe it. Thirty thousand people. Sydney Road packed solid for miles. You should have gone on Facebook, idiot. I don’t know how to—I’m stuck in a pre-Facebook world. Some people are saying the whole thing was only a social media phenomenon. Who cares? I was sad. I wanted to be around other people who were sad. Actually I howled. Me too. I’ve been sick about it all week. My guts were in a knot. I kept tripping over things and bumping into walls.
We gave up on the bar with its thundering men and parted on Bourke Street. On the platform at Parliament Station I read while I waited. A man sat down beside me. I glanced up. He was in his thirties, dark jaw, dark brow. Holding out his iPhone in cupped hands, he shuffled his bum along the bench until our sides touched. I leaned away.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. His face was shining. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I’ve come from the hospital. My wife’s just had our first child, a few hours ago. Can I share it with you?’
She had rung him at work. Come home! Quick! She was going into labour! He jumped into the car and floored it from Glenroy to Broadmeadows. He was nearly home when a paramedic called. The ambulance was stationary on the corner of Camp Road and the highway. She was about to give birth. He burst into the back of the ambulance just in time to see the baby crowning. It was a girl. Her name was Poppy.
He thrust the phone into my hand and we bowed our heads over the screen. There she was, in the hospital with her white-toothed mother: a stunned scrap of creamy brown in a jaunty cotton cap. I had to pull out my hanky. He was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. We both started laughing. Thank you for telling me! Thank you for listening!
