How a single devastating story can change the lives of millions.

By Catherine Keenan

As the newly-named 2016 Australian of the Year, Lieutenant David Morrison has pledged to focus his efforts, in part, on eradicating domestic violence — building, of course, on the important groundwork laid by Rosie Batty before him.

Ms Batty’s personal story of domestic violence had, and will continue to have, an unprecedented impact on how the public perceived such a complex and urgent problem.

Now, with domestic violence firmly secured as a matter of public priority in 2016, we look back at another poignant, personal story of domestic violence: that of NSW Labor MP Trish Doyle.

Here, Doyle tells Catherine Keenan — Australia’s Local Hero 2016 — how her personal memory of domestic violence has shaped her identity, and how she found the courage to share it with her community.

The power of a single story

Sometimes, in politics, a story matters. In the white noise of discussion papers and policy statements, a single story can rise up, like a flare in the night, illuminating an issue with sudden clarity.

This happened with Trish Doyle’s maiden speech in the NSW Legislative Assembly.

“Allow me to tell you a story,” began the newly elected Labor member for the Blue Mountains.

“Picture another place in another time, late at night, a young girl awake and afraid in her bed, trying to still her racing heart and holding her breath. She is listening to footsteps outside her window and is overcome with a sense of dread.

“In the blink of an eye, a man stands at the foot of her bed with one finger on his lips indicating, ‘Shhh’, and the other hand holding a rifle.”

After that, Doyle went on, there were screams and gunshots. Ambulances, police, fear. Later, the girl and her brothers and sister arrive at an orphanage, where they stay while their mother recovers from the severe beating and internal haemorrhaging administered by their father.

And then the kicker: “That small girl of eight is now the woman who stands before you.”

Around the chamber, an audible intake of breath.

Doyle thought carefully about telling this intensely personal story so publicly. She began writing it at home, with her two teenage sons, Patrick and Tom, around her and the TV on in the background.

People kept reminding her that a maiden speech is a rare opportunity for a politician to trace who they are and what they stand for.

“That particular recollection just came to mind,” says Doyle. “I didn’t feel shell shocked or upset by the memory; I just thought, ‘Wow, it feels like that happened to a different person’.

“Given the importance of the conversation around domestic violence in this country now, I thought: I need to share this.”

Sharing such stories can have a huge impact. Australia is currently conducting an unprecedented national discussion of domestic violence largely because of one story. When Rosie Batty’s estranged husband, Greg Anderson, killed her only son with a cricket bat and a knife it recast domestic violence from a distant social problem to a tragedy that pricked us all.

But domestic violence is a famously silent crime. What gives women like Ms Batty and Ms Doyle the courage to speak so compellingly of what they’ve endured?

As Ms Doyle asked herself before her speech (and after it): What role can this kind of public remembering play? How do we, as a community, hold these stories and respect them?

Ms Doyle grew up in public housing in Canberra, surrounded by her mother’s family and friends. But when her father was violent, as he often was, they were too scared to take the kids in; that’s why, on that night, they went to a kind of orphanage called Marymead. They were split into two houses and Ms Doyle remembers the tears as they were separated.

She also has one “funny memory” of her youngest brother crawling out through a cat flap so they could be together again. As the eldest, Ms Doyle often played mum and all four kids huddled in her bed. At a recent family gathering, she says, “we had a bit of a laugh about that, about how we all stuck together”.

‘Memories of domestic violence tend to keep people apart’

Memories can be the glue that holds people together, but memories of domestic violence tend to keep people apart.

Formed in terror and rarely shared, even with those who were there at the time, they become the dark secret that makes people feel even more alone.

“I presume that there are quite heart-wrenching feelings of sadness and loss that my brothers and sister have,” Ms Doyle says. But she cannot be sure. They rarely talk about that time.

Last week, another memory returned to Ms Doyle from when she had just gone back to school after that terrible night. She remembered her year three teacher, Mrs Murray, sitting the class down to do creative writing.

“I put my hand up and asked her how you spelt ‘haemorrhage’. And I recall her standing there, and her face went red and then absolutely white as a sheet, and then she started crying and ran out of the room.”

When Ms Doyle was a child, she imagined her story of violence belonged only to herself and her family. Now she realises it must have had a rippling effect on many people around her. Domestic violence is a social problem, as well as a private one.

Ms Doyle says she was able to create a path out of that life because education exposed her to a wider world and she hungered to be part of it. She didn’t want to be poor; she didn’t want to be trapped. She went to Macquarie University and decided to make her way into the unknown world of public policy.

But memories work on us in mysterious ways and after university she found herself working for a women’s information and referral service where the biggest single issue was domestic violence.

“How did I arrive at this point?” she asked herself, bemused. When her pilot project concluded after two years, she left, determined to put more space between her personal experience and her professional life.

She went travelling, and while in Ireland met Colm, the man who would become her husband. They had two boys, but back in Australia Colm sunk into a deep depression and attempted suicide. “It was his spiralling into psychosis that turned our lives upside down,” she says.

He was diagnosed as depressive bipolar with psychotic tendencies and spent years in and out of institutions, sometimes living on the streets.

She could not take care of him and herself and her two boys; they separated. These were the hardest nights of her life, she says, when she’d sob her heart out. After all she’d been through, she was not able to stop her own children getting hurt.

When the personal becomes political

Ms Doyle’s political career began when she worked as a staffer for her old friend from university days, Tanya Plibersek. Later, after Ms Doyle had retreated to the beauty of the mountains following the upheaval with Colm, she juggled casual teaching with casual staffing.

She worked for local member Phil Koperberg, and when he was departing he suggested she run for his office. She laughed. But she ran in 2011, losing respectably. She immediately began campaigning again, and spent the next four years determinedly attending functions and listening to anyone who wanted to talk to her.

Newly admitted to parliament in March of 2015, she told her boys and her mum that she would talk about family violence in her maiden speech and they backed her. None of them expected the overwhelming response she’s had.

“I’ve been inundated with messages on Facebook, phone calls to my office, emails,” she says.

Women and men approach her on the street to thank her for her speech. “Mostly people want to say that it was important to [tell that story] from a child’s perspective. A big, boofy bloke I know walked up to me in the street and just started crying, and threw his arms around me and said, ‘Thank you for your courage. I know that feeling. I was that little boy again.'”

At 45, Ms Doyle is capable and clear-eyed. She is obviously pleased that sharing her story has allowed people to feel less alone with their memories but she knows that stories by themselves are not enough. Just before Rosie Batty was named Australian of the Year, the Abbott government cut funding for domestic violence services. In NSW, the Going Home Staying Home reforms amalgamated women’s refuges with homelessness services, leading to some closures.

“There’s no use in somebody reading The [Daily] Telegraph about my story and feeing compelled to do something to change their own situation if they pack a few bags and call a taxi to head off to the refuge and it’s shut its doors.”

Is she hopeful that remembering in this way will lead to real change?

“I have to remain hopeful that we can shift and change things if governments are prepared to talk about the issue of domestic violence.”

Stories like Ms Doyle’s and Ms Batty’s, and thousands of others, stories from victims and those at the front line of services, need to be regularly heard at the decision-making level, and be used to inform policy decisions.

“We need a conduit between community and government and that’s where I feel I can be helpful,” Ms Doyle says.

For real change, remembering can’t just be personal.

A version of this story first appeared on the ABC’s tablet app, The Brief.

Catherine Keenan is co-founder and executive director of the Sydney Story Factory, and Australia’s Local Hero 2016.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.

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