One-time Australian of the Year Rosie Batty has given her first interview since announcing she’d be stepping away from public life to focus on grieving for her 11-year-old son, Luke, who was killed at the hands of her ex-husband in 2014.
Extraordinarily, Batty turned the loss of her only child into a ground-breaking campaign against domestic violence in Australia, but faced a shocking amount of critics along the way, namely for not appearing affected enough by her son’s murder.
“If I can save the life of some other children, why would I be a bad person trying to do that?” Batty asked Interview host Andrew Denton on Channel 7 last night. “What could possibly be wrong with someone like me speaking out in that way?”
Batty admitted that despite the strength she’s always shown when speaking publicly, she’s had moments of deep despair.
“I was in Sydney and it was busy, coming from one appointment to another appointment,” she recalls. “I opened the taxi door in a rush and a bus came past and took the door off and I just sat there for a few minutes and I didn’t know whether to feel relieved that I was ok or sad that I was still here.”
“That was a really deep realisation as I tried to make sense of what did I really want to have happened at that point.”
Batty also explained something of her grieving process, saying, “You don’t just lose your son. It’s very difficult for people to have relationships with you because they’re frightened of upsetting you, they feel guilty.”
“You never get over it and I feel this ‘oh my gosh how can I feel like this for the rest of my life. This is too much. If I’m going to feel like this for the rest of my life I don’t know whether I want to keep going.’ And I can see why people don’t.”
But Batty “still has things that make me happy.”
“I know that life is not an easy way for anybody and I’ve been really fortunate to be given the opportunities I’ve had and I’ve got a lot of things to be thankful for,” she tells Denton.
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