Sherele Moody on Femicide in Australia

0:00This message is brought to you by today's sponsor, Walden University, set a course for change. Now is the time to make a real change, in your life, career, and community. At Walden University, we give you the support and flexibility to get the W. Walden's online programs are designed for working professionals like you. You'll gain hands-on skills to take on real-world challenges and succeed. Your future is waiting and Walden is here to help you achieve it. Take the first step to make your impact. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University, set a course for change, certified to operate by chef. I have eventually turned my experience as a professional journalist into something that is centered on ensuring that the stories of women and children killed. Are told in a way that they deserve, that we show that they matter,

1:05that the circumstances of their death are context, but they're not a willy-been murder, they're not a sex murder, they're not someone's wife or daughter, that these are individual, unique human beings that deserve to have their stories told in an ethical and trauma-informed way. My guest today is a very special woman, Cheryl Moody, an award-winning journalist, anti-violence campaigner, and founder of the Red Heart Movement and Australian Femissade Watch. For more than a decade, Cheryl has tirelessly documented every woman and child who has been violently killed in Australia, telling their stories to ensure they are remembered for who they were, not defined by how they died or reduced to a headline or statistic. Since the Red Heart Movement began in 2015,

2:05this number now sits at more than 3,000 deaths. Before I tell you more about Cheryl, a note that this episode discusses child abuse, sexual violence, domestic and family violence, and the murder of women and children. Please take care while listening, and if you're affected by anything raised in this conversation, or concerned about someone you know, you can contact 1-800-RESPECT. You can contact at 24 hours a day on 1-800-737-732, or by text on 0458-737-732, or online at 1-800-RESPECT.org.au. If anyone is in immediate danger, please call triple-zero. As you'll hear, Cheryl's connection to this work is deeply personal.

3:05After a childhood marked by abuse, instability, and periods in foster care, she discovered as a young teenager that her stepfather, Barry Gordon Hadlow, had murdered two girls, five-year-old Sandra Dorothy Bacon, and nine-year-old Stacey Ann Tracey. Although she never met them, Stacey Ann and Sandra's murders profoundly affected Cheryl and would come to shape her life's work. Today, she brings together journalism, research, advocacy, and public remembrance, working alongside bereaved families, preserving the stories of women and children lost to violence, and campaigning for change to help prevent further deaths. For me, having this conversation was a privilege, Cheryl is a woman who models in every aspect of her life what it is to deeply care for others.

4:07She works on some of the hardest stuff anybody could work on, but brings to it a continuing spirit of kindness and inclusion. It is truly inspiring to listen to her, and I hope you not only listen to this conversation, but think about ways that you can support her work. Cheryl, welcome to a podcast of One's Own. It's super amazing to be here with an iconic Aussie. Well, that's very kind of you. I have been listening to your podcast, so a delight to have you on my podcast. Now, we're going to talk today about the incredible work you do about violence against women and children, and particularly making sure that we honour the stories of women whose lives have been lost. But before we get there, the reason you do this work

5:09is so deeply connected to your experiences in childhood. I did want to ask you to talk a little bit about your childhood. You've described it as one marked by periods of instability, time in foster care, violence at home. Can you give us a bit of a sense of who you are and the background that you came from? Absolutely. So I was born in 1971 in Sydney, and I'm my mother's Aboriginal and my father's white. I had three older brothers and eventually four younger sisters, so there were eight of us. Unfortunately, I was born into an abusive household, so there was a lot of violence. From very early age, from about two weeks, I was sent to foster care, and for most of my early years, from about that age till 12, I was shuffled between foster care and group homes.

6:11So what would happen is the authorities of the day believed that children should be with their parents, primarily mum, no matter what. So they would return me to home, and there would be extreme violence, and I would run away, and then I'd be placed into care. Three or four months later, I'd be returned, and this was a cycle that went on throughout my life. When I was 12, I had a terrible trauma happened to me, and it was the last straw, and as a result of that trauma, I was made a ward of the state, and so I became the responsibility of the New South Wales State Government. I went to live with my mum's sister and her husband, and unfortunately, it was really just repetition of the same stuff. And when I was around 13 or 14 years,

7:11I went to live with my grandmother, a proud woman from the Gameloroi region in New South Wales, and she was an awesome, amazing woman, I really loved her. When I was growing up, she was often the port in the storm, so we would go to see my nan, and she was really kind and gentle, and she would deflect the violence that we endured, and tried to make us feel safe, so she was someone that was really important to me. So I went to live with her, and it was a bit of a crazy time. I started drinking a lot of alcohol. I was doing a lot of alcohol, while I was hanging out with my mates, we were getting drunk down at the river, drinking bottles of flag, and big bottles of sherry, and stealing alcohol on cigarettes, and not really going to school, and all of that chaos. And then when I was 15, my mother turned up to my nan's house, and she had this man with her, and she was going to marry him, and his name was Barry Gordon Hadlow.

8:11And she came with this story about buying a house in Tuwumbur, and wanting her children all to be under the one roof, and wanting us to be a family, and this was a really big change. And it sounded so good and promising to me that I said I would go and live with them. So I went back to Queensland with them a few weeks later, and it turned out to be the entire opposite of what they'd promised there was no enrolling in school. I was told that I had to get a job, and pay money to my mother and this guy. And it was just, it was a really horrible thing, so I dropped out of school. I got a job as a jillaroo in Longreach. I was around 15 years old, and I bummed around. So I was bumming around for about four years, and I had returned to Tuwumbur, and my mother and this man had moved to Roma with my little sisters.

9:12I got a call from one of my sisters one day saying, can you come visit? And so I got on the bus and traveled to Roma that day, and that afternoon Barry picked me up from the bus station in his car. He was very excited. There was a real, he had this real kind of hyper energy, sort of a fixated energy, and he kept on telling me about this little girl who'd gone missing in the town. And the whole drive back to my mother's house was this man just fixating on this little girl who'd gone missing, and you know, I was about 19 years old, and I really wasn't interested in the conversation and didn't take much notice of it, and I just thought it was really weird. And he said to me, you know, I'm gonna go out and search for a, you know, with the rest of the community tomorrow, and that's what he did. He got up really early, put on his state emergency services uniform on, and he went and searched for this little girl. About four days later, the police came knocking on the door. There were detectives, and there were uniformed officers.

10:15There was a tow truck, and the lead detective said, she had a warrant to search my mother's house, and she came in, and the police came in, and they took Barry to another room, and they set myself down, and my mother down, and my four little sisters down at the table, and said to us that they were here because they believed that Barry had abducted and murdered the little girl who'd gone missing. And a few hours later, they left the house with him in handcuffs, and it was also on that day that they found her body down hidden under some bushes near a tree, just beside the town's rubbish dump, where he dumped her after raping and murdering her in my mother's home. So I was entirely shocked that this had happened, and I wanted to know more about it. So I went to the police station,

11:16and spoke to the lead detective, and she was kind of telling me what was going on, and what she could tell me about the investigation, and then she said to me, Cheryl, can you come into this room? We've got an evidence room, and I need you to look at some stuff. And so I went into the room, and there was all of this stuff there, and I was able to identify quite a bit of it as having come from my mother's house. It was stuff that was found with Stacey Ann's body. And yeah, so at that point, I became a witness for the prosecution, because I was able to identify all of that material. I was able to tell them what was happening that day that he picked me up. So basically in the morning, he had murdered her, and then in the afternoon, he picked me up from the bus station. And you know, towards the end of that conversation with the detective, we went out and sat on the backstep, of the Roma police station, and at the time, the watch house was exactly opposite the back entry of the police station,

12:17and you could look into it. And he was standing in the watch house, looking at me through the bars, and I said to Gail, you know, why did he do this? And she said, Cheryl, even the best psychiatrist in the world couldn't tell you that. The only person who can tell you is that man in there. And I said to her that he had told us a story about killing a man in a bar fight and having spent 22 years in Gail, and I said to her, you know, can you tell me about that? And that's when she told me about another little girl. Her name was Sandra Dorothy Bacon. He had murdered her. He abducted and raped and murdered her. He hid her body in the booties car. The next day, he searched for her. He joined the family in the search. He even spoke to the family and told them he knew what they were going through because his brother had gone missing once. And that afternoon, police found her body and he was ultimately charged with her murder.

13:20He spent 22 years in Gail. So basically it turned out when he was paroled, he went to to Womba. He went to a party and that's where he met my mother. And very shortly after meeting, they started seeing each other. And yeah, so I think there's not a day since finding out about Stacey Ann and finding out about Sandra that I haven't thought about those little girls. When Stacey Ann's funeral was being held, the detective took me to the church and I was there for the funeral. I met Stacey Ann's mum, her little sister, her grandmother, her granddad, you know. And when he was on trial, I spent time sitting with them because we were all witnesses and we all had to wait outside. And you know, over the years, I built up a friendship with this incredible family and through them, I learnt about Stacey Ann's story. You know, I learnt that she was a little girl

14:24who liked to sing. No. Sorry. So, you know, she liked to sing. She liked to dance. How old was Stacey Ann when she died? She was nine years old. Oh, so beautiful little girl loved to sing, loved to dance. Yeah, she had blonde hair and was a little bit boyish and she adored her little sister Libby. And, you know, that last night, she walked Libby to school. She kissed her sister at the school gate and she never made it to her own gate. He picked her up, you know. So, one of the things that was obvious to me at the time, especially after the trial, with headlines around her death. And the media reduced this vibrant little girl that's amazing little human being to a headline. And the headline was always, always had the term sex murder. And that was what she was described at.

15:25She was dehumanized by the media. And that didn't sit well with me. And so I went back to school. I became a journalist. I got into university. I became a journalist. And, you know, I have eventually turned my experience as a professional journalist into something that is centered on ensuring that, you know, the stories of women and children killed are told in a way that they deserve, that they, you know, that we show that they matter, that the circumstances of their death are context, but they're not, you know, they're not a willy-been murder, they're not a sex murder, they're not someone's wife or daughter, that these are individual unique human beings that deserve to have their stories told in an ethical and trauma-informed way. That's an incredible story. And one that it takes time to absorb

16:28and the things that you live through are truly remarkable. But before we get to your amazing contemporary activism, I do want to talk about the journey from there to becoming a journalist and then an activist. You know, the sense of shock you must have had when you find out that a man who's been introduced into your family by your mother as your stepfather has murdered once and she knew that, he had murdered a child and then had gone on to murder a second child. I mean, that sense of shock and bewilderment must have been overwhelming, let alone everything else you'd already experienced to that moment, the violence, the instability at home. How did you move beyond that into a productive career like journalism? I mean, it is remarkable to me, I think probably to everybody listening

17:28that that just didn't leave you to broken, to seize the next bit of your life. To tell you the truth, it took me a long time to get to a point where I was able to say Stacey Ann's name publicly, where I was able to talk about her. I carried this incredible level of anger, sadness and guilt. And even though the guilt was not mine to carry, it's still sat there. And maybe that was because my mother fully supported him throughout the entire legal process and was still married to him when he died in jail. She would victim blame Stacey Ann, so she would demean her and treat her really badly. So I was watching this person who should have known that are treating a child's murder victim like she was rubbish. And so you kind of carry this guilt with you even though you know it's not your responsibility

18:30or not your guilt to carry. And the other thing is that you kind of wonder, had we investigated this manslaughter claim that he made way back then? Had we have tried to find out the background of what happened? Perhaps there was a chance that we could have made sure that this didn't happen, that we could have warned people in the community that we could have taken steps. So you kind of carry that with you. This sat like a giant dark rock in my chest. And as a result of that of not being able to talk about it with people of not being able to kind of reconcile what happened. And also I guess losing whatever fragmented relationship I had with my mother losing that entirely and watching my family employed. You know, it just sat there for a long time

19:32and over the years it ruined a lot of things. I spent a lot of time running away from things, both figuratively and emotionally. It was really hard for me to connect to people. So I was always very disconnected. I would say that it ruined friendships and relationships. It wasn't an easy journey. And I kind of think about the years from when Stacey Ann was killed until about 11 years ago that it feels like I was just in a mad rush to get things over with, to get life lived and be done with it. And I had to find a way to stop being like that because I was in my 40s and I was getting to a point where I had to start making some really smart decisions about dealing with the trauma of this. Otherwise it was just my entire life would become nothing.

20:32And have you sought and had good professional help to work through that trauma? What would you advice would you give to someone who's trying to deal? I doubt that there are many who are trying to deal with as much as you've had to deal with but who have got a sort of traumatic episode in their life and they're hearing your words about feeling it like a rock and that's really resonating with them. You know what would you advise us to the way to work through that? I think the first thing that I would really say and this is imperative for anyone who has experienced trauma, everyone's trauma is relative. We should never consider someone's trauma worse than our own or easier to bear. It's something that we all hold personally and we all react to it very differently. So one of the things that I got was resilience. So I'm incredibly resilient and can take on a lot,

21:32a lot of other people's pain and a lot of my own pain. And you know it's not something that I should have ever been able to do but I can do it. And also being me, I found ways to work through it. I also have the multiple afflictions of ADHD and bipolar disorder. So I have really good care for that, which is really helpful. And I have really good help from my GP. And you know I tried psychology and psychiatry for a while but they just don't work for me. But what I did was I found something to do with it. For me my personal way of healing is acting. So you know turning the pain into something material. So in this case all that happened was I was reporting for news Corp

22:34covering a range of issues for the regional network up in Queensland. And my editor came to me and said in 2015, we need to do a campaign on domestic violence. You're leading it. And so that's actually how it started. I was tasked with writing a series of articles for the regional newspapers on domestic violence and obviously telling the stories of survivors was really important to me to be able to do that. And so we pulled together this really big campaign. And I had these incredible stories of survivors. And they went out to the editors and the editors wouldn't run them in their print product. And the reason was because they said that people didn't want to hear about it. They were sick of it. They could only handle a certain amount and then they had to move on. We had to move on to another topic and do another campaign. And so it left me with these stories that no one was publishing. And so I came home one night and I set up a Facebook page called the Red Heart campaign.

23:37And that's where I put the stories. Got the survivors I'd interviewed to share a photo of a Red Heart drawn on their skin, put it up. And that's how it started. And that kind of became, you know, became something that I could put my energy into, the trauma into. And when I was doing this, one of the natural things that occurred to me was, you know, we are losing so many women and children to this epidemic of violence. There's no memorial to them. There's no central database. I can't really go up and look up these stories or look up names or find out anything. And so I thought, I'm just going to put their stories on this Facebook page. And so Stacey Ann and Sandra were the first two stories I put up on. And it was just a photo, the date of their deaths and the little story about what happened to them. And then every day I would add more. Like some days I'd add 10 or 15 new stories. Some days one or two, depending on, you know, what the workload was about.

24:40And I'm the kind of person who's really hyper focused on stuff. And so that's what I did. I just just just adding them. And I had about 400 of these stories after about a year. And I was like, this is interesting, but it's not really showing anything, is it? So I had seen this map created by an incredible activist in Mexico where she was mapping missing women and and homicide victims. And I thought, I'm going to make an Australian one of that. And so I took all of these stories that I'd written. I put them into an Excel document and imported it into Google maps. And I laid the foundation of the Australian Famicide and Child Death Map at the time there were about 400 deaths. Each death is pinned to a location, generally the location where she died or where her body was found.

25:40And each victim is represented by a red heart. And so now that map has more than 3,000 women and children on it. And if you look at it, I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a Google map. And it's just Australia covered in red hearts and it continues to grow. So I'm, you know, every year I'm putting a minimum of 80 deaths on there, that a current that have happened that year of women and children and sometimes that's much higher. And yeah, so that was kind of the genesis of dealing with the trauma in the pain. And it has helped me, I think it's helped me process it a lot better because you know, you start to learn that what are the people have been through and you kind of start to get a sense of being able to heal, a sense of being able to find a way forward, I guess. And natural part of this has been connection with families impacted by Famicide or Child Homicide.

26:47So over the years, I have, I can't even count the number of families that I've worked with, the number of people who've come up to me and said, you know, you put my sister on the map or my, my daughter is on the memorial, or I saw, saw my, you know, my sister-in-law on the Shea Madder's mural in Melbourne. So, you know, so you just have these interactions with people and you start to learn that by giving space to the victims, by giving space to their stories, you're not going to help the loved ones heal from the trauma, but you're going to help them understand that their person is not forgotten and that their importance will continue. You You A missed call doesn't feel like anything, no red flag, no notification screaming at you,

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28:53We definitely know from human experience that honoring and recognizing and valuing the ones that we've lost is such an important part of us dealing with the trauma of that loss. From that decision to start putting the stories on Facebook and then to create the Femma Sidemap, I mean you started with Stacey Ann and Sandra's story which you knew so deeply, personally, because your stepfather was the perpetrator of the homicidal violence against them, but how did you find the other stories? I guess what I'm really asking is, if I got online now and did some search about women who were died in Australia, I would be getting information from news websites and the like. Whose stories get told and whose stories are really hard to find? Basically I have a process. I've got a very

29:55large offline database where every death is documented offline. So as you know, some stories we don't know anything about. Sometimes all we have is the location of her death and if we're really lucky we'll have her age. And that's it, that is the story. So some of the stories on there are no more than one line. There are dates, there are location of her death, there are her age and then often the perpetrator's name because he's been charged or just a little bit information if there's no other information around. So essentially I get my information from a range of sources. News media is obviously one of the key sources. Police, so police media releases are a very important part of my work. Communication with families, so a lot of families come to me now and tell me their personal story and I work with them to get it up online. I have a subscription to

30:57a website called newspapers.com and that contains a digital archive of print editions of most of the key metropolitan papers in Australia. So the age, the Sydney Morning Harold, a lot of the news court publications going back to when newspapers first started to appear up here in Australia. And that, so you can, I search through historically and it's a long harder there because you can't just go in and search a person's name because you probably don't have a name. So what I do is often I will go back like I can't split it into decades and so I might say all right, so this year I'm going to look at the 1920s and I will literally flip through pages looking for murders. It's very time consuming process but it is possible to do and I was doing that for a long time. Coronial records are really important because a lot of people don't understand that a lot of murders weren't being or a lot of killings of women and children weren't being documented. No way to the

32:02extent they are now back in pre 1990s so pre the digital age. So kind of getting, sometimes getting the information, it's had to come from Coronial findings from appeal court judgments, that sort of stuff. So we're talking about deaths that would fly under the radar now but definitely flew under the radar then. So women and children killed in the Northern Territory, in regional and remote Australia, women and children killed who are of non-English speaking background, those with disabilities. So people that you know in a really horrible way to have to phrase it who weren't considered to use worthy back in the day. So you're going to get a lot of that information from those authoritative resources. It is a lot easier to find this information now for me. I have a process. I check the media outlets every day. I do my police research multiple times of day. I

33:06liaise with contacts in all of the police forces and I have some really strong contacts in, especially in the domestic and violent space across Australia. So there's always the research is always happening and I'm always finding cases. In some cases, the deaths that are most likely misidentified. So women who appeared who have suicide died as a result of misadventure or you know died in circumstances that are not quite right for the family. And in that case, I have another database where those deaths sit and then over time I kind of build up enough information to officially document them or to just say to the family that we can't get their death across the line. So there's a lot of research going on that does take a significant amount of my time. I try to dedicate at least two hours a day if not most of the week to it if I can but often it's

34:07a bit of a struggle. And hearing you talk about the depth of that research, what really strikes me is the difference between what is actually happening. The numbers of women and children lost to violence, the deaths that you're tracking. Obviously you're tracking historically but the ones that you're identifying in the contemporary today's world compared with the consciousness that we as a community have about what's going on. I feel like you know we as a community are somehow floating up in up here well away from understanding the depths of what's happening around us. How do we bridge that gap? How do we get the community to understand that tragically this loss of life of women is routine to use a horrible word but it is happening often enough that it's not unusual. You

35:08are finding these cases literally every day. Yeah look on average we've reached a point where we're losing one woman every four days to enact the violence to an unlawful act. That doesn't mean that every death is domestic and family violence related around 60% are. We lose women and children to acquaintance violence and also a strange violence. So the media is not reporting on every death not in most mainstream media and you know and when it does often the stories are relegated down on the homepage so they're not really making it up on the top and unless there's some really click worthy stuff there they often don't make it onto social media. So we get an idea that actually it's not that bad you know it's really only 20 women this year but no actually it's 49 plus some others that I can't get across the line. So what we're seeing in the media is not a reflection of the

36:10reality that Australia is facing. So that's one of the big problems. For me the biggest breakthrough for for for myself with communicating what's going on is social media. You know social media is such a cesspit of misogyny and many other things but it's a beautiful tool for engaging with people and telling them what's going on and you know when I started in this space 11 years ago when I set up that Facebook page it was really hard to get traction very people very few people were connecting with it they weren't getting it they didn't understand it. What I did was I put I put the numbers there like I started making the number really bold every time a woman was killed she was given a number and she was put on the social media and then I followed it up with a she matters card and I do the same with the children so I have a children count as well and over the past few years it's really started to gain momentum because people are seeing it every time.

37:13The key is using social media the second key is turning up for every death not just turning up for the ones that make the mainstream media like you've got to turn up every time and consistency like it's the consistency of doing that and slowly it's starting to get people to understand the magnitude of the problem. So you know 11 years ago someone like Tanya Plybasek would not have looked at my work wouldn't wouldn't have even taken notice of it. Now she uses my numbers you know so most of the mainstream politicians use the numbers when they're talking about contemporary violence against women like what's happening in Australia today. Media are quoting it and stuff like that and the only reason why is because you know it was that consistency is putting a number to it and turning up for everyone and just being out there every time and I think that in the next 10

38:14years we will get even more eyes on it like I think that it just will continue to grow and the more that we keep turning up and the more that everyone else turns up for each each victim the more likely that we are going to see a change in the understanding of what violence looks like of understanding how it's perpetrated who the perpetrators are and most importantly how women and children are not only killed in one context how you know the danger is beyond the family home and it also shows the the tools of violence one of the things that we don't understand is um for instance how often vehicles are used to kill people in an act of violence so I often use the case of Alicia Lee Little who was murdered by her partner um about seven or eight years ago he was charged with her

39:14murder but ultimately spent three years in jail for dangerous driving causing death he used that vehicle as a weapon and there's Jackie Lee person in Tasmania who was run down deliberately by her former partner he was charged with manslaughter um and the vehicle again was used as a weapon the vehicles as weapons are one of the the top four forms of actual violence that I record and yet our documentation our official documentation the Australian Institute of Health and Malfur the ABS places like that even the police forces don't document them as such they document them as a road toll they don't document them as actual acts of violence to by doing this kind of work you know we're showing all of these aspects and we're showing that violence isn't you can't fit it into a neat little package of a man strangling a woman in her home and you profoundly believe that the more

40:21we understand and get to grips with the reality of what's happening the more action people will be prepared to take the more space that will make for change um and and I understand that and I think you're right about that and that your work is attracting attention but you are now sort of all in full-time activist in this space and the numbers we've been talking about and the way you present the data is one huge part of what you do but it's not all that you do can you talk to us about the other work the way in which you seek to honor victims and to tell their stories yeah 100 percent so for full clarity I was a journalist for 28 years and then in 2024 I left journalism and it was a bit of a push it was a big deal for me because I didn't want to be career lesson broke but I also had the benefit of Uncle Rupert Murdoch giving me a nice little

41:24payout having worked for news call for another 10 years the second time around so I had this beautiful little um moment where I I just thought fuck it I'm I'm just going to work on the femiside and child death work for full-time see how it goes I'll sell some t-shirts and one way or another I'll make it work and so that's what I did and what it's done is it's given me some really big benefits the first is I can now call out bad media so I'm really bad reporting on violence against women and children without fear of losing my job so that's one of the really great things but what is also done is given me the ability to work much closer with families of femiside or families bereaved by femiside and child death and I do that in a number of ways so I teach families how to control the narrative around their person because most often when it's a woman or a girl who is killed

42:26there's going to be a media reporting that blames her for her own death that in some cases will lead into slutschaming that will raise her identity so she becomes other she becomes someone's you wife mother daughter that kind of thing she's not an actual individual or she becomes an object like with stacey Ann was the sex murder she becomes a wheelie-bend murder or the shopping center murder or the mower murder or the tip murder or the river murder anything but her name so one of the things and often women when they look at all of us have really shitty times in that in our lives right all of us have done stuff I mean I used to steal alcohol when I was a kid when I am dead I don't want to be remembered for stealing alcohol I don't want to be named a thief I want to be remembered for everything that I am and this is what victims of violence deserve they deserve to not be defined

43:27by a bad moment in their lives but the media will cling on to that moment so my job is to come in and say hey this is how you control the narrative of your daughter or your sister or your mom this is how you talk about the speed bumps in her life but this is also how you talk about the really good things so that we can change the story for her I also help families with their campaigns a lot of families really feel you know very helpless they go through the legal process and that kind of holds that wall of grief back while they've got something to focus on and then after sentencing and after appeals done there's nothing they're just kind of it's like a bigger best and so they want to do a justice campaign or something like that and so I teach them how to do that I show them how to set up their petitions whether it's on change.org or get up or parliamentary petitions I teach them the basics of defamation so that they're not going to get themselves in trouble the basics of contempt of court I show them how to write stories how to write to their

44:30MPs and decision makers how to use Canva how to use social media like there's a whole lot of stuff and all of everything that I do with families is pro bono there is absolutely no cost I've partnered with three psychologists who have all been impacted by Famicide to start the homicide support group so what we do is we provide peer support to families who've lost someone to violence regardless of the gender of the victim so that's a growing group of families now and so we have a WhatsApp group where families can communicate with each other we hold meetings where everyone just gets together you know for lunch or something like that to have a chat and we also provide that really important peer support with the psychology team so they will take phone calls from anywhere in Australia and just be there and just listen and you know kind of because they're walking the same path and they're able to just you know listen and give guidance that you can't get through a normal

45:34normal psychologist so there's that I do the podcast I do obviously a lot of speaking around the country when I'm able to and just really liaising with media trying to teach journalists how to do their job better how to understand that you know you don't actually need to demean a woman for people to read her story people will read her story because they care customers shouldn't have to start from scratch every time they need help that's why we built them Fin answers questions helps buyers find what they need and remembers the context from one conversation to the next learn more at fin.ai Who says Halloween only last one day with Wayfair one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home from larger than life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the

46:35house Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night they're made all season long shop Halloween decor now at wayfair.com One of your great ideas one of your very generous acts was to also create a safe space for a woman who needs to get out of the situation she's in can you tell me about that? Yeah so that's kind of one of my probably one of the silliest things I've ever done but anyway I do it only for me financially so what I did was things things were looking a bit rocky right when Trump came to power the second time and the the old share market was doing this and I had a little bit of super in my super fund and I you know I thought I'm I'm going to take it out put in

47:37this self managed super fund and I'm going to buy a property just for stability and then I thought I don't want to be a landlord and I was so angry about the amount of women who don't have a home in this country about the amount of women who experienced domestic violence and are sleeping in their cars or they have to go and you know go back to the perpetrator because they want to keep themselves at least housed you know the leaving violence or experiencing violence shouldn't mean that you have nowhere to live and so I didn't want to be a landlord I just wanted to put the super into something that was stable and so I bought this apartment and I went to an organization here to you know chat to them about what we could do they support Aboriginal women leaving violence and Aboriginal women who've been incarcerated and they kind of echoed what I thought that you

48:37know that Aboriginal women were the most likely to not be able to get housing you know for a variety of circumstances and so that was the idea so I yeah I bought the apartment with my entire super fund and some of my savings did the repairs did a people donated to help repair it and get it livable partnered with an organization called UMata who came in and provided the furnishings and artworks that I wasn't able to add so they made it look beautiful it's absolutely stunning and yeah so now it's available for women leaving violence the idea is that a woman gets a year or if she needs a little bit longer that's fine it gives her breathing space financially so she has time to save money for her own long term accommodation whether it's in a long term rental whether it's a rent to buy scheme or just getting a mortgage so the idea is that she can save a lot of money

49:43just living there she has everything that she needs so it's fully furnished all she has to walk in the door with is her clothes the fridge was fully stocked the cupboards were fully stocked everything you couldn't have asked for anything better and yeah just move on in and that's it and so a woman moved in gosh when did she move in I think she moved in about may maybe March or April of this year she's the first tenant she will live there for 12 months at the end of the 12 months will have a look at her situation if she feels like she needs more time that's perfectly fine because the idea is that she doesn't have to move into an unsafe situation and that she's not going to end up getting kicked out because she's you know she's still financially vulnerable the idea is that it sets her up for a long life of stability and then when she's set up for that long life of stability another woman will move in and and so it will repeat you know for the next 10

50:46or 15 years and and I think it's you know it's it's a perfect solution for my super fun dilemma it's fantastic and you know what I'm I look in 10 or 15 years I'll probably go to sell it and I'll probably lose all my money but at least it will have made a difference for some women and you know I just we are a rich country we have space and we know we've got empty housing in this country and we know we've got space to build and we've know we've got the money to do it no Australian should be homeless regardless of their circumstances but most importantly if a woman is facing violence the reality is that the way that we approach the the situation in particular of domestic and family violence it's a reactionary approach a reactionary response so it means that we react by getting her to move out so she shouldn't have to face the choice of moving into a car or you know

51:52into a tent or couch surfing or living in a hotel with four children and you know drug users around like she she should at least know that she's going to go she makes that momentous decision it's the most dangerous time of her life the very least that we can do is make sure that she has a roof over her head incredibly well said thank you now you talked earlier about social media as a kind of superpower for getting the information out but we know that social media also is the conveyor of the backlash that currently around the world and in Australia we're seeing against feminism and women's rights and your work has been subject of social media backlash it's been the subject of backlash in the real world you've had to deal with threats of violence

52:52and there was the incident involving the mural that you had created to honour women whose lives have been lost which was defaced can you talk to us about how you've experienced that backlash and what do you think is driving it why is it so ugly out there yeah look social media like I said it's it's a it's a good tool for me and my work but it is a double-edged sword the I think the irony of it is social media drives the misogyny that underpins violence against women it is one of the key drivers of that misogyny now in this current you know the world we live in this tech world we live in so you know and I see that every day I see it when I see you know just normal social media posted around violence against women when women speak out about violence we see this all the time it is um you know people feel like they can say some horrific stuff to women that

53:58they would never say to someone in person in real life and that's really damaging for me I kind of I weather it really well I've I've got a routine I don't engage I you know the worst offenders are blocked if there's a real risk to my safety then police are called but there was a point in 2018 when I thought that my time on social media would end and that my time in this space would end because I gave a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra and at the time there were intense bushfires and during that press conference I spoke about how I worried for um victims of domestic and family violence in particular because we know that when natural disasters occur people who perpetrate violence are more likely to do so in those moments and I you know I kind of the phrasing may not have been great but it was very obvious what I was

55:01saying and I said you know for example a firefighter might go home you know he might I didn't save Michael home and bash is why if I said it might you know a firefighter who's out there who who's already perpetrating violence is out there fighting fires may go home and it may not be good for you know he's partner so it was it was an example and the headlines that the media ran was feminist says firefighters go home and bash their wives and it was it was oh my god the onslaught the onslaught of death threats um and the rape threats and the physical violence threats I got on on a plane in Canberra it gave that press conference got on a plane in Canberra by the time I landed in Brisbane I had been inundated with thousands and thousands of horrific comments and threats from men coming into my socials into my my mobile number the whole works and then it got really it got really

56:04real someone tracked down where I lived and came to the property and harmed some of the animals security guards had to be called in I was really lucky my work was very supportive because they saw this not only as something that I did in the area of activism but because I was a journalist and considered high profile you know they were very supportive and and they took every they did everything they can to to make sure that I was safe um the you know the police were involved the which eventual charges um yeah so it was it was a really scary time and and I thought at that stage you know how can I keep on doing this because this is a very real risk to life and limb but like everything something else came along and the angry people uh went and became angry at other people and you know I got through it and I learnt in that moment that there were things that I had to do that I had to make sure that you know that um that I was I guess finding my words

57:11better was one of the things like how do I speak about these big issues without kind of causing widespread outrage but also just making sure that I was protecting my privacy a lot more and um learning to disengage and to just ignore most of it but if I did see anything that was a potential threat to my life or anyone I knew then just engaging with police and yeah I did come out of that the other side after about a month it all calmed down and yeah now it's just it's not nearly as bad as it was um and I think it's because I went on a blocking expedition there for a while and and I you know I kind of have made it an effort to not engage with people who do this sort of stuff I'm so sorry you had to go through that can you tell us about the mural as well that was a very public demonstration wasn't out of backlash yeah no that that was that was just unacceptable and it hurt me more than actually that whole month of um of of of threats it was um so the She-Matters

58:18mural on International Women's Day 2025 I hung all of the She-Matters cards which contain the names and faces of women murdered that I put on social media I hung all of them from 2024 and the cards for 2025 up to International Women's Day so it took a very quite a big space of Hosea Lane here in Melbourne and I expected that mural to disappear to for it to be erased within 24 hours or at the very least a week because Hosea Lane is a public street art area but it wasn't and like it made it through the first night another woman was killed I went down to um office works I printed off a She-Matters card I hung it and I just kept doing that Senate grew and grew and grew after about a month of being up someone went down and um they spray painted it the whole mural except the top row of cards uh war on men was they they wrote war on men in very large letters across it and put

59:22this really horrible gold paint on it so it was essentially um it was erased it apart from that top row and that was really heartbreaking I before I saw it I was a sat in my car and I cried because you know you're not only crying for the victims on the wall that kind of you know the misogyny the kind of hate of women that it takes to do that the lack of empathy and the lack of sympathy but you're also crying for their families and I know a lot of the families of those women on the wall and so that was really devastating um but Melbourne is beautiful city it's it's it's it's really such an amazing city and so I put a post up saying I'm going to reinstall the mural on the weekend told everyone the time I went and got all the cards printed up got everything ready turned up expecting it to be me and my partner and maybe two other people and uh there must have been maybe 200 people there that day 200 300 just coming throughout the day helping reinstall it so we tore it

1:00:27all down we put it back up and I got a donation of graffiti proof uh graffiti protection paint which you put on your walls to just easily wash off graffiti and we painted that over the top of the cards and by the end of the day it was fully installed back to the way it was and um I kept adding to it I think the the mural was up for exactly 13 months and one day and it grew and it grew it was about three times the size of what it started because um all the women were being added so we had all of 2024 uh all of 2025 and um up till April two of 2026 um it was a lot of cards and then the forum theater tore it all down and so it's gone and what why did I do that uh I'm not really quite

1:01:29sure they said to me that they had to do work on the wall and um on the exit doors and where the mural was on the doors would have to go and they said they didn't like pastuffs anymore so they just basically chose to tear it down it was the conversation I had with them wasn't really clear about what they were doing like I had the feeling I could come back and fix what they broke um but I got the the call very early one morning and I got down to the the lane justice the last of the cards were coming off um so I haven't found a wall to put it on um obviously you know there's an emotional fallout for me um but it's nothing compared to the emotional fallout for the families on the wall like having to tell them that their person was not important enough for this business to remain on the wall that was really hard and it was really heartbreaking luckily I had already installed one in orange and I'm gonna go down there in a couple of weeks and reinstall it because we've

1:02:32run out of space so we've got to make the cards smaller so we can get all the women on um and I have one in ballerat so I worked really closely with um respect ballerat and women's uh health champions so in 2024 ballerat lost three women Samantha Rebecca and Hannah or within a matter of six weeks of each other they were all killed by men known to them and that had a really big impact on that community as you can imagine and what happened was the state government um gave the community ten million dollars to run a very focused um project that has many kind of things happening but the idea was to really change men's attitudes towards women to to teach men and boys to understand respect and to find um healthy emotional outlets instead of

1:03:35anger being an emotional outlet finding you know crying and doing all that sort of stuff and it works you know it works with women it works with men um it's across perpetrator programs the whole lot like it's a very intensive um uh set of programs designed to reduce violence in that community and so one part of that is respect ballerat it's called respect ballerat and um women's health champions a woman works their her name and she came to me and she said I want to put a wall I want to put a mural here and that was not long after I put the one up in Hosea Lane it took her ten months to find a wall we went through a myriad of walls none were suitable or we couldn't get approvals and then she found a business owner who has this beautiful wall it's actually the wall of the building that um uh cafes in children and family services it's on a lane way it's got a beautiful little cafe and hundreds of people walk past it every day and it's very long it's

1:04:35so super and so we um we got we installed it uh I went down there we had about uh 30 people from the sector involved in the store install so it wasn't a community installation it was actually involving the people in the front line front lines including people working in the perpetrator programs um so they did the install alongside me and we also had lots of families they're installing the card so it was this really beautiful um moment for that city because we got to put you know their women on the wall I'm gonna cry again and um as part of that so we we have um Samantha and Hannah and Rebecca in the 2024 section and then there's a special little section dedicated to the women uh who have been killed before 2024 it's all blue cards um and these are women that most people have never heard of they wouldn't even know their stories and so it continues

1:05:38to grow um every time a woman is killed a card is printed the cards are printed here in Melbourne with the an amazing uh print business that I work with um and either they send them down or I ferry them down and we put their cards up and so it continues to grow and so now we have 106 women from 2024 79 women from 2025 and we're um going to install the 47th 48th and 49th women from 2026 on Friday and then we've got about 10 cards for the local women and yeah so it just grows and it's a beautiful thing and on that day we had um uh uh smoking ceremony at the end of it by this beautiful young um emerging elder there and it just was one of the most beautiful days it was rainy it was wet it was emotional and yeah just there was nothing like it never seen anything like it I am full of admiration for your resilience and full of admiration for your

1:06:46activism and what you're doing and the way you're bringing people on this path and uh teaching us more about what is going on for women and hearing about moments like that the moment in Ballarat is really awe inspiring what can people listening do to support your work? uh look there's really a couple of simple steps right now I'm calling for a royal commission into Famicid in Australia so it would look at um all the killing of women and girls across all of the context um it would be really great if people would have a look at the petition on change.org and consider signing um it's a very simple process and I think it's a very important conversation that we have outside of that if you're following me on social media I really just engage with um the work so that we're getting it into the eyes and um minds of other people and if you have a few dollars and you're really feeling a bit generous jump onto the website grab a t-shirt or throw a

1:07:49few dollars into the crowd funding kitty and um what I do is not funded by government um it very much relies on um the goodwill of friends and and people I know and people who support me and I'm I'm really grateful that they do support it because I wouldn't be able to do it without them and everyone wants awesome t-shirts and you was most certainly are they are very cool they are very cool uh Sheryl thank you so much for joining me on a podcast of one zone I've very much been intrigued by the conversation but I am hugely admiring of your work and I would also recommend to people apart from the various ways that you've spoken about supporting your efforts to listen to your She-Madison podcast where you talk with family members you talk about a woman who's been lost and it's a way of bringing her story before us so that she is a fully rounded

1:08:55human not someone who is forgotten or sensationalized and that storytelling I think is hugely important work too so thank you so much for joining me today thank you for having me a podcast of one zone is created by the global institute for women's leadership at the Australian National University Canberra with support from our sister institute at King's College London earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the institute which was founded by our host Julia Gillard and brings together rigorous research practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepherd Alice Higgins and Alina E. Cot with editing by Liz Keane from headline productions if you have feedback or ideas please email us at g i w l at a and u dot edu dot a u

1:09:57to stay up to date with the institute's work go to g i w l dot a and u dot edu dot a u and sign up to our updates or follow us on social media at dual a and u you can also find a podcast of one zone on instagram the team at a podcast of one zone acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land sea and community we pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today thanks for listening and we hope you join us next time you hey everyone it's Chris Galibout here host of the side hustle school podcast this episode is powered

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