As cars carried their thousands of passengers to footy games and families blissfully rode mountain bikes beneath the falling leaves of deciduous trees in the countryside on a magnificent autumn weekend, I pumped a purposely made playlist full of songs about revolutions and uprisings, pain and empowerment on my car stereo.
Besides Friday night Thai takeaway and a Saturday night movie date to see The Fall Guy at the cinema, I skipped out on doing anything fun with my kids during the weekend days to throw my support behind a current and pressing cause affecting all Australians.
Instead of doing something entertaining, I chose to spend my weekend attending rallies against gender-based violence around the state.
As a mother, but in particular a mother of three boys, I feel it’s so important to set an example to them that these things matter and that the very behaviour that prompted the weekend’s rallies is not okay and won’t ever be okay.
As a woman — as a human — I am appalled and terrified that so many women are being killed by violent men.
It feels like every time I open a news app or social media on my phone, or every time I turn on the radio, I learn of yet another.
On the morning of the first rally, I woke to discover one more woman had died in a house fire and her partner had been taken into custody for questioning (he’s since been charged with her murder).
My eldest son asked: “Do we know anything else about it?”
I said: “No, just that there are now four more children left without a mother.”
My voice cracked with emotion as I added: “And not because she was the victim of a tragic accident or was struck down with a terrible disease; not because she died of a natural cause.
“She died simply because someone was upset with her.”
Hitting anyone is disgusting behaviour.
We are humans, not wild, untamed animals.
Unless it’s a combat sport, assault is not justified. It’s cowardly.
These men want to control these women, yet they lose control of themselves when they feel they can’t.
How do you intend to control another human if you can’t even master control of yourself?
Violence is a weapon for the uneducated.
You will only ever get positive outcomes with words and conversation; you will never get a positive outcome with physical violence.
Unless, again, you’re referring to a combat sport.
My kids didn’t want to come to the rallies with me.
Not because they didn’t believe in the cause — at the rate I’ve been banging on about it, they probably wouldn’t be game to take an opposing side or even a neutral stance anyway, for fear of never hearing the end of my ranting — but because they had a different kind of fear.
“People plough their cars into crowds at protests,” one said.
“I don’t want to get shot up,” said another.
And if that doesn’t tell you they’re aware violence exists in this world on many levels, I don’t know what does.
Even if their fears have come mostly from the social media they consume in snippets from foreign lands, the thought that something radical like this could happen had also crossed my mind.
It’s why I wore fitness tights and runners to the rallies, not jeans and boots; if I needed to run, I could do it faster.
These rallies were heavy, emotionally charged, heartbreaking and empowering events.
Too many of us have a story. Too many of us have multiple stories.
As the mother of boys, I’m trying so hard to teach respect for women, and for all humans.
I call out sexist jokes, school them against assuming archaic gender norms and, after I’ve broken up one of their brotherly punch-ons and everyone has regained their composure, I explain how their little violent outbursts proved nothing except that they can’t yet control their anger.
If I were the mother of girls, I’d be scared for a whole raft of different reasons.
One story of abuse from one person is too many, let alone one or multiple from one in four women.
In my younger years, I always thought it would be fun to join a protest, but I have never really felt passionately enough about one to travel for it.
But this weekend, I would’ve dropped almost anything to be present at these rallies because I’ve found a cause I care strongly enough about.
And in my maturity, I realise that attending a rally or a protest is not something you do for fun.
We do it because we truly believe in something and want to see real change.
So, while I ticked something off my bucket list, it wasn’t just a fun something to do.
I spent most of the weekend heartbroken and in tears.
There were a couple of other important takeaways from my weekend of rally road-tripping.
One: I still love driving, alone time and that chaotic brand of cathartic music loud enough to numb any thought process that doesn’t concern the current song itself, but I still love it more when my kids are with me in the car for company and the music is just loud enough so we can still hear each other talk.
And two: The roads across the state are still knackered. But I would gladly drive on potholed roads for the rest of my time if the budget money proposed to fix them was injected into saving more women from dying unwarranted senseless deaths instead.