There is a place at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra where, since February 2024, two dozen marble droplets sit on grass under plane trees.
They are tears made permanent. The stone is Queensland pearl marble from Chillagoe, on Wakaman Country. The plaque says the veins of iron in it are the scars — seen and unseen — borne by so many. The sculpture, by the artist Alex Seton, is called For Every Drop Shed in Anguish.
In February 2026 I was sixty-six and in the middle of the longest drive of my life. I had left Port Douglas in mid-January with no fixed date to come home. I was not driving to Canberra. I was driving through the geography of my own Australian life, and Canberra was a stop on the way.
At the Memorial I had lunch with two tour guides — Bob, and then Barbara. They heard my story. I wanted to tell it, and they listened. Barbara directed me to Alex Seton’s marble droplets in the Sculpture Garden.
I sat. I lingered. I laid a hand on each one. I wept. After about twenty minutes I left, and I was lighter than when I arrived.
It took me until I was sixty-six to put my hand on that stone.
I had been carrying the weight of it for fifty years. I had not been allowed to call it weight, because what had been done to me did not qualify by the rules of the time. I had not been in a war. I had not seen combat. By the rules of the country I grew up in, what I was carrying did not qualify for stone.
I had to wait for the rules to change before I could lay my hand on the rock and tell it the truth.
This book is the story of how the rules changed, and of what I was while they were changing.
