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 titled 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.
That morning, by chance, I took my first AWM tour. I had been to the Memorial many times in my life and had never done one.
Bob was my guide. After the tour, he asked if I would like to join him for lunch at Poppy’s Café, a quick bite before he started his next tour at two o’clock. I met him there at one. We talked. I began to share my story.
Around twenty past one, another guide, Barbara, joined us. Bob introduced us and suggested I share my story with her, too.
Bob left to get ready for his two o’clock. I finished telling Barbara.
“Stand up.”
“Sorry?”
“Stand up,” she said.
I stood. She hugged me, crying. I cried. “You are very brave,” she said.
I told her that although I had always loved visiting the Memorial, on this day it didn’t speak to me. It celebrated death and dying, valour, triumph and disaster. Important and right, but not the place for me that day.
“There is a place you need to visit,” she said, still holding me. “The Alex Seton installation. The stones.”
Then I remembered. I had seen the stones on Rachel Griffiths’s When the War is Over, on the ABC. I had simply forgotten the installation existed.
I approached them somewhat tentatively, for reasons unknown.
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.
