How Ann O’Neill turned grief into good for victims of domestic violence | Australian Story

[Music] [Applause] i think public speaking is feared second only to death and i've ticked that one so i've managed the the public speaking fear do we have a lighting guy even though she would have had nerves and so on she bloody hides it well [Applause] what's the worst that can happen for christ's sake when you've been through the worst what's the worst that can happen [Applause] our next speaker has survived the unsurvivable ladies and gentlemen dr anne o'neal now i'm going to share a lot about me i was 24 my estranged husband stalked harassed and intimidated me for a period of 18 months before taking it upon himself to end the lives of our children she didn't die that night and i guess she needs to have purpose in her life who was i now i had no idea but i quickly realized that if i did nothing i would drown when you have had a traumatic experience you've had it you could spend a whole lot of energy pretending it wasn't there and trying to push it away or you can say well i've got it i need to build up my muscles and learn how to carry it so i started to learn about this world called trauma and the emotions that come with it the shame the blame [Music] buddy hi let's do it i just go along and help anne wherever i can if she's going on a work trip somewhere i'd say hey how about i come along and i'll give you a hand a big part of my work is to assist people who have been traumatized through violence and who need some support so what's happening now are we going which meeting is next we're off to margaret river now there's been a spate of mass murders in western australia this year involving family violence the first one happened on the outskirts of the tourist town of margaret river i think i'm often called in when no one knows what to do and when the professionals have all left that's often when we are called because people think right now life will go back to normal and it doesn't it's very raw last time oh it was so early in people's journey they were really you know i'm sure there's still a big struggle to hold it but goosebumps [Music] when police were called to this small farm they could not have anticipated the horror they'd find three adults four children all shot dead this was the biggest mass shooting in australia since 1996 since port arthur since the deaths in margaret river there's been two more family violence incidents in wa involving multiple victims a mother her son and daughter have been murdered in ellenbrook in what police have described as a horrifying and complex crime scene as many as five people believed to be women and young children are dead after a suspected mass murder in bedford in the last four months uh 15 people have lost their lives in three separate family tragedies [Applause] and the numbers are just beyond belief i i just find it outrageous and i just think somebody should do something and do you want me in this session right last time if you could be that would be great and she gets the satisfaction from helping people definitely she always has she's always been that giver provider caregiver but yeah she i think there's a certain amount of sadness for her that it's come about from this you know from this massive tragedy of her own i first met norm o'neal when i was in high school we actually started going out when i was 14 and a half and got engaged when i was 16 got married when i was just 17. he was what most girls wanted he was somebody who was always there and pursued you and you know flowers and chocolates and all those sorts of things he had a fantastic sense of humor had a lovely mind you know he really was a very multi-talented person our son kyle was born when i was 18. two years later our daughter latisha was born i think i really noticed it significantly when carl was born there really seemed to be a big space between us and i don't think emotionally he was ever there for me after that he just seemed so miserable and um i guess stuck you know we were both almost stuck she was maturing and growing and wanting to do things and wanting to branch out and wanting to learn and all those kind of things and he didn't like that she was changing as she matured he actually couldn't respect that i was the sort of person who needed space that i'm quite a creative person you know um you know he hated the fact that i like to dance every time we went out dancing i was flirting or you know i was having an affair with someone or something like that so it was very possessive in that sense initially i asked him for a temporary separation if we could just spend six months working out who we were again he gave me all or nothing ultimatum eventually i said well i'll take the nothing option because i just didn't didn't trust him at all with my emotions once he'd given me this ultimatum he actually changed his mind he would cry he would beg me to take him back you know consistent messages of i want you more than anything else in the world which included some suicide notes and a suicide threat at one stage she tried everything to get help for him and to encourage him to go and talk to someone or to seek some counselling but he didn't seem to want to ask for help it was so hard to see him hurt so much and to know that you were the cause of that hurt lots and lots of friends and family said oh he must adore you he must really love you you know and given that he didn't drink or beat you or do drugs or anything like that you know how can you keep resisting this wonderful love he wouldn't have been what you called a violent man and he was fairly quiet and reserved but the things he was doing were quite scary his behaviour was more erratic his driving up and down the road was getting more and more frequent later and later at night earlier and earlier in the morning and although it wasn't overtly threatening it was very intimidating it was very intrusive it was very violating and because you never knew what was coming it was terrifying [Music] [Music] between 2 and 2 30 a.m that following morning norms come back broke into the house and then the first thing ann knows is that the light of the bedroom goes on and then norm shoots the two children in the chest with a pump action shotgun she throws herself across the children at which stage norm shoots her and gets her in a leg norm then very coolly and calmly says to sister anne i'm going now you can call the police from that point on the next thing anne knows if she hears another loud bang and we we can say this time that that's that's norm shot himself in the head [Music] with the injury to her leg and then crawls to the kitchen where the phone is and rings triple o [Music] he knew when he killed himself that she was still alive he knew that she was going to live the rest of her life not only maimed but without her two children and her leg you know her leg was in a terrible way and of course they had to amputate it just the realisation of um the realisation of what had happened was just it was horrendous yeah we heard the news and it said father had taken his two kids lives and himself and i just said to my husband why i just said to my husband why do the mongols always take their kids and little did i know at that time it was my own son that's what i'm still coming to terms with because he was never a mongrel and i still don't believe it was in him to do it normally when he was little actually that standard any thumb was i think isn't it i'm just angry he's left us the way he's left is he was just pushed to the limit and he obviously couldn't take any more i have no idea what her reasons were for kicking him out but norman was a very loving normal person he loved her so much and he loved those kids which makes it even harder dear little man i blame her while we haven't got our son partly to blame it's 50 50. we've seen what normally went through and we know what he went through and it was not easy believe me it wasn't easy but he loved her dearly the biggest issue i had to grapple with was if a stranger had walked into my house that night and done what norm had done the whole world would have been outraged nobody would have blamed me in any way but because it was their father somehow i'd made him do it [Music] i'm responsible you know for breaking his heart perhaps but i'm not responsible for putting that gun in his hand dad has just been amazing through it all i lived with him afterwards he was my bodyguard he helped me very much in the early days deal with a lot of the initial you know coping with with the the trauma of it all i couldn't have ever survived those first two years without having lived with him i was hungry as a horse she was very scared she locked herself in the room so night time make sure everything was locked and i had to sleep on the lounge close to hers for quite a while [Music] one day she was a mother caring for her two children doing all those things that a mum would do and a homemaker would do and then in a split second that's all taken away from her and she is now a single person coping with a disability and all the things that come with that [Music] i went to bed that night living in a book with characters everywhere and noise and hustle and bustle and i woke up on a blank page [Music] i once wrote that i am red white and blue i am red with the hurt white with the nothingness and blue with the sadness i'd spent over half my life with this man i loved him perhaps more than he even loved himself she doesn't hate norman now she doesn't like what he did she hates what he did but he is a person she she has never said to me i hate him a lot of people said they wished he was in hell hope did rot there i think he must have been in hell here you know i can't i can't imagine feeling so bad that that's your only solution i i can't fathom it despite everything i've been through i've now been in that darker place many of my friends have become very frustrated with me because i haven't gotten married and had more children you know she deserves to be happy and it must be awfully lonely for her i would love to see her with someone and she's a wonderful mother and i would love to see her have kids again and yet i don't know if i'll ever be able to do that in terms of trust in terms of the complications it brings i don't know whether i would ever go down that path [Music] you have two choices when something like this happens you sink or you swim how could i waste my life which was the one thing i wanted so desperately for kyle and leticia anne left school as a teenager and had children young but after the tragedy she decided that she wanted not to be a victim she went back to school so that she could get into university and she did her social work degree and then got a scholarship to do her phd she's just got this inner strength within her and she's had always had it i've seen it from the moment i met her she's one of these people that you know she puts her mind to something she doesn't give up my phd was exploring who were the family friends and community that supported people after a homicide and i also wanted to understand what professionals could do to help more as well [Music] her complete phd topic is driven by her own need to make a difference while anne was studying she set up angel hands in her back shed so she started off very small and now it's grown i'm good thank you i'm good angel hands really was established to support people for the long term journey of trauma recovery they're all going into the symposium satchels yep i had no role in life left so you know here's something i can do to help others have you actually got your speech ready i have i'm talking about the turning surviving into thriving through hope and people come to angel hands through you know word of mouth through referrals from police and they could be dealing with anything from homicide suicide in the family right through to their own experiences of trauma but also being able to fund it through the system you know the money's there one of the difficulties in attracting funding is that the topic is so confronting you know nobody wants to talk about death or dying in the first place nobody wants to talk about bad things happening to speak on her story and on stopping violence before it happens would you please make her very welcome the australian of the year rosie batty my first public interaction with rosie was when she made her press club address and i supported her you know by taking some of the pressure off from the media so what i want us to share with you is my story you all know it and just over a year ago luke was murdered by an estranged partner and what i want to share with you is this victim family violence and if anything comes out of this i want it to be a lesson to everybody many other survivors of violence are in the room today i would especially like to acknowledge anna o'neill together we are strong i certainly felt she was very generous with with luke's memory and and legacy and to lend that to the australian people to to do good i felt we had sort of followed a similar path in that way and we've continued to blame the woman many people after homicide you know you meet them and you get this unspoken mutual knowing there's a language you don't have to express i ask you what we do now dan's a very unassuming person and i think she's a very wise person and she would always make herself available i could ring her any day time and day or night there's no judgment because there is that understanding and i think that you know what she did was give me permission that sometimes it's just the pain is unbearable and that that's okay there's this higher expectation of having to be happy all the time or or strong all the time and yet we don't expect that of everyday people so why would we expect it of ourselves it is a disaster and one that we should be really quite ashamed of for her to be able to give so much still to people at the time when they need it the most is enormous strength an enormous generosity she truly understands where those people are at with their grief with their trauma and that is such a deep thing to experience when you are receiving that kind of support four children have been murdered in one of the country's worst mass shootings they're among seven people killed in a murder-suicide near margaret river south of perth in any situation where there's a sudden and unexpected loss of life people's worlds are thrown into disarray [Music] we live in a beautiful country we live in a beautiful town and in a heartbeat that will be was it's shattered [Music] and the ripple just there's no end point to that i came down with anne four months ago after the margaret river tragedy this community was still so raw and she was able to provide tools to the community to help them just get through the initial stages of grief nice to finally meet you she has a very deliberate way of how she introduces herself and she doesn't skirt around the issues at all it's hi i'm anne i'm really sorry that you need to meet me so she acknowledges it straight up the only reason i'm in your life is because something really horrible has happened today is probably a little bit different from last time i was here we were invited to provide some support to the community they're around dealing with the media that big bad ugly thing called the media the media were ruthless and they were everywhere and there was a lot of anger in the town about that with the inquest coming if you are confronted with a journalist coming to the shops or presenting at your door saying do you want to make a comment i really wish in my first lot of interviews i'd known some of this she's talking about her own trauma in these sessions you know she's already you know she has to talk about that first so that people understand she's a real person and this has really happened i was really really annoyed with the first interview i did where i actually allowed myself to be photographed where they actually went on and was selling the pictures of me and someone actually said to me the other day they said for the first time i felt like i wasn't alone and that's what anne gives you and gives you that space of yeah i've been there um and that sense of you are going to come out the other side oh thank you for trusting me i think for me emotional safety is probably the thing that i struggled to find more than most i was happy on my own for many years you know busy with my work and my study and then i met someone meeting wayne was quite by accident through family my sister invited me out and i sort of got there as extra people i wasn't expecting there to be i just began talking to her i thought this is an extraordinary person i knew what had happened to her so you form a picture in the head of what a person should look like after that happens and she was nothing like that um she was uh she was the most positive person i could i could remember ever meeting [Applause] one of the wonderful things about wayne is he's always been 100 honest he doesn't shy away from the difficult topics or perhaps the things that other people may find more confronting and uncomfortable as the relationship grew it took some time you know to start to trust him because of the traumatic experience her trust issues were huge how do you trust someone again after that anybody and and and it's only probably in hindsight that i'm able to realize what a tremendous thing that was that she that that she was able to trust me [Music] i know it's meant everything to and to be able to mother again that was a huge gap in her life can you reach that one how do you ever put a quantum on on the joy of a little person in your world he's a fabulous individual full of um you know mischief and and energy oh there's a chicken it's nothing more they're free it would be a mistake to think that aj is in any way a replacement child and anne would vehemently oppose anyone who sort of tried to suggest that um he's not he's he's a person in his own right which ones okay aj's aware that he has a brother and sister and that they're in heaven [Music] and he has questions that you don't get out of a normal kid like you know can we visit heaven and he wants to visit his brother and sister and say and you've got to try and explain no you don't get to visit it's it's it's a very um uh it's not a sad thing it's just a different thing um uh well we he he celebrates his brother and sister thank you mommy i guess for me most people sort of say well she's married now she's got another child you know she'll get over all that yucky stuff you know and and somehow that's going to make it all invisible but it doesn't take it away it doesn't undo it it doesn't change it what happened and i don't want people to fall into that trap of thinking somehow carl and leticia's lives didn't matter oh my goodness whatever you're getting but the parts of life that are full and fun are still full and fun what's going to happen tomorrow i have no idea but we'll deal with it and we'll make something of it and knowing end she takes problems and turns them into opportunities it will never leave her but she's able to push through and board your head and create a new life for herself and a legacy for her children which is wonderful [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 130,283

Keywords: Australia, Ann O’Neill, domestic violence, domestic violence in australia, me too, hope, survival, strong women, fearless women, victims, victims of violence, good grief

Id: ZP6Ujhik7fQ

Length: 27min 42sec (1662 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018