1: Something Burning
Illustration by Madison Griffiths
Content warning: This show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode starts—and ends—in a hospital, and while it’s an uplifting story, it’s also a bit heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. If you or someone you know needs assistance, please contact: Lifeline (13 11 14), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or any of these support services. Listen with care.
What does leaving actually look like? What does it mean for a space to become yours? Like, really, truly become yours?
For Roia Atmar, it began in a burns unit in a Perth hospital during the summer of 1998. After a brutal domestic assault from her then husband, the shy 20-year-old had never ventured out of the suburban home she shared with her partner’s family… at least since arriving in Australia from Pakistan six years prior as a 14-year-old bride. In episode 1 Something Burning, Roia harnesses her strength: musing on how, when something goes up in flames, it becomes larger than itself.
Further information
Key statistics on violence against women in Australia, Our Watch
Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2020, Australian Government Productivity Commission
See What You Made Me Do: Power Control and Domestic Abuse, Jess Hill (Black Inc)
Inside the abusive mind of a wife basher, 60 Minutes Australia (2015)
Rosie Batty’s advice to women living with violence, Q&A (2015)
Credits
Co-producers: Madison Griffiths and Beth Atkinson-Quinton
Lead Storyteller: Roia Atmar
Sensitivity Editor: Shakira Hussein
Assistant Producer: Danae Gibson
Sound Designer and Engineer: Jon Tjhia
Guests in this episode: Carol*, Jess Hill and Ashlee Donohue. Thank-you to Danae Gibson who voiced Carol, and Jon Tjhia who voiced the nurse. And, a heartfelt thank-you to Carol and Patricia who supported Roia through these early days in her recovery process, and to Nicole Lee
* Name changed for privacy.
Ashlee Donohue is a proud Dunghutti woman born and raised in Kempsey, NSW. Ashlee is an author, educator, advocate and speaker for the anti-violence message. With a Master's degree in Education, she was awarded with the UTS Human Rights Reconciliation Award. Ashlee has presented at the United Nations Status of Women Forums in New York City, and been the lead writer and co-creator for numerous anti-violence campaigns. She is also a published author with her memoir titled ‘Because I love him’ a personal account of love, motherhood, domestic violence and survival. Ashlee is currently the CEO of Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal Corporation and sits on the ‘Our Watch’ Aboriginal Women’s Advisory Board, City of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory panel and is Chairperson of Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Centre.
Jess Hill is a Walkley-award winning investigative journalist and author. Her book See What You Made Me Do won the 2020 Stella Prize, and has been adapted into a three-part series for SBS, as well as an audio documentary series called The Trap, in partnership with the Victorian Women’s Trust. Previously, Jess was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy's top 100 women to follow on Twitter, and also as one of 30 most influential people under 30 by Cosmopolitan magazine (two publications rarely listed in the same sentence). Her reporting has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.
Tender season two is Broadwave podcast supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and proudly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust.
Get in touch
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Episode One: Something Burning
[Music: ambient, soft and expansive.]
Madison Griffiths: Hey, Madison here. Just before you start: this show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode starts—and ends—in a hospital, and while it’s an uplifting story, it’s also a bit heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets tough.
[Hospital sounds: a ventilator, the gentle cries of a baby.]
Roia Atmar: Hospitals are a disarray of noise and distress. Newborns cry and whimper, as do their tired mothers. Men pace hallways: jittery, and cradling hot, cheap coffee courtesy of one, jerry-built cafe on the ground level. Visitors curse parking fees, the weather, their restless children, their restless roommates. Alarms sound regularly, and with urgency.
[Hospital sounds: a distant alarm sounds.]
Roia Atmar: It was December, sticky and unforgiving with its heat, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I had been admitted. By the time I had found myself in a Perth hospital’s burns unit, I had already given birth to four beautiful children. I had already tackled labour and all that comes with it. But it was different, now. Things were different now.
Roia Atmar: Hospitals are places riddled with angst and desperation. Time stands still. Faces merge into each other. And ageing flowers and tired bodies ebb and flow out of sterile rooms. I don’t remember all of the names of the nurses who tended to me, who waited for my singed body to adjust to shower temperature, room temperature, bed temperature.
Roia Atmar: But I do remember this: my time in the burns unit was transformative. Important. It was a safe haven: a singular, solid place I could just be in. Sometimes, in the night, I’d wake to nightmares of my husband, and a nurse would run in only to recite calming affirmations, patting my head, saying things like: “Roia, you’re in hospital. You’re safe. You’re okay.”
Roia Atmar: People cared, and I noticed. It was that simple. I was alive.
[Music: a suspenseful, expansive and hopeful piano melody begins.]
Roia Atmar: What does it mean for a space to become yours? Like, really… truly become yours? What does it look like? Does it look like jangly earrings on an enthusiastic nurse getting into the Christmas cheer? Does it look like the way a woman from the Muslim Women’s Support Centre—a compassionate, kind and gentle woman—pasted Eid Mubarak posters around my bed to celebrate the end of ramadan? Was it love in the shape of festive decorations? Of trusting my story?
Roia Atmar: You’re listening to Tender, a podcast that interrogates what happens once women leave abusive relationships. Once scars fade and change, once justice is pursued, and once we become the authors of our own narratives. What happens when we are given permission to howl, to be mad and sad and wounded, what happens when good-natured nurses hold our hand while changing our bandages, only to say...
Nurse (Jon Tjhia): It’s okay if you want to cry and scream, it’s okay.
Roia Atmar: What happens when you venture into the real world: of TAFE classrooms, of parenthood, of late nights dancing brazenly to Bollywood classics with hard-earned new friends, of standing up in front of your religious community and declaring your truth, of reminding other women of what they do and don’t deserve. What happens after the court orders and the phone calls, the self-doubt and frustration, the grief and growth?
Carol* (voiced by Danae Gibson): I received a telephone call early one morning from an agency that I frequently worked alongside with information that a young woman was in hospital with serious burns believed to have possibly been caused by a family member. I made inquiries with the hospital and later met Roia for the first time.
Carol* (voiced by Danae Gibson): With a small staff, I was the sergeant in charge of the Family Unit within Western Australia Police, and had the primary role to inform and guide police officers in matters of family and domestic violence.
Roia Atmar: That’s Carol, who worked tirelessly in the Western Australia Police Force, who handled my case, and who later became my friend.
Carol* (voiced by Danae Gibson):At the time, a government review of Restraining Orders was being undertaken and strategies to improve the response to complaints of family violence by the various involved agencies were being implemented.
[Music: ambient, gentle and velvety.]
Roia Atmar: When I moved to Perth from Pakistan, I was 14-years-old, a child in every sense of the word. My teenage years were not reckless or formative, like many an adolescence. Instead, they were restrictive and isolating: I was not permitted to make friends or immerse myself in this new, foreign country. I stayed quiet and restrained in my husband’s home, a home I shared with his family, tending to my domestic duties. Because of this, meeting people like Carol—people invested in my case and my recovery—was my first foray into friendship.
Roia Atmar: Despite how much my burns throbbed, ached and stung, my world was changing for the better around me, and—for the first time—I could see some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. I was ready.
Carol* (voiced by Danae Gibson):Roia is very special, and I’m extremely proud of her achievements, and of the beautiful woman she is and how much she continues to give to others.
Roia Atmar: Despite being such a widespread, global epidemic… domestic violence is an isolating experience. It somehow manages to convince survivors like me that they are alone, that hope and support and closure are just pipe dreams, and that even if it’s out there—justice, I mean —not often do we feel we deserve it, or that it’s ours to acquire.
Roia Atmar: That’s why talking about domestic violence like this is so important, and I’m not just referring to the grizzly details of abuse, or court dates, or meetings with police officers, or restraining orders… [takes a heated breath] but also what happens afterwards.
Roia Atmar: I feel it is my responsibility to talk about my experiences. It is my power. With my words, I hope to give other women the confidence to use their own.
[A scratchy, archived news headline begins: an A Current Affair segment.]A Current Affair reporter: There is a hidden crime wave in this country. It’s killing an Australian woman every week and leaving the many survivors with the most horrible physical and psychological scars. Domestic violence is the crime hiding in the shadows of suburbia, in our towns and cities. A crime shrouded in shame and secrecy.
[Sound effects: soft and eerie sounds of a forest fire, accompanied by a gentle, distant melody.]
Roia Atmar: When a thing goes up in flames, it becomes larger than itself. Have you ever seen a building as it sways alight? It swells, like some kind of ominous fiery silhouette. A single tree can quickly turn into a blackened forest, and a match can create blazing ripples that attach themselves to whatever fabric they can find in their path. That’s the thing about fire-- it moves and travels.
[Sound effects: a tree cracks in flames, signalling the end of a fiery blaze.]
[Music: Expansive, melancholic piano sounds.]
Roia Atmar: When my husband invited something red and ablaze into our home, he didn’t realise he had summoned something larger than himself. There is something burning, still. This, I can admit. But it is within me now, and I use this power, this heat, to assist other women, to help them locate the strength I found during my time in the burns unit, the driving force I had to leave.
Jess Hill: You know, it’s very much case by case as to whether the attending nurse, for example, will pick up on certain signs. And instead of just giving pamphlets, perhaps put them in touch with someone who can actually become like a caseworker, or even just do something like take them through a safety plan and tell them what it would be if they were to leave, or change their situation, whatever that would look like.
Roia Atmar: That’s author Jess Hill speaking to the complexities of long term hospital stays when it comes to survivors of domestic violence.
Jess Hill: You know, rather than just saying, ‘here’s a phone number, did you want us to call a refuge for you?’, all these things that sound so scary to a lot of women who are in these situations. Unfortunately what we see too often are people in hospitals who believe it’s not their job to take the woman through all these different steps, that it’s their job—if they see signs of this—to alert them to the services that are available, but not to necessarily relay their fears, or take them through it.
Jess Hill: A lot of people working in these hospitals may not even know who or where to refer these people to, or what the likely process will be for that woman. For example, one woman, Nicole Lee, who I spoke to… she’s disabled. And I’ve learnt so much from her about this whole process. She’s in a wheelchair. Her partner/carer (in inverted commas) was being horrifically violent to her. She was in hospital for anorexia. She stopped eating as a way to have some control over her life. But also, hospital was a respite for her, it was a place she could go to be safe. But when she was offered refuge by the hospital workers, her thoughts initially were… ‘well, I have two teenage sons. And boys, apparently, are not allowed in refuge.’ That’s what she thought. ‘And look at me! I’m disabled, I’m eating through a tube, if I go to a refuge, do you really think they’re going to let me hang on to my kids?’
Roia Atmar: Like the woman [Jess Hill] referred to, I too feared what it meant for institutions—such as hospitals and law enforcement—to get involved in my case. Would they take my children away? Would they see me as a worthy mother?
Ashlee Donohue: It's so important for any nationality to walk into a hospital and see someone like them. I reckon that would work magic. People just want to know that there’s someone there that can understand what they’re going through. And so, you know, a white nurse wouldn’t get her situation at all.
Roia Atmar: That’s Ashlee Donohue,domestic violence awareness advocate, educator and survivor. She speaks to the issues that First Nations women face when it comes to violence in this country.
Ashlee Donohue: For Aboriginal women, the responsibility to keep themselves and their children safe is beyond in Australia. Who’s looking after Aboriginal women and their children? They have to keep themselves away from the perpetrators, from the systems in place, from everyone! Who’s taking care of them? This goes back to colonisation. That’s what happened there. It was [Aboriginal] women that were being raped and having fair-skinned babies, and then those babies were being ripped from their arms, and the responsibility was: why didn’t you keep your children safe? Why weren’t you looking after your children? Ashlee Donohue: You can speak to nurses, they’ll say that when they’ve helped Aboriginal women, as soon as they’re stitched up or fixed up, they’ll leave. And that’s not because they’re being disrespectful, or because they don’t want to heal, it’s because they’ve got kids at home they need to look after and keep safe to the best that they can in those situations.
[Music: Atmospheric, suspenseful melody begins.]
Roia Atmar: Hospitals exist as sterile cocoons. The sort of places we retreat to: swollen, weary and burned. What we aren’t prepared for, though, is the re-entering. In a space as timeless as a hospital, it's hard to imagine the sort of lives we will be able to lead once out. Will our lives start… right away? How is it possible to return to the same world that continued to rotate while we slowly healed? To our families, our children. To the reverberations of abuse?
Jess Hill: I’ll lose my kids, I can’t go through with it. Now, instead of actually talking her through what this would look like, they just left it at that. And worse, they actually called her partner to come and collect her, after knowing and having him actually state in a therapy session at the hospital that he was raping her in her sleep. There was no question as to what was happening in that scenario.
Jess Hill: So, that’s the worst case scenario—well, not even—they are actually abided by policy. There are other examples of hospital workers who do take the opportunity to go above and beyond their station, which is what all hospital workers should be prepared to do at the moment.Because what we know is that there are moments, and they may last two or three minutes, where a woman is willing to entertain the notion of an alternative. It might be leaving, it might be talking to someone about it, it could be anything that is a side of being in total secrecy. And if you don’t take advantage of that moment, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s your job, the next person who comes along, whose job it is, that woman may not be in the same space anymore. She may not want to do that.
Roia Atmar: This moment that Jess Hill speaks of is one every survivor knows well: when a small change takes place deep inside us, something like breathing air for the first time in a long time. It may not even be that. It may be hardly inspiring. But it’s an acknowledgment of some kind that there is no way to keep going this way. That one might die here and this is not where one wants to die.
[A scratchy, archived Q&A segment begins, featuring Rosie Batty.]
Participant in the crowd: Rosie, what advice would you give to any women watching at home who are living with violence?
Rosie Batty: Um, [sigh] you know...advice, is it a good thing? I would say you stay safe, but it will never get better. And, you deserve more. You deserve to live a life where you can wake up everyday and not have to worry about the day ahead, what decisions you have to make-- whether you’re keeping yourself or your children. You know, there is a life where you don’t have to live.
Roia Atmar: That’s Rosie Batty on Q&A in February of 2015, making sure survivors know that they deserve a whole lot more than this.
Jess Hill: It’s so important for people in positions of authority to take those opportunities, connect to the woman, and to have the knowledge on board to know what to do when different women present with different issues: be it a visa issue, or whether or not they’re disabled, or whether they need extra help in the home in order to leave. It just feels so urgent for the medical system to update and be ready for that.
[Music: hopeful, gentle and expansive.]
Roia Atmar: One thing that shifted in my hospital stay was my relationship to the word ‘no’. I could say it. Finally! If a nurse was too rough, or invasive, or required something of me I wasn’t willing to give at that given time, I was safe enough to refuse. It was my decision to decide what was and wasn’t done to my body. I learnt not to fear the repercussions of it, of what it meant to create boundaries, to assert space. With every ‘no’ came more and more strength. With every ‘no’ came control.
Roia Atmar: And so, when I received a phone-call from an ‘uncle’, apparently [laughs]—when a nurse entered my room to tell me that there was a call waiting…
Nurse (voiced by Jon Tjhia): Roia, there’s a phone call for you from your uncle. Would you like to take it?
Roia Atmar: Somebody on the line who insisted he was a relative, I knew to trust my gut. There was no uncle waiting for me on the other line.
Roia Atmar: Only him, my husband.
[Sound effects: The echo of a phone rings out.]
Roia Atmar: When this man held a match to my body, his readiness to douse me in hate, in his hate, in his prejudice, in his cruelty—only then to watch me burn as I held our child—was enough. I didn’t owe him my warmth. I never did.
Roia Atmar: I’d tell you what he said but I can’t. I didn’t take the call. I said no.
[Music: Expansive, melancholic piano sounds.]
Roia Atmar: I want to thank Jess Hill and Ashlee Donohue for their participation in the first episode of this season of Tender, as well as for their work generally. Both of them shine a light on domestic violence in this country and how it stands as a national crisis.
Roia Atmar: This season is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and UNESCO Melbourne City of Literature, and is kindly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust, an advocate for violence prevention, fair wages for equal work, and the equal representation of women, men and gender diverse people in the decision making processes that shape our lives.
Roia Atmar: You are listening to Tender, a Broadwave production about what happens once women leave abusive relationships. This season is created by Madison Griffiths, Beth Atkinson-Quinton and me, Roia Atmar. Until next time.