As she speaks, Rosie Batty unwittingly thumbs a delicate pendant around her neck, randomly flipping the silver love heart over in her fingers revealing the name ‘Luke’ engraved on the back, the side that rests closest to her heart.
Her little boy is always with her.
“There were things that I got rid of fairly quickly after Luke died – the cubbyhouse, the trampoline,” Rosie says, pointing to a neat corner of lawn where 11-year-old Luke loved to play at their home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. “In the early days after his death I was like a woman possessed giving things away: ‘Here’s his school uniform, here’s this, here’s that’. Of course, I’ve kept things that are important, but the pain of seeing things, like the tub of ice-cream in the freezer he’d never get to finish, was too much.
“Sometimes it’s so surreal, it feels like it never happened, but then of course, there’s reality.”
A kookaburra breaks the silence as Rosie searches for the right words, her voice choking ever so slightly. “It’s horrible for people to have to deal with this stuff.”
It’s been nine years since that stifling February morning when Rosie Batty walked out her front door and calmly stood before the wall of television cameras camped outside her home. The evening before, her son, Luke had been murdered by his father, Greg Anderson, during
