“ I grew up in Sydney and I lived in Asia, various countries including Japan for about 10 years before I settled back in Australia. I wanted rural because I’ve been an animal activist 20 years now and I wanted to study law here to become a legal animal activist. I thought it would be best if I had more of a nexus to regional, rural life so I came here to study with the intention of becoming an animal lawyer. I’ve worked here in a legal capacity for 6 years. I thought I’d find a country town after study to settle down but it’s very hard to beat Lismore. It’s addictive once it gets under your skin so Lismore’s been so good to me. I love the community.
had almost finished my degree when I fell pregnant with my first child and quickly into that pregnancy my relationship dissolved. I was going through my pregnancy nervous, afraid and alone and at that time living in the bush so quite socially isolated. My first childs birth was the light at the end of a very dark tunnel for me. One day I was walking through Lismore and I had the feeling that the baby had fallen out. It was strange, I was due and waiting for labour signs and I felt something was not ok. I went to hospital and they confirmed there was no heartbeat. I then had many days of inductions and waiting for the baby to come and it wasn’t progressing. I was in hospital, alone and trying to find the strength to deliver a baby I knew I wouldn’t take home. I had to find the strength to bring her into the world, a way to keep going so I looked very deep within myself and thought, how do I turn what is the ugliest thing I have ever known into something beautiful’
I decided to start Lucy’s Project in my daughters name and at that stage I knew she was a girl and had decided her name would be Lucy. It’s actually approaching her 3rd birthday on the 4th June. I think about her a lot. Some of my colleagues were finding it hard to raise funding for the nexus between domestic violence and animal abuse and it was so frustrating to me that people weren’t aware of this issue. It’s such an important aspect to protecting children because when children witness violence against animals it’s permanently damaging to their sense of developing empathy, to their sense of self worth. We give them a teddy bear when they’re born, nursery rhyme characters are animals and they witness an animal being abused in front of them it is very difficult for a child. A lot of women have been trapped in their homes because they didn’t feel they could leave without all the family members. No shelter from the violence, no shelter for the animal which means no shelter for the children. So there in hospital I realised there was a beautiful synergy between what I was going through, protecting myself and trying to protect my child. With the love of my animals, the only constant, I thought this is how I’ll use her legacy, this is how I’ll honour her memory and I’ll do something powerful in her name and that’s where Lucy’s Project started. That was the strength that drove me through her labour and her delivery and that’s the strength I turn to when it’s hard because it will never stop being hard.
Last year was the first ever conference for Lucy’s Project. The first ever conference in Australia bringing together people working in this field. People came from WA, from Victoria, QLD, all over NSW and they all came to our region to talk about how to progress the movement and the energy in the room was electric. We have another organised for November and hoping this time to hold it in Sydney and invite International speakers to come because the movement is quite well established in Canada, USA and Scotland and we want to get greater adoption of protocols and principles to include animals in domestic violence services. We have a website which really needs developing, we need so many more resources on it and we need to make it more useful for people to go to as a portal. We support shelters that house animals whenever we can from domestic abuse situations. We would like to be able to house the humans so the animals can stay with them but those services need to develop. We fund research as well. I’m running a Thermomix raffle and only 160 tickets are sold at $25 each so that’s pretty good odds. The Thermomix is worth over $2000. There is a link on the website below. My goal is also to get our FB page up to 1,000 likes this year. The more people that like it the more people that talk about this. I just want people to recognise that animals are victims of domestic violence too. It’s been great to work with Dr Lydia Tong who is a forensic vet out of Sydney. She’s been identifying traumatic injuries in animals of domestic violence. I’m working with some great people.
There’s a song that Sufjan Stevens covered called ‘You are the Blood’. He sings…’you are the blood that flows through my fingertips, all through the soil and up in those trees, you are electricity and you are light, you are sound itself and you are flight, you say who you are to me.’ That’s exactly how I feel about Lucy. It gave me such comfort in the days just after she died when I realised she was made of love, of breath, of earth and air and she returned to those things. Everything that she is as a person, everything that continued to be. She say’s who she is to me. She was the one who made me a mother. I have changed in a way that I can never go back from and I’m so grateful to her for who she’s made me and I’m so grateful for how I’ve grown as a person since she was born. I listen to that song every year on her birthday and when I need her close to me. I’m not afraid to talk about her and I’m not afraid of the pain because that’s where she is. In the pain, I’m with my daughter. There’s a beauty in the pain.”
is the link to the Thermomix raffle –