Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Culture of Things. I'm Brendan Rogers, your host and this is episode 53. Today I'm talking with the author of My Broken Soldier, Karen Page. Kaz is a wife, a mum, a worker, a daughter and a friend. After a fairly turbulent upbringing in a blue collar Aussie family from suburban Sydney, two failed marriages and two young daughters in tow, she finally found a man who became her best friend, her rock and her lifelong partner in crime. But he also became a soldier, and at that moment, she became a soldier's wife. Kaz lives on the New South Wales Central coast with her husband and their daughters, Willow, Scarlett and Adelaide. She also has two adult daughters, Jessica and Ailey. Her interests include sustainable living, Brazilian jiu jitsu and homegrown food production. She loves spending time with her family and putting her family's enthusiastic paddock to plate ethos into practice. Caz is a passionate advocate for adult mental health, particularly the mental health of veterans and their families. Kaz is proud to use her family's story and her voice as a means to generate awareness. She also hopes to become an agent for change. Kaz, welcome to the Culture of Things podcast.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Absolute pleasure. I've been looking forward to this day for quite some time now. Kaz, there is a fine young gentleman sitting to your left. Would you like to introduce?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: I would. Thank you very much. So this is my husband and proudly, my broken soldier, Matt Page.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Matt, welcome to the Culture of Things podcast.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Thanks, friend.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: So, guys, today we're going to unpack this fantastic book that's in front of us, My Broken Soldier. Kaz, you talked about pre recording. You talked about a hot mess.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Tell us what is hot mess and how it helped write this book. My Broken Soldier.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: So when Matt joined the Defence Force, that was very new to him and I. Neither of us have really had any association or affiliation with defence through our upbringings.
So him going into military life, I guess was exciting for him and challenging for him. Very unknown to both of us at the time. I was working full time in my capacity and I was traveling a lot as well. So we kind of went through, I guess, a six to eight year period of both of us and traveling for work. And that was okay because it was very fast paced. We really didn't have time to stop and think about what was happening in our world. We just were going through the motions.
When you get to a point, I guess through his deployments and the kind of things that we had to endure through those deployments, Again, not really ready for them. Not understanding what that was going to be like. Get to the other side. That takes its toll. And you don't. Again, you don't realize that it's taking a toll.
When he then had his accident, that was career ending, we had to go through a lot. And I guess we'll talk more about that as we kind of transition through. But I guess coming to the end of the real high turbulent process after his accident, my outlet, because I didn't really have anywhere to turn, so my outlet is to scribble. I scribble things down to try and get them out of my head.
Otherwise it gets really busy and it's very noisy in your head constantly.
I would scribble a lot. And Matt and I were sitting there talking one day and we were just shooting the breeze, going through different things, and I just said, we can't be alone. Like, how do we go through such a horrific experience?
And it'd only be us, there must be other families. I said, what do I do with all of this now that I've written it all? Because I would keep everything, dates and times and people and pain and everything.
And so that, to me, that was my hot mess. That was my way coping. I would write and I would just scribble and brainstorm and whatever.
Matt sort of turned around in one of the conversations and said, babe, why don't you just write a book? Why don't you create something out of that?
So I took all of my notes and all of my notebooks and everything, and I started writing in a more, I guess, controlled fashion.
But that first iteration was very angry and it was very targeted against particular individuals that had really let us down or really hurt us through this process.
And it was very descriptive on how I would like to seek revenge to them. Not something that you would put out for public reading.
So I then started to, I guess, evolve through that. And because I was able to let go of so much of that anger by writing, I get to then write a second version that is less angry and more factual. Well, this is just what happened. And this is how we got through it. And this is what we did. And the more Matt and I started to talk about it, the more we thought maybe we could actually convert this into something that we could put out for people to read.
And as we kind of started to transition and think about the three, well, we landed on three groups that we wanted to help that became defence families that might or might not be going through their own pain. It was civilian families. That have never had any exposure to what it's like to be a defense family or have any exposure to mental health.
And then there is that whole massive topic around adults, specifically adult mental health, and what those kind of signs look like and what the triggers might be like and what it's like to endure as the supporter and the sufferer.
So my hot mess, then I sort of got people, very smart people smarter than me in the space of creating a book, and we were able to convert my hot mess into what you see here today.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: So that whole process, it sounds like it started like a really angry hot mess. How much of this process was a healing journey for you in writing this book? And obviously through this interview, we'll get into some of the details in the book, but how much of it was a healing process for you personally?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: 100%.
So the benefits that I hope other people gain from it really are just icing on the cake, so to speak. This, for me, getting to the end of this, I'm really good now, so I'm happy not to read this story anymore. I'm happy to look forward to the future and see what else we can do in the realms of helping people and make change and bring focus and awareness to it.
If I hadn't have written that book, if I hadn't had that to hold onto and learn and look back, that allows us an ability to look back and go, wow, not only did we go through a lot, but we survived and we came out stronger than ever.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: I'm so happy you touched on the anger point, because it was one of those questions that I had for later in the interview, because it was one of those things that my mind started to wander a little bit. I've read the book, as you guys know. For me, absolutely fantastic read. It touched me in so many ways and made me reflect not on my personal journey, but certainly journeys of family, grandfather in wars, and just the stuff that you just. You'll never know. You'll just never know. I guess the process of that and reading it and the anger part that come out, how much of that anger was expressed to the army, even to Matt? Or maybe just the whole situation, like the why me? Scenario that comes in.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah, there was a big portion of it that was, why me and why us? Why him to the army? It was constant. It was just a constant battle of, you know, for want of a better term, you idiots. Why can't you see what you've done? Why can't you be better than what you are for us right now? And he had done two tours, so it's not like he hadn't put on the uniform to begin with, because it's less than 2% of our population that are prepared to do that to protect our freedom. And then he also went to war twice.
So, for me, I was angry at the fact that this is a veteran. This is a veteran that sacrificed time with his family, wrote a blank check to the country, and then got injured on home soil. So I was angry at the treatment. The accident was an accident. And as heartbreaking as it was, you can't stay angry at something like that for forever. But I think if I didn't write the book, I would still be very angry at the Army. I would still be very angry at dva, Department of Veteran Affairs. And whilst I don't believe either of those two big organizations have necessarily changed to the point that they need to, I'm not angry. I am now determined to help change because we need both of them. We need an Australian Defence Force, we need Department of Veteran Affairs. We just need them to be better than where they are today. So I'm not angry, I'm determined.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: You've explained yourself again in the book. I'm just gonna make reference. You call yourself a broken head case. Do you still call yourself a broken head case?
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Oh, I think probably that I'm an evolving head case.
From the perspective of that, we're trying to get better every day. I think that's a big part of this stage in our life is where we're at. So for me, when I got injured, it was looking for opportunities. And I guess all those percent are percentages that you can sort of take into account to try and get yourself back to where you need to be. So at the moment, you know, I'm medicated for specific things, and that keeps a lot of the head chemistry straight. Doesn't mean that I don't sort of revert back into some patches there that are a bit darker, but I think with eternal vigilance, like, and doing the work, so doing, you know, constantly working towards digesting your own emotions and feelings and processing the way you're going about your day and being mindful of that side of things. I think as far away from being a complete head case as I could be at the moment. And I think that will continue to stabilize and cement itself in from that perspective there. I mean, both myself and Kaz, we don't shy away from, I guess, looking at the little breaks in our psyche or the way we're approaching the world and where we're looking at the world and saying, okay, what's the, the better option? Because neither of us feel that, you know, good enough was ever a standard that anybody should hang their hat on. So, you know, that's sort of how I'm treating life now out of the army.
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My Broken Soldier is such a fantastic title for a book. Who came up with that?
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Me.
[00:11:32] Speaker C: Yep. Kaz.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Because he is my broken soldier.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: He is. Tell us a bit about what made you broken. You know, a little bit of background around the events of your deployment and the act. Well, the accident, I suppose.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So as Kaz mentioned, I was deployed twice during my career.
Got to do the job that we all sort of signed up to do. You know, most of the blokes, when you know you're kicking around a regiment or a battalion or anything like that, everybody's looking towards how do we get the job done, how do we do this job that we've been training for so many years for. So for me that was, you know, this was definitely one of the key moments in my career was being able to deploy and successfully deploy, do my job on the ground and things like that. So that was huge for me. I guess from there we sort of roll through, you have a look at the mental health side. So coming out of theater, or when I say theater, we're referring to the Middle Eastern area of operations. So as you know, coming out of theater they normally have like a decompression period.
It used to be in Kuwait, now it's in the Emirates. And then from there you sort of go through, get a medical, make sure you're all clear. You see a psych for about half an hour just to make sure there's nothing specifically, obviously. And then after that you sort of just so keen to get home that you get home. And for me like when we came home, there's a period there of readjustment. Obviously. You know, there's a lot of things that you take into consideration that you start doing naturally when you're away on operations, but that isn't stuff you do when you're at home, you know. So I was a cavalry commander which meant we're armored vehicle movements. So one of the things that I guess controls the way we effectively operate over there is, you know, we have to operate on roads or adjacent to roads and things like that. One of the biggest, biggest things that will make any cavalier scared will be, you know, IEDs and RPGs which is also the, you know, weapon of choice of most of the people we were trying to locate and take care of. So, you know, a lot of those considerations when you come home don't fit for conventionally driving a car. Even, you know, you're rolling through stop signs because you don't stop when you're on the road because that's a fixed point and that's when you're likely to get something happen to you. You're looking forward to keeping vehicles away from you. So you drive down the center of the road and everybody gets a wave off and they not away from you because you're the biggest and baddest people out there at the moment. So they're not going to take that on. So those sort of things take a little while to settle down. Within about six weeks you're sort of starting to calm down.
You still have certain hyper vigilant aspects there. So I find it really hard to downregulate when I'm in say a shopping center and it's very busy because there's just this abundance of information that your brain's processing, things like that. So you know, you sort of learn to try and reinsert yourself back into regular life and dealing with kids and wives and things like that. And then from there on in, you know, even coming into the accident, you know, we were deployed to on a training exercise at the time it was just as simple as we were conducting a night move. And my driver at the time, because I was acting troop Sergeant, I was put with one of the least capable drivers because that's normally what they do is they'll put sort of a strong mind with a, with a learning mind or they'll put a experienced guy with an inexperienced guy so that hopefully between the two of you you'll get the job done. And he gets looked after because he's inexperienced or less capable and he'll do what I need him to do and I can teach him the ropes as he goes through. For me that was, he was actually a long term soldier, but he Was fairly mentally, I guess, limited in his capability. So he deployed to Timor. At one stage there he came back and he hadn't sort of done much since. But what eventually led to the accident was that, you know, fitting out his night vision equipment. Because I was in a senior position, he didn't want to, I guess, allude to the fact that he hadn't been able to set up his equipment correctly. So he was actually driving under night vision equipment that wasn't focused in or wasn't. Didn't have the resolution correct for him to be able to actually operate a vehicle. And he was relying on me, being a senior soldier, that I would just, you know, talk him through it. While we're trying to move over ground at night, we're sort of, you know, work not too bad on the way out, on the way back, we're in. In the night move, which means you're driving under no lights or anything like that. And he started to. Eventually we started dragging behind and we weren't keeping up with the rest of the party. I was in the rear because I'm the troop sergeant. So we're the last man out to make sure that everybody's where they're supposed to be. I give him a hurry up, so he starts to try and push the speed, but he's still drifting off, as in out of alignment with the rest of the group. And then next thing I know, I'm sort of hung up in my weapon station out of the sort of gun ring, which is like a hatch out of the top of the vehicle. And I'm sort of hung up there by all my equipment. And he'd driven into a dry riverbed and I got slammed up against the weapons station.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: And now we're jumping quite ahead. But I look at you today and you're a pretty fit bloke, right? See you in the street and think like, there's nothing wrong with this fella.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: Yeah, 100%.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: How has that accident impacted you?
[00:16:35] Speaker C: Yeah, so that's. That's a. It's a long one to try and unpack. I guess I'll probably just run you through quickly about how, you know, where I get from that. The vehicle to the area medical facility. So we eventually, once I get my sort of wherewithal back, we conduct them the rest of the move. And I sort of marry us up back up with the rest of the troop. We're moving into our nighttime hide location. So we get there, we do what we're supposed to do. We switch off the vehicles, we use our Noise discipline, light discipline, all that sort of thing. So we're conscious of that stuff. And then I went to disembark my vehicle and sure enough when I went to step down off the vehicle, my legs just weren't there underneath me and I tried to get up and I just couldn't and I was a little bit all over the shop. And so one of the directional staff came over and said, oh, what's going on? So I just, I couldn't get my feet underneath me, got banged up. So they, they put me off to one side and they sort of observed me for 15, 20 minutes. They decided they were going to evacuate me. So in that time too, what was ordinarily probably should have been like a fairly high priority kazavak, despite the fact that I was still conscious at that time and verbal. So normally if you can get responses out of people, they, they treat it fairly low. But head case, like any head injuries and things like that they normally treat as a fairly high priority. So it wasn't given a priority. They sent out a white fleet vehicle into the middle of, you know, the bush scrub.
So we were basically driving out in just a conventional sort of a four wheel drive through scrub and the rest of the range.
And in hindsight now, and knowing what I know, you know, and looking back on it, none of the correct medical assessments were being done right from the beginning. So you know, there's a set of stats that's supposed to be taken with any head injury. You're also supposed to fit a neck brace because the neck's likely to be damaged. You're also probably supposed to put them on a board. None of that was done. Wind up in the military area hospital. They keep me there for ops overnight. They then start to do scans and things like that. So the best scans they could get were CAT scans, which we later got told that, you know, no, under no circumstances would you use a CAT scan to try and diagnose a traumatic brain injury, that you'd be better off using a MRI because you can get a better understanding of the damage that's been done. So they did as much as a CAT scan. Then we're sort of in limbo for a day and a half, two days and by the end of that, like I've got key deliverables that I've got to achieve as part of my organization as well as reporting to the directional staff because they've got to try and achieve their goals, which is training young officers to become full members of the Australian Defence Force as The officer class.
So from that perspective there, like we want to be getting the job done. So I've got a pink discharge from my nose at that time, which had been sort of off and on for two or three days.
And I start talking to the doctors, talking to the nurses, saying, what's going on? Where are we going? Well, we're not sure what we're going to do with you yet. Okay. So then I decided to take it on myself. I'll organize my own idea about what I'm going to do. And I decide, well, I'm not doing anything functional here. I'm going to go back out and continue on my job. So organize it with my boss to come pick me up, organize it with the nursing staff, tell the doctor what I'm doing. And ultimately it was like, well, I guess we can't really stop you so will carry on. Which you know, is not normally.
I guess people wouldn't ordinarily expect that you should take the, the word of a brain trauma patient as gospel. Like we're not all together there during those times.
Deployed back out to the field to carry on, finish out the task. Still had for about five days there was a discharge from my nose. Later specialists have just sort of indicated that probably was CNF fluid.
So spinal fluid, brain fluid, when the back of the nose gets sort of cracked a little bit, it can suddenly start to come through. So you're draining that out. And then my key, key thing was just like, let's get back on with the job, get that done. I just noticed I was chronic headaches and, and I had whiplash injury obviously as well. So that was painful and I was just medicating with whatever I had on me or whatever I could pick up from inside the organization.
And I just noticed too, like I was very short, very aggressive, very felt doughy, tired all the time. But that's not unusual if you're out field for an extended period, you know, doing a lot of work in this very short amount of time and you're not paying attention to sleep hours necessarily because it's a 24 hour battle space. So you're trying to get that emphasis going as well. And it wasn't really until it came home that we sort of really started to realize it was a bit more going on than, than what we first thought. That there was a lot of big gaps in my memory and things weren't sitting, settling down properly. I still had insane pain in my neck and back and monstrous headaches, just shocking headaches all the time with it so, you know, came home really angry. Yeah. It was really hard to regulate in that sense.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Please help me understand.
So I'm finding it really difficult to understand how when we're dealing with a job like that, that is life and death situation that it just seems like, without any disrespect, a comedy of errors that just rolled on. Rolled on in this, I don't know, 24, 48, 72 hours after an event like that. How does that happen when your job is life and death and those important processes don't seem to be in place?
[00:22:08] Speaker C: Yeah, look, and I'm with you on that one too. I'm a bit, A bit befuddled by that whole sort of thing myself. In the sense that was.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: That was polite.
[00:22:15] Speaker C: That was polite, yeah.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Feel free to use any other words that you choose.
Are you being nice for the camera?
[00:22:29] Speaker C: Trying to pick my bright words.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Get back to your befuddlement.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: Okay. My chronic befuddle settlement. Yeah. So from my perspective too, I guess I always had the emphasis on, on my mentality towards my army career was I always wanted to be not considered the best, but I wanted to perform at the highest possible level all the time. So when I was, you know, acting as troop Sergeant, I would always be on the boys to make sure that we had all the correct information going back on time every day when we're out field sort of thing. Because you've got to constantly got to report, you know, your fuel state, your weapon state, how much ammo do you need, rations to sort of. So that you can keep the planning cycle going. Because that all has to run at the same time that you're actually carrying out this operation. It's the, the operation itself is a very minuscule part of the complete machine. There's so much there in logistics and planning and just getting stuff out there to make it all happen. And because we're trying to do it in a training sense and we want to try and get as much out of our training time as possible, you know, you're then using those as opportunities to, you know, can we use the medical staff as part of this as well to increase training capability. So then will they come through and do, you know, a check of a village or something like that? For us in, in while we're conducting operations in this particular part of the, the range that we're at or, you know, something along the lines of, you know, your refuelers, you get them to start doing their job in, in a tactical sense so that they have an understanding of what's required if they're taking out into the field or if they deploy and they need to conduct these sort of operations in a live theater, I guess without sort of wanting to be too ruthless and, and say things too bluntly. My gut feeling is that because this all happened at nighttime, it was quite late at night, most of the headquarters staff had knocked off for the night. And so I think they had a junior medic on because they were required to. That was their obligation as part of keeping people out on the range at that time. And they had a night watchman for the manning radios and things like that and keeping operations center going. So I think ultimately like that comedy of errors started by the fact that nobody really wanted to probably wake up in the middle of the night and take control of a situation. They just wanted to sort of go, okay, well we've got a medic, we'll just get him to the local area hospital and then we'll just sort of clean our hands of it and carry on. As far as the capability of the individual medic was a very junior medic. I don't think it was her fault. I think she was trying to deal with a lot of things that she's probably understood in an academic sense, but didn't understand of what it's like to actually have to deal with a patient, what it's like to deal with, you know, a bloke who's had a head injury, he's trying to tell you he's not going anywhere, that he's not going to go to the hospital, he's fine, all this sort of stuff. And how do you confront that? Especially when I outranked that person as well. And that comes down to that person in the organization as well, not feeling like they had the authority enough or not being given enough agency to make a decision and say, listen, I've got to get this done. So talking to my boss and tell him to shut up and get on the truck.
So she was dealing with a bunch of stuff that she just wasn't capable of. And then it just led into one thing after another.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: And the comedy of errors didn't just stop on the time of the exercise either. They continued over a seven month period post the accident.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: There's so much I find fascinating about this, but just that point that you raised at the end, which is an extreme level of dysfunction in a team when you're talking about life and death situation, that, you know, rank and authority and organizational structure, my belief is very powerful in organizations, but it can also be and this is an extreme case of where it's been very detrimental. That person has felt like they've not been able to maybe really speak up to the level they've needed to and that has impacted you. And this journey that you guys had to go on, that's a pretty extreme case of dysfunction in a team. Aren't you guys all supposed to be mates as well?
[00:26:22] Speaker C: Yeah, ultimately that's what it's the ethos is, you know, teamwork, initiative, mateship, those sort of things. And these are all sort of principles that we keep on re bringing back or coming back to in the Defence Force. That this is what we, you know, as a nation feel is, is our core values. In the Defence Force like any other organization, there's people there that are career oriented and that are politically oriented and especially too, once you get up to a certain level of officer, they're political beasts. After the colonel level where you're controlling a whole regiment or battalion, after that point there you start talking about politics, you start to produce reports on capability and you start briefing senators or anything like that. And so then all of a sudden all these little issues that come up, that's not your bag because you don't have anything to do with that sort of business anymore because you're just specifically there to, it's essentially a liaison thing. So right up there at the top end it's super difficult in the sense not to be a political or a career minded, conscious person because that's entirely what you have to be to be in that position at the lower levels during, at the company level or at a troop level and things like that. I guess it certainly speaks volumes about the individual integrity of some members of the Defense Force. And that's as clear a statement as I can make about it. In that sense is that like any place in, in business there are people there that just aren't interested in doing the job to the highest end. And unfortunately for me, you know, me and Kaz, we only see the highest possible standard as our minimum. You know, we're not here to produce substandard work or subpar work. We're here to produce work of, you know, a very high standard no matter what we do. And so that became a huge frustration is just people taking the responsibility of their role seriously without wanting to try and pass emphasis onto somebody else or pass, you know, whatever the consequences on, or share them about, you know, with a group of people. And you'd like to think there was a significant amount of integrity there amongst them. We I certainly found it not to be the case. Some of the people I've worked with in the past have been extraordinary professionals, like as far as capability, skill set, they can back up what they talk about and they have like a massive amount of moral courage. And there's a few of those. And those guys are. I've been nothing but impressed and always tried to look towards as to how I was conducting myself professionally was always to be like, these are the guys I want to be like that, you know, people might not like them because they work very hard and they produce a lot of work and they, you know, their direct reports may work hard as well, but ultimately they're the guy you want to follow because he's so skilled and so capable and he can back it all up.
So, yeah, I find it very confusing that that's not across the board when it's supposed to be an institution of excellence.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Again, I'm going to go back to something you said earlier. There's around 2% of people serve. I want you to answer this question because I find that people talking about other people, it's so much more honest and as opposed to asking Matt this question, who'll just put a level of humility on it. And I want to know what makes Matt that 2 percenter person? Like, what was his drive? Cause that comes through in the book really strong. Like, you know, the sacrifice you and the family made. And for Matt's drive, there was no sort of stopping him. He knew this is what he wanted to do. What makes him like that?
[00:29:51] Speaker C: What.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: What puts him in this 2% that want to serve us and put their life on the line?
[00:29:57] Speaker B: I think ultimately the. At the end of the day, and some people aren't going to like this, and some people certainly aren't going to agree with this, but it's the thrill of the chase. And so the pinnacle is for men like Matthew chasing the war, going and being able to put everything they have been trained to do into action. And you will hear people talking all the time about, oh, we sent them over there too many times and they deployed too many times. A lot of these guys, that's what they want. That's what they live for, that's what they're conditioned. And I say it all the time. Matt did not break because he went to Afghanistan and Iraq. Matt because he would never be able to go back there again. And that's a really powerful statement that people need to understand.
Matt broke because the accident happened on home soil and the treatment wasn't fast enough and thick enough. And brain trauma, epilepsy now says that you can't go war fighting. And that to him was. It was devastating. That stopped him being who he thought in his mind was the only thing he could ever be was an elite soldier. So not being able to go back to SAS selection again and things like that, that's devastating to him. He loved going to war. He just did. And 98% of the population will not understand that. And good cause God help us if we all got it. You know, war's not glamorous. War's not right. War is not. But it is something that's going to keep coming. And we need men like that and we need to do better at their enlistment. We sent people over there to Frontline that we shouldn't have sent and they broke and we didn't capture it quick enough to identify. But there's a damn site that we're gonna send and we have sent and we'll have to send again that it's okay. And it is okay in their mindset and it is okay what they're about to endure and undertake, because that is the caliber of that person that can handle it. Now, I'm not saying they can handle it 12 times. And we don't need to do at conditioning their mental health and helping them when they come home. Absolutely we do. But when you break it down, the people that can do this job, it's a really small percentage and they can do it because there's something in their makeup, that adrenaline, that chase, that everything that they have to go through and do. They love to do this experience.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: For you guys, it's your experience. And we certainly don't want to diminish it. It's a really powerful experience, both the bad and you guys turning that into good, which we'll get.
But it is your experience. I mean, how isolated is this experience in the Defence Force? Because we could sit here today and we've got all this focus on this situation and there's lots of things that happen in organizations that's bad. Again, this is an extreme level of bad. But is it isolated?
[00:32:54] Speaker B: No. And that's probably. That's the saddest part about bringing this book to life, is that I think, you know, and Matt can answer from his perspective. But for me, I naively thought that there might be a couple of other families out there that had kind of gone through something similar to us. But once the book was released and all the social media was kind of up and we were starting to get messages, you get to the Two and a half thousand mark and you kind of go, all right, there's a real problem here in this country. Something's not right. And then to hear two and a.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: Half thousand people that have had, that.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Have direct messages us or put messages up on posts that we've put up on social media. And a lot of the people, most of the communications that we're getting are by direct message because people don't want to be on a public forum.
They're not keyboard warriors, they're not narcissistic, they're not assholes.
They literally just want someone to hear them. So they won't go to a public forum and write their story. Some will. And that's great. And for me, I don't care if they're writing posts. I don't care if they're responding to my posts or if they're messaging me direct, as long as they're talking, because that's what I have found they need. So whether they're direct messaging me or they're posting against something that we've put up more power to them. But there is a lot, there is a lot of families out there hurting because of their journey and what they've had to endure. At some, you know, and I would say probably at least 60% of them are just straight mental health issues. Mental health related issues. A lot of them will have some sort of physical attributes or there might have been an accident where there is a physical ailment, but a good portion of them are just simply mentally the person broke.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: I would like to sit here and say that this interview we're doing is perfectly timed for PTSD Mental Health Month. But did you know June is PTSD Mental Health Month?
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Only because I saw something on social media the other day. So otherwise, no.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Isn't life funny how things bring us together?
[00:35:05] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Perfect time.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Absolutely. You talked earlier about Caz, the healing process that the book enabled you to go through.
Again, what's sort of really troubling for me and Matt, I need you to help me understand it. And maybe Kaz, you can go off the back of this as well, is that I know I'm not allowed to sit here and say, tell us what happened in war and things. That's not something you ever ask a sold. Kaz wrote that in the book and I wrote that in big, big writing.
But the flip side of that is that the talking through things is a healing process. And you've written things in a book about your own journey and being a soldier's wife and living with your broken soldier. The flip side of this again, how do you heal if there's things that you really can't talk about or maybe just through the culture of the army, you're just not able to. To talk about?
[00:35:57] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that's, that's one of the things that, you know, ultimately you're looking at a lot of high end, I guess traditionally you'd call them alpha style people. You know, they're very direct, they're very, in a lot of sense, have a lot of, you know, capacity for aggression and things like that. So even coming out of that environment, trying to, you know, work through it and heal, like inside the, the machine, I guess there's not a lot of emphasis placed on guys needing to, you know, tune ups with their mental health and things like that, which as we more and more like this is, becomes a lifelong thing that, you know, as you go through changes in life or different things and circumstances, you have kids, you start a business, you lose a business, you sell a business, whichever it may be, you know, we need that constant sort of tune up, you know, it's no different to running a car. Your mental health needs an oil change every now and then. And I suppose that's one of the biggest learning things for myself. A massive part of healing for me has been really learning.
And, you know, I guess I'm still, I'm still in the healing process now.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: He was late to the party.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: Yeah, I was, yeah. I think, I think probably the most productive healing and the most beneficial healing I've done is probably in the last 12 to 18 months, realistically when I guess we'd had the opportunity to put together a plan where we could travel the world for six. Oh, travel America and South America for six months.
And we'd come through a pretty bad patch in our, I guess, a tough time in our marriage where, you know, I wasn't being the best husband to Kaz, and Kaz was trying her best. But I guess, you know, probably the only downside that Kaz would have had in that was that she wasn't being as open and as honest about where she was at mentally and psychologically and emotionally. But when we had the time and place there, we were able to do a lot of work on just us, you know, and that in turn has helped me is understanding, you know, my motivations for healing, my motivations for getting closer to being well or rehabilitation or anything like that. So when I first got injured, I sort of just took it upon myself. It was a real simple One like, you know, I had a banged up head, I was getting nerve pain in my body and things like that. I was a massive physical fitness guy, so I was trying to work out and things like that. Doing a lot of powerlifting before that. And because my nervous system was shot from getting a sudden jolt in the brain, my lifts were all out and things like that. So I just. Okay, well we've got to get into the gym, we've got to do this and we've got to do that. And then I started to feel a bit good with myself. Not really addressing the psychological aspect, the emotional aspect that's there. You know, it's a big part of your identity that you've now have a door shut onto, you know, and, and you've built, I guess, a projection of what my next 10 years is going to look like and how capable am I going to be? What am I going to do? What do I hope to do? You know, how many more deployments will I get? How many opportunities will I have? Will I go instruct at rmc? Will I go instruct down Kapuka where the basic training happens? You know, any of those sort of things.
And sorry, just to backtrack a second there too. Everybody you deal with on a daily basis is in the machine. So everybody I worked with were all part and members and then everyone who I would see outside of work was generally the same because you socialize in this great big group of people and they're the ones you know and when you, you know, live in. When we lived in Townsville, every second house was a defense house or a defense related house. You know, whether they be from circle surfaces or you transfield or one of those guys they're all working in. So they were probably X anyway ex defense anyway and they've just moved over to the civilian side of things.
So I struggled with that for the, for the longest time. As far as that group identity, that tribe, you understand who you are by understanding the people around you sort of thing. So that sort of all goes away. And as far as healing goes, that's a big gap of what you've got to do. So you sort of. For myself, I just started to tackle more and more things that were causing me grief. And then as I was ticking them off the list, you know, I need to make sure I can earn. Okay, cool. How do I do that? All right, I can't go back to the army now because this is the door that's closed to me. What am I going to do? Okay, so we bought A coffee shop. So we were just working through that. It ended up being a terrible investment.
But it did give me time and space to be able to have a safe place to work that I could learn a skill. I was keeping myself mentally stimulated in that sense and I was talking to people and I guess that's also probably responsible for my rehabilitation from being a member of defence because that's another story that people aren't really talking about there, is that you become institutionalized during your time there. So for me to work in a retail situation selling coffee and related things was a really great opportunity for me to be able to bring that part of my civilian aspect back into my current day life and fit it in amongst all my other skill sets that I'd now developed. Going forward from there, I felt like I was doing really well.
Decided that I was going to go back into doing some offshore security work, which is pretty much one of the key. We call them like an AJ dream. So the army jerk dream is that, you know, oh, when I'm out, I've had enough of this and now I'm going to go join the coppers or I'm going to go work in the mines or I'm going to go do private security work offshore and stuff like that. So I went offshore work.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: That was in Timor, wasn't it?
[00:41:09] Speaker C: That was in Papua New guinea on Menace Island. Yeah. So same job, different uniform, very similar in that sense.
It was pretty much a retirement ground for ex army and Navy, Air force, whatever. Everybody there was similarly minded. Most of us guys that we were working for and in that group there, I was a team leader for the emergency response group. So similar to like your high readiness stuff in the jail. So you're the guys that strap on suits and go in when there's things that aren't supposed to be happening, happening. And in on Menace island in. During that patch there, we had an incident where they started to write and the guys had taken back two of the comp compounds office. So we then had to deal with that. We had two other compounds in the area that were, you know, pretty hairy as far as where they were going to go. Didn't know which way it was going to go. So we had to work on that job and we wound up taking back both compounds and then we had to work through the process of, okay, we've got key important people here that have helped. This whole thing's been out of control. So we need to take those guys away, hand them over to the local civ pole because now they're, they've created this whole other issue. And police in Papua New guinea, they do things their way. And so we didn't have any control over that. So there was a lot of guys that weren't getting treated very nice.
But you didn't sort of necessarily say, hey, this is wrong or anything like that because it's their country. What are you going to do?
So all these transferees end up coming back to us after being processed through the police force and they come back to Menace island and you're just trying to deal with these guys, even though last week you saw them beating into your mate with a 4x2 sort of thing and they'd had a bunch of homemade weapons and stuff that they sort of were trying to, they would have absolutely killed somebody if they'd given a chance to just to make a point. So after that, it's sort of, I guess the wheel started falling off again for me. I was very intolerant of anything. And so we've sort of made the decision that it was best for me to come home and start pursuing mental health a bit more seriously in that sense. So back with my specialists, back with my training doctors to, to do that side of the work, get the chemicals all realigned and then just, you know, a couple of worth of, you know, just really good solid therapy, like just working with a psych, working with a psychiatrist just to try and get, keep that all stabilized because those, those are all the manageables, you know, like a doctor can manage how the chemical imbalances in your brain are going to work, or a doctor can manage, you know, you're going to have nerve pain here. So we're going to treat this. But through that process, it's, it's also, there's an onus and a responsibility on the individual to want to get, get better. And I think that's a lot of what we don't like to talk about is the onus and the responsibility on the individual and how hard they have to want it. So for me, I've wanted the whole time to be the best possible partner for Kaz, but parent for my kids and I guess the best, you know, human I can as far as that goes. So it's, it's all about just recycling back through that and try and, you know, if I have a fight with Kaz, I got to look at it and go, okay, well what was the, the hinge points there? Or if I have a confrontation with somebody, you know, what was the key point there that sent that down the wrong way. And me, did I overthink things or did I over, you know, express my point to lead it astray, or do I need to, you know, deliver things better in more of a, I guess, civilian kind manner than how I was doing at the time?
[00:44:26] Speaker A: Just to lighten the mood a bit. You're doing very, very well in that. You said you were going to use a lot of swear words during the interview and you find it hard. Befuddled is the worst word you've used today.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: And I am so not going to let him live befuddled down ever.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: But the area he's not doing so well at, he's using a lot of acronyms now. But don't worry, in the show notes, we'll make sure we list out a whole. There's gonna be a page of acronyms.
We'll sort that out. We'll sort that out. The mental health scenario. See, again, part of this is tapping into that. Unfortunately, mental health seems to be one of those things that it's like maybe cancer nowadays. Like it's touching so many families and maybe some families don't even know it's touching them and they're dealing with things and they're not quite sure what's going on. Mental health's touched my own family and my sister and I would. Mom and dad have got to that point now where they know that or they feel it's not going to get better. I'm no doctor, but I don't feel like it's going to get better. We're just going to have to learn to live and manage and the person, my sister in this case is going to have to want to be a big part of that process as well. Is that the case? Am I speaking the truth? It's not about you get better, but you learn to manage it a lot better and you learn to work through it.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: I'm going to jump in here for a second. I think that's really hard to go, yes, that's right or no, that's wrong, because there's two sides to this. Mental health still has such a real derogative stigma to it in this country across the board. And I think it's only just now, in the last sort of few years, that we're starting to try and stop it from being two little dirty words and more about what actually is mental health. Do you get better from ptsd?
Yes, you can, because PTSD is derived from a traumatic experience that you have undertaken and it has triggered some sort of mental health response.
Can you get better from depression or do you just have to manage depression? Well, it depends on the type of depression that you have. Is it manic, is it not manic, is it chemical, is it environmental? So you can't just as a simple rule, go. So you just have to learn to manage or you can heal and get better.
What you do have to do, though, is want whatever that path is and you have to want it enough for yourself first and foremost.
So I quite often say that there are two types of, I guess, for want of a better word, two types of victims in this space. The first victim is a victim that has endured something horrific and now wants to move forward and meet their medical team, whoever, 50, and really try and get out of that space or learn to manage within that space. And then there is the other side. There is somebody that has also endured something horrific but just for whatever reason, is not yet ready for help. And you trying to go in there and force them or tell them that this is how it has to be and you have to do this is never going to work. It just isn't. And I think for a good portion of the time, Matt was the last better. So he was suffering quite badly. And for those that read the book, you'll know I also went through something not too dissimilar years prior.
So there is an element there where you sit and you will push back on anyone trying to help you and all the rest of it. You're burying your head in the sand for whatever the reasons. You have to be prepared to take that first step to be able to evolve forward. Whether that's down the path of repair and heal and move beyond, or it is a case of learning to manage within for us. Where Matt is, he will never heal. This is the world that we live in now. And it took us a long time to stop fighting each other, recognize that this is our new world, and stand together and face the demon that was his depression and anxiety and adjustment disorder trigger from the events that led leading into and post the accident.
So he doesn't heal. But we also then had to take on the journey and learn that there's management within our system. There's management within our new world.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: What made you ready, Matt? Jumping across from that, not ready to being ready. What was that?
[00:48:52] Speaker C: I think for myself, I think I always felt. Felt ready. That's a tough one because I think I always thought I was moving in the right direction. Whereas if I really dig down and if I'd given her a bit more scrutiny earlier on, I would have realized that I still had a significant amount of things that I needed to address before I moved on any further or go step over into that. Okay, active sort of healing process.
So for myself, you know, there was a huge amount of things to unpack. There was a loss of identity, there was a loss of. Loss of support group, there was, you know, loss of even just knowing what I was going to do day to day. All of a sudden, I was responsible for that, not somebody else. Which is. Is. Sounds like such an obscure thing to say because everybody goes about their day normally, but for me, a big chunk of my identity and a big chunk of the job that I was doing was that I knew that I knew when I had to turn up every day, I knew I had to be on barracks by seven. So that was easy, you know, because I knew that I would be out there doing PT with the lads until nine. Like, it was as simple as that. And then I knew that after that, the boys would all get showered up and then we'd go about our day doing our. Whether it's maintenance jobs, whether we've got to set something together for, you know, a future operation or a exercise. So as far as that goes, you know, like, I mentally thought I was ready, but I wasn't really being as honest with myself as I should have been or choosing not to be honest. Because I think ultimately sometimes that little beast inside our head says this, oh, now you'll be right, because you don't want to address these real dark things. And one of the big things in that I came to the realization was, as far as our relationship goes with me and Kaz was that I've got this person here who's got my back all the time, and I'm supposed to love her and I'm supposed to respect her as a person and as a human, as a professional, as a mother of my children, as my wife. But I'm not being real nice to this person. And that's saying enough.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:47] Speaker C: You know, and it's. It seems so weird to think like, this is the person that I want to protect the most. And yet this is also the person that's seen the. The worst of me. So I don't want to take away and say that, no, you should never, ever express how you're feeling or let yourself be vulnerable with another person. It's a bit of a hypocrisy to sort of say, well, this is the most important person to myself and I can definitely do the right thing by them, but I'm also going to show them only my rough side as well. Like, that seems really obscure. So for me, it was suddenly working through and going, what am I doing? Why am I treating this person that I love so much like a piece of shit? Why am I just snappy and responding with sarcasm in things? And why am I belittling when something's obvious to me but not obvious to her? It's a human experience that we're dealing with here. So some people have individual experiences that are different to everybody else's. So obviously Kaz isn't going to get all the things that I get organically. And so that's not something to denigrate Kaz for or to belittle Kaz about. That's something to go, oh, cool. Well, I have some experience in this area, so here's my two cents. You know, I wasn't doing that. I was snarking at her or sniping at her or, you know, just being mean. So, you know, for me, those. Those are one of the key points. And Kaz became clear, fairly, I guess, late in the piece as well, about being worth more than. Than the treatment that she was accepting. And so Kaz also put a boundary in place to say, hey, like, this has got a. This has got a stop. And so I'm worth more. Yeah, 100%.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: That's a really big message for everyone. Know your worth, understand your worth, and be prepared to step up and say, no, I'm worth more. I deserve better, and this needs to stop.
[00:52:29] Speaker A: There was a moment in the book where Matt was in the darkest place, maybe, and you called. Kaz still gets me. Like, you guys got me so many times in this book. It's a fantastic read. Unbelievable. So raw and so emotional.
But you made a call and I can't remember the exact words, but, you know, you were ready to let it all go and, you know, you just couldn't deal with this anymore. Kaz on the other end of that line, and I'm going to be the first to swear I wouldn't want to fuck with her, right? And I think that was the powerful moment that, that, like, hold on a minute. Don't fuck with me. It came out like, so, Kaz, take us back to that space for you. You know, your reaction and maybe how that started to turn the direction into a way that we can start to work through this better together.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: So that was four days before Christmas, leading into a Christmas period, and we were really in the thick of it at that point. We knew at that stage we'd had a diagnosis. So we knew that we were dealing with some pretty intense head trauma. What we didn't have from any of that was what that was going to look like.
Medically supported, financially supported, help from DVA or army moving forward.
And as Matt had mentioned before, we bought the coffee shop as a safe place, right, for Matt to go to. Because I was still working full time and I was still having to travel across the countries that I was supporting. And we also had at that point two kids under two. So it was a pretty hectic world that we were living in. And there weren't a lot of great dates.
There were really bad days, and then there was really horrific days.
So through all of it, I had learned to buffer the children from when daddy would hide in the bedroom for two or three days at a time. Or I would buffer the children if he was in a really foul mood and he was snapping. And there was never any physical violence, but there was a lot of verbal. I don't think he ever meant it maliciously, and I don't think he ever quite understood how nasty he could come across when he was in pain. And so all of these were reactions from him. He wasn't just going out of his way to be an ass, but we also had the coffee shop and we had employed friends of ours, so we had employed adults into a hospitality type business that we knew nothing about and was bleeding us financially. So we're hemorrhaging financially. We've got no support from dva, no support from defense.
Any other day. I don't know what mood he's going to be in. It's like living with Jekyll and Hyde. I'm trying to protect the kids. Kids keep working because that's what was feeding us.
And I had put little check references in place. So Matt would go walkabout. One of the critical things that changed after his accident was his inability to identify time. So he would tell you he was going for 10 minutes and three hours later, Matt would reappear from God only knows where. And you'd ask him. He'd go, oh, no, I just, you know, I just went to wherever.
No, but okay. So he just had no concept. So I would put little checks around town and I would have a network of people that I could call and leverage if we couldn't find Matt, and if he was in a really bad spot, then my panic levels would kind of rise because this isn't the life he wanted for himself. And you knew that in the thick of it, they were the thoughts that would be creeping in that he's lost his manlihood, he's lost his ability to protect his family and do all these kind of things. So only is it brain trauma, induced epilepsy and brain trauma and everything associated with that. But now you've got all these other things. He's lost his career, he's lost his ability to protect us and to provide for us. And so you could just tell in his mannerism that in the dark periods, it was really dark, so you never knew if he was going to come home. That fear was constant. This one particular day, it hadn't been a great couple of days. He'd been in quite a dark space. So we call it. Matt refers to it as the demon off your peripheral vision. I just call it the black Hol. He would just slide into it and that would be the end of it. So he had been in this dark space for a while. A few days leading into this day. And he was supposed to be on shift at the coffee shop. And the staff are ringing me saying, do you know where Matt is? No. So we started this initiation of phone calls. I had the two little kids at home with me, and I started to pace and panic, not knowing what was going on. We couldn't find him. He wasn't answering his mobile phone. The network of people that we would call.
Nobody was answering and nobody knew where he was. And it had been a couple of hours at this point. And my mobile phone rang and the two kids were in the sort of dining room area with me. And I saw that it was Matt. And there's that mixture of relief and then panic. So I answered the phone and, you know, my first words were, hey, babe. Silence. Babe, can you hear me? Are you there? Silence. It's like, matt, I know you're on the phone and I know you've called me, which is a really good.
I just need you to talk to me. I just need you to answer. I need something from you at this point, please. And again, there was just that silence. And the longer it was silent, the more panicked I kind of became and anxious and, you know, and there's that combination of anger as well, I guess. If you do something stupid right now, by Christ, I'll hate you.
So you kind of get that whole myriad of everything. And I just kept saying to him, answer me, answer me, answer me. And then finally there was just. Just this broken voice that it wasn't crying.
It was just like almost a desperate whimper of, you know, I'm here. And he just Said, I'm sorry, I just can't do this to you anymore. And I just went white. I just froze. I just. My whole world, my heart's in my throat. I don't know. There isn't enough words to describe the level of anger and hurt and fear that I had in that split second.
And I don't even think I gave thought to it. My instinct was just, I'm not enough to save you right now, but maybe your kids are. And so I just screamed down the phone, if you fucking kill yourself, I will raise your children to hate you because they weren't enough for you. And they will hate you every single day of their life.
And there was silence again. And I'm sure he was really pissed off at me for doing it. And then I just got, I'm coming home. And he hung up the phone. And then I just had to pace.
The kids obviously could see me. And so I've sort of hung up the phone. And you know, my two year old at that point is just stunned. Why is Mummy crying? And so then I've had to kind of calm her down and no, no, no, it's okay, baby. And daddy and I are just playing and everything's fine. And so I put them into their room with a video cause a movie on. Cause I knew dad was gonna come home and I just needed to make sure they were away in a safe space in case he came through livid.
He came in and, you know, there was sort of a real uneasy kind of period there. And I just hugged him and we didn't talk about it, we just moved forward. And then he went back into his room and sort of kept in a safe space. To say Christmas that year was very subdued is an understanding.
It was one of the worst. It's not the only time we've been to that point. But I also write in the book that most of the people that you hear that suicide, their families are shocked when they've died because there was no warning, there was no lead into it. There was no, you know, they might have had dinner with them the day before. And everything seemed fine. So I don't think I would have got that phone call if it was that time, which is the only way I can describe it. I don't think if Matt ever gets to that point where he's going to end it. We're not going to know until it's too late.
[01:00:34] Speaker A: Was walking away for you ever an option?
[01:00:36] Speaker B: Walking away was certainly. There were periods where I didn't want this to be my life anymore and the ask too big, the journey too hard. But then the thought of waking up and him not being next to me was worse. So. So yes, I wanted to run, but I didn't want to run without Matt, if that makes any sense at all. So it was never Matt. I don't think that I ever wanted to leave. It wasn't my relationship that I wanted to leave. It was the nightmare that we were in.
And I get very angry, or I used to get really angry at Matt because he would be this really vicious person that I just knew wasn't him and I could never understand. And this is why I come back to saying, know your own words worth. Be prepared to step up and say I actually deserve better. And if I am as important to you as you are to me, then you are going to start listening to that point and somewhere in amongst that, we are going to work together to find our footing again.
So it would have become more of an issue for me and it would have become an option had I not have been as important to him as he was to me. And you could always see from Matt, you know, through the thick of it, you could always see the want in him to want to be better, to want to get that help. That was enough for me to keep going. But I also think, looking back now, you said something before about not wanting to get on the wrong side of me. I am exceptionally strong and I will endure a lot before I break.
So I think we are fortunate in that regard.
I think we know a lot of couples that have broken and divorced because they've not necessarily been as, I guess, as stubborn or as strong in that regard. And the ask is big. It's huge. And what you have to endure is tough.
Our interview will continue after this.
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[01:03:25] Speaker A: You had a very tumultuous relationship with your father who's since passed several years back, how much of this stubbornness, fight can you repay to him? Again, there's such some special moments in the book and some words that you say about your father later on and sorry to him and you know, he'd passed several years back, but how much of this fight do you attribute to him? And even that the relationship and the headbutting that you guys have had or had over many years.
[01:03:56] Speaker B: You know, I love my dad, I just do. And right, wrong or indifferent, he was who he was, he wanted children. And my brother and I, you know, that was never, never not known. But for my father, his only way of showing love was materialistic. So, you know, we got horses and we got speedboats and we lived a very comfortable life. But there was never any emotional acceptance, acknowledgement, pat on the back, you knew when you'd screwed up. He, you know, was not backwards in coming forward and telling you, but there was never any, well, well done, good job, you're achieving great, I'm proud of you, none of that.
So he owned a, owned a petrol station. When my brother and I were young and before I'd left primary school I was working at the petrol station. We were raised that if you couldn't afford it, you don't buy it, you don't go into debt, you don't get credit cards, you don't, you know, so you, you earn your way in life and if you want it damn well get off your ass and go out and do it.
Simple as that. So yes, I attribute a lot of my stubbornness and my ability to just knuckle in and get it done to my father. We were always very physical in the respect that we did a lot of sports when we were growing up. I was allowed to go and try anything I wanted to try. So soccer, gymnastics, trampolining, but it was all very physical and again, that was my dad's only way of saying I love you. We just were too young to understand it at point that, that point as we got older, I lived a life that was so foreign to my dad. My dad didn't understand, he didn't understand evolution, I guess so he didn't understand modern technology and he didn't understand, you know, that the need to achieve and want to really excel. My dad was a blue collared worker that made enough money to live comfortably, have a holiday, you know, in their older years and whatever. He didn't want to travel the world, he didn't want to be an executive. He didn't want to climb to the top of whatever mountain that was that he was facing.
He just wanted to be okay. Whereas my drive is very different to that. I want to excel, I want to exceed, I want to. Or succeed. And I. And I want to achieve things.
I guess from that perspective, him and I were very different.
And so as I became an adult and I started to carve my own path, he didn't understand it. He didn't like it, and we grew very much apart.
And our common goal, our common ground, I think was, was that we bought acreage up at Armadale and we had horses. And that was my dad's passion as well. So we got to stay in that space of, let's not talk about my life. Let's not talk about what you don't like about me. Let's not talk about what I don't like about you. Let's just build stables and play with horses and, you know. You good? Yep. You good? Yep. We're fine. You'll see, as you've read in the book, that it. It goes bad at the end. And. And I guess my biggest lesson from that is my last words to my father were, you will never win Father of the Year award as I hang up the phone. And it was said with a lot more descriptive words than that. So be really careful what you're saying to people that you love, because you just never know if that's the last message you'll give them. And I have to now live with that. So, yeah, to him on his deathbed, I was.
[01:07:15] Speaker A: So it reminded me, when I read that part in the book, it reminded me of a song called the Living Years by Mike and the mechanics and the lyrics of that and sort of not the best relationship and then sort of at the end and reflecting and stuff.
[01:07:32] Speaker B: But he does exactly what his dad did, too. So his dad was too busy when he was little, and as he gets older, he's too busy for his dad. So, yeah, that's math.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: You wrote some beautiful words in the book, which I found about your father, and you said, I'm sorry you never understood me. And I'm sorry I never really understood you either. I love you and miss you every day.
[01:07:54] Speaker B: I do.
[01:07:55] Speaker A: That got me big time when I read the book as well. There's just so much power in those words.
[01:08:00] Speaker B: And I'm not sorry for who I am as a person. It's really important that people understand what I wrote. I'm sorry that he never understood me.
[01:08:09] Speaker A: So give it some context, because you do Say a little bit about that after. In the book, I think.
[01:08:13] Speaker B: I guess the really big turning point for me was when Matt had the accident.
None of our family really stepped up. None of our family understood or wanted to understand which is more important.
None of them took the time to really, really see what was going on in our world. And we weren't an open book at that point by any stretch. We had the doors closed a lot.
I guess we didn't understand a lot of it either, but my dad, we were at the point where we were nearly going to lose everything. So this had hit us quite financially, quite badly. And I had wrestled with it for about six weeks that I was going to have to go to my parents and ask for help. And I did. And my mum seemed quite empathetic to the request. And my dad then rang me a couple of weeks later and said, you know, it's a fine mess you've got yourself in now and we're going to help you. But. And his cut words were, don't you think it's about time you learn to stand on your own two feet? That's all I had ever done, was stand on my own two feet. I had never been taught by my parents that it was okay to go and ask them for help. So I had never asked. I had endured a lot and I had never asked him for help. And on the eve of my. On Christmas, on Christmas Eve, the year I was 30, I unleashed and I let my dad know everything that I had been through that I'd never been able to lean on him about.
And for me, that was my turning point. That's where I got to stand up and say, as a human being, I'm actually really good. I'm a really nice human being and I am trustworthy and I am honest and I will give you the shirt off my back if you need it. But at the same time, if I'm focused on something, get on board or get the hell out of my way because I'm going down that path. And he never understood, understood that. So I was sorry that he never took the time to understand me as a human being and really get to know me and therefore be able to be proud of me. That's a big thing. That's something that hurts a lot. And I, you know, I'm sorry that he never saw value in taking that time to learn about me. But at the same time, too, I'm sorry that he was sick. We didn't know he was sick and we ended up on a really bad Path.
And that's the last kind of engagement that I had with my father. It didn't end well and there's nothing I can do about that now, except, I guess, more in the process.
[01:10:44] Speaker A: I'm sure he's unbelievably proud of you today.
[01:10:47] Speaker B: Maybe. I don't know.
And, you know, look, I think my brother said on the day my dad passed, I had stayed at the hospital with him until he took his last breath. And then I came back to the house, house, and my brother was there and he said he was looking quite lost. And I said, what are you thinking right now? He said, I'll never get to understand why. And I said, why what? And he said, why we were never good enough for him.
So, again, it's, you know, I never want my kids to think they're not good enough for me. You know, if they feel that they're inadequate in phases of their work or friendships or relationships, whatever, that's on them. But as far as being my child, they're good enough.
[01:11:26] Speaker A: On that point. I was honoured to meet three of your five children the other night at a networking event. Beautiful young ladies going back to that sort of black demon, Matt. And let's put the three girls aside that you are a birth parent of and two of Kaz's, where you're not a birth parent of, but they made a choice. And again, it's just not about a book review because, again, people can buy the book. But there's a really powerful moment, a another really powerful moment in the book again, where the two girls, Aileen, Jess, you'd been around a while and were just a big part of their life and decided by their own admission to call you dad.
Again, help me understand the getting to the point that we touched on before and Kaz said, I'm going to make your children hate, you know, just the respect that those two, two ladies must have for you as a person, as a leader of the family. Like, I.
Again, I find it really hard to understand how an individual gets to that point when there's two young ladies who make a decision to call you dad, which is just an unbelievable thing when you're not their birth parent.
[01:12:39] Speaker C: And again, I was very resistant to it early on in the piece because we had a very, I guess, tentative relationship with their father, father. So that was all very difficult at the time. So I didn't want to muddy the waters by making that emphasis. They'd actually spoken to me about it a couple of years before that. Particularly, Jesse, I don't know about Ailey. But yeah, and I'd sort of said, look, narc, you've got your dad, let's keep that there, let's not make any waves because, you know, we didn't need that extra hassle in, in our lives, to be honest, at the time. And neither did the kids because ultimately it, you know, it was going to come back and affect them, them by being, you know, causing an issue with their father.
So I'd sort of been very reluctant to adopt that mantle, as we say. And I guess there was a part of me that was a little bit inflexible in the sense that in my head, the picture that I had already sort of drawn upon was that the first person to call me dad would be somebody that I was, that was my blood relation, that I'd, you know, met somebody, you know, or me and Kaz had had a baby and that would be the first person to call me dad. So that was my own, I guess, short sighted thinking in that sense and not really taking into consideration what it would mean for the girls either. So I guess going through that process and looking at it on paper, I'd already been there for other, for 10, 12 years at that time.
So it was just administrative really at that point. You know, it was just a title thing. But for me it was a sticking point at the time. And then as we got closer to having Will I come along and that it sort of just seemed to make more sense in that sense to have it easy and quick and clean across the board and say, look guys, if you want to, we'll go with it. Just be mindful of your father that he may take some things on board because, you know, you have to sort of be, I guess, a little bit vulnerable with your own mentality in that, am I doing this for me or am I doing this for them? Well, I was doing it for myself because I had this vision of how the future was going to turn out. And I was already, you know, two thirds of the way down, a vision, vision of reality that I hadn't anticipated anyway because I had lost my career.
So I was holding onto things for the sake of holding on to them. I wasn't really for any other reason.
[01:14:50] Speaker B: And that's my bag to do, you know, not yours. That's what I used to do.
So Matt didn't understand the impact of the kids coming to him at that point and saying, because we had said to the kids, look, when Willow's born and you're referring to Uncle Matt, can you call him dad, if Willow's in the space, just so that Willow doesn't get confused as to, you know, who's Uncle Matt kind of process.
And so they had taken it upon themselves to have the conversation say, well, can we just call him dad? Because for all intents and purposes, that's what he is.
And we had agreed to it at that point, but I don't think Matt had really understood the level in which it took for the kids. Kids to come to that conclusion. And I guess the compliment that it was to him for those kids to be able to say, you're our dad. Anyway. So it's a naming convention. Why can't we just do that? And like he said, he was more caught up on the fact that he wanted it to come from his own biological child first. So it's taken him, I guess, a few years to kind of really understand the impact of where that come from too.
[01:15:59] Speaker A: And there was a bit of a process around getting to have your own children. You guys went through ivf, you went through hell. Just give us a context.
Probably best to talk to the lady around these things.
Tell us what sort of hell you went through.
[01:16:14] Speaker B: Kaz, there's two different versions of this. There's my angel and his version.
[01:16:19] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I'm starting to again. I knew this would come out in the interview at some point, but I'd said to you a little while ago, reading the book, at times it was like, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. And what you just explained about the dad situation, that was one of these. It sounds like it's going to be one of these again, very much. Tell us about this hell of the process of trying to have your own children with Matt.
[01:16:40] Speaker B: There was no medical reason identified early in the piece as to that we wouldn't be able to have kids. And we had both said early on, when we kind of made our relationship public, that we were definitely going to have children. Children were on the horizon. So fast forward a few years and we decided we would start trying what again, what I don't take into consideration through these processes. I mentioned earlier that I'm like a bull in a china shop, right when I got my mindset on something. Get on board or get out of the way. So for me, it was very much right, we're going to start having children. Excellent. I will be pregnant. We will have a baby. Great. I didn't fall pregnant and we weren't having a baby. And all of a sudden that wasn't great. But it became my whole focus. So everything you know, you see these stupid movies and everything where women are timing it right. Come home, we've got sex right now. Okay, that happens in real life.
[01:17:34] Speaker C: It's like.
[01:17:34] Speaker B: But yeah, but it's Sunday.
[01:17:36] Speaker C: Aren't we going to church?
[01:17:40] Speaker A: You mean you didn't drop everything?
[01:17:41] Speaker C: What will Jesus say?
[01:17:46] Speaker B: So, no, we have to have sex right now.
And so that sort of became our world. And Matt's very much of the laid back approach. Babe, it'll happen. It's very fine. Just trust me on this. And I'm very much. No, I need to control it and I need to make it happen. And so therefore we have to do this my way.
[01:18:03] Speaker C: And I would hope, meanwhile, just to cut in there. We hadn't actually spent one night under the same roof for about two years between our two jobs.
[01:18:13] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[01:18:13] Speaker C: So we were literally passing in the doorway between army courses or Karen jet setting off to, to train in Hong Kong or Malaysia or wherever.
And so we had very limited time where we were actually doing, you know, the day, I guess the deed or you know, doing anything together at the same time was very, very limited. And so from my perspective in that.
[01:18:35] Speaker B: But that's detail.
[01:18:36] Speaker A: I'm just as a bloke, Matt, I'm trying to understand what's wrong with that.
[01:18:39] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it seems perfectly normal.
[01:18:43] Speaker B: Don't get caught up in the detail.
We weren't, we weren't pregnant, you know, that's all you needed to know.
[01:18:48] Speaker C: So it was like, no, if we just spend some time together, we're bound to get pregnant eventually.
[01:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And neither of our jobs were allowing that. If he wasn't away on a training exercise or a promotion exercise, as he said, I was, you know, overseas working, doing whatever, but I, that wasn't enough for me. That's, you know, he would justify it by saying that and I'm sure it made way more sense back then than I allowed it to make. But it still wasn't happening and I still wasn't pregnant. And therefore we needed to do, do more. So I embarked on this medical journey of going and knocking on doors of specialists and finding out and you know, even then that one of the GPS was going to give me medication that was entirely placebo effect just, just to try and shut me up and hey, go and have this white tablet. Oh, it's a miracle pill. Yes, it's an aspirin, but have it anyway, whatever.
So we tried for a while and you know, it just wasn't going to happen.
I had got myself in a headspace where it wasn't going to happen.
And so Iraq was starting to become a real thing. We had. We had got married, and he was going to deploy to a war zone. And for those that have never been the partner of a man who is, or a woman who is going to deploy, that brings with it a whole level of fear. He's going to war where people die. Now I get. People die every day. I understand it. But you don't go through life thinking that you're going to get hit by a bus. You go through life living.
And when your husband comes home and says, babe, I'm deploying to Iraq for eight months, and, you know, people are over there and they're dying and getting blown up and all the rest of it, I went into panic mode. And I didn't want my husband to deploy for any period to any frontline war zone without me having a baby from him. I wanted, as cold as it sounds, I wanted a legacy. I to. Wanted, wanted that to continue if I lost him.
So I said to him that he couldn't go unless we went down the IVF path because obviously nothing else was working.
And he agreed, I'm sure, reluctantly.
And so we did.
As I write in the book, he had to go and do the deed, and we froze his swimmers and he went to Iraq, and I went down the IVF path. And the first round, I. He had come home. So I'd gone through the removal of the eggs, and the. They blended then and created the embryos.
And then I had the first implant done while he was still in Afghan, in Iraq.
And IVF's a really bizarre process because they only tell you the good stories. It's, you know, it's all big, shiny toy, and you're going to have this baby. And by the way, you know, don't worry if it doesn't work, because you can just try again. You think, okay, cool, no problems. You don't realize that in that petri dish, you know, they don't tell you that that's your baby. That's. Yes, it's an embryo, and. But they're going to implant that into you, and instantly you're in love with that blob on the petri dish. And that's going to be put inside you, and then you're going to start rubbing your tummy. And so we did all of that, and I was taking video snippets as we went through every step, and I was sending them to him over in Iraq. Arc. And again, you don't realize that it was probably the most stupidest thing I could have done was go down the IVF path on my own whilst he was in a frontline war zone. But one of my negatives is that, you know, I'm focused and I'm going to get what I want. So I didn't, I didn't get what I wanted by any stretch. I went down the path. I had embryos implanted inside and then within 10 days I got a phone call to say that none were viable and I'd lost both embryos implanted. And that's devastating. That's. I'm kind of frozen in this world of I don't know where to turn, I don't know what to do. I don't have my husband here. I don't have. I can't breathe. It's suffocating, the devastation that comes with that. And I really, really feel for any family out there going through IVF right now because they don't tell you about the fall. So it was hard.
And then he came home from Iraq, truck and we had like a very short window of time before it turned again and he was re. Ramping up for Afghanistan. And we had one embryo left. No, we had two embryos left and we both said, you know, look, we'll, we'll do it while he's here before he goes. And so we both went down and we had the two embryos implanted and, and the phone call in that 10 day space was, you're viable, you were seeing levels, it's good.
So for me, I was elated. It's like, oh my God, we're going to have a baby. That's so exciting.
And eight weeks later we went for the first scan and there was no heartbeat. So at that point you just.
That hurts.
It's everything you want, you know, he's going back to a water.
I just wanted us to have a baby. I wanted his, his name and his legacy and something, the, the one thing that would be unique to him and I to create and it wasn't meant to be. And I couldn't, I couldn't understand what we had done that was so wrong. I couldn't understand why we were being punished when we would be amazing parents. You know, nobody has this shit squared away, right? But we would do everything we could could just like we were doing with the other two, to raise them right and know right from wrong and give them love unconditionally and everything we could. And it just wasn't going to happen. And I knew I wasn't going to stop him from going to Afghanistan.
So what do I do then? What. Where does that leave us in that space?
And to his credit, you know, you can't fix that at that point. You can't make it better for me. The best you can do is just be there. And he was, he was amazing. And he was there. And I just kept saying to him, I'm so sorry, because it was the one thing I promised him that I would give him. And it seemed to be the one thing that I was failing at over and over and over again was being able to produce a child for him. And I was letting him down. I was just.
And so I, you know, I didn't know how to. I didn't know how to live with the life loss and I didn't know how to live with the thought of not being able to give him that one thing that, you know, only I should be able to give him as his wife. And I just, I just kept saying to him, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, over and over again.
And he was amazing. He was really good. He just kept saying, babe, just breathe. It's okay. If this is what life is going to be, and if it's you and me and the two girls, then that's what it's going to be. And I'm good with. With that.
Unbeknownst to me that at the time, he was just laughing on the inside like, we're going to have kids. I don't know what you're worried about, but his process of things and my process of things is slightly different, I.
[01:26:02] Speaker A: Guess, being deployed as well. But do you really understand the magnitude of the situation and what Kaz was going through?
[01:26:08] Speaker C: Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. You don't really sort of have a.
[01:26:11] Speaker B: It's.
[01:26:12] Speaker C: Well, I guess if, if we did, then we'd probably be able to sell a million books because this is what women actually think about stuff.
[01:26:19] Speaker A: So point, you know.
[01:26:22] Speaker C: But yeah, no, like this, this. It's a multi tiered aspect there. Like, if, if we were looking at it in any other sort of thing from the business world or from whatever, you want to look at it like you've got a multifaceted problem to solve. And it's not just as simple as I need to be pregnant. It's. We're going down this process where we're going to try and hijack nature and make it happen regardless of the circumstances. And so we're going to throw what's already a fear fairly. If we break it down as well. Traumatic cycle of events for a woman. You know, even just their monthly cycle is quite draining in the sense that it takes a lot of resources to build up all this tissue and things like that. But when you go into it and you're starting to try and, you know, multiply cells and you're trying to feed all that, and you've got hormones and things like that at play, like, it's an incredibly taxing thing on. On anybody. But for somebody who desperately has their heart set on.
[01:27:13] Speaker B: I'm just thinking, sorry, I'm just gonna jump in. I'm reminding you of that. That three weeks into the next cycle, as you go, here we go again.
[01:27:19] Speaker C: Here we go again.
[01:27:22] Speaker B: I'm playing this podcast over and over and over again. Sorry. It's taxing and it's draining here. Sorry. Keep going.
[01:27:32] Speaker C: So, yeah, like, it's. You don't. We don't have anything that we can relate it to from the instance, from the aspect of the fact that we generally by and largest men don't get railroaded by our emotions in the same sense. There's obviously always outliers and caveats to that. But yeah, for the most part, there's something that's pretty powerful as far as its ability to be able to control the way you're in viewing your world. Because there's no. There's nothing you can say to Karen at the time that says that brings it back into perspective, because there is no perspective as far as she can see. That's okay. You know, there is no perspective there for that because everything's bad right now because it's not. Not happening. So, yeah, like, you're sort of making up that playbook as you go. But, you know, again, you know, lessons learned after making mistakes is that you start to go, okay, there's a way to deal about. Deal with these things, and there's a way not to. And so you've got to let those emotional sides sort of play out, because if they don't get played out, then they sit there and fester. So, you know, when it comes to this, we've got to address those issues. We've got to reinforce with, you know, listen, I'm not going anywhere. You're safe. We're safe. Safe. That's not a problem. If we have this ongoing issue where something's not occurring correctly, well, then we can start chipping away at what those little 1 percenters are that are stopping it from happening so that we can make it happen.
And our answer to that was that instead of staying in Armadale. When I went up to Townsville, I suggested to Kaz that just come along, just come up, new start, new town, just clean slate and take a year, reset, breathe.
[01:29:02] Speaker B: And you know, look, karma worked in an amazing way because I'm not a believer that karma is just to kick in the ass if you're being bad. Karma balances the good with the bad. And we transitioned up to Townsville, and through that journey up there, I fell pregnant and he got to have the last laugh going, I told you so.
[01:29:24] Speaker C: So the system works.
[01:29:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
And he told me.
[01:29:30] Speaker A: As you should, Matt. We don't get many times.
Absolutely. I am with you 100%, mate.
[01:29:37] Speaker B: He's leveraged it for 12 years. Trust me.
[01:29:41] Speaker A: The thing that stands out for me when I read the book and hearing the story again now is that there are just science can't replace human connection. Because really what happened, you went through this scientific process of generating a baby, fabricating a baby, and then you just. Just spent some time with each other and had some human connection. And the difference that makes to our bodies, I guess the difference it has to make to our bodies and our.
[01:30:08] Speaker B: Mindset and everything, it was that ability to let go. And Matt nailed it perfectly. It was his ability to reassure me that I was safe, that he wasn't going to leave if we weren't going to have this magical baby through whatever means.
And I guess in the core of it, I probably knew that, but needed that reassuring anyway. So it hurt and I was gutted, and I was devastated and my world was breaking, but he was that rock that let me just sit for a minute and go, I'm okay. I'm safe. I have him. We are together. I have us. And now we have this opportunity to go to Townsville and just have a year. And he might deploy, he might not deploy, but we'll be together, together until we know. And that reset, you know, that refocus that. All right, just breathe. We're just going to bench it for now when it's not necessarily over in its entirety of processing or whatever, but we're just benching it. That gave me space to breathe and just be us. And that's when, you know, we took the drive up to Townsville and it was Matt who went and bought the pregnancy test. I refused. So stop talking about it. Leave me alone. Stop raising it. It's a bug. It's a stuff stomach bug. You're being mean right now.
[01:31:29] Speaker A: That's 10 bucks you spent, mate.
[01:31:31] Speaker C: This is it. Yeah, yeah.
Doppler. Oh, yeah. The stomach so we could hear, hear the baby's heartbeat. Because of course, being a well adjusted female, like all females are well adjusted, Karen naturally thought that every time the baby didn't move, it was dead. So we needed to go to the hospital and check. So we bought a Doppler instead, instead. And we hear the heartbeat and we knew everything was cool. Karen could sleep well that night and it was all good.
[01:31:59] Speaker A: Well, I have to say from an outsider looking in, it's just to me that seems like a really natural thing to do. Trying to put myself in a position of understanding the ups and downs of the emotions. And when you guys are dealing with life and there's lots of people out there, we're all dealing with life. But when you throw the context of defense, family into that and the moving and the shaking and the live or die situation that you place in like, this is extreme stuff.
[01:32:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it adds another layer.
[01:32:28] Speaker A: Life is extreme for you.
[01:32:30] Speaker B: Definitely.
[01:32:31] Speaker A: No wonder you're broken.
[01:32:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think hopefully if you live a good enough life, maybe we all wind up a little bit broken by the end of it. But I think that's kind of the way it's supposed to be. I think if you live a life that doesn't shape you and you don't have a little shape on it, then you're probably not doing something right then.
[01:32:49] Speaker B: Because you're not living. Yeah, there's a difference between living and existing.
[01:32:53] Speaker C: And I guess for us, we don't even know how to be anything different to what we are. Like we just, just got to live. It sounds really cliche, but we just have never lived anything but our best life like, or tried to, you know.
[01:33:07] Speaker B: And being prepared to push even, even when it's not favorable. I think to a degree.
Sometimes people come into our life and the intensity in which we live at is too much and they will leave almost as quickly as they come into our world. And that's okay. That's a part of our journey. We, you know, we get to meet really unique and dynamic people as we transition through different facets. But you're right, everybody has their own journey and their own pathway to live. And as humans in today's world, let alone 10 years ago, it's hard enough. And then you add the extra element of defense on of top and yeah, it does add another layer of intensity to it.
[01:33:49] Speaker A: I want to just double down on that intensity because this is something that as a father I've never had to deal with and like, it just once again just pulls at my heartstrings. In the book, there's a story. So Willow came along in 2009, and Matt was redeployed. But before redeploying, you guys did some something, and it involves a sheepskin rug. Tell us a bit about that because I can't talk anymore about that. I'll lose it.
[01:34:19] Speaker C: Yeah, so I guess it's. It's probably, for lack of a better word, but there's a certain aspect of my personality that I guess is sort of a bit grand and almost romantic in the sense of, you know, I have all these ideas about how things should be done, you know, so for me, the idea of going to a war zone wasn't daunting because that's what things like my great grandfathers had done. You know, they were oftentimes, you know, they spent time with the Australian Imperial Forces, so they were deployed for years on end when they were overseas fighting the great wars and stuff. So it sort of. I felt I had this massive connection with them because I was, I guess, sacrificing on the same level that I was going to be away and I was going to be off war fighting and doing my job, job, and my baby was going to be born at home. So to me, it gave me all this almost this sort of feeling of connection with those had gone before me. And so it was very important that that all happened. But also it was very important, too, that I made sure that there was at least a keepsake there. So we bought a black sheepskin rug, and I just wrote a message to let Willow know that no matter what, you know, even though she. I'd not met her, that she was always loved and that, you know, she will be forever loved no matter what. And it was just important because I understand. I understood enough to understand that the relationship between a daughter and a father is very important in, I guess, the formational years of their life. You know, this is the man that they're going to judge all other men based on, you know, how he treats their mother is going to be one of those ways, you know, hence the reason why I'm. You know, it's been so important in the last couple of years to put good work into being the best husband that I can be. And so. So for me, I needed to at least convey that I didn't leave because she wasn't important enough, that I left because I loved her, but I wanted her to see that I loved her as well. And so, yeah, that was hugely important that she had that at least. And then I knew that she would Be as she was a baby and rolling around on the ground and things like that, that she would have that to lay on and that would be our connection until we got to meet.
[01:36:23] Speaker B: At whatever capacity that looked like, yeah, 100%.
[01:36:26] Speaker C: If it was not, then it was in the next.
[01:36:28] Speaker B: They don't talk about not coming home at all, and rightly so, but there just needed to be that one conversation that says, babe, there needs to be something here for her. And so he wrote on the back of the sheepskin rug in the pen, and we still have the sheepskin rug today, and she will forever have that. But we also got a, like, it's called a glow worm and you can record into it and it, you know, babies. It can go in cots with babies and that. And so we had bought one of them and he had recorded a message in it. And then the day he deployed, I took the shirt that he had slept in that last night and I kept it and that stayed in the cot with her. So in the cot she had the sheepskin rug that he had written on the shirt that smelt like him and the glowworm that spoke his voice, you know, three aspects from that. If he came home, then the smell wasn't too foreign and the voice wasn't foreign.
But if he didn't come home, then she had a smell and she had a voice and she had a message.
[01:37:36] Speaker A: Willow's 12 what's her comprehension of what her dad did for her?
[01:37:40] Speaker C: It's hard to say. I mean, I think a lot of times in life these things happen and we don't recognize them for what they were at the time. So I imagine for her, she's about the business of trying to learn how to human. So that's her level of understanding at the moment.
[01:37:53] Speaker B: She does get it a little bit more than that, though. So she took your medals and the book to school.
She understands it on a very literal sense. So she understands dad went to war, she was born while dad was away.
She understands and comprehends even Iraq, which was well before her time, and Afghanistan.
So she gets it at that logical sense. She doesn't understand the emotional impact of it as yet. And I don't think that will come until, you know, she's well into her 20s.
[01:38:24] Speaker C: It's probably not till she's ready to have children of her own, really, and understand what that feels like.
[01:38:29] Speaker B: And that's okay because, you know, she's a kid and we just want her to be a kid. So she understands everything that we're doing now. And you Know, for as much as we are much stronger together today, and we're. We're in a really good space. Space, he still has moments and times where the black hole is still there. So it was only two weeks ago where he was in a really bad space. So the kids are still living in that world, but they don't know any different.
He broke before they came into the world kind of thing, or, you know, when they were really, really little. So this is their world, too. This is what they've been raised in. So they know when he's in a bad space to give him space. They know when you know, he's dipping or mum's going into protect mode or they know the routine. They know the gig.
[01:39:19] Speaker A: Pretty clever kids, aren't they?
[01:39:20] Speaker B: They have to be. Yeah. And they have to be resilient and they have to be strong and we have to be smart to know when they're not and to let that be okay, too. Because, you know, even today, sometimes it's too much for them. So we've just got to learn when to wrap them up and when to let them stand and be okay.
[01:39:40] Speaker A: Because you mentioned, you mentioned probably 10 questions back now, but it's been in the back of my head. You talked about the door being closed for a long time.
[01:39:47] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:39:48] Speaker A: Why is that door open? And why is it so important to you guys that the door is open?
[01:39:52] Speaker B: Because it was such a flawed mistake on our behalf when we did it. So when we were going through the motions, and I talk about this a lot when I'm out speaking to people, and I keep referencing mental health as dirty words because society, you know, there's such a stigma with it. And there was 10 years ago, too. So when he had the accident and we were going through all this turmoil, we didn't want people to know. We didn't want, you know, our immediate circle knew because I had to have that network of friends working for us and all the rest of it. But it's not something that we didn't think to go out there from this mountaintop and scream, hey, we're in this world of pain right now, and here's why. And please, please help.
And I guess to a certain degree, too, there is ego, and we are very strong individuals and we don't break.
So, you know, when you are breaking in the thick of it. He wasn't ready to identify that he had broken on that level or to that degree.
So if I couldn't get him to own it, acknowledge it, or be okay with it, to try and Fast track, some sort of healing. I sure as hell wasn't going to go out and tell everybody else that's where he was because that would just make him angrier. And in that space. It was hard enough after he had the accident, he was having blackout seizures right now. We didn't even know at that point that he had brain trauma induced epilepsy. But he was having all these real moments where he would just disappear for 30 or 60 seconds. And the amount of fights we would have about me saying to him, you can't drive, please don't drive. And he would just be, be like, you're talking at your ass, you don't know what you're talking about. Be quiet, I can drive. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I couldn't, I wasn't strong enough. I couldn't get him to see what I was seeing. I didn't have the right help. I didn't know where to turn for help.
And at the same time you have this whole thing that, is it me? Am I wrong? Am I getting this wrong? Because we didn't know what we didn't know.
So when you're in the thick of all of that, the last thing you want to do is try and justify it to people who are going to judge you or you know, have bad opinions. If anybody was going to have bad opinions and you just, in that space, in that time, that's all I could think. I don't need any more pressure of people thinking wrong or misunderstanding where we are or what we're trying to achieve. And I write about it in the book. You know, if you looked at a sort of super superficial, and you said it before, he looks young and he looks fit and he looks able. So if you then turn around and go, well, actually that's not the case, people kind of, their first reaction is bullshit. So if you looked at us on the surface, we had a lovely house, we were driving nice cars, you know, but you scratched the surface and all of that was about to be gone. We were about to lose all of it. And on top of that, he was fundamentally dying is the best way I can describe it at that point. Because I was losing him. And I didn't know, know why. Now when I look back at that, the worst thing I could have done was hide behind it and not scream out for help. Because maybe I could have got him to accept it quicker, sooner and faster if I had have been stronger and pushed through harder and said, I don't give a rat's ass what anybody thinks of Us right now. I need help, and I just didn't. And I want people to learn from my mistake. Mistake. I want people to understand that they are right to ask for help, they're within their right and they're damn well worth it. Just push harder, ask for help, don't be afraid. Like, honestly, if I had have gone to somebody and said, make him stop driving, yeah, I would have felt the wrath of him. Absolutely I would have. But it might have forced him into a situation sooner to get help sooner, if that makes sense, or push harder to get the right, right help. I just know that we tried to keep everything contained within our own four walls so we weren't judged wrong. And I don't want people to make that mistake. And the more we get out there, the more we talk about it, the more we make it okay, the less people will judge.
So hence where we are today.
[01:44:08] Speaker A: It's almost like I'm relating mental health to culture in that organizations and culture, it's one of those things that's always there.
Sometimes it's good, most often it's not as great as what people would like it to be. But on the surface, things can look okay, but there's a fair bit of trauma happening in the background. Sometimes individuals are having more trauma than other in organizations and culture. And the thing that I find in working with leaders is that there's some there that know that and they're brave enough to do something about it and not just sort of pull the black wool over it. But then there's others that don't want to do anything about it, and they even know it's there and they're just happy to move. So culture and it may be a strange analogy, but culture and mental health, it's like, in my world, how do we get more leaders aware that actually your culture's not great, you're living in an ivory tower and we need to do some work. And actually you, you are the cause of this. From a mental health perspective, it's like culture's hard to deal with because it's hard to see and it's hard to feel. And how do you explain mental health seems to be in that bucket? Like, how do we get inside your brain and we can put all these things on our heads and whatever. How do we. Again, in that version of opening the door and the door is open, how do we move this forward? How do you guys move it forward? And particularly, again, I know the book is on way of moving forward, but where are we now with defence, families and Mental health within the defence family situation. Where are you guys taking this to make it a common conversation?
[01:45:46] Speaker B: We've found a lot, we've learned a lot in the last three months and this is again, this is something that we're not doing well as a nation.
So in the last three months since we've released the book, we've found all of this amazing stuff that's out there for defence families. Families, right, but it's siloed and it's fractured. So Open Arms is doing something, Soldier on is doing something, RSL is doing something and you know there's three and a half thousand somethings out there, someone's doing something and whether or not they started with good intent and now it's just a money spinning exercise, who knows? There's a, I guess a fair wack of them as well.
But we didn't know prior to writing the book and five and a half thousand families aren't going to write a book. So for us it was really daunting or for me personally, I'll let you speak for yourself, but for me it was really daunting over the last three months going oh my God. I had no idea that there was all this help out there because it had not trickled down to my level. And so for me now it's really important to start going out there and being a voice and not aligning with anyone in particular but just saying, hey, did you, you know that these services kind of exist on the central coast now for us personally we're working in the space of rsl, Overwatch Legacy and Naval Association, Partners of Veterans Association, Vietnam Veterans association and I'm sorry if I've missed anyone else but yeah. So we're bringing this group together to say you all have your place and you are all important but we need to make it easier for the defence families to find you. And it is not just support that needs to happen, it's services as well.
So defence families need to understand about financial budgeting or you know, paying rent. Now if you're not in a defence house or buying your own house because you're out now and you're settling in a place, they need to know about accountants and you know, if they've moved to the central coast and this is, they've just left and they've now moved here as a forever after place, what services are out there in a business world.
So what we're looking to do now is bring them all together and say okay, we want to build a real simple, easy to use website that is just that here is all the, they call them ASOs, so another acronym, but it's Ex service organizations. Here are all the ASOs on the Central coast and what they do. And here are a whole lot of businesses, whether it's accounting, legal, whatever, financial babysitting, mental, physical health.
And they are all prepared to offer something unique for a defence family to say thank you for your service. Freedom isn't free. And we're not saying that it's always going to be a financial discount or anything like that. It could just be that a financial institution is going to fast track an application of debt conciliation or whatever.
So for us our kind of next phase is really about trying to be a voice to say reach out to further whatever geographical area you happen to reside in. Push harder, know that it's okay to ask because you do deserve better. And then to the power brokers, to the people in these positions that can make these kind of decisions, please, please stop forgetting where you came from. Leadership in this country, irrelevant of the organization needs to take a long hard look at themselves and understand and remember where they started. Because all too often you get people that finally make it their career driven, their career focused, they're politically focused, whatever the case may be, and they get to a particular pinnacle and it just becomes all about the career or the next political win. It stops being about remembering where they came from. So if I could do one thing, it would be to remind leadership in this country to remember where they came from.
[01:49:48] Speaker A: If we go back to the crux of the story, the main fight getting to this point is actually the army acknowledging that you weren't well, you were broken because it was harder to see it was here somewhere as opposed to a physical issue. How confident or not are you guys in that? Actually there's some acknowledgement, but at what level is there real fundamental change that could happen, happen from the situation that you guys have gone through? Because that's where the problem's got to be solved, doesn't it? All these other things are really, really important and dealing with. But where's your confidence level with that?
[01:50:28] Speaker C: So we've been to a couple of different things run for the RSLs and one of them was an advocates conference. And some of the information that was coming out there as far as what the Department of Veterans affairs and what the army or Defence Force itself is looking at is this, this approach whereby we start looking at the family unit not just as the individual, as the member serving member. And I think that will go a long way, if they keep down that track, I think that's going to go down a long way because it gives a couple of things.
It lets the families feel part of this great big family that every person who's put on the uniform feels they have that level of ownership and belief belonging for the defense members themselves. These are the guys that are going to support us. These are the guys that make everything right for us or make it so that we can do our job.
So for me it's super important that that's the focus going forward is we have this holistic approach to not only health, being that, you know, we have physical health, we have mental health, we have emotional health health, we have psychological health, we have a bunch of different aspects there that are equally as important to keep the whole organ organism running and to make sure that we maintain the height, highest level of capability. Because that's, that's the part that we don't remember clearly here is that we need to provide a capability.
And I think most people in business are looking at what capability they can provide or if you, if you're a senior management person, you're looking at what capability you can draw on. And the family is the support network for this capability.
So they're saying a lot of great things at the moment. They're having a lot more open days and things like that on larger bases.
I know the RSL really is driving forward and open to listening to us about the family unit and how we support them so that they can support the member. So I think there's a lot of inroads there that are being made as far as mental health. I think we're starting to become more aware and we're starting to understand the effects of that and what it has over a long period of time. We're also starting to understand too there's certain neurological aspects about our job there that affect us on a psychological area as well is that sub concussive blood flows, which we get consistently from just training also has a long term neurological effect as far as what it does to your brain. And so then has this other side effect is that then it throws into the mix a chemical imbalance somewhere down the, down the path. So then we find that we've got a lot of issues with the same sort of problem. Depression, anxiety, adjustment disorder, substance abuse. You know, in some cases too we've got spousal abuse, it falls into line there. Plus you know, addiction, behavior and things like that. There is a hell of a lot of that. And that's concerning in Itself because it's always seen to be acceptable behavior, which is definitely, you know, for my mind it's not. But you know, I think defense is making some inroads. I think they've got a long way to go yet. I think we're probably at least another 10 years before we start seeing what this will all look like. And hopefully in that time we have a fairly quiet period on the geopolitical front. So therefore we can actually take the time to, to grow our capability and grow our support network for that capability.
So I'm positive as far as that goes. And that's probably the. Another big point as far as our story goes, is that neither of us are anti defense force. If all my kids came to me and said they want to serve tomorrow, the only answer I would give them is make sure you join the army first so that when you join a sensible thing like the Air Force, I don't have to denigrate you for being a legal Aussie Raffy. You know, like that's, that's the big one is that you gotta, you gotta get your topic and then you can go wherever where they treat you sensibly. So.
[01:54:10] Speaker A: Well, Ailey did join the defense force, didn't she?
[01:54:12] Speaker C: Yeah, Ailey attempted and that, you know, for what, whatever reason or whatever way, it didn't go the way she's not anticipated, she's not in now and yeah, so that, that winds up being the way it is.
[01:54:23] Speaker B: There is a lot of, a lot of really good things happening across, across DVA and Defence at the moment and they're starting to get it.
But same said, you know, if you have a look at what happened with the Royal Commission, right, so the Royal Commission took two and a half years to approve, Just to approve, to say, yes, we will do it. Now that the Royal Commission has been approved, terms of reference have to come into play. So they close that down. It'll be another six months before the committee's formed and whatever investigation starts to undertake honestly. And anyone who tells you different, I would challenge you're looking at at least five years before you see the benefits or we reap any rewards from the Royal Commission.
So what happens between now and that five year timeline? We can't just stop, we can't just sit back and go, hooray, we've got a Royal Commission. Let's wait and see if they figure out why all these defense personnel are suiciding. No, let's not stop. Let's celebrate the fact that the Royal Commission is going to be undertaken and That's.
And in the interim, let's keep remembering that we need a viable defence force. We need a strong defence force, and that can't just mean $167 billion to build up the personnel. We need to make sure that we're caring for the personnel as we build them up. Are we enlisting them correctly? Are we making sure that the right support mechanisms are in place for their families if they're going to deploy? Honestly, if I had somebody that I could have called while I was pregnant with Willow and he was in a war zone, that would have done so much for me. And it's simple little things like that that they could put changes in right now to benefit families as a united front. But are they? I don't know.
[01:56:14] Speaker A: Well, let's take a step of that in the future, because only last week, I think, June 8, you were involved in a symposium and bringing all sorts of hopefully wonderful people together to make positive change. Tell us a bit about that and the outcomes. And then there's some more stuff happening further in this year, in November, I think.
[01:56:31] Speaker B: Yeah, there is, absolutely.
So they are wonderful people because they all agreed to move forward and they.
[01:56:38] Speaker C: All agree with Karen.
[01:56:39] Speaker B: So that's very important.
See? Get on board or get out of my way.
[01:56:44] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:56:46] Speaker B: All right, so they're RSL sub Branch Gosford, the president there, Greg Mawson was a gentleman that we met some time ago here on the Central coast, and we hadn't had a really good experience historically with the rsl, so we weren't members. That's not what this was about. We met him and we had mentioned that we were going to write the book and bring it to life. So when it came to life, we then touched base with Greg again and said, would you read it? Would you review it? Would you support it? Fast track. Three months, and Greg has asked us to guest speak at a number of different venues, which we've gone and done, and we've started to really get more involved in this space of the esos and understanding what they do and meeting different people, different generations.
Been really empowering to us in that regard.
And as I kind of sat back and started looking at, all right, well, what do we do now? I started getting tired, I think is probably the best way to describe it, of trying to keep track of what everybody did. And it got really noisy and I don't know for anybody else, but for me, when stuff gets too noisy, it gets frustrating and I get angry and it's like, oh, my God, smoke it. Stop.
So I wanted the noise to stop. I wanted to be able to see clearly what was happening. And I come from a business analytical and conceptual design process. So for me, seeing is being able to go somewhere and look at it and review it and understand it. When I started going to all these websites, they were just word salad. None of it made sense, it was just. And I was bored after the first paragraph, so I was not learning about what was, was going on.
So I put a proposal together that said, how do we simplify this? How do we make it clean and easy? I come up with a solution of a website that would Showcase all the ASOs and services. But it couldn't just be my opinion whilst I think I'm right all the time. Thank you very much, Matthew.
It couldn't just be my opinion. So the proposal to Greg was simply, I would like to bring all the ASOs together and in a meeting, showcase and deliver and present my design and to, if it's approved, to have it work means we need to then bring together the three groups, so the families, the services and the support esos, businesses and people bring them together in a forum where they all get to have a voice. So it's not a conference, because if you go to a conference you're there to be taught, talked to, whereas in a symposium I wanted everybody to feel like they had a place. So the proposal on the 8th last week that we did, we brought all of the ESOs together that were willing to come and listen and there is a handful of veterans that work with me in this space. We're all volunteers. There is no money in this. We're all just doing it for love.
So between Matt and the other veterans, I got them all involved and said, am I talking out my backside here? Is this a waste of time or do you see the benefit? And they all absolutely agreed with the benefit. So we went on Tuesday to present to and we had Lucy Wicks and a bunch of the ASOs, the president of New South Wales RSL and a few other people in the room and the veterans. I presented how I saw it, why I saw it, what I saw it. And then I also got the veterans to stand up and speak their truth as well. So what their, you know, a highlight on what their journey was and why they would have been able to benefit from something like this. And then at the end I just said it was really important to understand that what I was proposing was not trying to just say this is the only way that this can work. It was about saying this is one of the ways this can work.
And so if for a 60 year Vietnam veteran, he's not web savvy and he likes going down to the club and having a beer and talking to his mates and going to a meeting, that's, that's great. More power to you. Continue.
For a 30 something year old veteran who is very tech savvy and is constantly on the Internet, build a website and show him what's available and he can pick and choose what he or she wants to be involved in. We can showcase defense family days where they can network with other like minded people or people who have been through similar experiences.
So we did that, we went into the presentation, it was a unanimous yes. We've now gone into business propositions so we're getting all the quotes and everything worked out for the website and then on the 25th of November we will showcase the symposium. So we will have defence families, any businesses that want to be involved and the ESOs here on the Central coast all come together for a day where we will collect information. What, you know, if the website was there, what makes it helpful? What services would you look for? What are you looking for from your esos and esos? What are you delivering in this space? There's a lot of hearsay and speculation about what they do or don't do. So this is a day for facts. This is, you know, tell us your story. What would have, could have, should have made it better. So once we get all that information on the 25th, 25th of November, then we will make sure that the website is built appropriately for the Central coast for defence families.
[02:02:14] Speaker A: Exciting stuff. What does that look like in say 12 months do you think, think after November, what do you hope for it to look like?
[02:02:22] Speaker B: I hope it evolves to probably a space that allows defence families to also start networking and working together. I think there is very much a them and us mentality. So there's defence families and then there's civilian world. Right.
And we need that to become more cohesive. We need defence families to assimilate back into civilian world to better. But at the same time to do that, the civilian world needs to understand the people that are trying to assimilate back in and to try and understand maybe a bit of that journey as well and to also respect the fact that freedom isn't free. So anyone that's put on the uniform has done so to protect this country's freedom. Irrelevant of position or deployment or not, just putting on the uniform has written that check. So if a business on the central coast has the ability to step up and say, I want to be a part of that and I want to say thank you, then that's empowering for a defense family. Right. That's telling them that they are seen, that they're heard and that they're appreciated. And I think that's massive. So I think that builds that cohesiveness, that builds that ability to soften the transition back into civilian life. It's a big thing to go from. From army to no army or Navy to no Army, Navy or whatever. So I think that's my hope that we build something that even in 12 months, time has evolved. Where there's a lot of businesses offering a unique service, there's defence families using it to prove that clean, simple and easy to use is powerful. And the esos are proving that they're willing to work together for the greater good. And the greater good is defence families and healing and transitioning into civilian world. Well and supported.
[02:04:16] Speaker A: So it sounds to me that progress now and from last week and moving forward that somehow you've maybe been able to take ego out of the room to some extent in getting people actually talking.
[02:04:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[02:04:29] Speaker C: Wow.
[02:04:29] Speaker A: That is something you need to bottle.
[02:04:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just, you know, it's the Karen way.
[02:04:35] Speaker A: Is the Karen way or the highway.
[02:04:37] Speaker C: I mean, it's been.
It's not far from the truth.
[02:04:42] Speaker A: I think they're all just shit scared of you.
[02:04:45] Speaker B: There's that probability.
[02:04:47] Speaker A: In all seriousness, I mean, it takes exceptional people like you guys to do shit like this. You know, there's lots of people that talk in this world. There's lots of people that gunner and wanna and all that sort of stuff, but you guys are doing shit. You're making a difference. Exceptional.
[02:05:04] Speaker C: Thank you. Because, I mean, I guess our. Our ethos in life is. I mean, well, Karen's big one is the family. One of hope. Help one person every day. And the way we keep going back to the.
[02:05:16] Speaker A: We will take a picture of that tattoo after this.
[02:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, sorry.
[02:05:19] Speaker A: For those that'll be on the socials.
[02:05:22] Speaker B: It'S actually inked permanently into my skin forever.
[02:05:25] Speaker C: That's how much she believes about.
[02:05:26] Speaker B: That's right. That's commitment.
[02:05:28] Speaker C: You're right.
[02:05:28] Speaker B: Commitment to the.
[02:05:29] Speaker C: So, I mean, this is, I guess our ethos towards parenting is that. And it sounds like an abstract concept to say that this is our ethos towards parenting, but it's also our ethos towards how we want to shape our world going forward is where we're the custodians of life, the world, the Planet, whatever for our kids. And so there's always this underlying mentality there of I want to build the world that I want my kids to want, want to live in because the world I was born into wasn't one that I wanted to live in right from a young age. And you know, same with Kaz, much the way it was. You know, there's a lot of things in society and life that we, we certainly don't think is being done the best way it's possible. But we have to start somewhere. So, you know, like, like all humans, you know, if you stick to your strengths, you're likely to have a higher rate of success.
So one thing we do know is that families have been through a bit. Families that need to re enter society for lack of a better term, and then understand where their place in the world is from that perspective there, you know, we're trying to every day make something better, you know, and we're always, every learning moment with the kids is always, if everybody just worries about what their portion of the mess is, then the mess never gets cleaned up because somebody's always not doing their share.
So we always figure if we try and make everybody, everything better one day at a time, than it's going to get across there.
[02:06:54] Speaker B: And don't get me wrong, please don't get me wrong. We screw up, by Christ, we screw up and we still get shit wrong. We just do. I think if there was a book written for how to get parenting perfect, you'd never get to the end of it. I just don't think there is an easy solution on that by any stretch. And so we don't get it right all the time as far as parenting goes. We do, we don't get humaning right all the time. And sometimes both him and I can be assholes. We just can be. I think that's human nature, but we do try. And that is probably what will separate us from a lot of other people in that we are relentless in our need to want to leave this place better than how we found it. So we take that across all levels. Now sometimes we probably take that, that we, that's the royal we. I probably take that to an extreme. Matt very much is my, hey buddy, come back a bit, you know, step back a bit, calm down, relax, it's okay.
[02:07:56] Speaker C: Kaz would honestly give you the last dollar out of a wallet even if we had no food in the fridge, because that's just cash. She wants to help other people and of course, you know, falls into the trap of, well, My family, they're fine because they're my family. They're real strong. They're. They're capable people. That's not a problem. This poor person over here is struggling, but we've got to find that balance. And so we do that.
[02:08:17] Speaker B: He helps do that for each other. He helps me find that balance.
[02:08:20] Speaker C: That's really the admirable. One of Kaz's many admirable qualities is just that unrelenting.
Want to help people. Like, you know.
[02:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, but I'd also go to the extreme if you weren't there to balance me too. So we are the yin and yang in that regard. Like, I know exactly who I am. It doesn't stop me. I know who I am. I'm just very grateful that he is in a headspace where he can say, say, kaz, slow down or, you know, maybe put the dollar back in your wallet because we need to buy food this week or whatever the situation is. But, yeah, I think we balance each other out in that regard. And, you know, Matt sits really quietly as we talk about the symposium and we talk about all the work.
Yes, I've done the legwork in that regard. But we also have three kids at home and a house to keep maintaining and all the things that come with that. You know, we homeschool two of our three children and none of that happens by fairies out of the cupboards at 9am it all falls on Matt to keep everything going. And he keeps me going too. So he allows the space for me to be this focused and driven and all the rest of it because he is the one that's monitoring it all and making sure that we're all checking the right boxes and keeping us as a family balanced and on the times that he can't. I've learned enough now to understand his spiraling out or falling into the black hole. And that' when I step back and go, no, no, right, we're focusing over this way now and we just pivot in that regard and we get shit done.
[02:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Obviously, it's very obvious that you guys are a fantastic support network for each other. And the family unit, that unit that you guys have built, and then the extended unit and the, you know, the green army unit, there's all that you're building support networks, which is obviously really, really important for all of us in our lives. There's one person I haven't mentioned today yet, and I think it'd be very remiss if I didn't. And I'm not sure where he sits in this yin and yang scenario. But the name Peter Goom, what does he mean to you guys?
[02:10:27] Speaker C: He's pretty big.
[02:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah, he's massive.
[02:10:29] Speaker A: Just to put some context around it, that was a guy that was sort of your support network in the army when you guys were just fighting the army. And that's a big beast to fight.
[02:10:41] Speaker B: Yep.
[02:10:41] Speaker A: So tell us what this guy means to you guys.
[02:10:44] Speaker B: Ah, life. Life support. I think there's no better way to surmise that. And again, when Matt first had the accident, we spent seven months trying to convince the army that Matt was broken, that there was something wrong and we didn't even know what that was. We had no concept.
So that made the whole depression component so much worse than it put probably was ever going to be had. They have done it right from day one. They didn't. And he would come home just broken. Like, they don't believe me now. If it was a broken arm or a broken leg or something, if it was tangible, if they could see the break, it would have been so much better. But it was the brain. And you said it at the start and I've said it again, he looked physically able, healthy, competent, and there was no trigger point. I couldn't say, do this and he'll have a seizure, you know, and we didn't know it was a seizure, so I couldn't say, do this and he'll stop talking to you for 30 seconds. Or, you know, he. He would go onto the barracks and he would suppress all of his anger and everything like that. So what was coming home was 10 times bigger because he had to try and hide and hold all this in because he couldn't go to his warrant officer or his RSM or whatever they were at the time and go, you dumb bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. I'm broken. Fix me. So he used to have to go there almost with his hat in his hand and say, please help. And they would say no. So seven months of this continuous, you know, rejection, rejection, rejection. I cracked it and I wrote a ministerial and it wasn't until I wrote a ministerial that people started. So for those that don't know, a ministerial is writing a letter to the government to say, do something before I go public. And then all of a sudden all these bells and whistles started opening and the Australian Defence Force sent Pete Goom to us as a caseworker. So he came from Canberra. We'd never met him, we had nothing to do with him. He rang me one day and said, hey, I'm Warrant Officer Pete Goom, I've been assigned to your case. I'd love to come up and meet with you and Matt. Great. Please come.
[02:12:56] Speaker C: Which seems for starters, seems like a really odd thing to begin with given the fact that he was a Warrant Officer Class 1, which is an RF RSM level, the most senior of senior soldiers at that level. So your non commissioned officers, like this is the pinnacle for that. So these guys are capable, they're subject matter experts, they're normally hard hitting.
Ideally they'll be very hard charging people. And so for him to turn around and say, hey, you know what, Cass, you're doing a bit tough, I'd like to come meet the whole family and just find out what the skinny is on this whole thing so then we can start working through this. That's, that's massive for some somebody of that level to have put his focus onto that and to take, take this cause on. So that's, that says a lot just in the fact that he was addressing us as people.
[02:13:38] Speaker B: Yeah, he probably didn't have to get in his car and drive to Armida from Canberra and meet us. He could have just done it all remote.
[02:13:44] Speaker A: But it gave you some confidence that hey, Defence Force was taking this seriously or the government was taking it seriously.
[02:13:50] Speaker B: We finally felt like, well, I finally felt like I had an ear, there might be some hope now. And he came to meet us and he was there, I think for two days. He'd stayed in town overnight and on the, the second day before he was going back to Canberra, he gave me his mobile phone number and, and I, I'm not sure if he today, like we still talk to Pete today, but it's probably the one thing he regrets because.
And probably not, but he gave me his mobile phone number and he, he said, you ring me anytime.
Well, he was the only lifeline I had and so I took him at his word and I took it literally. And so on the days that I was just, you know, you asked me before, did I ever think about leaving? So on the days where it felt like I was staring down the barrel of no choice but to leave, I would ring him and I would just sit. I remember one day I was sitting in the car park of the street shopping center and I was literally hyperventilating. I was just. So at the end I just didn't know where to turn and I was screaming down the phone to him, why, why does it have to be like this? Why are they doing this to us? Why can't they See the pain they're inflicting on us? Why are they not moving mountains to help us? I don't understand it. And literally screaming it like I must have looked like a right to what? Sitting in my car screaming down the phone.
Now he couldn't fix it, he couldn't resolve it, he couldn't wave a magic wand, but he could listen and he could empathize with me and he could get to the end of my ranting and he could just say, I've got you, Kaz. And that's the best he could do. But it was enough for me to breathe. It was enough to know that somebody I wasn't going insane. I wasn't mad, I wasn't losing my shit. This was really hurting. This was genuine. I was losing my best friend and I didn't know if he was going to kill himself tomorrow or not. And it was an everyday, relentless.
Is he still with us? Okay, good. Today's another day that we've got through and the only person I had that could on any way, shape or form grasp that was Pete Goom. And so I rang him sometimes two or three times a day and I'm sure he had probably 30 or 40 other families that he was case managing and all the rest of it, but he never once didn't pick up that phone and answer me. So to this day he was a large portion of what kept me in the thick of it to work with Matt to try and save us. And we will be forever grateful to him for that.
[02:16:30] Speaker A: It sounds like we need to spend some of those billions rather than on some of these submarines that are going to be delivered in 30 years that we need to do some cloning of Pete Coombs.
[02:16:39] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yep. Well and truly. And you know, that's one guy that could go to the top and never forget where he came from in all honesty. And I don't know if he wants the top, I can't speak for him but you know, so many that are. There could take a leaf out of his book and learn a lot.
[02:16:56] Speaker A: How do we get hold of this.
[02:16:57] Speaker B: Book from our website kazpage.com it's also up on Amazon and will soon be released on all Audible as well. So from the website caspage.com, you can get hard copy or ebooks for either Mac or what's the other one?
[02:17:16] Speaker C: Android.
[02:17:17] Speaker B: Thank you, Android. That other technical speak. And you can also go to I believe Amazon to get it as well and we will have it released to Audible soon.
[02:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's Just briefly talk about that. So my good friend, your good friend Mark Sherrett who's sitting behind this curtain, he's made all this stuff.
So he's been working on the audio book for a while with you guys. So what's the release date? Has he given you anything? Should we put him under some pressure?
[02:17:45] Speaker B: It's next week, isn't it Mark?
It depends. How soon do I want it released? It might not be for another three months now after this.
[02:17:55] Speaker A: So the great thing is you guys have put a lot of work and self narrated too. Both the parts you've written. Kaz, you've narrated. Matt, the bits that you've added too as well in your corresponding views you've narrated as well. So it's from the heart, it's what you guys sort of felt at the time.
So yeah, hopefully we hear that soon. It's going to sound fantastic. I know Mark's putting a huge amount of effort into it.
[02:18:17] Speaker C: He is. He's probably ready to pierce his eardrums with how many times he's heard our voices, to be honest.
[02:18:21] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Guys, do you have any just parting advice again, this whole context today around mental health and link back to Matt's injury and defense and you the lack of support and really how you guys have turned anger which you talked about at the start into something really good, really powerful and moving forward in a direction that actually there's some light at the end of the tunnel. What advice do you want to share with? Probably let's say defence families, people out there that hopefully get a chance to hear this and know that help is there but hopefully even more help is just around the corner.
[02:18:58] Speaker B: Start with you for me, look I'd probably like to go a bit broader than that and just go not just defense families but anyone who is supporting a sufferer of mental health. I'd really like my message to go to you know your worth. Know that if that sufferer is not seeing you for your worth and not prepared to work as hard as you in the space of making it okay and manageable that it's okay to walk. Because there's a lot of partners out there right now that won't walk out of guilt and you need to know your own worth.
So please, please look at your reflection in the mirror and understand you as a person and want better for you. If you are supporting and you're staying because your partner is meeting you on that equilibrium then both of you need to understand your worth combined and push harder for the help you so rightly deserve and it doesn't matter what organization you come from, defense farming, corporate dental, I don't care. As human beings in society, mental health is going to affect many and we need to be okay with that and we need to be prepared to do more to help in that space. So for me the big one really is, is firstly know your worth and be prepared to own it and stand up for it. And secondly, you know my mantra is hope, help one person every day. It doesn't have to be big. It can be opening a door for someone or smiling at someone just because you just don't know what somebody's going through. So you know, a kind gesture can go a really long way.
[02:20:41] Speaker A: Thanks Caz. Matt, what would your be your parting words?
[02:20:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess my parting words are that the stigma is created because of people not wanting to feel different and feel weak. But the real act of strength is having the ability to go and self reflect and say hey, I'm not doing my best work or I'm not doing my best humaning. And that takes the real courage to be able to turn around to the person you love the most or that you're supposed to be most, you know, vulnerable to and be able to say hey, I'm, I'm struggling because without that level of conviction or truth to yourself then you're not going to be able to get onto that path again.
So I guess it's be totally non egotistical when it comes to your foibles.
[02:21:27] Speaker A: Guys, I have to say that as I've said a couple of times in this year I've read the book and I actually haven't known you guys for that long. As far as Lifetime goes, maybe a couple of months and Kaz and I ran into each other when you were doing something some of the audio process.
But the vulnerability that you guys have shown through the book, if I hadn't met you before that and I just read the book, I think, wow, I know these people, you can connect with these people and it's just to me such a valuable, not only the words in the story but just a fine, fine example of true leadership. It's about being vulnerable, it's about sort of opening that door. And Matt, you touched on it. Just sharing what you've got, not being afraid to share. That's the stuff that builds trust and that's stuff that brings people together and makes a difference in whatever we're trying to make a difference in. So I cannot express enough how much it means to me that we've been able to spend some time together today. You guys are exceptional, exceptional human beings. Thank you very much for coming on our program and sharing your story with us.
[02:22:36] Speaker B: Hey, look, you know what? Thank you for having us. Because without you guys and people like you helping us in this space get the message word out. It's just that it's just a word. So please, for what it's worth, don't underestimate your power in this as well, because you allow us a platform to stop mental health being dirty words. And for that, we appreciate you.
[02:22:59] Speaker A: Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure.
[02:23:01] Speaker B: Thanks, guys.
[02:23:01] Speaker C: Thanks.
[02:23:12] Speaker A: What a powerful and emotional conversation. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll see the tattoo Kaz wears proudly on her forearm. It's a symbol and an acronym of Hope Help one person every day. It also includes the words, stay humble, Stay hopeful. It isn't just a tattoo. It's what Kaz and Matt stand for. It shines through in the interview through the vulnerability of the their story in the book My Broken Soldier, as well as all the work in bringing the many organizations together to focus on the collective goal of providing better support networks for veterans and their families. Kaz and Matt Page are exceptional human beings. I'm honored and privileged to know them and call them friends.
These were my three key takeaways from my conversation with Kaz and Matt. My first key takeaway. Leaders have a relentless drive for improvement. They want to always perform at their highest level as well as knowing there's always room for improvement. Matt and Kaz are doing everything they can to leave this world better than they found it. Our aim is for all leaders to have a relentless drive for improvement. This will make every workplace a much better place. My second key takeaway.
Leaders face challenges head on. As you heard in the interview, Kaz and Matt have certainly had their fair share of challenges. They've never taken the easy road and walked away. I can't begin to understand the life and death struggles they've both faced. What I do know is if I faced a challenge, I want both these guys in my corner supporting me through my third key takeaway. Investing time into people builds quality human connections. There's not a truer example of this than Kaz and Matt's IVF journey. What an emotional roller coaster that ended in heartache. Science just can't fix everything. When they invested quality time in each other, they connected on a human level. Together, they produced three beautiful daughters, Willow, Scarlet, and Adelaide. And it was happened naturally. So, in summary, my three key takeaways were. Leaders have a relentless drive for improvement. Leaders face challenges head on, and investing time in people builds quality human connections. If you want to talk culture, leadership or teamwork, or have any questions or feedback about the episode, you can leave me a comment on the socials or leave me a voice message at the culture cultureofthings.com thanks for joining me. And remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.
Thank you for listening to the Culture of Things podcast with Brendan Rogers. Please visit brendanrogers.com to access the show notes. If you love the Culture of Things podcast, please subscribe, rate and give a review on Apple Podcasts. And remember, a health, healthy culture is your competitive advantage.
