Tears of Hope, with David Wenham

They serve our country, or are the loved ones left behind.

When can a kid just live like a kid, instead of going, OK, how's Dad going to be today?

For all those lost on today's battlefields, many times more die at their own hand.

Losing a child under any circumstances is absolutely world shattering.Suicide takes it to a whole new level of shattering.

You're about to meet some brave, remarkable Australians, dealing with the deaths of others, or their own demons.

Mum was reading a card and all of a sudden Dad said she went white.

I was a soldier and I served my country and then I was nothing.

I felt when I got back that I had no help and I was just abandoned.

It just uplifts my soul to know that I'm going out on the water. I always feel safe out there, nobody can get to me, I feel peaceful.

Their strangers turned soulmates in a new journey, one of hope and healing. The making of a unique sculpture, representing blood, sweat and tears, shed in anguish.

01:25 TEARS OF HOPE

01:42 GEORGE FREDERIKSON, VETERAN

A lot more guys come home with mental scars than physical ones, and a lot more guys come home than don't, and I think that it's very easy to focus on the people who didn't make it back.

It's very easy to focus on the people who have the physical disabilities.

It's pretty close to my heart because I understand the struggle of it.

There's something powerful about being a part of that, you know, like we're able to come and see where they quarry them out.

It was sheer chance, but when Army veteran George Fredrickson was assigned to haul some massive marble slabs, it had become part of his life story and journey.

Then to load it on the truck and to take it down there for Alex to create something, and so much of it, like it's going to be six blocks, it's going to be 80 odd tonne of marble in the paddock, you know.

There's something so fitting, so very Australian, that a timeless work of art has its origins here in the red, raw soil of our ancient land.

The blocks will wind their way 2,500 kilometres to Sydney to be cut and shaped into 18 marble droplets.

The sculpture commissioned by a group of veterans and families and the Australian War Memorial.

It's really nice to have stumbled across it. Sometimes life just gives you what you need. Those blocks are always bigger than you remember them.

Waiting for George is renowned sculptor Alex Seton.

Hey, Josh. Hey, Alex.

Thanks so much. Haven't seen you for ages. No, it's pretty good. 36 tonne there.

Must be weighted. Yeah, it's a light load. Little load, yeah.

From just these three? Just these three, yeah. Sort of right on the edge of your overhead crane. If you're willing to do that, that's fine.We can obviously move that block. No, we'll get these backs off and we'll work it out. Easy as.

That one's really beautiful. That one's got dark red lines that I really want.

Then when he says, I don't want your pure white ones because I want the ones that have some character and I want them to have some soul about them, some different colours and I want them to be unique.

I mean, I'm looking at this first block here and I'm thinking, oh, without that red line, this block would be completely useless to me because otherwise it doesn't have any of the character that I was looking for. But thankfully, Sue got just enough. These are all your blocks? Yep.

And they're like, oh, but they're our factory seconds type thing. He's like, they're the ones. Take me to them.Let's grab them.

I really need one of these cranes in my studio.

So good.

Oh, so it's exactly right. These are the veins that I'm looking for that I was choosing when I was back up at the quarry. That blood red iron, you see it oxidise over time.

So even when we have the finished sculpture, that will mature in colour as well in the sunlight.

I thought, well, that's really, really fitting because the people that the monument will be for, they might seem strong on the outside and pretty and polished and everything seems wonderful, but on the inside they've got the same scars and the same marks and the same discolorations as everybody else.

05.56 JESS TAYLOR, FAMILY ADVOCATE

For Jess Taylor, countryside and her animals are a refuge from a day she'll never forget and the years of trauma, hurt and loss that follow.

It was the day her late husband Dwayne returned from duty in Afghanistan during the process of discharge from the Army.

As soon as he got off the plane, his eyes were black and he was just - sorry. So our whole life just come crashing down as soon as he got off that plane.

Sorry. Sorry, I hated that day. I just hate that day.

Dwayne had been given a new explosive sniffer dog not long before deployment. He worried the dog wasn't ready.

He'd just become a father and the day he mobilised, news reached Australia that another digger had been killed.

So that caused a lot more of alarm for him to go, I've got a child at home and I don't know if my dog is up to the task to find what it needs to find to keep everybody safe.

The Army, says Jess, put undue pressure on him.

Getting told if you and your dog don't find the IEDs and you blow up and kill someone, it's not just you, it's the other people's family too.

So you're ruining their family's life, not just your own. So that's a lot of pressure that you put on one person to complete a task.

Back home, Dwayne was shunned and shamed.

He spiralled. Addictions, mental health, violence in the home. He battled getting help from DVA.

As soon as he would have a phone call with them, he would be triggered because they just didn't do anything. They just... They're just like, oh, unfortunately, you know, it hasn't been looked at at the moment, it will get looked at soon, all this sort of stuff. Now, that was four years it took.

At the end of the day, you didn't give us what we needed prior to his deployment, and then when he returned to support him the best way possible and get the support from the Defence to help him. Because I can tell you, I asked for help. I asked for help.

Oh, I had the Padre over all the time at 2.30 in the morning to pick him up because he would be smashing doors or he would be, you know, causing havoc and hurting himself.

And at the end of the day, I didn't want him to hurt himself. I didn't want to go through everything that we're going through, but, hey, they brushed it under the carpet and just said it's going to be OK.

Well, it's not OK because he's now dead and I have two children who miss their dad and just want to talk to their dad and don't have that chance anymore.

They're living with the scars that no-one can see. The ripple effect hit them so hard.

And people just think they should be OK. They're kids, they're resilient. They're resilient.

When is enough enough? And when is a child allowed to be a child and not have to be the adult?

When can a kid just live like a kid instead of going, OK, how's Dad going to be today?

Lives could be so different if there was a lot more support. I don't understand why they're not going to new families and going, OK, where did we go wrong? Just ask that question. Where did we go wrong? Defence, ask it.

DVA, ask it. Where have we gone wrong and where can we fix it?

All he wanted was to be able to get retrained and make sure that everything was covered because getting told if you don't find the bombs, you're going to kill not only yourself, you're going to kill those other people, that is a lot of pressure.

And if he's not 100% ready, well, why are we sending them over there? Why are we putting them in the deep end? You threw him in that water and you're wondering why he sunk.

Because you didn't give him the floaties to get him through.

As if the emotional rollercoaster hasn't been hard enough, Jess has had to deal with another unexpected factor.

A lot of people have judgement of me moving on and things like that and just because I've moved on doesn't mean Dwayne isn't there in my heart every day.

I look at my son every day and I see his dad. Just because we left doesn't mean I gave up. I kept trying.

I tried as long as I could. I just didn't find him.

11:25 DR GEORGIOS

Dr Efikara Georgios studies post-traumatic stress disorder.

Misunderstood for centuries, it was misdiagnosed for Australians as far back as the Boer War and World War I.

Sometimes men would turn up to army hospitals and they would be mute, they wouldn't be able to walk, they would be severely depressed, anxious, maddened, basically.

And doctors would say, oh no, this must be caused by a physical symptom. This must be something that happened to you physically.

What is physically wrong with you?

During the Second World War, this idea about heredity and personality problems as the cause for what they called during that war, war neurosis, was continued.

Actually, it was amplified, even in official histories of the war, official medical histories of the war.

[LAST POST PLAYS]

But it wasn't really until a decade or so after 1980 that in Australia post-traumatic stress disorder became talked about and recognised in veterans.

So this is a significant wait from 1975, the official end of the Vietnam War, to, say, the mid-1990s, 20 years of suffering.

[MARCHING BAND DRUMS]

13:15 KIMBERLEY HICKS, IRAQ WAR VETERAN

Now approaching the RSL ACT branch and sub-branch, led by Kimberley.

I'm honoured, I am so honoured, to have World War II veterans or any veteran march.

It is beautiful to see. The pride in their face, the pride in their families and the crowd watching is amazing.

Few Australians have flung themselves into the care and cause of veterans like Kim Hicks.

She has three formal jobs. CEO of the ACT RSL, Secretary of the Gungahlin sub-branch and part of the Ministerial Advisory Council for Veterans and Families. Informally, Kim works with the War Memorial.

She organised this march. Her empathy was forged by the pain of her own experiences. Kim served with the RAAF in Iraq and came back injured and ignored.

I felt when I got back that I had no help and I was just abandoned, that's how I felt. Whether it was my unit, whether it was the RAAF, whether it was DVA, I was just abandoned completely.

Ninety Australian air traffic controllers keep watch over Baghdad airport.

This, literally, was the view from Kim's workplace, the control tower at Baghdad International Airport.

Kim was part of a contingent to train and support locals so they could eventually take back control of the airport.

Twenty-nine hours after slipping out of Australia, Mr Howard set foot on Iraqi soil.

Despite the happy snaps and visits by politicians and brass, there was constant danger and almost daily rocket attacks.

Some were out without instances. Other times we were shot at, you'd be hiding under a truck and you'd see the incoming fire.

Then you'd go to shoot back, but then we'd, you know, get up and leave and then two minutes later it was rocketed.

So in the container that I was just in with my American friend that I got to know quite well because we were there weekly, she sadly passed.

So that was the hard thing because I was in there two minutes prior to that.

Was it from a rocket? That was from a rocket.

And there was this one time that I was speaking to my husband on the phone, trying to say hello to the kids.

A rocket did come in and land in the car park and my husband heard it just come in and just everything just went bang, glass shattered and I just went, I've got to go and it cut off.

And then he didn't hear from me for four or five days after that. So it was hard. It was hard.

So I think most nights I went to sleep crying because I'd miss him or I'd miss the kids and I slept with my rifle every night. It's the only way I felt safe.

Eventually, Kim did get injured herself.

At one stage I was on a drip up in the doctor's office and I was on a stretcher and some rockets were coming in and they went to stand two so they all ran down to the bottom floor and I was left up there by myself and I'm just like, no, I can't, I'm not staying here.

So I ripped my drip out, got everything and then got downstairs as fast as I could.

I came home and I didn't feel safe.

I actually didn't feel safe at home. Even though that's where I left, that's where my husband, that's where my kids were, that's where my family was, I didn't feel safe at all.

I got questioned, I was a female, I was too young, I couldn't have been deployed there, I couldn't have had the amount of injuries that I've got and it was a continuous, why do I have to prove myself?

I was diagnosed with severe PTSD and major depressive order.

There were a number of years where I wouldn't leave the house. I didn't go anywhere, I didn't like to do anything.

So there was no thought given when I came back, I was just, they said, oh, you're not deployable anymore, so you're medically discharged.

And that devastated me because that was the end of my career.

So that's been my thing, I think, with DVA for the past 20 years, that one shoe doesn't fit all and they need to broaden, therapy-wise, of what works for someone.

So they have changed their policies and things now, which is great to see, where they're picking up people a lot earlier.

But what we need is we need defence to change their narrative.

Instead of them saying to us, you are broken, you are no longer good to us, how about saying, oh, let's convert your skills to a civilian qualification and you're equipped to be whatever you want to be out there.

Before this march, one old digger contacted Kim personally to see if he could take part.

He was in his wheelchair and he was right behind me and that pride, oh, it just makes you want to cry because the smile on his face, that's why you do it, that's why I do it, because it's like, look at him, he served his country, he might not be able to walk anymore, but he's here.

So it's great to be out and advocate for veterans that don't have a voice or don't think they're being heard.

It's a 24-7 job with the three positions that I do hold, but it's something that I hold dearly to my heart and I'll do it for as long as I can do it.

19:18 CHRIS PROUD, IRAQ WAR VETERAN

Yeah, Firebolt, there's more to it that I'm not willing to speak about, but Firebolt has burned a place in my heart and will always have part of my soul.

Got a flare over here? Yep. Listen, mate, there's stuff in the water there.

Yeah, it's their RHIB. Yep, that is their RHIB here. We're going in the water.

Let's go in the water.

And it happened almost straightaway, as soon as they got alongside me. It was a pretty powerful explosion.

That was meant to be our boarding party. It would have been our people.

And the Yanks right at the last minute said, we'll just do that one, it's closer, you can do ours.

They were faring back the injured as quick as possible to us as being the major ship in the area.

He's gone under, he's under the water. He's not coming up.OK, move him in. Go, go, go.

I think there was five or six pretty badly injured American personnel.

With the three deceased, they brought them back later and we brought them on board and I helped the doctor just where she needed help there.

We could hear what sounded like machine gun fire and the Iraqi guys managed to hit the boat and it exploded. And the shockwave that hit the ship apparently knocked us all off our feet.

We had some difficult times and a lot of people, you know, still struggle with it. And I do every now and again.

You know, I have my trigger points and that and I'm getting better and that's why, you know, I'm glad I'm a member of the Motorcycle Club, the Patriots Australia, because we can talk and share our passions.

We can cry. I think the government need to really pull their finger out.

We've had that much happen now in the last couple of decades that they're not coping with.

They're not dealing with. And unfortunately, the suicide rate's gone up, which I have personal connection with.

I've had a few, about three of my mates, pass away.

We're broken. We're broken inside. We've got fractured memories and that and yet here it is in these beautiful spheres so we can see the imperfections and we can say it's good to have imperfections but from imperfections we can have this beauty.

It doesn't have to be dark.

22:22 GRAHAM EDWARDS AM, VIETNAM WAR VETERAN

Me coming home as a wounded soldier, it was an absolute bloody disgrace.

We were snuck back into Australia, flown into Richmond Air Base about three o'clock in the morning.

It certainly would not have been good for the government of the day to have any media around to witness the ill, the wounded, the dying, the flotsam and jetsam of an unpopular war coming home.

[HELICOPTER SOUNDS]

Graham Edwards stepped on a landmine in Vietnam and lost both his legs. He later became a successful state and federal parliamentarian.

I was conscious right until the time that they wheeled me into the operating theatre and I remember looking into the surgeon's eyes and feeling sorry for what I knew he had to do.

And when I woke up in the morning, it wasn't a matter of being told I'd lost my legs. I woke up and I looked straight down to see how high the amputations were and I was just relieved to be alive.

I was so incredibly lucky to have survived that blast and I think most of my life I've tried to reflect on just how lucky I was.

So many of my mates and so many others who trod on mines never survived. Mum was reading a card and all of a sudden Dad said she went white and let out a bit of a yell.

And Dad reached over and took the card from her and basically what the card said was I was in church on Sunday morning when we were asked to pray for your son.

It went on to say words along the lines of the Vietnam War is an immoral war and it might be better if your son died.

It's incredible, it's sad and I think someone who suffers those post-traumatic stress disorder issues really finds there's no other option but to take their own life and of course there are other options.

Terrible torment they live in. They need support and they need someone to wrap their arms around them and care for them and to look after them and we need to do that better as governments and we need to do it better as a nation.

It's just an incredibly sad aftermath of war.

Incredibly sad to think that so many young Australians take their lives because of their experiences and because they find no other option and no way to settle back into the community.

25:56 DUNCAN HALL, EAST TIMOR VETERAN

One of the things that helped me throughout this whole time was that I've got a love of fishing.

Even when I launch the boat it just uplifts my soul to know that I'm going out on the water.

I always feel safe out there. Nobody can get to me. I feel peaceful.

I get so into my fishing that I tend to forget about the rest of the world and that gives me a really good release.

One of the few places that I really do feel at peace and at home. Bit of gourmet love.

Bit of fresh bait make all the difference. Yeah.

People used to say, you can go 30 kilometres offshore in two metre seas on your own but you're scared at the mall.

What's wrong with you? Well, you tell me. They call it a mental illness. It's not natural.

It's not normal. But it is real. I always felt under threat and that I had to control every situation and that everybody was out to do me harm.

It was quite a hard way to live.

I think of my husband and I think that he could have been a statistic. So I'm so grateful that he's still alive.

I'm grateful that my daughter is still alive because suicide impacts everybody.

I got a call from Duncan on my mobile, even though he's in the next room, saying I've done something really stupid. And I said, OK, honey.

So I went in and he said, I've taken all of these. And I think he took 50 diazepam and 100 of these. And I went, you know what? It's OK.

And he's a big boy, so I guided him down the stairs, went to the front office, called the ambulance, had him by the collar.

It's OK, honey. He'd say, oh, you're better off without me.

These type of comments have to stop. No, that's not an option. I said, you've got a big tuna you need to catch. It's 150 kilos. It's coming soon.

You always used to say that this was the only place where the enemy couldn't get you or... I felt safe, yeah.

You felt safe. And I think that's the key issue, you know. Oh, safety's huge.

Isn't it? For those that suffer PTSD. Yeah, absolutely.

When I was really sick, everything was about safety, about where to go, who to go, who to trust, trust no one.

Everybody's out to get you.

Do you trust me now, Dunc? Yeah. I've always trusted you.

I think, you know, like I rang DVA and, you know, a few places a few times because I was thinking, oh, I've got shrapnel in my back and a bullet in my foot and all I wanted was a bit of physio but I couldn't even get through that because they just, it was all to do with filling out forms and, you know, waiting in lines and go do this and go do that and I just wasn't able to concentrate or function long enough to do all that so I just never got any help until you came along and you were able to tick the boxes.

And that's the thing about suicide too, don't be afraid to talk about it, to ask your mate, like, you know, if you think your mate's off, are you okay, mate? What's going on? And, you know, don't be afraid to ask direct questions.

If you think your mate's not doing well, I'd say, well, how you going, mate? Well, I'm alright.

Well, you're not contemplating suicide. Just be direct. Don't beat around the bush because that may save a life, you know what I mean?

In Australian society today, as much as we don't like it, there is still stigma against mental health sufferers.

So what will happen is if a soldier or a veteran is presenting with mental health symptoms, they would be less likely to admit them, they would be less likely to speak about them, because it might tarnish their reputations, and not only their reputations, but the reputations of the military in their eyes, their family's eyes, and also society's eyes.

So it's a great fear.

These men and women do not talk about their issues, and this can lead to a worsening of their conditions.

There was always a stigma with PTSD. Most of my friends and a lot of my family didn't know that I was suffering.

I wouldn't tell anyone. I wouldn't let my husband tell anyone. That was my battle, not theirs.

31:08 PENNIE LOOKER, AUSTRALIAN ARMY VETERAN

A horse can sense your heartbeat from, I think it's around 100 metres away. So being around horses and using the horse to help you understand your own energy and how you're responding to things, it's just magical.

You notice a change in your pulse rate, you notice your breathing rate slow down, you notice just this whole calmness come over your body.

You become one with the horse, and it's all about being just in that moment and just letting go.

And it's one of the things that I've loved, and helping other veterans as well to break through their own barriers.

Penny Looker says horses saved and sustained her life.

I'd lost my career. I joined the Army at 17, and I'd been in the Army my entire adult life, and it was gone.

Everything I knew about myself and how I saw myself was nothing anymore.

And I'd been a mum the whole time, and I loved being a mum, and it's my most proud thing is being a mum.

But I was a soldier, and I served my country, and then I was nothing.

The Army was Penny's dream.

Deployed three times, twice to East Timor, she became a psychological examiner. She heard the troubles, terrors, even suicidal thoughts of others, but buried her own.

I was at home on stress leave, and my husband had called me, and I was home alone with our, at the time, I think three and five-year-old.

And Aaron had called me and asked how I was and was checking in, and he couldn't understand what I was saying.

And he kind of jokingly said, are you having a stroke? And he didn't understand my response. And I'm trying to talk, and the words weren't coming.

By the time we got to the hospital, I couldn't speak at all anymore, and things were going downhill pretty quick.

And I was admitted to the acute stroke ward. It was a stress-induced stroke.

It would take Penny two and a half years to learn to speak properly again. She tried to extend her Army service.

So at a time where I was recovering from stroke and needed my support, the request for an extension of just three months was denied, and all of my support mechanisms were taken away from me.

And that was the hardest thing. And that is one of the main reasons why that first year after my discharge, I felt hopeless and helpless, because I had everything taken from me.

My career, my support, my health, it was all gone.

And it all went really quickly. It wasn't just the after-effects of the stroke.

Penny has had 38 operations, complications, she says, from army training.

I've had a lot of surgeries. Head to toe, basically. Had several surgeries on my hands.

I've had four surgeries on my hips, knees, ankle. The biggest one is the fusion to my spine.

I'm massively proud of her. Massively proud of her. She's been to hell and back. She just keeps coming back.

Husband Aaron is a soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah, if you ever want Penny to do something, tell her she can't.

And it doesn't matter whether it's a physical or a mental or a professional, whatever, it doesn't matter.

There's times when it's, nah, it's all too hard, I'm done, I'm out.

And then the coin will flip and the steely determination means that she'll go and do it.

11 weeks post my spinal fusion, I did the city to surf run.

Because I'm not going to tip back and not live life. There's been so many times where I've felt that what's the point in being around?

And then you come through that and remember that you've got this amazing family and you need to live while you can live. So I've done it.

Unbelievably, Penny also managed to do the Kokoda track walk.

Fear of crowds has led Penny to sit in her car for three hours outside a supermarket.

Aaron has been my rock.

Without Aaron, there would no longer be a Penny. The times when I didn't even see me, he still saw me. I describe myself as a broken person.

He describes me as just his Penny. Their children saw things no child should ever have to see. The youngest saw me have a stroke.

When we go places and I'm not in a good state, they will walk either side of me as my protection.

And they're my children. They see me go through all of it.

And my youngest, who's 13 now, he's got the most beautiful soul. He'll notice and he'll be like, can I make you a cup of tea?

Because he knows cups of tea fix everything. So he will bring cups of tea and he'll just sit and hug.

My children have been through hell with what I've been through. And they've come out as amazing, amazing young people that I'm so proud of.

So when the good times come, really cherish them and really milk them for what it is.

And try your hardest to keep them up for as long as you can. I think in my head I call it Up Penny is the time with Up Penny is precious.

It gets less and less as the years go on, but it's still there, which is awesome.

The red. The veins going all the way through.

You can't help yourself but walk up and touch it.

You can see the shine through it. We think of it, we've got our blood, we've got our sweat, we've got our tears. Everything we've spoken about.

The shape of us is amazing. You can imagine people coming into the War Memorial and just wanting to do this. Wow.

Hi. You alright? Yep. You? Always.

Always? Don't laugh. You'd cry. I'd cry.

40:32 DR NIKKI JAMIESON, MOTHER OF A VETERAN, SUICIDOLOGIST 

Oh, he was very cheeky. So he, probably for the first few years of his life, he'd be the ones who, you know, would run around.

And, you know, you'd be telling him to get here and he'd just be running around in the supermarket or whatever.

He was full of life. He was, you know, the class clown.

Nikki Jamison lost her soldier's son, the boy she called her cheeky chappy, to suicide in 2020.

Devastated, she tried to take her own life. But she came back from the brink to devote her life to prevention of suicide.

She's done a PhD and a Masters on military suicides.

She tours the country and world, talking about mental health.

I was adamant that this just cannot happen to another family. You know, I've lost my daughter.

I've lost both children. I've lost my daughter to pneumonia. Her death was devastating.

To lose a child to suicide, there are just no words, is above and beyond any kind of loss a parent can ever imagine.

And losing a child under any circumstances is absolutely world shattering. Suicide takes it to a whole new level of shattering.

Daniel's dream was to be in the Army. But Nikki saw her son morph from a happy soul to a troubled one.

Things started going downhill when he trained and graduated from Kapooka.

You know, he was super proud. He was super excited that he'd finished. But there was something in his eyes.

As a parent, you know your child. There was something in his eyes that had changed. There was a life that had gone from him.

His energy, the fun side of him, he'd become very, very robotic. Very, you know, stoic and hard.

It got worse when Daniel transferred to Darwin.

A particular officer made his life hell. He was struggling with the relationship with this other person. He felt like he was being bullied.

He felt like he was being ostracised. And I said, why don't you just leave? And he says, Mum, I can't. They will charge me.

I will be court-martialed. He says they will hunt me down and take me back.

So that was his understanding of being able to leave Defence.

And none of that was ever corrected. So to have it blocked, to have all that preparation and planning and to truly believe you are leaving on a certain day and then to be told, no, actually, you're not going anywhere now until the following year was devastating.

For Daniel, that was it. Quite literally, the final nail in his coffin.

Private Daniel Garforth, 21, his mother's boy and a father, too. Most of us will be looking forward, you know, to Christmas and events.

We don't get to do that anymore. That's all right.

He's one of 1,273 military members and veterans known to have taken their own lives between 2001 and 2019.

His mother, Nikki, was the first to give evidence at today's Royal Commission, reading the note he left behind.

The thing that has finally pushed me over the edge was this job. Constantly being demoralised and ridiculed.

Sharing what he can't.

I'm hoping that it will improve accountability. Nikki felt blocked in trying to find out what happened to her son. It took four years for the Inspector General's report on his death.

His phone, when returned, had been wiped. His laptop has never been returned.

So I knew when Daniel died that I had a choice.

And that choice for me was either I live or I die. Because I was also struggling with my own mental health when he died and also made a couple of suicide attempts as well.

Because, you know, as a mother, I was very keen to join him.

So I made the choice that if I wanted to continue living, I had to make big changes and I had to stop this happening to somebody else.

Nikki felt Daniel was there in spirit as she challenged the establishment at the Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission heard he'd been bullied by his leaders and had told people he was fearful of going to work.

The fact that he was described as catatonic is really concerning to me. By his chain of command, the very chain of command, who was also threatening him with being a malingerer.

He was there, he was both there in the photo.

And I think for those who believe spiritually, I do think he would have been there and I think he would have been like, yes, yes, go, Mum.

Nikki regards her work as Daniel's legacy. So, again, very mixed feelings.

There's a sense of anger, I have to say, in doing the PhD and doing the Masters and even doing the book to some extent.

No parent should be in this position so there's a sense of anger that I was put into this position where that was literally my choice to live and die and I chose to do that to keep me alive.

So today we've laid down the templates and put them out in the order in which we think the end droplets are going to be.

Trying to figure out where the footings are, how it flows out from under the tree line.

Trying to discern just the shape and form, the number as well. I think we started off with 27 droplets to begin with.

Today I've also brought down two polystyrene prototypes of the 80 centimetre tall droplets in the two different shapes, basic shapes.

And that is so much more eye revealing about just how much space the sculpture will take up.

If we orient different grain lines, you actually change up the directions and so you have people, like, we want to send the audience through meandering in their own path, not in any one direction.

We are all flawed. We're not this white crystal ball. You peel back the layers, you'll get to the depth of what we actually are and who we represent.

Oh, looking good.

And the colours within the stone, yes, it will represent the blood that has been shed, the tears that continually still fly out of my eyes.

Yeah, guys, I think let's just get it centred and that's good. I just don't want to be in parallel with the same rings stacked up in the same direction. There.

Let me show you some of them. Remember George Frederiksen, the truck driver and army veteran who delivered the original marble blocks to sculptor Alex Seaton?

Well, he's now back in the army and has come to see the shiny droplets fashioned from those rough slabs. And you've got that deep red iron red line through it.

Yeah, well, there's very showy ones, very dramatic. Yeah. Very dramatic ones.

You'll see that in the block too. Yeah, yeah. And some blocks actually had surprises in it, so I didn't expect these ones to be so pale.

But then when there's delicate, just a delicate line running through them, a little fissure.

No one would have thought a pig and a goat could bring so much relaxation to someone.

All I have to do is if I'm having a bad day, I'll go in there and they will know and they will just sit with me and just be.

And just being out here is just, it's quiet. I don't have to worry about anyone. The kids don't have to worry about anyone.

They've got, you know, places to run and roam. But animals bring more life when you least expect it.

As I said, I don't hold the Army to blame. I joined willingly and I love my time in the service. I wish, and I think that a time when you leave, they need to spend a bit more time telling you what might happen or some of the things that have been changed in you. I think that's definitely important.

I think if I'd known earlier, I might not have wasted 10 years drinking on a couch.

Because that's basically what me and my best mate did.

And the government just need to listen.Everyone just needs to listen.

But at the moment, DVA, there's a two-year wait to get a claim accepted. There's a six-month wait to see an advocate.

It's hard and it's not acceptable. It's not acceptable at all. We get told when we get medically discharged, we get told we're broken.

But we're not. Even though mentally, physically, yes. But you can come out on the other side if you get the right help.

Knowing that I've fallen apart before and it all came crashing down and suicide is one of those things that comes up.

But I know I was strong enough before and I had the support before.

And now it's not something I think about because now I know that I can find the purpose again and I can get through it, even though it's hard.

It's hard and it sucks. It's horrible. But I know that eventually things will come good.

I think the importance of these types of memorials is that they offer a warm, friendly, welcoming, calm, tranquil environment.

And I think it's good for veterans and their families to be able to go and do that and to feel part of that whole concept of tranquility.

Alex, look, mate, what you have done has really touched me in such a way you'll never, ever know.

And I will speak for other veterans. I know they will see it for what it's meant to be.

And I thank you for the veteran community and from myself, deeply down, honestly, the healing process can start from that.

God bless you, mate. Thank you.

[IAN MOSS SINGS]