On Friday 1 November at 11am, women and men gathered in the blistering sun and howling wind at the Taree Cenotaph in the centre of town to honour the forty-five women who have lost their lives to domestic violence since the beginning of 2019. The event was organised by the grassroots activist organisation Restore Our Refuge (ROR). Members of the group include former workers and volunteers of Manning District Emergency Accommodation (MDEA) who managed Lyn’s Place Women’s Refuge in Taree. The groups aim is to ‘restore Taree’s secular, feminist, specialist domestic violence refuge’ which after over thirty years of community management was handed over to the Samaritans charity as part of the NSW governments Going Home, Staying Home (GHSH) reform.
Source: Restore Our Refuge: Honouring Women event, 1 November 2019 – ALEXANDRIA HAWKINS
This was a moving and graphic way to highlight how shocking 45 murdered women actually is.It was very sad as each woman filed past and place a posie at the feet of the “Guardian angel”. Each woman whose life was arbitrarily taken by a violent male to date in 2019 had her name read out and her age(mostly in their 30`s-horrifying)Having a professional community choir singing in beautiful harmony added much emotion and poignancy.
It has been suggested that if women all over Australia held an event like this one the killing of women and lack of specialist feminist domestic violence services may be harder to ignore and for Governments to lie about!The Taree Restore Our Refuge Troupers street theatre group are determined to speak truth to power.