Grace Tame // On Survival, The Spectrum And Speaking Out

We all know I rarely find myself struggling with words, but certain guests and their stories simply defy adequate description. I was lucky enough to interview Grace Tame at an event back in 2022 where her bravery and eloquence moved a room full of excitable adults to still, silent awe. Getting to chat with her again and share that with you all this week feels like such a great privilege and again found me quite lost for words.

Grace, on the other hand, speaks with such clarity and composure even on her unfathomable experiences of trauma and pain. As a survivor of child sexual abuse both at the age of six and 15, she has become a powerful advocate for legal reform, reduction of stigma and primary prevention of sexual violence against children.

Add some complex layers including anorexia, domestic violence, late diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and having it all laid bare before the whole nation becoming Australian of the Year at just 26 while still processing it all in real time... and there you have a journey unimaginable to most of us. And yet, Grace’s capacity not only to continue her advocacy with the Grace Tame Foundation, but to find pockets of joy, hope and love is perhaps what blows me away the most.

I won’t attempt to say more as it continues to feel inadequate, but I am grateful not only to help continue raising awareness of complex issues like grooming and consent but also to share some parts of Grace you don’t hear as much about elsewhere. You know that’s what I love most about this show and being a survivor of child sexual abuse is simply not the totality of Grace Tame.

She is funny, quirky, reflective and hopeful - an ultramarathon runner, artist, author, bookworm and dedicated friend. Despite a pathway in which she was given no choice and where finding her yay could not be the main focus - unlike many of our guests - she somehow finds it anyway. I hope you enjoy as much as I did.

Follow Grace here.
Visit the Grace Tame Foundation here.

If this conversation raises any emotional distress for you, please reach out to someone, or call Lifeline for 24 hour crisis support and suicide prevention services on 13 11 14.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A couple of notes before we begin. This episode discusses
topics related to child sexual abuse, eating disorders, and mental health,
and may not be suitable for all listeners. Please take
care while listening, and if you're struggling, please don't hesitate
to call lifeline. On thirteen eleven fourteen, the episode wasn't
planned around the news cycle this week, but I do
feel grateful to be helping shed light on child sexual

(00:20):
abuse at such a tough time for many Australian families.
One a hundred Respect is another great resource should you
want anyone you know require support in the area of
domestic or sexual violence. Finally, due to uncooperative Internet, the
audio does get a bit echoe at times, but nothing
can dull the impact and eloquence of grace tame, as
you will very soon find out. Thank you always for listening.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Never pans out the way you imagine it, for better
or for worse. You know, expectations have never met exactly.
Someone else tosses aside their shame. What that does is
allow other people to feel emboldened to toss aside their
shame as well.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Welcome to the Seize the Ya podcast. Busy and Happy
are not the same thing. We too rarely question what
makes the heart seeing. We work, then we rest, but
rarely we play and often don't realize there's more than
one way. So this is a platform to hear and
explore the stories of those who found lives they adore, the.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Good, bad and ugly.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
The best and worst days will bear all the facets
of seizing your yea. I'm Sarah Davidson or a spoonful
of Sarah, a lawyer turned funentrepreneur who swapped the suits
and heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha Milk bar.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Sez the Ya is.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
A series of conversations on finding a life you love
and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy and fulfillment along
the way.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
We all know.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
I rarely find myself struggling with words, but certain guests
and their stories simply defy adequate description. This bio, the
questions for this week, the edit, then the snippets all
took me much longer than usual, and still I'm not
sure they do justice to the extraordinary Grace Tame. I
was lucky enough to interview Grace at an event back
in twenty twenty two, where her bravery and eloquence, moved

(02:10):
a room full of excitable adults to still silent or
getting the chance to chat with her again then share
it all with you guys this week feels like such
a great privilege and again found me quite lost for words. Grace,
on the other hand, speaks with such clarity and composure,
even on her unfathomable experiences of trauma and pain as

(02:31):
a survivor of child sexual abuse both at the age
of six and fifteen. She has become a powerful advocate
for legal reform, reduction of stigma, and primary prevention of
sexual violence against children. Add to that many complex layers
including anorexia, domestic violence, late diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder,

(02:51):
and having all of it laid bare before an entire nation,
becoming Australian of the Year at just twenty six while
still processing everything in real time, and there you have
a journey unimaginable to most of us. And yet Grace's
capacity not only to continue her advocacy with the Grace
Tame Foundation, but also to find pockets of joy, hope

(03:12):
and love in between is perhaps the part that blows
me away the most. I won't attempt to say much
more as it does continue to feel quite inadequate, But
I'm so grateful not only to have the chance to
continue raising awareness of complex issues like grooming and consent
through this conversation, but also to share some parts of
Grace that you don't normally hear as much about elsewhere.

(03:33):
You know, That's the part I love the most about
this show. And being a child sexual abuse survivor is
just not the totality of Grace Tame. She is funny, quirky,
reflective and hopeful, an ultra marathon runner, an artist, an author, bookworm,
and dedicated friend. Despite a pathway in which she was
given no choice and where finding her yeay could not

(03:54):
be the main focus, Unlike many of our guests, she
somehow finds it anyway. I hope you and joy this
one as much as I did. Grace Tame, welcome to
seize the A thank.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
You for having me, Sarah. I'm very excited.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Oh my gosh, I'm the excited one. I'm in such
awe of everything you do and know how busy you are,
so it feels like a real privilege to have some
of your time today.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Well, the privilege is all mine. Any opportunity that we
get to speak is one we should be grateful for.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Well, grateful is definitely one thing that I'm feeling. I
was so lucky to speak with you a couple of
years ago and very much appreciate the chance to follow
that up today. But nervous is another one that I
mentioned offline, and that's partly wanting to do you and
your story and work justice, but also to adequately cover
the many dualities that exist in parts of your story,

(04:47):
one being that I think you speak even about the
most harrowing topics with so much.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Grace so to speak.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
But I love that you're a little untame, and that
you have suffered immeasurable trauma in your life but are
still constantly smiling and finding joy or yay in your life.
And then that you've described your autism as manifesting as
discombobulation or difficulty expressing yourself, and yet you're one of

(05:15):
the most eloquent people I've ever heard speak. So many
many dualities there, but also it takes so much to
be ready to share all those parts of yourself, and
you do so so vulnerably. So maybe we could start
with what it takes for you to be here today
and to be ready to revisit such difficult, complex parts

(05:36):
of your life. Do you get nervous? How do you
prepare yourself to be so open?

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Look, whilst it's important when speaking about complicated topics to
have you know, at least an entry level of knowledge
and evidence to draw upon lived experience, is also a
qualification in of itself, of which I have a wealth.

(06:02):
So I'll be honest with you. I don't ever rehearse
for an interview or do much preparation besides familiarize myself
with the interviewer, because I think that that's an important
thing to do. What you're trying to achieve when having

(06:24):
a dialogue is a connection between those engaged in that dialogue,
even if there's disagreement. So I think it's a market
basic respect to know the person that you're speaking to.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Oh I love that.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Otherwise I know myself, I know my experience inside out.
You can't fake speaking from the heart. For some people
who don't speak very often, I think the nerves can
come from and we were speaking about this offline as well,
the nerves can come from, you know, really wanting to
articulate your ideas clearly and not make any mistakes. But

(07:02):
that's also part of a natural conversation. You're not going
to speak word perfect, and it's okay to get a
word or to slightly out of place, or your grammar,
your sentence structure. You're syntax slightly out of place when
you're having a conversation, so long as your passion is
clear and your overarching message is clear.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Absolutely, although my perfection side finds that difficult, So I
think that is where some of the nerves came from.
Wanting to do this perfectly, but also because of the
magnitude and complexity of a lot of your life experiences
and my personal lack of familiarity in covering the nuance
and emotions involved. Plus, when you have followed someone's work

(07:47):
closely and read their book and had the chance to
meet them, you want to show other facets of who
they are. And one of the things I love the
most about this show is diving into chapters that aren't
as exhaustively covered elsewhere, And I love that in the
earth pages of your book you write that time hasn't
defined my unfinished experience of life, and so being a

(08:08):
survivor of child sexual abuse is not the totality of
who you are, despite it being the chapter that many
of us were introduced to you through. So perhaps we
could go back to the early days, to young Grace
and who you wanted to be, what you thought you'd be.
It's an incredible career that you have now, and yet

(08:28):
not one that you were sitting there thinking I want
to be when I grow up.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
So what else did did I consider? Other career bads
to being an activist against child sexual abuse?

Speaker 1 (08:40):
But I guess that is what's so unique is most
of our guests, we spend a lot of time on
the painstaking planning put into what they choose to do
with their life. Whereas you know, no one dreams of
becoming an advocate for a traumatic event that is involuntarily
visited upon them. So I would love to know what
you had envision for yourself. I know you love art

(09:02):
and you love yoga, So what did you think that
you would become.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
It's a great question because in hindsight, I don't think
there was ever a static goal. As you've identified, there
are lots of things that I was interested in as
a child that I enjoyed doing, and I retain that
same sense of enthusiasm and curiosity. My love of learning. Yeah,
I was always very active. I loved to run around,

(09:28):
and I'm very grateful that I grew up on that
sort of cusp as a millennial, but on that cusp
before the Internet, which it existed for a couple of
decades already, but its role in our daily life was
not so prominent. I think that that meant that, you know,
creativity was more free flowing, and the sort of more

(09:53):
fragmented life that we live now, it looked very different.
I recall when I was very young, sitting on the
carpet at my mother's house. My parents has been separated
since I was two years old, but being on the
carpet at my mother's house drawing and my mother in
particular very much encouraged all of the different areas of

(10:16):
interest that she herself fostered. She used to say, oh,
you would be a good lawyer. She would say, you know,
you would be a great artist as well. When I
was ten or eleven, I was involved in some of
the school drama performances, and it was clear that I

(10:40):
really very much enjoyed inhabiting different characters, and that's what
led me to audition for the School of Performing Arts
at the High school that I eventually was accepted into
on a scholarship for performing arts as well as academia.
That's where I was headed. I think for a time
was towards potentially performing arts, potentially acting as a career.

(11:04):
But again also in the background, I was very passionate
about languages, in particular German and writing creative writings, was
analytical writing, which is something that has cropped up again
later in my life. I contribute to various publications with
opinion pieces and reviews like I don't know and I'll
be honest with you. Everything did sort of fall apart

(11:26):
after my experience of not just prolonged but CITI stick
child sexual abuse as a fifteen year old, you know,
not just sort of breaks your whole world, it redirects it.
And for a long time, up until very recently, to
be honest, I've just been following where life led me.

(11:46):
There's not been a lot of design, a lot of
planning to my life. I've been in sort of survival
mode with limited agency and whilst for example, the platform
in Australian of the Year has given me so many
opportunities which I'm eternally thankful for and I understand It's
not an experience that everyone has the privilege of having. However,

(12:09):
the reality of it behind the scenes is very different
to I think the perception of it in the public eye.
There's you know, very little time to do anything except
respond to the different requests that come your way and
to be pulled in the sort of different directions. You know,
the multidirectional pressure is quite difficult to manage, and the

(12:33):
pace and the frequency of various different competing events and
tasks sort of prohibits time to absorb them all and
to make clear choices that aren't kind of you know. Again,
you find yourself moving in one direction and then you
get pulled in another.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
I can't imagine having your choice and autonomy over the
direction of your life taken away so cruelly at such
a young age, only to then have the momentum of
your advocacy kind of take on a similar pace that
you don't have much control over. And you have stepped
up to the challenge so remarkably and are doing incredible

(13:12):
work with the Grace Tame Foundation. But another unique part
of even among Australian of the Year recipients is that
many awardees are being celebrated for an achievement in an
area they're passionate about. That's a skill or a talent
they've been voluntarily honing for their whole life, or it's

(13:33):
an invention. And in your case it's so different. It's
a traumatic event that happened to you.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah. And I think also too, most importantly, for an
achievement in a career that's already been established. And whilst
there was an achievement, a collective achievement, I think most
importantly that precipitated the Australian of the Year award. Yeah,
it was not central to my life. You know. I
had worked very briefly as an illustrator when I lived
in California for nearly six years there, when I was

(14:00):
eighteen years old, and in fact, nine months before us
named Australian of the Year, I was still living in
California and I was working in a retail job. And
then COVID hit and I moved back to Australia. I
was on job seeker payments, unemployed, living with my aunt
in a housing commission area, and then bam, Australian of

(14:22):
the Year happened very suddenly.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
I just can't even imagine the freight train that hit
you at that time, and people do forget there are
entire chapters and jobs.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
That you had.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
There was a whole period in the US before Yeah,
we met you as Australian of the Year and I
don't even know how you've come up for air since then.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
To be honest, I learned how to breathe underwater.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Another one of your exclusive.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
CSVA reveals Grace Tame actually.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Fish, another of the many hats that you wear, and
another example bringing it back to the fact that the
totality of Grace Tane is not child sexual assault survivor
an incredible advocate. Despite that being a big part of
your life's work, there are so many other aspects to
who you are. You have passions and interest and parts

(15:11):
of the story we don't worry about, like how dares
she have a whole life? For example, your school years.
You know that's meant to be such a beautiful time
of self discovery and innocence that we know was devastatingly
torn away from you later in your school years. But
what about before then? In primary school? What was school

(15:33):
like for you? I think another thing you speak often
about is your neurodivergence and autism being diagnosed, actually not
until you were nineteen, but in hindsight, looking back at
the way that the school system is sometimes slanted towards
particular kinds of intelligence and can maybe not always be

(15:55):
conducive to neurodivergence students being able to flourish or understanding
that they are clever, particularly back in the nineties and
early two thousands. I'd love for you to explain to
anyone who doesn't maybe understand autism how it manifested for
you at that time, and what your experience was like

(16:16):
at school around then.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Before high school. I loved school. I loved school. It's
where I met my best friend who we're still best
friends today. His name is Don Cabella. Yes Tom, Yes,
the famous Dom and his family who are equally my friends.
They're a second family of mine. Not only did we
go to school together, but we lived close by. But yeah,

(16:40):
Dom and I met when we were bouth seven years
old with their grand friends. For over twenty three years,
we just sort of lived in our own oblivious world.
We were very carefree and still are able to communicate,
you know, not just in words, but in this sort
of spoken implicit language, and we made our way through

(17:06):
primary school being odd balls, but also being accepted. I mean,
I was the only girl on primary school soccer team,
and I was often, as a result, the only girl
invited to birthday parties, and I was not. As you know,
I knew that I was different in some ways, but

(17:26):
you know, when difference is celebrated, it's not a barrier.
That's how people react to that difference that actually makes it,
that takes it away from being it being a neutral
thing that actually enhances everyone's quality of life. I'm also
lucky to come from a very on my mother's side, especially,
but on my father's side as well. Interestingly, my parents

(17:48):
have been divorced since I was two. As I said,
but my father's sister is living with us at my
mother's place, which has sort of three units or connected.
There's a house, and then there's a unit next door
that I live in, and then underneath their houses.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
And wow, that's very tazzy.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yes, you know, everyone actually in Tasmanias related. My family
very very close and very supportive and very quirky, and
so I always felt like, you know, despite my difference,
as I fit in quite well. Although when I got
to high school. That was a different world that I
didn't quite belong what I felt like I belonged to

(18:28):
or in. And that was a world of you know,
tradition and status, and you know, it was an all
girls environment, which is, you know, not something that I
was accustomed to at a co ed school where not
only was I at a co ed school where that
was you know, that that sort of more natural mixing,
but I had been friends predominantly with men or boys.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
So interesting that in many different contexts of difference, that
primary school is often reflected on as a time where
kids don't really notice, you know, they're so young, they're
unconditioned by societal ideas as normality, like whether there's physical disabilities, neurodivergence, race.
I was, you know, one of the only Asians in

(19:12):
a very very white local primary school, but it just
wasn't necessarily noticed or a thing. And then high school
is this rude awakening for everyone where difference is suddenly
other and less than and yeah, it's quite a rude
shock to show.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
Humanity is many things, and it has its flaws, and
one of the biggest flaws, and we're seeing it play
out in the in the geopolitical climate right now. One
of its biggest flaws, it's discrimination, but that is concocted,
that's manufactured human beings. We ascribe meaning to things, whether

(19:48):
it's a person or you know, a material, a commodity.
We've created a whole system of value that reflects a
very narrow cohort, you know, And that's if we're being real.
It's the white supremacist hegemony, the sort of the colonial

(20:09):
imperial hegemony that has dimmed things to be of more
value than others.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
And I think that also manifests sometimes as a hierarchy
of intellect and the view that certain types of cleverness
are more valuable than others, which coming back to you
being undiagnosed until nineteen. I think many people do go
through the schooling system not knowing that they're clever because
they're differently clever, and that later diagnoses can be very

(20:39):
validating and a big relief. But for anyone who doesn't
know much about autism, can you explain how it manifested
or manifests for you and what it feels like. I've
read you describe it as you know, some people say
it's a superpower. I've read you say, it's not a superpower,
it's not less than it just is. So how would

(21:00):
you describe it to someone who didn't know much about it.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Autism is from birth to death. It's inherited. It's a
natural variation in the human genome that produces differences in
sensory processing, so processing stimuli that's both both coming in
and how things are communicated by other senses. And every

(21:24):
autistic person is different. That there tend to be that
there are some common traits. But you know, if you've
met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. I
don't think I was ever consciously until I was nineteen,
or actually even later. It's been in recent years. It's
probably been in the past three to four years that

(21:45):
I have consciously sought out and digested information about autism
that has been very useful. Prior to that, however, throughout
my life there were obvious science that I was autistic.
My mum, when I was three years old, took me
to hearing specialist because you thought I was deaf. It's
not that I'm deaf, it's that I can't filter out

(22:05):
background noises, which is something that autistic people often experience.
Not autistic people have auditory processing disorder, but many people
who are audistic. To many autistic people are highly sensitive
to humming noises or mechanical noises, so things like aeroplanes,
vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, hand dryers, and that was a

(22:28):
big red flag in my case. I was a very otherwise,
very placid baby. I didn't cry a lot. I would,
you know, if I woke up in the morning before
everyone else, which is obviously infants often do, I would
lie in my bassinet and I wouldn't cry. I wouldn't
or be in distress. I would actually self soothe again
another autistic common autistic trade. Self soothed by clicking my tongue.

(22:53):
But if I was taken into a public restroom, that's
when I screamed, and it was quite jarring, I think
for my mother. But it was because of the sound
of the hand dryer. Oh my gosh. I didn't use
a hand dryer until I was in the eighth grade,
when my friend Gillian, who I'm still friends with today,

(23:14):
believe it or not, after this story, she forced me
by exposure therapy. I think that was the that was
the strategy she forced me to use a hand dryer.
But I like, I don't use them, and I also
don't like I will just shake my hands dry, or
much to my mother's discussed, I'll just wipe my wet

(23:35):
hands away.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
I don't think that's limited to autism, though, I feel
like a lot of us do that.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
You know. I try to be I try to be
as environmentally conscious as I as I possibly can living
in the world that we do. But I also don't
like the texture of hand towels that pay the hand
towels so that I, yeah, it's wet hands for me
when I come out of the hot We love that. Yeah, hot,

(24:01):
we're hands wow. Okay. I mean just like things like
my ability to retain information and not necessarily consequential information either,
just like useless trivia, birth dates, numbers, that sort of thing.
I've had previous partners of mine joke about, you know,

(24:22):
you know, don't get an argument with her actually remembers everything.
It's interesting because my my, my thought patterns, my speech
are often tangentile, but it's never because there are gaps.
It's that there's almost an excess of information that's all
competing to get out at the same time, and also
a fundamental understanding that many things that I'm speaking about

(24:43):
are either directly or indirectly linked. And so there's sort
of like curvey linear kind of tumbleweed of ideas in
my brain going at any one time.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
And yet every time I hear you speak, it sounds
like you must be doing an incredible amount of work
to rain in the tangents, because you always speak in
such an organized, orderly fashion.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
That blows my mind. That blows you do.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Though it's wild, And so I think about I often
think about what it must take certain brains to get
to neutral before they can do what the average brain
is doing. And so to know how your brain, by
default is doing this tangent thing, I'm like, oh, my goodness,
you are extraordinary to channel it constantly into the articulate,

(25:34):
orderly wording that you come out with.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
I have several analogies for the way that I see
my brain working and trying to harness specific ideas and
communicate them chronologically or as you see in it, in
a quote unquote organized fashion, which again that to me
blows my mind, because I always feel like it's very
not so much chaotic, but not necessarily ordered correctly. And

(26:01):
one of the analogies is it's her fishing analogy, which
is odd because I'm not a huge fisherman. Oh two
hour earlier point, I'm actually a fish. But I like
in my brain's containment of several ideas on different tracks,
as being like a charter boat with lots of different

(26:22):
rods and there's a tuna working on every single rod,
you know. I don't know, there might be like five
or ten rods with tunas hooked, and I'm trying to
just reel them in one at a time, you know.
And I'm reminding myself while I'm speaking often to large
crowds or in interviews, I mean, just just one, one

(26:45):
thing at a time, don't jump ahead, you know, because
you lose your grip.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Well, that's more fishing analogies than I was expecting today,
But at least from the outside, it's extraordinary that you
have such an ability to articulate what you're thinking, especially
if behind the scenes there's all this action with the
fishing rods going on, because you do always seem so
composed and eloquent, which brings me to the chapter of
your life that you do speak about so vulnerably and eloquently,

(27:14):
and one that we mentioned earlier, is of course not
the future or direction that you had dreamed of for yourself,
but that you have embraced is probably not the right word,
but used as a platform to become a powerful advocate
for child sexual abuse survivors. You've changed the law in
this area, and you've changed many lives at great cost

(27:37):
to yourself. In revisiting this traumatic time of your life
as a survivor of child sexual abuse from the age
of fifteen at the hands of your fifty eight year
old teacher. That is unthinkable to most people in their world.
But the more we speak about things like the process
of grooming, the more people can understand what to look
for and perhaps how to prevent this happening in the future. So,

(28:00):
as much as you are comfortable with sharing today, can
you tell us a bit about this time of your life.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
First of all, I just want to qualify that I
I haven't done any of this alone. I'm very fortunate,
and I think it's actually my greatest privilege, as I've mentioned,
to be surrounded by very loving, very caring, very attentive family,
in particular my mother, who one of my greatest advocates,

(28:31):
and my close friends who are like my family and
have never judged or faulted from the solid position of
backing me up. I just want to explain, you know,
child sexual abuse for audiences, the reason why it's wrong.
It's not just you know, socially stigmatized, but it's wrong biologically.

(28:53):
And again, it's not just wrong legally, it's wrong biologically
because in every case of an adult offender abusing a
child victim, that adult is exploiting the incapacity of a child.
They're not socially developed, neurologically developed, or physically developed in

(29:14):
the way that an adult is, and therefore they do
not have the same capacity to even understand what is
happening to them, and that as a result of that,
there is a delay often in a child realizing the
extent of the harm that they have endured and then

(29:34):
being able to communicate that. That's not to say that
you don't actually you carry it at the cellular level,
because it does cause because it's brain damage. Your neural
pathways are altered by especially prolonged child sexual abuse, which
involves a deliberately warped system of punishment and reward, wherein

(29:57):
the offender will praise and gift a child if the
child behaves in accordance with what the offender wants, but
then by the same token the child will be threatened
or physically assaulted. Obviously there's the actual sexual abuse as well,

(30:18):
which you know it is awful. You know, in various
ways those sort of methods of control reinforce in the
child's mind through open being, recircuitry reinforces are very warped, dynamic.
It's taken me a long time to actually accept how

(30:38):
sadistic it was. I think that's one of one of
the things that's been hardest in hindsight, and it's been
through doing a lot of research actually and through having
conversations with others who upon hearing what happened to me,
which often I will speak about in quite a matter
of fact way, because once you want to and something,

(31:00):
you do actually take the sting out of it, the
emotion out of it. And if you want to change anything,
I think first you have to understand it. You have
to know what you're dealing with before you seek to
alter it and prevent it. In the case of child
sexually is what we want to do, is we want
to prevent it. My first experience of child Secuviies was
actually in the home. I was six years old and
older male child from my extended family offended against me

(31:26):
and some other children in my family. And at that
time I certainly didn't understand that what happened was wrong.
It was framed by this older male child as a
game and is often the case, you know, with offenders.
You know, you do have children who engage in harmful
sexual behaviors with other children. That's very common and not

(31:47):
something that we speak about often enough. And well there's
not adequate funding for the services that exist that can
help in those circumstances. But yeah, my first experience, I
was six years old, didn't disclose to anyone because I
didn't think there was anything to you disclose until I
was about ten years old, when I was just essentially
recounting a memory and experience with another of my cousin's

(32:08):
female cousin who she was five years older than me,
and she was quite distressed and told me that I
sh should tell my mother, and I told my mother
around that time. But again, even at ten years old,
the gravity of it had not occurred to me, and
it wasn't until I was in high school. In my

(32:30):
early teens, and we were learning about sex education, learning
about sex and the concept of incest briefly plopped up
and that shocked me. It also, I think had an
effect on well, I know that it had an impact
on another one of my cousins who was also abused,

(32:52):
and the female cousin and I we had lots of
discussions about that is I think one of the reasons
why her and I both engaged in some self harming behaviors.
I really struggled with annarexia at that point in my life,
and that's where my experience of feeling very different and

(33:14):
feeling very isolated, I think became the most prominent, the
most clear. I actually disclosed to one of one of
my teachers that I had been offended against as a child.
I described exactly what happened that I was asked by
this older male child to undress in a closet before

(33:36):
he sat me down on my bed and molested me
and encouraged me to touch him as well in a
sexual way, and this teacher sat on it for a while.
I didn't know that this teacher had a history of
grooming and sexually abusing girls, and he used that information

(34:00):
as well as other information that he procured from me
about other family instability and other traumas, other things that
made me particularly vulnerable. Obviously for reasons I've stated, all
children are vulnerable. They're still developing socially, they're still developing biologically.
And then to introduce the contact defending of me, which

(34:21):
eventuated a few months later, he requested that I stay
back after school and he led me to a deserted
classroom in the science block after everyone had left, and
it was dark. It was winter at this point. And
what did he do. He requested me to undress in

(34:43):
a janitor's closet, so he actually recreated step by step
the abuse that I had disclosed at months earlier, which
again highlights the saddism that underpinned a lot of what
this adult of and then did. It's interesting because I've seen,

(35:05):
you know, and we do see in the media child
sexual abuse. And I don't just mean in print media,
but I mean in content like films, and when we're
talking about pornography and child sexual abuse, material incest is
the most highly sought after and readily available. It's the
most prevalent form of both of those things. Of both
pornography and child exploitation material, so it's quite embedded in

(35:28):
our culture. And because of that, there are lots of
false narratives about child sexual abuse. You know, you know,
young girls are provocative and they want it, and that
it's the ultimate fantasy for a young boy to be
you know, groomed and have sexual contact with an older female.
In many cases, it's it is very complicated because offenders

(35:51):
will in order to maintain control over their over their victim,
just like they're able to coerce, you know, everyone around them.
It's not obvious violence always in some cases it is,
but that is often cushioned or couched in as I mentioned,
like gift giving and praise and special attention, which is

(36:16):
very hard for a child to compartmentalize. However, to try
to explain to you. And it's sad because I thought
this was normal. I mean, I remember being quite shocked
after the abuse when I started dating a lovely man
who I'm still friends with today. This was years after

(36:38):
the abuse, but I was confronted by having intercourse in
a bed because the majority of the rapes occurred on
the floor of my maths teacher's office, and I had
never experienced an orgasm. I didn't actually experience an orgasm
until I was in my mid twenties, which is, you know,

(37:00):
ten years. I mean, that's sooner than many people who
experienced child sexual abuse. I had nerve and tissue damage
to my vagina. It was very painful for me. But
again I thought that that's what I was like, Oh,
this is what this is is supposed to feel like.
Sex is supposed to be very painful. And you know,
I did self harm during the abuse. I would go
home and I'd be, you know, massive tears. I'd be

(37:22):
so confused because again, you know this this teacher would
he would give me that special attention. But the sexual
element I was very confused by and uncomfortable with, but
unable to say that because I was at the end
of the day, I was afraid of him. You know,
he was six foot two. Before he was a teacher,
he was a soldier. He fought in the Civil War

(37:43):
in mozambiquees from South Africa, and he was known widely
known throughout the school as being quite provocative and racist
and homophobic and sexist. And it was such that, you know,
and this had happened over time, I think, you know,
I later found doubt that he you know, he very
difficult for the staff, for the administration. By the way

(38:04):
that we saw it as kids is that he was
you know that everyone just accepted that he was. He
was like that, and everyone laughed it off because over time,
insidiously he had groomed and desensitized. He desensitized the entire environment.
And that's what offenders do. They consciously and in a
very calculated way, groom the entire environment such that abuse

(38:28):
can happen in plain sight or at least it's normalized
or people look the other way, because such a pattern
ends up disarming people. Because you learn over a period
of time, through there being specific consequences for specific things,
you learn that the safest path or the easiest path

(38:51):
is the part of least resistance. So, for example, some
of the if you want to call it coercive workplace
coercive control or workplace grooming that was perpetrated by this offender.
Often he would make racist remarks, and this is documented
in the principles statement to police that was made after

(39:11):
rite Rudfield what had happened. It was documented that he
would make racist remarks or sexist remarks in front of
large audiences. Mind you, and often staff or even parents
or students would make a complaint and that complaint would
be presented to him, and his response would be to
flip the script, to deny what he had done, and

(39:34):
then to make himself a victim and turn up to
the school with his lawyer or threatened aggrievance. And that created,
over time an environment where everyone preferred not to resist
him because he would make it so difficult if they did,
And that meant that in the end, the things that

(39:56):
he was able to get away with were criminal and
affected men. Children.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
I mean, Grace, thank you so much for continuing to
share your story. I'm sure it is never an easy
thing or place to revisit, but doing so has exposed
and helped educate so many people on I mean, I
have learned so much about grooming and the psychology. I

(40:25):
think that the long game of psychological weaponizing that can happen,
and why it can take victims so long to speak up.
You don't understand that from the outside. Often how people
don't immediately know that it's wrong or yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Meant to be invisible and it's meant to be untraceable.
There are material signs of grooming like for example, this
man groomed me online as well as in person, and
communicated with me organized abuse online in chats and things
like that. So there was material eviden that was relevant
to the case. And he'd also solicited self produced child

(41:06):
exploitation material from me, so I had upon his request,
I had, you know, and he asked me, had to
ask me a couple of times. So again there was
that coercive element. But he coerced from me a naked sketch.
It wasn't actually of me. I didn't draw myself naked.
I actually, as an artist, had lots of books that
featured new drawings, and I copied one from a book

(41:28):
and I didn't even draw a head on this sketch.
I think it's somewhere. I think I've got it somewhere, sadly,
because the police gave me back some things that they
realized must have been mine. And I'll just say as
well for anyone listening, that as much as twelve percent
of child sexual abuse material is self produced by children
who've been coerced by offenders to take picture of them

(41:48):
of themselves or film themselves with seeing an upward trended
live streamed child sexual abuse material because now we have
these portals that give offenders instantaneous access to a whole
world of victims who might not understand that they're speaking
to an adult on the other side of the forum,

(42:09):
and it might be a computer game or something like that,
something that can also you said, you know, the long
game of child's actually abuse preparation. You know, through that
psychological grooming of not just the victims and the victims networks,
but the entire community on the scene. It can also
happen over a short period of time, especially just because

(42:30):
children are so susceptible and when we look at biologically
what childhood is, it is that process of integrating experiences
and lessons taught to us by our adult caregivers who
are supposed to model behavior and attitudes. So if you
are targeted by and deliberately isolated by an offender, even

(42:51):
in a short period of time, if they provide a
need that is otherwise not being provided, a missing need
to a child, that child is probably going to quickly
attach and defer to that adult caregiver. So again, it
can happen over a short period of time. But yes,
the grooming of the environment does tend to take longer.
It takes longer for that to really be an impenetrable

(43:15):
regime of control where all the conditions are set by
and dictated by the offender at the head of that regime.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Oh my gosh, Grace, it is so confronting and devastating
to think about the level of manipulation of such an undeveloped,
naive young brain by an adult who is supposed to
be a caregiver, and unimaginable. How confusing as a child
that must have been, and the work you must have

(43:45):
done to be able to now tease that out. Looking
back at that time.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
There's that cognitive dissonance, and again that's so hard to
tease apart. As a child, you just don't have the
neural architecture to understand something so complex. And as a child,
what's more important to you is that illusion of being
safe and being careful. That's how we survive is through

(44:11):
stories that we tell ourselves that we are loved, you know,
because what's the alternative accepting that we're being harmed by
someone who doesn't care about us. That's very hard to
live with.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
And I think one thing that's been extraordinary about your
journey is that you have been unraveling all of this.
I think you worded it in the book that all
of your firsts of having these realizations learning more about
what happened to you teasing out. Now that you are
older and do have the neural architecture to understand these

(44:46):
complex power dynamics and psychology, You've done it in public.
You've been experiencing all these revelations in public.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, it's been a messy and unlinear process for sure. Well, because,
as I said so, if we think about the human
brain and its development, that development tends to continue until
about the age of twenty five, and one of the
last regions of the brain to finish development is the

(45:16):
prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and judgment.
When I was named Australian of the Year, when I
was thrust onto a very big platform, I had some
exposure prior to that, but on a small scale. The
large scale exposure that was overnight came when I was
all of twenty six years old. I just had my

(45:36):
twenty sixth birthday less than a month before. I was
also very unwell. I was in the middle of at
that point about two year relapse of anorexia that had
caused a mean area. I hadn't menstruated for two years.
I was about forty five kilos. I was running obsessively,
which at that time was like a shield for that trauma,

(45:58):
for that disordered eating, which was definitely directly linked to
the traumas plural I had experienced in childhood. And so
there was this bizarre, unprecedented and very unnatural phenomenon wherein
I was processing my childhood trauma finally to the extent
that an adult brain allowed, and I was doing that

(46:22):
while under intense multidirectional public and media scrutiny.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
It actually defies belief.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
No guidebook for that experience.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
You're the only one who could write one if there were.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
By nature, it's so unpredictable. I found myself on live
television being asked questions, often in good faith, sometimes not.
But I'd be asked a question and it would recontextualize
my own experience in a way that I was actually
able to see or break through a particular barrier and

(47:01):
then have to sort of formulate a response live on national.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
It's almost laughable. I mean it's not funny, but it's
almost You have to just hysterical.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
You absolutely have to laugh again. Because I had had
a full life before that, and a very eclectic life.
I'd experienced domestic violence as well. I was in an
abusive relationship, and you know, I'd been spat on, and
I had lived with someone who used to punch holes
in the walls of the apartment, but who was also
a very traumatized child. And I think that's a very

(47:31):
different it's a different issue that we need to treat differently.
But I guess the point that I'm trying to make
is that my life was very full, and it was
also very intense, and so it was just another layer
of intensity. I think, you know, I perversely, the turbulence
and unpredictability of my life prior to the Australian of
the era A would prepared me very well for the

(47:54):
turbulence and unpredictable that issued.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
I'm quite speechless about how you have weathered the storm,
and this being a podcast at its heart about joy,
it is so.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Inspiring and.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Well unique for sure, but hopefully even reassuring for anyone
listening who is in the depths of their own traumatic chapter.
Your capacity to still feel joy and to make your
way back to lightness and humor and love. I mean
one thing that shines through so much on your socials
that I love your birthday dedications to the people around you,

(48:35):
Like I don't even know any of these people, but
I just read them and think what a legend. Like
I want to be their friend.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
I should be a professional eulogist. Literally, you can.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Write mine now and I'll save it for later. But
I mean, your capacity to have experienced this in your lifetime,
in your like still quite short lifetime so far, and
still be able to find the good in the moments
in betwe is truly extraordinary.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
That's my default. My default is to find joy and
where I can't find joys to make it. Oh.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
I love that so much. But it is so unique
in such a short time for you to have reached
that place. And one of the statistics that shocked me
was the time it usually takes to report sexual offenses.
I can't remember if the statistic was child sexual offenses
or or.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Not, but it was, Yeah, it was twenty three point
nine years until.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
Twenty three point nine.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
But a lot of that is to do with the
biological lag that I mentioned before, as well as this
social shame and the internal shame, because shame is the
is the key weapon that an offender uses to underpin
their grooming. It's guilt, its stigma. Those are the main

(49:52):
drivers as well as that delayed realization of actually what
happened was not not that I think there's anything as
such normal, but oh yeah, the realization of, oh that
was harmful. That was a harmful thing that I experienced
that has affected my brain, my ability to function.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
And you've mentioned before the especially in the case of children,
because you are so sexually underdeveloped, when it happens that
the conflation of pleasure and consent at a time where
your body is betraying you, but the offenders are weaponizing
that body against you, is that a great source of
shame when you do first start talking publicly.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah. So this is a really really crucial part of
the dialogue, and it's a nuance that is poorly understood
and a particular piece that is used against children. And
I think this is a great opportunity to sort of
break this down and there's a lot of research out there.
I'll give the chair of the Grace Taine Foundation a plug.
His name is Professor Mike Salter. He works at the

(50:58):
University of New South Wales. He's a criminologist and he
specializes in child sexual abuse, child exploitation, material and other
forms of violence. The conflation of arousal and consent is
something that is very much propped up by the child
sex offender base. It is important to make the distinction

(51:20):
between giving your full consent, your enthusiastic consent to something,
and being sexually aroused, which can happen by force. If
you touch genitalia. It's the most sensitive part of the body,
your oroginous zones, your genitalia, and so they can easily

(51:44):
be stimulated in a manufactured way. As an adult, you
can discern between, oh, that's just those body parts being activated,
but I don't actually want that, whereas a child will
feel those feelings that are very new to them and
they feel good. Do you feel excitement, You feel you know, adrenaline,
and your thought is, oh, well, this is this is

(52:06):
a good a good thing, and it gets doubly shameful
if you are brought to orgasm. I am very grateful
that I was Actually I was never brought to orgasm,
and I think a lot of that is because it
was actually so painful. The penetration. There was a size difference.
I won't need to elaborate on that. I had vaginiusiness,

(52:29):
which is where the vagina just essentially is like shut
up shop. It's like, no, no customers today, thank you
very much. I don't want anybody here. Like yeah, So
I had I had that experience. I was confused by
the attention, you know, and I'm not ashamed to admit
that that that. You know, this was somebody who who

(52:51):
saw that there was a gap there in undivided attention
and consistency because you know, from the age of two,
my parents were separated. They both remarried, you know, they
both loved me, but there was no consistency in my life. Again,
I was also different. I survived at the ald Girls
High School because I had a sense of humor and

(53:12):
I was definitely considered to be a class clown. And
I did have some great, solid friendships back then. Again
my friend Jillian, who forced me to use a handwrap,
good old Jillian because they were saying the performing arts school,
and my friend my friend Gabby and Emily and later
my friend Georgie who was in grade above me. We've

(53:32):
become almost inseparable. I had some good friendships, but I'm
very grateful for But there were gaps. There were gaps,
and those were exploitant and widened by my math teacher.
You know, he deliberately undermined those relationships. He would degrade
my mother. He would say things because my mother felt
pregnant when I was in grade nine and gave birth

(53:54):
to my baby brother right when the abuse started, and
so there was that as well. Is that, you know,
my stepped dad was working a very stressful job. That
meant that he was just often distracted until midnight and
a lot of nights, and my mother was at forty
five years old, caring for an infant. And at that

(54:14):
point is why I stopped living with my father. So
I was living in the one for the first time
in my life. I was living in the one household.
But there was so much going on that this is
what offenders do. They're they're very deliberate in their choices. So,
you know, whilst there are offenders who are opportunities seek
a lot of offenders will It's not just opportunism, it's

(54:35):
crafting an environment to offend.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
I'm so grateful for how open you are in explaining
the complexity and nuance in this area because for so
many it is such an unfamiliar territory. And yet you know,
many of us are parents or friends and want to
look out for the signs of grooming. And I think
about young impression Grace with her life ahead of her,

(55:01):
and just what to cry thinking of? You know, what
ended up derailing so much of your youth and as
we've mentioned, thrust you onto a pathway that you never chose.
And I mean you even had to leave the country
and finish school in the States. And I think for
a lot of people who experience such a dramatic life

(55:23):
altering trauma, there is some sense of a parallel life
and lamenting the person you would have become or could
have become. Do you ever think about who you might
have been?

Speaker 2 (55:37):
No, he doesn't deserve that credit. You know. I still
am me. Yeah, I'm still may. I have a few
dings and dense he scribbles. Literally, I've got some yanky tattoos,
which yanky.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
I love that, you know.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
I've got big scars. I've got myself and there was
another child present during the abuse that I experienced, and
we both have matching scars on our thigh that says,
fuck that we carved with a kitchen knife. Again, you
gotta laugh. I did have laser removal to reduce the scarring.
It's still visible, but I do remember the doctor looking

(56:16):
at it and just saying, well, at least just spelt
it right, ye, silver lining. I've got scarring keyloid scarring
that has, as I said, has been reduced with my
arms and legs. And I have tattoos that I got,
I would say impulsively my late teens and early twenties

(56:37):
that I then tried to remove through more laser. And
I got to a point of self acceptance realizing that
it doesn't matter, you know, as long as as long
as the machine is healthy inside and functioning optimally. I
think that's the most important thing. And also you realize,

(56:58):
and a lot of this just comes with age, think,
but you realize that those who are judging you for
those superficial exterior factors are not worth keeping in your life.
You know what matters most of all of the sort
of the spiritual connections that you make. I think the
memories that you that you make with those spiritual connections

(57:19):
that you forged. Life never pans out the way you
imagine it for better or for worse, you know, expectations
have never met exactly and being okay with that, being
okay with not knowing some things that are inherently unanswerable.
And I certainly couldn't answer where my life could have

(57:43):
or should have would have gone had certain things not happened.
And I think when you start to play that game
as well, it's very hard to draw distinct boundaries. You know,
if you remove one part or you alter one part
of a trajectory, where does that end? Because that ultimately
will feed into or lead into another event that probably

(58:07):
wouldn't have taken like I wouldn't have been I don't
think I would have been named Australian of the Year
for the work that I continue to do had the
abuse not happened. And again that's not a credit to
that man who is responsible for the abuse. I and
the people around me who supported me deserve credit for

(58:29):
how we all as a team responded to what happened
to us, you know, because it had a huge effect
on my family as well as well as the institutions.
And that's massives. I don't like to entertain that. I
like to think about, well, what things do I have
control over how can I manage what has happened? And

(58:51):
what can I do? How can I move forward? What's next?

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Again, the strength of your mindset just blows me away
in the face of such unimaginable adversity. And you have
moved forward so powerfully with everything that came next with
the let Her Speak campaign in your role as Australian
of the Year, that being the whirlwind that it was,
and yet you rose to the challenge so beautifully. And

(59:16):
now of course with the Grace Tame Foundation, continuing to
devote yourself passionately to cultural and structural change to eradicate
sexual abuse of children. And we talk a lot on
the show about people's relationship to the concepts of success
versus fulfillment versus joy in their life path. And again
that's an area where yours is so unique. So how

(59:41):
do you feel about the work that you do now
with the Grace Tame Foundation. How do you measure your success?
And that it does sort of take such a sacrifice
in sharing your own story and revisiting a painful time
in your life to generate that change.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
Success is largely a feeling. There are men you know
and we do live in a capitalist world where we're
obsessed with like, well, you know, is there a dollar
figure that this success translates into her? Is there? Or
is there an other kind of like measurement where we
can prove with statistics that this is a successful thing.
There's also a type of success that is incredibly powerful,

(01:00:18):
and that is when you are able to experience a
connection with a human being who has been impacted by
a positive change and they actually are able to give
a story to that of how they've evolved from a
place of pain to a place of ongoing healing or

(01:00:40):
pain management. And before I had a big public platform
and was working with Nina Fanell, who created and continues
to run the hashtag let her Speak and let Us
Speak campaigns. She's an investigative journalist. You know. When I
was working with her back in twenty seventeen, in the
early days, I was connected with an odd advocate in

(01:01:01):
Tasmania by the name of Steve Fisher, who just got
married in December and I was the best man at
his wedding. He's a survivor of child sexual abuse. He
was abused by a priest when he was a child,
and in two thousand and one he became the first
Tasmanian survivor of child sexual abuse to speak publicly under

(01:01:21):
his own name about his experiences because he was given
he was awarded a court order that meant he got
an exemption to the legislation that previously existed in Tasmania
to prevent or to make it illegal for survivors of
child sexual abuse to self identify and tell their experiences
on their terms. So I was connected with Steve Fisher,
and the impact that Steve had on me was profound

(01:01:46):
and not able to be quantified. Although we were different
in age and had different individual experiences of child sexual abuse,
there were some common patterns and I felt so seen
and so understood, and the valley of that propelled me forward.
And then I have been privileged enough to have direct

(01:02:08):
experiences with people who have been impacted by the work
that we have done since then, and it becomes a
domino effect of positive change making that connects with people
at that individual level, that of course then becomes a
societal change. Like I said, I'm very lucky that people
are connecting with the work that we're doing and that

(01:02:30):
they share that with me. The people that come up
to me in person and are often in tears. It's
not about me, like we're both We're actually both equal
in that situation because we have an understanding of a
trauma that previously isolated us and previously we internalized, and
now we're actually able to get it out of our
system and it has less of a negative effect on us,

(01:02:52):
it has less of a defining, limiting effect on us
when we're able to xpiate that trauma, get that out
and and start working on ways to deal with it properly.
And yeah, I think, I think that's a phenomenally beautiful thing.
And also the more we do that, the more we
bring things like child sexual abuse and the grooming that

(01:03:12):
belies it out into the open and we start to
understand it and we start to create preventions, and interventions
will reduce the prevalence of it and there'll be less
of a need for mass public disclosure.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
Well, your continued openness and including in this episode has
taught me and I hope some of our listeners so
much about navigating the nuances and complexity of child sexual
abuse and the reality is it does happen, and of
course no one expects it will happen to them or
around them, but I mean even the case of being

(01:03:50):
on the other end of a disclosure. Most people aren't
ready for that or know, you know, what to do.
So perhaps in that area, if anyone does end up
the situation, do you have any advice on how to
be you know, a safe place if it does arise.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
You don't necessarily have to know the exact right thing
to say to someone if they disclose to you. I
think there are key messages to try to communicate as
best you can. You know, like, you know, it's not
your fault is number one, it's not your fault what
happened to you. But also you know, like I support
you or I'll support you to the best of my ability,

(01:04:28):
and I believe you, you know, especially if it's a
child disclosing child sexual abuse. For reasons we've covered. You know,
children don't have the they don't have the neural capacity
to construct complex lies. So child's disclosing something as advanced
as child sexual abuse, give them an audience and give

(01:04:49):
them your compassion. But yeah, I know, when it comes
to communicating that information to audiences about these sorts of things,
there's often some sort of penny drop moments and breakthroughs
that that happened because there's a permission giving someone else
tosses aside their shame. What that does is allow other

(01:05:10):
people to feel emboldened to toss aside their shame as well,
whatever that shame looks like, and whatever the source of
that shame may be.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Well, you continue to embolden perhaps an entire nation to
confront and start to heal from their shame by doing
the work that you do.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
And I'm one star in a constellation.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
And the humility, but the work you are doing is
truly extraordinary. You are I mean, I was all struck
before we began, and I continue to be of everything
that you do and the lightness that you still bring
to life in light of everything that has come your way.
So I'm so grateful to have had any of your
time amidst all of the different things that are competing
for your time and attention. But I would love to

(01:05:54):
just finish on some of those lighter points as much
as I could talk to you for hours and hours
and hours in amongst all of the heavy and consuming
work that you do that does have such a personal
element to it. How do you find the lightness and
enjoy do you? Binge watch TV I know you love

(01:06:14):
John lecare novel, which I also love. We have an
intelligence officer coming onto the show next week, Spices Babe,
such a spy that their voice has to be obscured,
Like I am going to Asia. I am so excited.
If I disappear, you'll know where I went. What do
you enjoy? You know, do you binge TV?

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
How do you enjoy your downtime? If you actually allow
yourself any Very.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):
Rarely do I binge watch TV. I voraciously consume books.
I love reading, and I love reading nonfiction because I
like there to be a learning or multiple learning, several
learnings from a text. And I love running, running with people,
running by myself, running on the roads, running on trails.

(01:07:03):
That's a core part of who I am as a person.
And I think it's a great metaphor for life. You know,
you know, it's sort of dichotomous elements where it's you know,
it's a beautiful thing, but it can also get really
ugly at times and be really difficult. But it's a
proven treatment for complex post traumatic stress disorder and other things.
You know, it helps you regulate your emotions and it

(01:07:24):
increases the functionality of all of your energy systems and
spending time with loved ones. You know, when I'm in
Tasmania and not traveling as I often do, I see
my best friend Dom and his family. We have a
dinner either on a Friday or Saturday night, and we
just get together and laugh and cook delicious food.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
And yeah, oh that's beautiful. And your relationship with Dom
sounds so special. I know at this point after it
a million times, but your capacity to find joy in
life and to love those around you so deeply despite
the cruelty that you've seen of humanity is extraordinary, and
the work you do equally extraordinary. Knowing how busy you are,

(01:08:08):
I'm aware I've taken up so much of your time
away from that work. So I will end this there,
but just so very grateful for your time and openness
today and in awe still of everything you do. So
thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Thank you very much for saying that it's all in
the eye of the beholder. But I really appreciate the
time to speak about some of these topics that need
to be shared far and wide. And yeah, also a
fan of yours, So keep up the good work and
the joy. Oh that is very kind of you.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
We will include links to the foundation, to your page,
to all the resources, and also of course to Lifeline,
which I know you've actually spoken at length about what
a wonderful resource Lifeline is, so we will include links.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
It's great, it's the services exist for a reason.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Absolutely so thank you so much, Grace.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
No worries at all. It was great to say see
you again, albeit on the computer.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
Oh again. I have no words but to express my
gratitude for and or over this incredible woman, her openness
and her strength. If there is discomfort in confronting the
topic of child sexual abuse as an objective observer, it's
just unimaginable for her to have been a victim, a
survivor and then continue to revisit that time of your

(01:09:24):
life so that it may be better understood and prevented
for others. If you were as moved as I am
by Grace and her work, please do share the episode
tagging at Tamepunk to thank her for her vulnerability and time.
Of course, I'll include links to the Grace Tame Foundation,
Lifeline and other resources for support in the show notes.

(01:09:46):
And if you have found anything in this episode distressing
in any way, never hesitate to reach out for help.
It is a sign of strength and as Grace says,
the resources are there for a reason. In the meantime,
I hope you're all looking after yourselves and each other,
and we will be back soon with the next installment
of Yay