First Published: Womens Agenda 24 Jun 2025
Throughout my more than 30-year career in the Australian Defence Force, the recurring questions have lingered: Can women really serve in combat? Can they carry a pack? Can they drag a teammate to safety under fire?
These questions have, for as long as I can recall, been spoken loudly in public forums and whispered quietly in corridors.
The truth is, I’ve carried many different packs. Some heavy with ammunition, rations, and gear. Others, heavier still, filled with the unseen weight of silence, harassment, betrayal, and responsibility. Not all packs weigh the same, nor can they be easily emptied. And for women in the military, some are carried forever.
During my period of service, I have been located on operational bases, in war zones, on exercises, in headquarters, within the United Nations, within the walls of defence reform, and now as an advocate for veterans. I am a mother, wife, leader, friend and veteran. But most enduringly, I am a woman who spent her adult life inside systems never truly designed for us.
The military taught me how to lead with discipline, how to act with purpose, and how to adapt and overcome. It also taught me something else: silence.
As a woman in uniform, I learned quickly that speaking up, especially about harm committed within the ranks, was dangerous. And as I rose in rank and responsibility, the line I walked became razor thin. As the inaugural Gender Advisor to the Chief of Air Force, Defence’s Director of Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and later a Strategic Military Advisor to the UN, I became one of the women my sisters in arms came to when things went wrong.
They came with stories of sexual assault, harassment, bullying, silencing, gaslighting, medical neglect, and mental health crises. Some were formally reported. Others never could be. Some of these experiences were turned back on the victim and shaped into weapons that destroyed lives, families and careers.
They came to me because they thought I could help. That I might assist in making it right. That I would believe them. And I did. I always did.
I was not their manager or commander. I was their confidant, someone they could trust when they didn’t feel safe going through official channels. I carried their stories not with authority, but with responsibility. I listened. I offered counsel. I laid out options. And I sat with them as they weighed the risks, most often concluding that the potential damage to their reputation, their mental health and future career felt too high. For many, reporting was not a safe option. The system, they feared, would not protect them.
But belief is not enough when the system demands proof that is rarely accessible and offers protection that rarely holds, often affording more protection to the perpetrator than the victim.
I carry those stories, entrusted to me by women from Baghdad to Canberra, whispered on deployments, shared behind closed doors at training bases, spoken in fragile voices across conference tables in the United Nations. I carry them still. They haunt me not just for what happened, but for what didn’t. Because too often, I knew the truth: the system would not protect them. And I could not lie.
What do you say to someone who asks, “Should I report?” when you know the process will retraumatise them? When you know the burden of justice will fall on her, and the shield of protection will fall over the perpetrator.
Even harder, perhaps, is the silence I’ve maintained about my own experiences. I have never publicly spoken of them. Never confided in someone senior. Never sought redress. Not because it didn’t matter. But because I knew the cost, to my credibility, my career, my sense of control, would be too high.
So, I bore witness to others’ pain while swallowing my own. Conflicted and feeling like a fraud.
That is the double burden of leadership as a woman in defence. You are asked to uphold and support a system that harms you, and many others, while trying to reform it from within. We are told we must work with the system to change it. But at what cost?
What does it do to a person to be trusted with truth, only to be part of its betrayal?
For years, I believed in reform. I wrote policies, strategies, and action plans. I trained gender advisors and in various roles worked with Defence and the UN to develop programs. I believed we could shift culture through structure. But what I’ve come to realise, painfully, is that culture doesn’t change because a framework, strategy or policy was approved. It changes when leaders act with courage, when principles are not compromised for comfort, and when accountability is real.
They ask if women can drag a teammate to safety under fire, as if that’s the ultimate proof of our right to serve. But what happens when it’s a woman under fire, not from an enemy combatant, but from harassment, abuse, or institutional neglect? Where is the team then helping them find safety? Too often, we are not the ones being dragged to safety, we are the ones left behind. The battlefield is no longer just physical. It’s psychological. It’s systemic. And when the enemy is inside the wire, we don’t call it combat, we call it “culture.”
I have watched women fight for their dignity, their health, and their careers while the system that promised to protect them looked away. And I’ve stood with them, knowing full well that we were asking women not only to serve but to survive two wars: one on the field, and one within our own changerooms.
We do not need more reviews, cultural change programs or champions. We need leadership rooted in integrity, not reputation. We need systems that prioritise the safety of individuals over the protection of institutions. We need leaders who are not only brave enough to listen, but brave enough to act.
Exceptionalising or ‘fixing’ women is not the answer. Too often, the focus of reform lands on women themselves. How to make them more resilient, more ready, more able to thrive in an unchanged environment. This misdirected approach pathologises women instead of addressing the deep structural failures of the institution. It asks those already carrying the pack to grab more and add to the weight.
We must reframe the centre of gravity in reform. It must begin with leadership underpinned by the moral courage to act. It must be upheld by accountability. Without these, change remains cosmetic.
And the costs of this failure are devastating:
- Women veterans are twice as likely to die by suicide compared to civilian women.
- Those who are medically discharged are nearly five times more likely to die by suicide than women who have never served.
- 52.1 per cent of women veterans report at least one long-term health condition, compared to 35.9 per cent of women in the general population.
- The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide recorded nearly 800 official reports of sexual assault in the ADF over five years. To break this down, this is 160 sexual assaults a year or more than 3 assaults per week. Underreporting suggests the real number is far, far higher.
These statistics are not abstract. They are lived realities. They are costs borne not by the institution, but by the women who served the organisation with honour and now struggle to survive it.
True commitment is not measured in frameworks, strategies or speeches. It is measured in whether women are safe. Whether they are heard. Whether justice, however imperfect, is done.
This is the real test of whether women belong in combat. Not whether they can carry a pack, but whether they can carry the burdens this system still places on their shoulders. The question shouldn’t be can women carry a pack. We’ve proven for decades we can. The real question should be, when will the leaders of this organisation pick up some weight these women have been carrying ?
We must continue to support women veterans, not just with words, but with action. This means listening without judgment, designing systems that do no further harm, and building communities that honour their service by addressing the inequities they still face.
Women Veterans Australia is committed to improving the lived experience of all women who serve. Whether through advocacy, research, peer connection, or policy reform, we will continue to elevate their voices and demand the structural change they deserve.
Because women who have carried the pack, both visible and invisible, should not have to carry it alone in silence anymore.
Feature image: Llani (LJ) Kennealy. Credit: Defence Images.