ON 25 JULY 2016 I was in a paediatric roundtable at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, where we discussed early interventions in Koori children’s lives to help give them the best start possible. Later that evening I found myself horrified by images of teenage Dylan Voller being stripped naked, hooded and strapped in a chair by adult men in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. Like many others I will never forget those images. I grew so distressed during the airing of that show that my husband wanted to change the channel. I said, ‘No. I am a witness, I am witnessing something here.’

During and after that Four Corners episode and Q&A, Twitter exploded. I joined in. Those acts of cruelty and violence, the brutality and inhumanity against powerless children, was an unambiguous reminder to me of why many of us do the work we do.