After her harrowing testimony at the aged care commission, the Australian poet’s luminous new collection bears witness to a life and troubled death
Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
She points to previous royal commissions into banking and child abuse, which also involved thousands of hours of harrowing testimony. “I think when governments call a royal commission, there is and should be an expectation of major reform to follow,” she says. “You’re asking people to give up these intimate and personal stories, surely, for an outcome that honours that gift.”
Holland-Batt was born on the Gold Coast, an unlikely place for poetry in the 1980s, but her father nurtured her interest. “He would take me into all of these different worlds,” she says. “He was interested in so many things – in philosophy and literature and classical music, which was the tragedy, when he got Parkinson’s, because he had such a fantastic brain, and he’d always been such a generous intellectual mentor.