An Inner West life, changed
Two years before [the siege], life was pretty normal. Self-absorbed. Normal was living in the Inner West. It was a happy place to be, pretty groovy. I was living that lifestyle: movies, theatre, coffee, cocktails – self. I had a pretty broad base group of friends and lived the single life.
My life was acupuncture, massages, and treatments. I was happy, content and very focussed on myself. Although I say that I was focussing on myself, that wasn’t always true. It’s more that a significant illness changes your life focus.
Prior to then – in September of 2002 – I got diagnosed with MS, I discovered that I was divorcing and I turned 40. You know, how people have monumental life-changing moments? Well, that was my moment.
Then through all of that is my transformational experience of faith. I go from being an extreme devout atheist to coming into faith.
Because of this, my life, despite its tumultuous nature on the surface, always seemed to have this undercurrent of steady peace and personal growth.
In the siege
It reads a bit like a melodrama, but I try not to be melodramatic.
When it was definitely confirmed that it was me [in the siege], my friends kind of went like: “well, of course it was Louisa. If anyone was going to be there it had to be her. You know because of the nature of her life of constant insanity, quite frankly.”
The facts of what happened in the Lindt Cafe don’t change. The terrorist came and what happened, happened.
Despite all of it, the fact was that he was very polite and very well spoken. A man with a heavy accent, who was trying very hard to articulate himself. He was equally considerate. Like he was saying to the people at the window, “get down, you don’t want you to get tired. Um, and someone else stand up at the windows and yes, you need to have toilet breaks.” Later on he was like, “who wants a cup of tea?”
The other fact is that this is all the while being absolutely convinced we were going to die. I really did think I was going to die. When I put on my logical hat I could not see any other way other than to die in the circumstances. I really thought that he was either going to kill us or we were going to be killed by the police rescuing us.
He was a duplicitous, double-minded human. The type we see and know in our everyday lives.
The rescue
Hours pass. And all of a sudden, a massive explosion.
Literally right after this, a cop comes over to me and says: “Get up, get up, run, run!”. My foot was damaged so all I could do was hop out of there. They pulled me out of the café and I’m lying on Phillip Street. There we were.
My first thought was “Oh my God, I cannot believe I’m still alive!” The practice of gratitude had been part of my Christian practice for a long time, so that feeling was very real for me immediately. After the post-traumatic shock was the post-traumatic euphoria.
I then thought I was going to lose my foot, which made me think about Gill [Hicks]: “who’s that bloody Australian woman who lost both her legs in London, what’s her name? If she can do it, she did it. And she lost both her legs. I can just lose one foot, you know, I’ll be okay, I’ll get over this.”
I was convinced that my mother had died. Absolutely convinced. There was no way. I thought there’s no way anybody could have survived something like that. I lost track of her in the room and I was coming into an anxiety about:
“Oh my God, how am I going to tell my family? How am I going to help them manage and not turn out crazy and hate all Muslims?”
Once we confirmed that Mum made it through too, the focus then became about helping her. The ordeal really rattled her and she was in crisis. At one point she even said, “I can’t believe that one person could hate the world so much.” Mum really was somebody who could rule the world – so hearing that really rattled me.
We all have multi-layered thoughts and feelings all the time. But in those moments, I think it was the adrenaline, I was so aware of the different layers of my own thinking and feeling. I was working myself up into a frenzy while at the same time going “thank you God, I survived.”
Psycho City
You may think that the siege, the actual 17 hours, was insanity. That was like nothing compared to what happened afterwards. That’s when it all goes “Psycho City.”
We were very aware of the media and the power of what was going to be said and done. There was a lot of praying going on because we’re complete media novices. I mean, what the hell do we know? We might have lots of opinions, this media game is such a different world.
I knew we had to tread very carefully, but we also didn’t want to be involved in anything that was anti-police or anti-Muslim. We don’t want to have any media that was spinning and some of the outlets were absolutely out for blood. But we kept coming back to a key question one of my friends posed: “who is the audience that really needs to hear this message of forgiveness?”
Starting the Louisa Hope Foundation
Ultimately, gratitude and compassion are practices that apply to all aspects of life, and it would ultimately be the compass we use to navigate our way through this.
The Louisa Hope Foundation came about as a “thank you” to the nurses who worked so hard to give us the care we needed. I didn’t conceive it to be as big as it has become. I conceived of it as a gift.
50 grand was not enough – it’s seed money. Yet they do these amazing things with this money. Once I got involved with that level of nurses, you know, it just became “well, I can’t stop now!”
The story that doesn’t turn off
All of us in our lives, we are all like a wine barrel.
The wine barrel is made up of slats. And the slats represent the various aspects of our personal development. We might be strong and mature in our financial dealings, but not so in our emotional dealings. Or we might be sexually mature, but not so in how we deal with conflict.
All of us throughout our entire lives are all at different stages of development and change. And so, when we look at the barrel and then we go to pour into the barrel, all the good stuff that’s going to make up our humanity, the barrel can only ever fill to the lowest slat, right?
The strengths of my life: my psycho-spiritual work, my character and personality, they were all very strong and solid. My physical health was the weakness.
I talked about the wound in my foot, and here we are six years later, and we are still talking about it. And living it. The overall impact and the way my health degraded three months in hospital was quite significant.
There’s the impact on me personally. And then there’s also the impact on my family… The siege is an undercurrent story that can’t be turned off.
