Last year I was humbled to win the Australian War Memorial’s Napier Waller Art Prize. My artwork Deathmin embodies the mountains of paper and endless forms my family dealt (and still deals) with to receive the support veterans are entitled to. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide releases its findings and recommendations later this year. At my height and my late husband’s weight, ‘Deathmin’ asks more of those in power.

When Australian actress Rachel Griffiths was walking the halls of Parliament House while filming political drama Total Control she says was stopped in her tracks by my artwork. Griffiths said, "It was just so compelling. And I remember ... I walked towards it, and then when I saw Deathmin, which just rang completely true to my brain, doing anything administrative,"

"And then I found out about the Napier Waller Awards, which I had not heard of, so then I went down that whole rabbit hole and the diversity of experiences. The painting of the breastfeeding soldier and all those artworks, you realise that we don't share many stories, a great diversity of stories. I think everyone's white and they're all male, you know?

"Then I got thinking about the art of war and realised that so much of my own understanding of war came from everything from Hogan's Heroes to M*A*S*H* to movies to portraits and the dioramas that I saw here at the war memorial. It all came from art."