About

Versión en español: Sobre la autora

I am Jacqualine Roche, a writer and lived-experience researcher based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

What happened

We were together for twenty-one years and married for seventeen of them. He was an Australian soldier who deployed to East Timor in 1999 and again in 2001, during the Army's clinical trials of the antimalarial drugs mefloquine and tafenoquine. He finished his career as an officer.

For the whole of that career I was an army wife. It is a role with no rank and no pay, and a soldier’s career rests on it.

We raised four children together across Australia, Panama, Canada, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In 2018 my children were removed from my care. I spent the years that followed in Lo de Marcos, Mexico, much of that time homeless, before the people of that town helped me home.

What it did to me

The marriage ended suddenly. He left in August 2017, and almost at once I could barely function.

You cannot understand the worst of it until you are completely separated from the person who did it. For me that meant living in another country, on the other side of the world, for several years. I was too terrified to cross the ocean before then. I was too terrified of him. I still am. I cannot be in the same country as him.

I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, the form that follows harm that is prolonged and repeated. The soldiers who came home from East Timor were, for the most part, diagnosed with PTSD. I was the spouse. Why did I end up with this?

In the last years of the marriage he was using drugs, and I was coerced down paths I would never have chosen. Then I was dismissed. I was left in another country with four children and no money, in a world of drugs, with no one on the outside to help.

What it did to our children

The threats, the abuse and the aftermath did not stop with me.

Our four children were close. That bond has come apart. What they once felt for both their parents is barely there.

Why I write

This is a horrible story. It is one I could never have imagined myself writing.

I write it because writing is how I search for answers. How could everything go so wrong after twenty-one years? So wrong that it reached our children and has not let go of them?

I have found my voice again. I have not yet been heard. The more I write, the more I feel held in place as the victim, and I have come to think that a victim stops being one only when someone finally listens.

So I have given the rest of my life to finding answers, for the love and the loss of my children.

The questions I am asking

I cannot find a case of domestic violence on record, connected to the Australian Defence Force, that is worse than this one. I cannot find much on record at all. Why not?

• How will anything change if members and spouses do not come forward, and are not heard when they do?
• How many other spouses are out there now, frozen inside it, unable to see it because they have not yet got away?
• What happened to the man I married, and was it East Timor?
• Three official inquiries examined what the drug trials did to soldiers. Why did none examine their families?
• Why did every institution I approached tell me it was not their responsibility?
• Was a retired Army officer protected in ways that I, as his wife, was not? I do not know. I ask because no one has answered.

Policies mean nothing behind closed doors. The Defence Force says family violence is incompatible with service. In my case each agency said the matter belonged to someone else. So the last say went to him. Not to me, not to government, not to the police, not to Defence. If that is the result, what are the policies for?

This is not about punishing one man. It is about being heard, and about the families no one counted.

Why this site is in Spanish too

Mexico is at the centre of this story. It is the country where he left his family. It is where the worst of the violence in our twenty-one years together took place.

It did not happen to us alone. It happened in a small town, in front of people who fed us, drove my children to school and took them in. A whole community was affected, and most of them were never told what they had been part of.

They speak Spanish. They love our children and miss them very much. They have a right to the whole story in their own language, and that is why everything here is published in both.

What this site is

This is an independent record in English and Spanish. It holds two kinds of writing, and each is labelled.

• Research draws on public records, inquiries and published studies, with sources linked. It separates what is established from what is inferred and what remains uncertain.
• Personal narrative is my own account, from memory and from documents I hold.

Where to begin

• The timeline of the drug trials and the inquiries that followed, 1999 to 2024.
• What the Royal Commission said about families, and who it left out.
• Unacknowledged Casualties, the research series on the trials and the families.
• Secondary Trauma in Small Communities, on what a town absorbs from a household in crisis.
• Mexico: Lo de Marcos, on eight years in a town where quiet is kept.
• Or go to Start Here or All Writing.

For researchers and anyone who knows these systems

I am still gathering evidence. I welcome advice from anyone who can suggest how a case like this should be handled.

To my children

I want my children to know that I love them more than anything else in the world. I wish none of this had happened. I will keep searching for answers, to understand how and why this happened to our family. It is unfair, and it is unfair that I am no longer in their lives.

I wish things were different, but I do not know how to change that now. It feels as though it is too late.

I will always love them. That will never change, whatever the future holds.

Contact

jacqualine.roche@icloud.com

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