What the Record Would Not Hold

Versión en español: Lo que el registro no quiso sostener

Between 1999 and 2002 the Australian Defence Force gave the quinoline anti-malarials mefloquine and tafenoquine to nearly 3,000 personnel in clinical trials, largely during and after the INTERFET deployment to East Timor. The Senate later put the maximum number exposed, including mefloquine prescribed outside the trials, at 3,523. My former husband was deployed twice into that period. Nearly three decades later, the question of what those drugs did to him remains formally unresolved and personally unanswerable. This article does not argue causation. It documents what followed.

Introduction

There is a document I no longer have. It ran to roughly twenty-five pages, prepared by a lawyer in Mexico, and it set out what had happened to me and to my four children in sequence and in detail. I do not know where it is. I do not know how to request a copy, or whether a copy still exists. It was the most complete account of my situation ever assembled, and it was never read by anyone with the authority to act on it.

I have come to think of that document as the exact shape of the problem. Not the absence of evidence — the evidence existed, was compiled, was professionally drafted — but the absence of any body whose job it was to receive it.

This is an account of two records that ran in parallel for nineteen years. One was official: enlistment files, deployment histories, clinical trial registers, compensation determinations, police reports, court filings, child protection assessments. The other was lived, and was mine, and was never entered anywhere. Where those two records diverge is where my children were lost.

I begin with the drugs because he did, and because it is the only part of this account that a government has ever formally examined.

Development

The trials

Between February 1999 and 2002 the Australian Defence Force ran four clinical trials of quinoline anti-malarial drugs on deployed and returning personnel. The tafenoquine eradication trial ran from February 1999 to April 2000 across Bougainville and Timor-Leste, with 1,017 personnel on tafenoquine and 464 on primaquine. A tafenoquine prevention trial ran in Timor-Leste from October 2000 to April 2001, with 492 personnel on tafenoquine and 162 on mefloquine as the comparator. A mefloquine prevention trial ran across 2001–2002 in Timor-Leste, with 1,157 personnel on mefloquine and 388 on doxycycline. A smaller treatment trial ran in Australia across 2000–2001. The Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee later put the maximum number of ADF members who took either drug, in the trials or through mefloquine prescribed outside them since 2001, at 3,523 — up to 1,983 on mefloquine, 1,540 on tafenoquine — and noted the figure was probably an overestimate, because personnel could appear in more than one trial and the records did not reliably distinguish them.

That last detail is not a footnote. A cohort that cannot be counted cannot be followed.

Two exposures, of different kinds

My former husband deployed to East Timor in 1999 with the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, as part of INTERFET, and again in 2001 with the 1st Battalion. He has always said he was given trial drugs both times. For a long time I could not reconcile that with the published register, because the register does not put a trial on the ground in Timor in 1999. It took me a while to understand that the register was not where I should have been looking.

The mandatory anti-malarial on the 1999 rotation was doxycycline, taken daily at supervised pill parades. It was a punishing drug in that climate — photosensitivity, nausea, vomiting — and men who could not keep it down were moved by medics onto weekly mefloquine on clinical grounds. That switch was treatment, not research. It produced no trial record, no consent form, no follow-up schedule and no entry in any cohort.

The trial came at the other end. Every soldier on that rotation, home around January or February 2000, was required to undergo an eradication course to clear the parasites still in his body. The tafenoquine eradication trial was running at exactly that time — February 1999 to April 2000 — and it was a trial of precisely that procedure, tafenoquine against primaquine, with the named battalions followed in the record by the word others. He came home into the middle of that window, into the very treatment being trialled.

The 2001 deployment is the more straightforward one. The tafenoquine prevention trial set out above ran with the 1st Battalion until April 2001.

So the account I could not verify turns out to be consistent with the record, once you stop looking for a trial in the place where a deployment happens. What I still cannot establish is which arm he was in, on either occasion, or whether the 1999 switch to mefloquine occurred at all. One exposure sits inside a trial that was registered, audited and counted. The other, if it happened, sits outside every register there is — not because the record was lost, but because no record was ever opened. A man who was in a trial can at least argue about what he was given. A man switched by a medic in 1999 has nothing to argue with.

What the inquiry found

The formal position is that the trials were lawful and ethical. A 2015 ethics review found Defence had applied appropriately rigorous scientific and ethical evaluation. A 2016 Inspector-General ADF report found the trials were conducted ethically and lawfully. A 2018 FDA audit confirmed compliance with the approved protocols and reached no conclusion of impropriety. The published adverse-event data is comparatively unremarkable: in the mefloquine prevention trial, 57 per cent of participants reported at least one adverse event against 56 per cent on doxycycline; three serious neuropsychiatric events were recorded, two of them in personnel with undisclosed pre-existing conditions; 75 participants, about 6.5 per cent, switched medication because they could not tolerate it.

The committee also heard the other half. Veterans told it that consent inside a military hierarchy is a category error. A serving Lieutenant General told it plainly: I don't think there is any such thing as informed consent in the military. Another submitter put it shorter — nothing is consensual in the military. Defence countered that more than four hundred members of the relevant battalion took alternative anti-malarials, which demonstrates that a choice existed. Both things can be true. A choice can exist on paper and be unavailable in practice to a soldier who is twenty-two years old and does not intend to be the one who declines.

On follow-up, the divergence is wider still. The protocols monitored participants during deployment and for six to twelve months afterwards. Around a hundred received additional eye, lung and blood testing. Veterans described the aftercare differently: that was it — in eighteen years.

What I saw

I knew him for two years before he first deployed. We met in 1997; I was twenty-three and he was twenty-seven. He was warm, and he was kind, and he smiled in a way I have not seen since. That is my baseline, and it is the only one anyone has. It is also worth nothing to any institution I have ever approached, because what it consists of is a wife's memory of her husband's face. We married after he came back from that first deployment — after the change had already happened, and after I had already seen it. We were together nineteen years in total, and those first two are the part I am asked to prove and cannot.

I want to be exact here, because this is the point at which accounts like mine usually become imprecise. I cannot tell you that mefloquine made him what he became. Nobody can tell me that. No clinician has ever assessed him for it in a way I have seen. He received a significant lump-sum compensation payment from the Department of Veterans' Affairs, which establishes that the department accepted something, but not what. The causal question is open, and it will almost certainly stay open, and I have stopped waiting for it to close.

What I can document is the shape of it, and the shape had two steps. He came back from 1999 altered, and he came back from 2001 altered again — a second drop, from an already lower place. He grew louder, then angrier, then colder. He blamed the army, then his family, then the world, then me — increasingly and then exclusively me. The empathy I had read as shyness turned out to be absence: an inability to register that another person's interior existed at all, and with it, no mechanism for accountability. Someone who cannot recognise your feelings cannot be wrong about them. So there was blame, and there was never repair.

The pattern, in its components

Domestic violence rarely arrives as a single identifiable event. It arrives in components, each of which is survivable in isolation, and it is only the accumulation that has a name. The arguments that always ended with me crying and him unmoved. The intimacy that made no room for me. The dismissals. The silences that could erase me from a room without a word being spoken. The withdrawal that stepped back from intimacy, then affection, then love, each step small enough to rationalise and all of them in one direction. I absorbed these one at a time. I did not have the language — I did not know the word narcissist, did not know that love-bombing has an expiry date, did not know that a person without empathy can perform affection the way an actor performs a script.

Then the threats. If I left, he would destroy my life and leave me with nothing. I believed him. By then he had the blueprint: my money, my movements, my body, my safety. Repeated threats of suicide became a control mechanism of their own — fear and responsibility used as restraints. He relapsed with a second attempt, was flown home, admitted to a private hospital, and returned to Mexico as though nothing had occurred.

And there was money. A DVA lump sum. Repeated unrepaid loans from his mother. Trust funds intended for our eldest son, gifted by a great-aunt in England, which vanished. His own sister questioned him about it and never accepted his answers. There were waves of gambling. I worked full time, took overtime, and we never got ahead, because income was never the variable.

Mexico

We had sold an investment property to fund a new beginning overseas. Counselling. Anger-management programs. A promise. Then he left — not in anger, not in crisis, but with a deliberate finality. What happened immediately before he went is something I will carry and will not describe. It raised a question I had never permitted myself: how far is too far, when it comes to a person's safety, dignity and autonomy. It marked a line I could not return across.

Two weeks after he left, I found he had joined an online dating site. Credit card entered, subscription paid, while I was working out how to feed four children. He called it a mistake.

Over the following months he sent approximately US$14,200 in small, irregular, unannounced transfers. No schedule. No explanation. No indication of when they would stop. That uncertainty was not the by-product of the abuse; it was the instrument. Nineteen years reduced to a handful of wire transfers and a few personal belongings. He kept the household contents in storage, including things that were mine and sentimental. I do not know whether any of it passed through a legal channel. I did not contest it. I had nothing left to contest it with.

The decision

By then I was inside a calculation with no acceptable outcome. Staying meant continuing a pattern of harassment with no identifiable source — irregularities in my phone logs, unexplained movements around the property, and a steady pressure I could not name and could not dismiss. None of it individually met the threshold for official action. Collectively it formed its own kind of record, which is to say a record no agency would accept.

Returning meant delivering my children to a man already documented in police reports and legal filings. On paper, a parent with standing. In practice, a known risk: resentful, without empathy, and intent on retaliation for the single fact he could not accept — that I no longer loved him and had stepped outside his reach.

It was not a choice. It was a forced position between two dangers, and the only question available to me was which one was survivable.

I contacted our embassy in Mexico and arranged emergency flights. I did not give them the full account. I said I was financially crippled and could no longer support my children. I believed that once we were home I could rebuild.

What happened next took days

The embassy contacted him. He lodged a false complaint with child services portraying me as an unfit mother. He persuaded an American expatriate in Mexico to file a second false report. Two fabricated statements. Child services accepted his version without inquiry and placed four children with a father whose instability was years-documented. No statement was ever taken from me. I had my lawyer's documents prepared. Nobody asked for them.

I arrived home with no support system, effectively homeless, and psychologically exhausted. For him it had resolved perfectly: the final act of a pattern designed to isolate, destabilise and erase.

What has stayed with me is this. If the embassy had never called him, he had no intention of taking the children. He did not want them out of love. He wanted them because taking them was the last available retaliation against their mother.

My children could not have known that. They believed I had abandoned them. The system made it look exactly like that. In fact the system abandoned one mother and four children and failed to protect any of us. Two of them eventually answered in the only way available to them: my daughter lived with him for six years and left at thirteen; one of my sons stayed two years and left at fourteen.

I have been separated from my children for eight years.

Analysis

Three structural observations follow from this record.

First: the causal question is being used as a gate, and it should not be

Whether mefloquine or tafenoquine altered my former husband's neurology is, and may permanently remain, unestablished. Individual causation in quinoline neurotoxicity is extraordinarily difficult to prove: the exposure is decades old, the cohort was never reliably enumerated, the follow-up ended within a year, and the symptom profile — depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, personality change, psychosis — overlaps almost entirely with the accepted psychiatric sequelae of deployment itself. The trials, in other words, were designed in a way that makes the question unanswerable, and the unanswerability now functions as the defence. An exposure that happened outside the trials, at a medic's discretion, is harder still: there is no protocol to audit and no cohort to belong to.

But nothing in my account depended on that answer. Whatever produced his conduct, the conduct was the same, and the institutional response to the conduct was the same. Where an aetiological question is unresolved, protection must not be contingent on resolving it. In practice, it was. Every door I knocked on wanted a category before it would open, and my situation did not have one.

Second: harm concentrated in the interstices, and every actor behaved correctly

Consider the sequence. Defence ran trials that ethics reviews, an Inspector-General and a foreign regulator each found compliant. Veterans' Affairs made a compensation determination within its scheme. The embassy identified a citizen in distress abroad and arranged repatriation — a correct action that functioned, unintentionally, as the trigger for everything that followed. Child services acted on two statements, quickly, as its urgency protocols require. The courts processed filings as filed. Not one of these bodies did anything obviously outside its mandate. And the aggregate outcome was that four children were transferred to a documented risk in a matter of days on the strength of two lies, and their mother was never interviewed.

This is what distinguishes systemic failure from misconduct. Misconduct has a responsible party. Systemic failure has a diagram. Each agency held one fragment of the record, none held the whole, and no mechanism existed to assemble it. The twenty-five-page complaint is the physical proof: a complete account with no institutional destination.

Third: litigation abuse is the terminal phase of coercive control

Coercive control is now increasingly recognised in law. What is far less recognised is its migration into procedure once the relationship ends. Litigation abuse — the strategic use of complaints, filings, notifications and legal process to continue control after separation — presents to an institution as engagement rather than as abuse. The abuser appears cooperative, documented, represented. The victim appears chaotic, foreign, unsupported, financially destitute, and is frequently accused of the very conduct being perpetrated against her; in my case, of a drug problem.

The asymmetry is not incidental — it is produced by the abuse. Financial abuse creates the destitution. Isolation removes the corroborating witnesses. Years of psychological pressure produce the affect that reads to an assessor as instability. The abuse manufactures the profile, and then the profile is used as evidence. Institutions assess presentation, and coercive control is a technology for degrading a person's presentation.

And so the question was never whose account was true. It was who was more credible: the man with the lawyer, the uniform and the paperwork, or the woman with none of those things.

Conclusion

I do not know what those drugs did to him. That question has been examined by a Senate committee, an Inspector-General, an ethics review and a foreign regulator, and it remains open, and I have no expectation that it will close in my lifetime.

I know precisely what the institutions did, because the record of that is complete. Defence ran trials on a cohort it did not durably identify and did not durably follow, and treated men outside those trials without recording that either. Veterans' Affairs paid a sum without producing an account of what it was for. An embassy performed a humanitarian function that, absent any protective framework around it, became the mechanism of my dispossession. A child protection service acted on two fabricated statements and never took a third. A legal system processed a man's filings and had no capacity to recognise them as the continuation of nineteen years of control.

None of these bodies failed at its own task. They failed at the one nobody was assigned: holding the whole record and reading it as a single document.

I have not forgiven my country, and I am not writing toward forgiveness. I gave that country a life too — not only the one who wore the uniform. What I received was silence, blame and abandonment, and I want nothing from it now.

What I want is narrower and harder. I want the twenty-five pages found. I want a system in which a mother's statement is taken before her children are moved, not after. I want the trial cohorts enumerated properly, and the men treated alongside them counted too, so that they can stop arguing about whether they were ever there. I want the record to hold.

I lost my children. I have never stopped loving them, and I cannot imagine a life without them in it. That sentence is not a conclusion. It is simply the fact that has not changed in eight years, and the reason the rest of this is written down.

Related reading

• One Tablet
• Neither Verdict
• The Quinoline Era

Sources

• Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, Use of the Quinoline anti-malarial drugs Mefloquine and Tafenoquine in the Australian Defence Force, Chapter 3 — aph.gov.au
• Summary of ADF Mefloquine and Tafenoquine Clinical Trials, 1998–2002 (committee submission) — aph.gov.au
• ABC News, "'It's destroyed my life': Hopes inquiry will back veterans' claims anti-malaria drug caused illness", 31 July 2018 — abc.net.au
• The New Daily, "Veterans 'disheartened' by Senate inquiry into ADF anti-malarial drug trials", 5 December 2018 — thenewdaily.com.au