Dear Brittany,
You don’t know me, and you probably won’t ever read this. But I want it to sit in the public record; something emotive and kind and human.
You are a hero. You are my Australian of the Year. You have stood strong where many would have crumbled. You have crumbled, and yet you have endured. You have shown us what strength looks like. It is a young girl in a white dress. That dress. The dress they shamed you with for wearing again. That somehow if a rape was committed in that dress you would never be able to wear it again? If that was the case how would anyone continue to go to work in their paramedic, or nurses, or defence force, or police uniform?
The white dress wasn’t just ‘evidence’ in an alleged crime. It was evidence of a patriarchal society’s inability to provide safe spaces for women. It was evidence that the fairytales of the virgin in a white dress are still pervasive and emblematic purity is as dangerous to our safety as dark streets. Dark streets that belong to us as much as any man. But patriarchy does not permit it. Your story was evidence that the white dress narrative is toxic. You broke the code of secrecy. These things happen and they go unreported. They are stains on the hem of our white dress. The dress we wash ,naked at midnight, with our own tears.
You didn’t do that. You broke the code. You wore the dress again.
So many of us never took our perpetrators to court. We have minimised the many rapes in our lives. We tell ourselves, I was drunk so who will believe me? I might have given mixed signals’… We tell ourselves that if we don’t speak about it then it will fade. It’s not true. It festers in us all, as this deeply etched pain. This betrayal of our intimacy. Of our agency. Of our selves. But most of us never step forward. We stay mute.
Because we know the lies of this system enshrine and protect the power of men. We know that only one in ten reported cases of sexual assault results in a conviction. We know that when there are no witnesses you are victim to bias. You are victim to misinformation. You are victim to ideas about what passes as consent. You are victim to being a woman. The system is barbaric, and it re-traumatises women. Sometimes that rape is more brutal than the first.
It has been hard watching you. Seeing the justice you deserve slip away. It has been hard observing the public narrative. The lack of care for your wellbeing. You are the same age as my daughters. I watched you in awe. The tenacity. The strength. The aching vulnerability. The refusal to accept the cloak of shame so many tried to hang on your shoulders. I felt proud of you.
As you fly from Australia to take up your life in France, somewhere you may have some anonymity, I just want to say that there are women and people like me who see you. Who saw what actually happened.
The system may not have delivered what I believe you deserve. But you have delivered much more. You stood in the maelstrom of male power and you showed us what strength looks like. Your vulnerability has changed me. I believe it has changed many.
Have a beautiful life.
Thank you.
When I wear a white dress I will think of you. It will remind me of your courage.
– Mandy Nolan
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
