The mother's son did not want to die. Of this fact, she was certain. She had brought him into the world, had nurtured him as he grew, and when he enlisted, she was, in her own words, the proudest mother in the world. She had two children, and she felt that was lucky.
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The Navy got one of her children, and when he enlisted, the recruiter told her, "You are not his family now - we are his family".
Still, she was proud.
Her son served for 20 years protecting the national interest, which at times meant turning back leaking boats of starving, desperate, sick and wounded people who his government had decreed had sailed to Australian shores illegally.
Petty Officer David Finney was tasked with boarding one such boat and holding it in 2009, two years after his own infant son had suddenly died.
The toll, his mother said, was unbearable. There were other incidents, and soon, Finney was reassigned to a land job that his mother called "soul-destroying".
David Finney was not ok. He did not want to be discharged, but he was. He held a veteran's gold card that should have opened the door to any medical treatment he needed, but he struggled to find a mental health physician to help him navigate his grief and trauma.
He had asked the Department of Veterans Affairs if there was a psychiatrist close at hand who could help and was told that they could fit him in in April or May 2019.
He died in February of that year. He was 38.
David Finney was not ok. During his two decades of military service, he believed he had been a model sailor. In 2016, he appeared in a recruitment advertisement for the Navy. He was, literally, a poster boy for military service.
But, in the stillness of his most inner thoughts, he despaired that no one cared about him.
"Nobody thinks anything. Nobody cares about anything. My son died," he told his mother once. "I broke down at work, Mum. I was called 'soft cock'."
When he was eventually discharged, he said, "Mum, I know now that I'm not good enough for the Navy."
David Finney was not ok. Three days before he took his own life, he posted online that he felt like he was holding a fishing net in the rain.
When she speaks about her son now, Julie-Ann Finney's voice shakes with the incandescent fury of a mother's grief. She feels that she cannot cry. She cannot mourn because if she appears too emotional, she fears no one will listen to her.
"You all ignored me," she said. "You all thought that I would move on, and I would go and cry in a corner. Last year, in November, I had a bit of a meltdown in Parliament House, and then nobody wanted to speak to me. Nobody wanted to hear my words. Because I was being too emotional."
"They got my son."
"They got my son."
When the police came to Mrs Finney's door, they told her that her son had died on February 1.
There are days when she cannot remember anything that came next. There are days when she cannot seem to forget. She wants to wake up. She wants it all to have been a bad dream.
"Can you have a six-and-a-half-year dream?" she pleads. "Can someone still wake me up?"
Five days before David Finney died, another young veteran had been found dead, having similarly died by suicide on January 26, 2019.
Brock Hewitt, of Perth, had served in Afghanistan for three years. He was 22 when he was discharged in 2012 with post-traumatic stress disorder. His family said that he never recovered. Three weeks before he died, he had told them that he was going fishing.
In her desperation, Mrs Finney contacted Hewitt's parents Jan and Rick when her own son died. They were five days ahead of her, she had reasoned. They would know what to do.
"That is how desperate you are," she said. "They will know where I am going next. They did not - we were both desperate. And today, someone else is going to feel that desperation. And if not today, it will be tomorrow."
Mrs Finney spent the years after her son's death campaigning for and eventually testifying to a royal commission into veteran suicide.
She travelled the breadth of the country to attend every hearing in 2021 and has become a symbol of the grief of parents of servicemen and women who, notwithstanding the pageantry and artifice of the national memorials, were forgotten when they took off the uniform.
She wants to see the recommendations of the Royal Commission in 2021 through legislation.
She wants both major parties and their leaders, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, to campaign on the issues that the commission uncovered - that too many servicemen and women have died forgotten by the country and the service that swears annually that it would not forget.
She wants the politicians, who so easily recite those three words on Anzac and Remembrance days, to make good on the promise to remember.
"Every family and everyone who has ever served - we think we can buy them off with trinkets, a medal to be proud of. But we need more," she said.
"We need to spend more money on the human asset that is in Defence."
On Anzac Day, on Friday, David Finney's story will be sung into the annals of the national memory by the songwriter who, 42 years earlier, had penned the military trauma ode I Was Only 19.
John Schumann never wanted to become 'that war guy', but the 1983 folk-rock song he performed with his band Redgum transcended even the few Vietnam veterans that inspired it to become an anthem for anyone who has worn a uniform and paid a price for it.
Among David Finney's effects, it was found as one of the most played songs on his Spotify account.
Fishing Net in the Rain is Schumann's latest word on what has become, against even his own intention, a career of penning the mud-and-boots response to the glamour of the nationalist fantasy.
He has spent the years between the two odes championing mental health causes and speaking to workers across industries, from police to FIFO miners, about the stress and struggles that almost one in two Australians face.
The chorus repeats Finney's words as he wrote them. It's a metaphor, Schumann says, so loaded that it speaks for itself.
"It was just there," he said definitively. "Fishing net in the rain. Whatever way you come at it, it makes sense."
When the royal commission was being formed, a few veterans organisations had suggested Schumann - the voice of the traumatised serviceman and woman - should be a commissioner. At least the veterans would trust him, they thought.
The call was soundly rejected by Scott Morrison, which Schumann now regards as a "badge of honour". He followed the commission's findings, and the tallies of veterans who had taken their own lives - at least 1677 between 1997 and 2021, 20 times the number killed in combat.
As the testimonies emerged, Schumann's manager and collaborator Ivan Tanner came to him with a melody.
The song was released on Wednesday evening ahead of Anzac Day this week.
He and Mrs Finney eschew the ubiquitous line, 'lest we forget', and demand instead that they are heard and remembered.
"I remember I played at the funeral of Sapper Jamie Larcombe," Schumann said, recalling the 21-year-old engineer killed in Afghanistan in 2011.
"I have since become friends with his mum and dad. They were a simple Kangaroo Island farming family in their best clothes and their dark glasses. And the military do what they do so well. But I'm sitting there watching them looking at their kid in a box. I thought, if that was my kid, I would be so f---ing furious."
When David Finney was laid to rest in 2019, Mrs Finney's grief could be known only to those who have lost what she had lost.
"I was staring into that hole in the ground," she said. "And it occurred to me that they were going to put my son in there. You're going to put my child, my world, in there. And you're going to cover it up and hope that I never speak about it again."
Then: "Stick your 'lest we forget'. You say it on two days of the year. How can I forget? It doesn't matter if you tell me to forget or to remember."
"It's all about the parades, and the government is all about building more memorials, and that is fantastic. I want them all to be remembered. But, God, if we're not doing something to save their lives, we're not going to have a defence force."
Earlier this month, Mrs Finney released a petition calling for the disbandment of the old guard of ex-services organisations advising the DVA, which she believes have failed to protect veterans after they are discharged.
She wants new blood in Canberra, speaking the truth directly from the mouths of those who have lost loved ones - that raw grief, she says, cannot be ignored.
"If you signed that piece of paper to serve this country - whether it is your first day of service or whether you're the Chief of the Defence Force - I am grateful that you did," she said.
"It was incredibly brave. And I hope that you found the family that my son found with his mates, who were the people who stood with him.
"But the Defence Force is not your family. It has a culture that is traumatic. It has policies and legislation that can kill you. Something is truly wrong because we keep losing these people."
"The Ex-Service Organisations Round Table is asking the government to pay them for advice."
"I'll do it for free."
- If you or someone you know is experiencing trauma, help is available. Call LifeLine on 13 11 14. For veterans and their families, the confidential ADF Mental Health All-hours Support Line is on 1800 628 036. For the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service, call 1800 737 732.
