Hannah's gift

When Sue and Lloyd Clarke lost their daughter and three grandchildren in a hideous act of violence, their world crumbled. But they have built a lasting legacy for Hannah, and have now been recognised as 2022 Queensland Australians of the Year.

- SUSAN CHENERY

In the days before Christmas, in the rising early morning heat, a house in Brisbane is festooned with decorations. Santas all along the front fence and all through the house, Christmas trees and ornaments everywhere. Sue Clarke is a “massive” Christmas person. So washer daughter, Hannah: “My daughter loved Mariah Carey’s Christmas song.” Hannah had spent every Christmas of her life with her parents. They always went all-out.

Around the house are photographs of Hannah’s three children – the grandchildren who will never come for Christmas again. The first without them was “surreal”, Sue says. She still puts up the decorations, even though the holidays could never mean the same thing.

We are sitting at the kitchen table. Hannah sat here in the last weeks and days of her life. She had come for refuge when she had finally summoned the strength to leave her suffocating husband, Rowan Baxter. There was, she told her mother, “no love left. He ruined it.”

By then she had a secret second phone because he had tapped her original one with tracking and listening devices. “There were too many times where he would just pop up,” Sue says. And by then Hannah was scared. He knew where she went and who she spoke to. He even knew she had spoken to her brother, Nat, who had answered his wife’s phone. Hannah understood that he wasn’t going to let her go.

In the last week of her life, Hannah spoke to her mother and a friend about writing a will. “She said to me, ‘When he kills me, he’ll be in jail, and I don’t want his family anywhere near the kids,’” reveals Sue. Hannah wanted her parents to take her children.