Interviewed on the ABC's The Drum before the screening of Hitting Home, her scarifying program on domestic violence, Sarah Ferguson pointed out that the statistics arising from this home-front scourge had scarcely altered in a couple of decades.
Is it just that we are paying more attention now that makes it seems so much worse than before?
For various reasons, including the courageous efforts of people like Rosie Batty and the brilliant investigative journalism of Ferguson, it has attained a visibility beyond denial.
But how far back into our history does this dismal phenomenon reach? Did it just appear suddenly 20-odd years ago, like a kind of social big bang, or is there a more profound provenance?
In January 1889, this editorial comment appeared in a recently launched Sydney journal: 'Is there a place in our town in which any homeless woman could shelter? And have we taken pains to have its location and purpose so well advertised that no one could fail to know of it?'
The writer followed up a little later with, 'We could quickly fill the largest building in Sydney with women and children who now, for the sake of food and shelter, but more for the sake of what is called their "good name", are bearing blows, insults, servitude and degradation.'
In 19th century Sydney this was heady stuff, and the author and her journal gained immediate notoriety. The writer was Louisa Lawson, Henry's mother, and the journal was her brainchild, The Dawn, launched on 15 May 1888. Written almost single-handedly by Louisa, it announced, in the words of Joseph Addison's drama, Cato, 'A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty/Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.'
What in our time has come to be called 'domestic violence' was certainly an important component of Louisa Lawson's campaigning for the rights and welfare of women, but she envisaged a bigger, more ambitious and visionary picture.
She saw the trials and sufferings of many women as originating in a role that male society had forced upon women and that women had acquiesced in, a role which assigned credit to meekness, subservience and exemplary unselfishness.
'We do not want to see women attempting to seize a mastership,' she wrote, 'or growing quarrelsome about imaginary rights, but we do want them to see that the unselfishness which seems a virtue is practically the abandonment of their position ...
'Women must learn that if they bear wrongs other women must bear