.jpg)
Legacy Week: When Service Ends, the Family Story Continues
AWARENESS STATEMENT
For Immediate Release
30 August 2026
Each year, Legacy Week asks Australians to notice something that can too easily sit at the edges of our understanding of military service: service is rarely experienced by one person alone.
Behind the medals, deployments, postings, injuries, transitions and losses are partners, children, parents and extended families whose lives are also shaped by what military service asks of a person.
Legacy Week, held this year from 30 August to 5 September, has been part of Australia’s public life since the 1940s. The small Legacy badge has become a familiar symbol of something much larger, a national promise that the families of those who have served should not simply be expected to carry the consequences of that service alone.
Legacy traces that promise back to 1923. Today, the organisation reports supporting around 30,000 partners and children of veterans who have lost their lives or their health through service. Its work encompasses practical assistance, education, connection, stability and support for families navigating lives that may have changed profoundly because of military service.
For the Australian Association of Mental Health Practitioners, Legacy Week also invites a broader conversation about what happens psychologically and socially within families when service changes the trajectory of family life.
The effects of service do not always stop with the person who served
There is an understandable tendency to think about veteran mental health primarily through the experience of veterans themselves. That remains critically important. Yet families live alongside transition, injury, trauma, grief, disrupted relationships, altered roles, financial uncertainty and, sometimes, bereavement.
Not every veteran experiences psychological distress. Not every military family struggles. Indeed, military communities can demonstrate remarkable strengths: loyalty, adaptability, humour, persistence, collective identity and strong bonds of belonging.
But acknowledging those strengths should never require us to minimise the pressures some families carry.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs identifies anxiety, depression, trauma, social isolation, relationship difficulties, grief, loss and adjustment to change among the circumstances for which veterans and families may seek support. It also recognises families as an important part of the veteran mental-health and wellbeing landscape, with services including Open Arms – Veterans & Families Counselling.
The point is not to pathologise military families. It is to recognise them
.
A partner adapting to life with someone who has returned physically or psychologically changed may themselves need somewhere to speak openly. A child growing up around grief, injury, hypervigilance or major changes in family functioning may need adults capable of understanding their experience without immediately labelling it. A family bereaved through service may need support years after the ceremonies, paperwork and initial expressions of sympathy have ended.
Furthermore, what is often needed is not acute psychiatric intervention. It may be counselling, peer connection, family support, practical assistance, community belonging, grief work, coaching around major life transitions, or simply the presence of a skilled practitioner who knows how to listen without trying to turn every difficult human experience into a diagnosis.
That wider ecosystem of care matters.
Grief does not operate according to commemorative calendars
Legacy Week also gives us reason to think more carefully about grief.
Public remembrance necessarily has dates. Families do not.
Bereavement can change shape repeatedly across a lifetime. An anniversary arrives. A child graduates. Someone marries. A grandchild is born. A family moves house. A surviving partner reaches an age they had expected to reach together.
Loss can become quieter without becoming irrelevant.
This is particularly important for helping professionals to understand. Our work with grief should not be built around an assumption that there is a neat psychological journey from loss to closure. Human beings generally do something much more complicated: they learn how to continue living while maintaining an evolving relationship with what, and whom, they have lost.
For children and young people, that understanding can be even more important. A child may revisit a parent's death or disability differently as their own cognitive and emotional development changes. What they understood at eight may need to be understood again at twelve, seventeen or twenty-five.
Support, therefore, cannot always be thought of as a short intervention attached to a single event.
Sometimes support means being available for the next chapter.
“The promise is not simply that somebody will help in the darkest moment”
AAMHP Chair Shane Warren said Legacy Week offers an important reminder about the long arc of community care.
“There is something profoundly Australian in the promise at the heart of Legacy: that when someone has given greatly in service, we do not turn away from the people they love when life becomes difficult. But the promise is not simply that somebody will help in the darkest moment. It is that families will continue to matter when the headlines have moved on, the ceremonies are finished and everybody else has returned to ordinary life.” [Shane Warren]
Shane Warren said the mental-health sector also had a responsibility to think beyond traditional service boundaries.
“Good mental-health support is not only about what happens when somebody reaches crisis point. It is about building enough points of connection across communities that people can find support earlier through counsellors, peer workers, family services, community organisations, veteran-specific services and appropriately qualified practitioners. A strong system should have many doors, and people should not have to become desperately unwell before one of them opens.” [Shane Warren]
That principle is particularly relevant as Australia continues implementing reforms following the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Current veteran-support reforms have explicitly adopted a “no wrong door” approach intended to make services easier for veterans and their families to find and navigate, with greater emphasis on coordination, prevention and early intervention.
It is a direction worth supporting.
No single profession, organisation or government program can meet every psychosocial need within a family or community. Effective support requires different parts of the system to know their role, understand their limitations and be capable of connecting people with something more appropriate when needed.
Remembering also asks something of us
Legacy Week is rightly associated with giving. Buying a badge, making a donation, volunteering or fundraising helps Legacy continue work that has now extended across more than a century.
But remembrance ought also to influence how we think.
It should remind mental-health practitioners to remain curious about the contexts people bring into the consulting room.
It should remind services that veterans' families are not merely adjuncts to the person who served.
It should remind policymakers that wellbeing includes relationships, housing, finances, meaningful work, education, social connection, identity and community participation, not simply the absence of a diagnosable mental illness.
And it should remind all of us that care is often most meaningful when it continues after the obvious moment for caring has passed.
The Legacy badge is deliberately small. The promise behind it is not.
As another Legacy Week opens, AAMHP acknowledges the veterans who have served Australia, the families whose lives have been intertwined with that service, the volunteers and Legatees who have sustained Legacy's work across generations, and the practitioners and communities who continue supporting people through grief, adjustment, transition and recovery.
Perhaps the most meaningful way to honour that legacy is to keep widening the circle of people prepared to say: You and your family still matter here.
Support and further information
Legacy provides support to families of Australian veterans who have lost their lives or health through service. Information about Legacy, volunteering and ways to contribute is available through Legacy Australia.
Veterans and eligible family members can also access mental-health and wellbeing support through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and Open Arms – Veterans & Families Counselling, which provides free and confidential support.
Media Contact:
Shane Warren, Chair
Susan Sandy, Secretary
Philip Armstrong, CEO
Comments