From our inner cities and regional towns to the furthest corners of Australia, suicide steals lives and takes a devastating toll on communities.

Mental illness doesn’t discriminate.

Yet still an inadequate and ill-equipped health system discriminates against those held in its grip.

It can creep up stealthily and ever so silently but its crippling effects create a roar of pain that reverberates through families, workplaces, schools and sports teams.

Still the damning figures continue to rise.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians between the ages of 15 and 44 years – at a rate almost three times the national road toll.

What are we to do?

Hope can prove elusive when you are in the grip of mental illness.

Despair can be a constant companion when you lose someone to it.

One brave Albury family refused to be swallowed up by the silence and stigma of an unfathomable loss.

Annette, Stuart, Jack and Henri Baker took the suffocating grief of losing their daughter and sister Mary, and shone a light on their pain to support others who have lost loved ones to suicide and mental illness.

Today marks the fifth Albury-Wodonga Winter Solstice for Survivors of Suicide event where the community will gather on the longest night of the year to hear from renowned speakers in the field of mental health and suicide prevention.

They gather by cosy open fires with food and music to nourish body and soul.

As the driving force behind this event, the Bakers have become beacons of hope in this community and beyond – not for triumphing over the darkness, but for surviving it.

The evening’s host, David Astle, says he is proud of the Border community’s “snowballing” support for this grassroots event.

“This event is making its own degree of difference,” he says.

“However small, we have to hope the difference in one person’s life could be massive.

“The statistics are bleak and we can only intuitively measure the upside of people making positive, shrewder choices.

“As the crowd grows and the movement spreads, we can hope the statistics will keep improving.”

We do it for every life saved in the shadow of the lives already shattered.