In a darkened room in Fyshwick, veterans of foreign wars each pick up an axe, hold it above their heads in both hands, count to three, take two steps forward and hurl the blade at a target where it lands (usually) with a thud.
For these women, it is a liberation from whatever darkness clouds their minds. Some of them imagine a person who is getting on their nerves - so the thud is cathartic.
Their togetherness also gives them a female solidarity in a male world which hasn't always accepted them.
It's part of an event prmoted by the Department of Veterans' Affairs during Veterans' Health Week.
"The axe throwing activity at Fyshwick is a an example of the positivity of military service which should be celebrated, there is a joy in the camaraderie between all women veterans regardless of service, age, rank or experiences," the vice-president of Women Veterans Network Australia, Natalie Colbert, said.
"If people are going through a rough time, sometimes just getting out here and throwing something sharp at a wall is just that physical release of what they're experiencing emotionally," Pauline Battersby of the ACT branch of the network said in between thuds at the Axxe and Breaker venue.
She joined the army in 1981 and served for 20 years, rising to the rank of major. She then spent 12 years in the army reserve. Apart from throwing axes, she and the others in the network meet every month simply to chat and share experience. A painting group is on the way.
There is a solidarity there, particularly among women who felt they had been patronised by military men over the years.
The rule in the military, for example, is that medals are worn on the wearer's left-hand chest. Veterans' widows, widowers and other relations could wear their relative's medals on the right side of the uniform.
But Pauline Battersby said that women wearing their own medals correctly were sometimes approached by men and told that they were wearing their medals incorrectly. The assumption was that they weren't really veterans but the relatives of veterans.
"It still even happens now. When you're out wearing your medals, there will be people, mainly men, who will come up to you and tell you you're wearing your medals on the wrong side," she said.
She said that men would assume women were "wearing them on the right side because they're either your husband's medals or your father's medals or your brother's medals.
"And we have to remind them and say, 'No, sorry, they're our medals'."
The ACT Facebook group for the network has more than 300 members. Across the country, there are about 12,000 Facebook followers, encompassing women who served - and who still serve - in the air-force, army and navy.
"We have quite a few women in our broader Australian group who have served in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and even some of them didn't feel like they were veterans because the focus was so heavily on men," the former major said.
She said that, at one time, women veterans themselves didn't quite see themselves as veterans: "It took a while for for a lot of us to actually accept that we were veterans." She has only started marching in the Anzac Day parade recently.
A big change in attitudes came in 2018, she said, when a defiant song called On the Left was released, promoting the idea of sex equality of military service. Members of the vocal trio, Sisters in Arms, consisted of women from each of the services.
Pauline Battersby is now pretty nifty with the axe at the Fyshwick venue herself - but it's comradeship which she really values.
