For years, they have watched this little girl grow up, this most exploited child. They watch her as she is abused and raped, the photographs and footage of her particularly popular because they are so violent and graphic. She is watched by two groups of men, both cataloguing her image, their files growing larger and larger. One group is hunting the other. It’s a good versus evil game of chess where both sides consider themselves in the right.

“The chessboard is the world,” the leader of one side writes. “The pieces are the Law and the Group. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always patient. And we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ­ignorance.”

QUEENSLAND AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR WINNERS

SEXTING: SHOULD TEENS BE LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES

Eventually, the Law wins. Tracking every minute mistake, they outsmart the Group. But as doors are kicked in at Group homes around the world, they move in knowing they could not save Chloe. Of all the victims, she is one they can’t find. It is a terrible victory over evil. Because Jon Rouse and his team at Queensland’s Task Force Argos don’t measure their success by the number of arrests they make. They measure it by the children they rescue.

UNDER THE GUN

Long ago, back before online international child abuse rings, before his work with Interpol and the FBI, before his nomination as Queensland’s Australian of the Year, Detective Inspector Jon Rouse, now 55, was a cop like any other. (He still insists he is a cop like any other, ­regarding his accolades with extreme embarrassment.) Rouse always wanted to be a police officer. Perhaps it came from having parents who served in the navy. His father, Patrick (who died in 2006), worked at Defence Department HQ in Canberra prior to his retirement in 1978 and his mother, Susan (who died in 2014), was a nurse.

When Rouse was young, the family (with brothers Greg, now 57, a marine biologist in the US and Jason, 46, a Brisbane-based construction manager) moved to Singapore, where Patrick had been posted. It was here that he began tinkering on his mother’s Yamaha organ. He showed enough talent for her to organise lessons, but the tuition was never as inspiring as the old radio cassette player he would place on top of the organ, blasting Top 40 hits over and over until he learned to play them by rote.

Returning to Brisbane, Rouse finished school at Marist College Ashgrove and got a job as a teller at the Commonwealth Bank, Paddington, also in Brisbane’s inner west. He spent much of his salary on musical equipment and joined a band, Neon Park (now known as the Electric 80s Show and still performing), playing keyboards. They toured as ­support to the likes of Pseudo Echo, Eurogliders, Goanna, Party Boys, Kevin Borich and Kids in the Kitchen, covering songs by Toto, Duran Duran and the Fixx.

But a career in the police force proved an “enduring ­desire” and Rouse revealed his ambition got a bit of a nudge during his time with the bank. “I got held up twice as a teller and stared down the barrel of a gun [on both occasions], so I think that propelled me a little bit earlier into law enforcement,” he told ABC Radio National in November.

Rouse joined the Queensland Police Service in 1984 as a 21-year-old. After rotations through several suburban ­stations, Rouse eventually landed at Brisbane Mobile ­Patrols where he was partnered with Lance Vercoe, now a Detective Inspector with Counter Terrorism Command. Decades later, Vercoe remains Rouse’s best friend. “I often wondered when it was going to happen,” Vercoe says of his mate’s Australian of the Year nomination, insisting Rouse would “hate” the attention.

Vercoe says he learnt a lot about Rouse when they were on the road together. He recalls one particular incident when they were working the “drunks van”. A call had come over the radio that three men had been spotted riding on a motorbike along Samford Rd in Alderley, in Brisbane’s northwest. They soon spotted the bike and the three ­helmetless riders. “We pulled them over and arrested all three,” Vercoe recalls. “At the start, things went OK. Two of the three were of average size. The third was not. He was maybe 195cm and 110kg. Jon is about 5ft 8 [173cm], 5’9. I’m probably 5’11 [180cm],” Vercoe says. “And we’re both about 75kg wringing wet.”

Vercoe was ushering the big bloke into the back of the van when the offender planted his foot on the bumper and pushed back, and Vercoe found himself in a tangle with a man nearly twice his size. “I was in a world of trouble,” he recalls. “And then I just hear these running feet. A blur of blue. And Jon comes flying across and leaps on the back of this bloke. Jon thought I was in real strife. I’d never been so happy to see that flash of blue.”

It’s the kind of stuff that uniformed police deal with all the time, but Vercoe learnt something important about the man who would become his best mate. “I think Jon’s biggest trait is his loyalty,” he says. “There were times there when we were in situations where we were outnumbered, and I knew he wouldn’t let me down.”

RISE THROUGH THE RANKS

Rouse soon made detective and took up a posting with the Criminal Investigation Bureau at westside Taringa and then The Gap. In 1996 he was promoted to Detective Sergeant and assigned to the Child Abuse Unit. It was the same year that Task Force Argos was set up to invest­igate institutionalised child abuse – one of the outcomes of the 1998-99 Forde Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions.

Four years later, Rouse was recruited to Argos to begin investigating the threat posed by the now burgeoning internet. Today he runs the task force, and the work his team does – now focused exclusively on technology-enabled abuse of children – is world-renowned. While many law ­enforcement agencies around the globe rotate their officers out after a finite period, most in Argos stick it out. Some give up promotions to stay. Their work is too important.

Over the past two decades there have been many oper­ations and many children, but when former state deputy police commissioner Ross Barnett reflects on Rouse’s ­career, it’s Operation Achilles he comes back to. Barnett ran the Sex Crimes Group for three years and Rouse worked for him. “The really interesting thing about [Achilles] was that sometimes you do these jobs and you don’t get any local benefit out of it,” he says. “With this type of crime, you don’t know who [the perpetrators] are and where they are living. Your target could be anywhere in the world.”

But Rouse, he says, doesn’t care about this so much. He only cares about rescuing the children. “He has that singular passion for this particular crime type,” Barnett says. “You couldn’t do it for as long as he has done if you just didn’t have that all-consuming passion. He’s a phenomenal detective. He is part of a global network of like-minded police, and that’s unique. They are identifying offenders and victims in each other’s jurisdictions all the time. And you need that level of cooperation when you shut down a major operation. Everyone has to be going through the door at the same time.”

Humble, focused, passionate, totally committed … ­Barnett rattles off the adjectives. Rouse takes the job ­seriously, himself not so much. He is loyal. He thinks ­globally. His staff would follow him anywhere. He’s ­plateaued his career – as far as rank goes – to remain in his role, his very important role. Operation Achilles, Barnett says, is the perfect example of Rouse’s passion. He took on a major worldwide investigation that had nothing at all to do with Queensland. Not then, at least.

THE EVOLUTION OF ACHILLES

Achilles – which would become the biggest multi-­agency takedown of a pedophile ring of its time – began over a lunch on the Gold Coast. New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs had taken a man into ­custody and gained access to his online accounts. It took them down a rabbit hole for which they were unprepared. They called in Argos and handed the file over.

Soon after, then-commissioner Bob Atkinson sent Rouse to listen to an FBI agent speaking at an event hosted for FBI National Academy graduates on the Gold Coast in 2005. Arnold Bell, the FBI’s then-new chief of its Innocent Images Program, was one of the presenters, and Rouse ­organised to have lunch with him.

“When we met, [Jon] was talking about how this case had come to them from New Zealand,” Bell recalls. “We basically had an hour for lunch and I said, ‘why don’t I send a guy over and have him spend a couple of weeks with your undercover guy and let’s see what we get?’ ”

Bell knew that forming an international network was important. This crime, more than any other, knew no ­borders. Online networks could only be shut down with ­different countries and jurisdictions working together. They would call the investigation Operation Achilles – it was all about finding the weak spot.

An FBI agent duly arrived in Brisbane and set up the ­investigation with Argos, poring over the information they’d gathered to that point. “When [the agent] came home, he was like, ‘we’ve got to do this, it’s a really big deal’,” Bell remembers. “I got on the phone with Jon and said, ‘hey, I am willing and ready to fund this thing. Bring your guy over. We’ll put him up in an apartment, give him access to all our tools. We’ll put together a team’. Eighteen months later, we took this thing down.”

For months, they worked their way into the Group and collected intelligence. The level of sophistication was ­unprecedented. The Group’s leader, like the others, would ­lament the loss of societies in which it was acceptable to ­conduct sexual relationships with children. One day, the Group believed, it would be so again.

“Imagine a time,” the Group leader narrates in a film he produced for newcomers, “when a picture is just a picture. And those who view them are not vilified.” His words flash across images of Paris’s famed Louvre. “Follow me to a ­museum,” he says, “where dreams come true.” He takes the viewer on a tour of his Louvre, a visual walk-through of an art gallery filled with ornate frames. Inside each frame is a graphic image of child exploitation.

But it was the Daphne and Irena film that changed everything. Daphne and Irena were two little girls who would appear frequently in child exploitation material shared within the Group. “The Daphne extra special video,” the Group was told, was “made by special request”. Group members had contributed to its cost. The covert officer from Queensland and his FBI counterpart uncovered ­discussion among members that drew them to a site where children could be selected from a catalogue where “made to order” films were offered.

In short: Group members could “order” the rape of a child, any type of rape, and pay for it to be filmed. “Here is what I would like to see in the next vid,” one member writes, before giving a detailed and graphic description of his order.

TRAIL LEADS BACK TO QUEENSLAND

More and more law enforcement agencies were brought in to work on Operation Achilles: Europol, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands. Achilles was being run 24/7, online, around the world. Investigators ­listened to the voices of the girls in the Daphne and Irena films. Rouse had known they were European but, with the help of his international counterparts, he learned they were speaking Belgian Dutch, or Flemish. Then the Daphne video, commissioned exclusively for the group, was leaked and shared among pedophiles across the internet. Invest­igators monitored chat threads and it wasn’t long before the international team of investigators gathered enough information to lead them directly to Daphne and Irena. Their ­father, from Bruges in Belgium, was arrested. After some ­interrogation, he led police to the backpacker hostel where the films had been made. He also gave them Sergio, the Italian “filmmaker” responsible for the Daphne video and the made-to-order child exploitation website. Sergio and the girls’ father would each be sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Police were horrified to discover that in every case, the children who were taken to Sergio to appear in his films had been delivered by their parents. As the arrests and rescues began, Europol set up a side operation. Operation Koala, named in recognition of the work of Rouse and his Argos detectives, would target every single person who paid for one of Sergio’s films.

When they compiled their list of targets, Rouse discovered that the investigation had a Queensland link. The No. 3-ranked Group member was married father-of-three Derek Richard Mara, 30, a human resources manager for Australia Post. Arrested in Townsville, north Queensland, on February 29, 2008, Mara was one of four “core” members of the group who screened, tested and admitted new members. On Mara’s computer, police found more than 75,000 images of child exploitation and nearly 1000 films. The judge would call it a “cache of depravity”, and Mara was sentenced to six years’ jail in 2009.

In the US, Bell organised coordinated raids on all his ­targets. Fourteen American offenders would collectively be given 325 years of prison time, and 23 children were rescued from harm.

PROCESS OF ELIMINATION

Operation Achilles was done. Chloe had not been one of the team’s rescues. It had been a wrenching ­decision to leave her behind. But investigators hadn’t given up.

The Chloe file amounted to 731MB of images and 424MB of video. Not a lot by today’s standards. But it proved enough. They searched every image for clues. In some images Chloe was posed in a car. In others she was filmed in what appeared to be cheap motel rooms. Invest­igators spotted doughnut packages and nail polish bottles, collecting information on the brands and where they were sold. They looked at the interior of the car she’d been posed in and worked out the make and model. From a package in one photo, police obtained a partial postcode. They used Photoshop to isolate the little girl from the seedy motel room and sent the photographs to as many motel chains as they could. “Do you recognise this room, this furniture, this bedspread?” they asked.

There was often a man in the images and films, abusing Chloe. He always obscured his face but investigators sometimes heard him speak. They speculated he might be a ­farmer from his permanent tan lines. All these clues – his accent, appearance, the brands, the postcode/zip code – led investigators to the US. To Jonesboro, Georgia.

They found Chloe on June 9, 2008. FBI agents kicked in the door and arrested 38-year-old Georgian man James Huskey. They discovered, with horror, that Chloe had been raped as recently as the night before.

“The images in this case are horrific,” prosecutor Francey Hakes told the media. “And that doesn’t even really begin to describe it. This case ranks right up there with the worst I’ve ever seen in 12-and-a-half years.” And it started, she said, with police in Australia. It had been members of Task Force Argos who’d first spotted Chloe.

Rouse says officers cannot afford to let one child or image get to them. “It’s not our job. But I won’t ever forget that one,” he recounted in a 2015 interview. “There are [cases] that are imprinted on your brain because it’s the first time you’ve seen a child being raped. It’s a really confronting ­moment. I think Chloe is one that will stay with me forever.”

THERE’S NO ‘I’ IN TEAM

On the wall in the office that houses Task Force Argos are photographs of three former team members who died during their terms of service.

Detective Senior Constable Karl Scholz was on assignment, interviewing a victim, when he developed a dental abscess and became ill. He died in hospital in 2002. Detective Sergeant Stewart Kerlin was killed in a car crash while investigating a case in 2006. His partner in the vehicle at the time, Detective ­Senior Constable Paul Meese, died two years later after ­developing a brain tumour.

It’s the “team” that’s important to Rouse. Being singled out as Queensland’s Australian of the Year does not sit comfortably with the father-of-one. His daughter is now 24 and Rouse is rightly protective of her identity and safety. He describes her premature entry to the world (born at 27 weeks and weighing just 700 grams) and her struggle to ­survive as one of the defining moments of his life, coming just a year before he started working in the child abuse field.

He and his wife divorced when their daughter was quite young and Rouse is now partnered with Cecilia Wallin, who is from Sweden and works for the Interpol Crimes Against Children unit in Bangkok, Thailand.

Home for Rouse is still the northern suburbs of Brisbane, which he shares with a Tonkinese cat named Meeshka. Both proved reluctant to be photographed for Qweekend and plans for a photo shoot before Christmas were ­interrupted by a mercy flight to Bangkok after Wallin was injured in a fall, fracturing several ribs.

Rouse is extraordinarily proud of the work of Taskforce Argos and his team but shuns the media glare ahead of next Friday’s announcement of the 2019 Australian of the Year. He settles on the positives of this great accolade, noting he can use it to further the crusade.

“This vicarious trauma that I’m suffering,” he says, “is a platform, I guess, to … drive awareness. Argos has a huge history that has made the unit what it is today. It’s not just me. It’s a successive group of people. And it’s not just Argos. It’s the Child Protection ­Investigation units across the state. It’s our counterparts nationally. It’s the teams we work with internationally.”

Ross Barnett, whom Rouse has described as a “great mentor”, is unsympathetic to the detective’s discomfort. “If you want to talk about careers that matter,” Barnett says, “his career matters. Argos is an example of the Queensland Police Service being as good as any other in the country, or any in the world.

“That’s the level of Argos. Jon Rouse is world-class, and so is Argos.” ■

*Name changed to protect identity

2019 AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR NOMINEES

Queensland: Jon Rouse

Since 1996, Detective Inspector Rouse has undertaken the heart-breaking yet vital work of investigating crimes against children. Jon implemented the Australian National Victim Image Library to assist police to identify victims.

Victoria: Mark Sullivan

Founder and managing director of not-for-profit Medicines Development for Global Health (MDGH), Mark and his team develop medicines based on public health rather than commercial needs.

New South Wales: Kurt Fearnley

Representing Australia over a 20-year wheelchair-racing career, Kurt Fearnley AO now champions the rights of people with disability and advocates for greater access into communities and workplaces.

ACT: Virginia Haussegger

For more than 25 years, Virginia Haussegger AM has built a career as a television journalist, writer and commentator. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2014 for service to the community, gender equity and the media.

Western Australia: Craig Challen

In June 2018, cave diver Craig Challen helped rescue a soccer team of 12 boys and their coach from flooded Thailand caves, receiving the Star of Courage for his selfless bravery.

South Australia: Dr Richard Harris

In July 2018, anaesthetist and cave-diver Dr Richard Harris played a key role in the rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach, giving them an anaesthetic to enable them to be carried unconscious out of the cave.

Northern Territory: Michael Long

In 2004, Michael embarked on ‘The Long Walk’ from his home in Melbourne to Canberra and established the Michael Long Learning and Leadership Centre in Darwin to put Indigenous issues on the national agenda.

Tasmania: Bernadette Black

After personally experiencing the stigma associated with teenage pregnancy, Bernadette (Bernie) Black founded Brave Foundation in 2009 to provide resources and education opportunities to support teenage parents.

Source: australianoftheyear.org.au

The winner will be announced on Friday, January 25

AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR HONOUR ROLL

2018: Professor Michelle Simmons (NSW), Professor in quantum physics

2017: Emeritus Professor Alan Mackay-Sim (Qld), Biomedical scientist treating spinal cord injuries

2016: Former lieutenant-General David Morrison AO (ACT), Equality advocate

2015: Rosie Batty (Vic), Family violence campaigner

2014: Adam Goodes (NSW), AFL player and community leader

2013: Ita Buttrose AO OBE (NSW), Media icon

2012: Geoffrey Rush (Vic), Oscar-winning actor

2011: Simon McKeon (Vic), Social entrepreneur

2010: Professor Patrick McGorry (Vic), Mental health expert

2009: Sir Gustav Nossal (Vic), Scientist and reconciliation campaigner