“Tell me to shut up if you need to,” Judy Ryan offers helpfully over a bowl of pho on Victoria St in inner city Melbourne. “I don’t draw breath.” Then, mid-sentence, she pauses, raises an eyebrow over bright red specs. “Hear that? Nothing. No sirens. Five years ago, we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves over the ambulances.”
In this pocket of the Melbourne suburbs of Richmond and Abbotsford you didn’t have to linger long to hear a siren’s wail. Heroin overdoses were claiming more lives here than anywhere else in the state. Ryan, who lives 200 metres off Victoria St, would invite outsiders for coffee at the Quint Cafe on the corner of Lennox St. She’d strategically seat her guests with an unencumbered view of the street. “I’d sit with my back to this intersection,” she says. “I’d watch as their eyes just grew as big as saucers, as all the emergency services descended on to the latest overdose.”
These days, the Quint cafe has shut up shop, and if visitors look straight down the barrel of Lennox, they can see the top of a bright green building poking above the trees. This is the controversial medically supervised injecting centre (MSIC) for which Ryan campaigned against the backdrop of three coroners’ reports, a parliamentary inquiry, two elections, a private member’s bill, and dozens of preventable deaths.
Ryan knew next to nothing about injecting centres before she launched the campaign, other than that they seemed to raise eyebrows.
She didn’t know much about heroin either, despite the fact that two of her sisters had lost sons to heroin. Ewan died in Brisbane in 1996, aged 21; Richard in North Richmond in 2003, aged 28. Neither nephew features in her new book, You Talk, We Die short of one mention of their deaths as a way of disclosing Ryan’s personal connection.
The book, instead, is a forensic account of how she rallied residents to approach the heroin dilemma as a public health issue, and how her campaign contributed to the change of the mind among business and political leaders after decades of inaction.
Ryan says the exclusion of her family’s tragedy is deliberate – this isn’t a memoir, and “I didn’t start this campaign to avenge their deaths”. Raising young kids of her own at the time, Ryan says she “wasn’t on the journey” with her sisters as they grappled with their sons’ drug addictions. “But I had the experience of when they died and how unbelievably shocking it was … I knew them as little kids, I changed their nappies and they were beautiful.”
“It’s that aching story that I really want to represent without flogging it. They’re not just people who go to the injecting room. They’re not junkies in a shooting gallery. They are people who are loved.”
***
Around here it’s possible for locals to step from the slipstream of everyday life on a sunny afternoon to suddenly watching someone overdose in the street. Residents have found people flickering on the edge of death while on the school run, the supermarket dash, watering the garden. For Judy Ryan, on one particular day in July of 2016, it was at her back gate.
A young man lay slumped in the sunshine, “still and quiet”. Ryan had been here before, so many times she’d lost count. “You get this rush of adrenaline to try to keep this person alive as you listen to their shallow breathing.” You ring triple 0, she says, and then you sit with them, and you wait. Finally, the ambos arrive and they thank you for your time. On this occasion, the man, one of Ryan’s “regulars” as she calls them, was revived. “Then you go inside and you collapse.”
Something about that afternoon was different. “I just looked at this beautiful young man and thought somebody loves you, what would they think? Something broke.”
With next to no knowledge of the issue, Ryan googled, and roamed on to the website of the Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Sydney’s Kings Cross. A medically supervised injecting centre is a place where people can inject drugs in a supervised health setting, it’s also an opportunity to access other health services like mental health support, drug treatment, wound care and blood testing. If someone overdoses in the room, a staff member can respond immediately. “I thought, oh God, that sounds amazing.” But, “it wasn’t my job”.
Ryan and her husband John had moved to the inner city area in 2012 after raising three kids in Wodonga on the Victoria/NSW border. A country girl who grew up in Wangaratta as the second youngest of eight, Ryan was 55 years old and in her fourth year of remission from breast cancer. Working part-time at a school, she was on the verge of starting a new business, Women Love Moving Relocation Service, assisting women to transition into new accommodation and new phases of their life.
“I’m actually a licensed estate agent,” she whispers. “I didn’t include that in the book because people hate real estate. I was a hopeless one, I never made any money.”
But for this idea, Ryan had business cards and letterhead ready to go. “I was so passionate about it.”
Still, she kept hovering over the United MSIC website. As a fairly new kid on the block, she didn’t know that many people in her area. She figured running for council – on the single issue of a safe injecting facility – would be the best way to shake people out.
Ryan decided to run as an independent candidate for Langridge Ward in the City of Yarra in the 2016 local government election. She signed up 15 minutes shy of the deadline.
“I put my 50 bucks down. And I was shocked – the returns officer said, ‘Good luck. I’ve been living in this area for years. You’re absolutely right about this.”
Turns out she was on to something.
***
Ryan started with three campaign T-shirts, 1,000 flyers and eight posters. She barrelled through with no focus groups, no strategic plan, no marketing, no social media, no money. (Campaign colour: red. Why? “I just really like the colour red.”)
Certain she had no hope of winning, Ryan didn’t bother organising scrutineers to attend the vote count. But despite her political naivety, or maybe because of it, she ended up with 4.63 % of the primary vote. Perhaps more tellingly, she also nabbed 791 second preferences – which meant “after voting for their rusted-on candidate, many people gave their second vote to an unknown candidate and an MSIC trial.” People took notice. Ryan started to forge contacts and get a good read on how much support was out there for a safe injecting facility.
“I think I was fair. I was upfront,” says Ryan. “Here’s my phone number. This is where I live and this is what I think. It’s not a brain fart. It’s actually something that’s steeped in evidence. Let’s talk … convince me otherwise, or let’s find middle ground.”
***
Ryan’s interest in people made her a born retail politician – she went on to stand as a candidate for the Reason party in the Victorian state electorate of Richmond in 2018; and again for Reason in the federal electorate of Melbourne in 2019. Her shiny (red) moving company business cards are still sitting in their box.
She approached the challenge of igniting people’s politics a bit like “picking a scab”. Residents had become “so weary, they just put up with stuff, and they put up with politicians doing nothing”. Ryan wanted to remind them that they could demand more. All her runs were primarily targeted at highlighting the need for a safe injecting facility, but is there a part of her that wishes she’d won?
“The answer’s yes. Yes. I would’ve really loved it.”
Ryan often refers affectionately to the time she spent growing up, and then raising children, in the country. She remembers the way the community would always look out for each other. “Imagine what they’d do in Wang [Wangaratta] if someone’s child collapsed in the street.”
Her mother has a lot to answer for too. Widowed at 42 and mother to eight, Mary earns the book dedication.
One ice cold night in Wangaratta, when Ryan was five, someone knocked at the door. Her father had died two months earlier, at the age of 43. Mary answered to a homeless man. “He said ‘lady, I’m freezing, do you have any clothes?’ And Mum said yes – she gave this man my dad’s clothes, his shoes – they fitted perfectly.”
***
The injecting facility and associated trial opened in June, 2018. That’s when the real work began. As Ryan witnessed, “it’s a lot easier to divide a community than it is to bring it together.” Ryan doubled down, starting with offering anyone who was interested regular tours of the facility.
“That stuff is hard work,” she admits. “But it’s substantive. It’s evidence-based. It’s real.”
In its first 18 months of operation, MSIC staff safely managed 2,657 overdoses, many of which may have been fatal or resulted in serious injury if they had happened outside the facility. The MSIC had also seen more than a third of clients request support for other health services, and almost a quarter of clients express an interest in alcohol and other drug treatment. The trial was extended until June 2023.
But people still roll up to Ryan’s gate to inject from time to time. After all, Ryan says, it’s not compulsory to go to the MSIC, there are exclusions that mean some people can’t use it, all sorts of reasons. “We still have public injecting, there are still ambulances, we still have overdoses in the street. Has the injecting room been the panacea for all ills? The answer is no and it never will be,” she says. “But it’s so much better.”
The work is never over. Ryan’s phone pings constantly. She’s leading another tour of the MSIC this week, this time for residents of the CBD, just near the proposed site of a second injecting facility. She’s been charged with finding residents in that community to support the project.
The last few years have expanded Ryan’s ideas about what makes a community. “I used to think it wasn’t so much an inner city thing. I’m not so sure now. This is a beautiful place, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. And the people who come here to inject, who came well before I moved here? They’re part of that community.”
You Talk We Die: The Battle for Victoria’s First Safe Injecting Facility is out now through Scribe ($32.99)
