FDS Insight Magazine Jun - Sep 2023

16 ‘Something broke’: How an overdose at her back gate turned one Melbourne woman into an activist Sophie Black, The Guardian (18/2/23) udy Ryan knew she had to do something to help her ‘beautiful’ inner-city community. She also knew it needed a safe injecting centre. ‘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. Ryan knew next to nothing about injecting centres before she launched the campaign, other than that they seemed to raise eyebrows. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian 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. J