FDS Insight Magazine Jun - Sep 2023

17 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.’ Judy Ryan: ‘I just looked at this beautiful young man and thought somebody loves you, what would they think?’ Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian 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