FDS Insight Magazine Jun - Sep 2023

19 ‘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.’