Continuing on from Women’s Safety on the Stage. Silence When I Asked to Be Heard - December 2022.
On Wednesday 28 December 2022, I met with St. George Police Crimes Manager Robert Allison.
I brought requests, recommendations and records. I left documents and another USB containing evidence of what I had been trying to explain for years.
Robert Allison was pleasant, but I needed more than a pleasant manner. He had his watch on the table because he had another meeting in an hour. I felt as though I was competing with that watch before I had even begun.
I had always struggled with exam anxiety. My strength was having the time to think, write and explain properly. Now, carrying everything I had been through, I was trying to explain traumatic events against a visible deadline.
He had read the police records. But those were the very records I was trying to challenge because they were dangerously inaccurate. When I put my own records before him, he said, as I recall:
“I’m not going to have time to read all that.”
Then how was I supposed to correct the record—or, until I could do that, stop further foreseeable harm in this extraordinary situation?
He had read their account. Mine apparently required more time than he could give. That left me trying to explain the harm, challenge the inaccuracies and prevent it happening again—all while watching the time run out.
That’s why the meeting felt like tokenism to me: a meeting they could say had happened, while the substance of what I needed remained unresolved.
Superintendent Rohan Cramsie had arranged for me to meet with his crimes manager. He didn’t meet with me himself. Yet I had already emphasised that I needed someone to listen properly after all the times I hadn’t been heard.
Mr Allison’s pleasant manner didn’t remove that need. In the letter I intended to send him, I wrote:
“I also sensed that, by the end of our meeting, you were starting to see how serious this issue actually was. Am I correct?”
I wanted that understanding to lead somewhere. I needed time, attention and action.
They were supposed to protect me. They weren’t supposed to become another source of harm.
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Listening can’t end when the speech does
At the local walk against gender-based violence, I had heard Superintendent Cramsie speak about listening to victims.
Under my breath, repeatedly, I said: “bullshit.”
That was the distance between the speech I was hearing and the treatment I had experienced.
In my message asking him for a meeting, reproduced with my intended letter to Mr Allison, I wrote:
“The biggest indignity to the human person is when no one is listening.”
And:
“And you need to listen for all the times your staff never did.”
My matter was work-related psychological abuse. I had asked for a safe work environment on 2 July 2019. What followed, as documented in the records I compiled, was the conduct I was reporting: retaliation, harassment, stalking, privacy violations, financial harm and repeated failures by the organisations I approached for protection.
I needed police to understand that context. I needed them to investigate the conduct I was reporting, including my allegations of fraud and intimidation.
I didn’t need another encounter in which the distress caused by those experiences became more visible than the experiences themselves.
I had already tried the route I was advised to take. My intended letter records that the Fair Work Ombudsman told me to report the harassment to police. In September 2020, I approached Kogarah police and was directed to apply for an APVO at Sutherland Local Court. The registrar then referred me back to the Fair Work Ombudsman.
How many times was I supposed to go around that circle while the harm continued? By December 2022, I was asking police to address what those earlier referrals had left unresolved.
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Thirty minutes for years of harm
In the intended letter to Mr Allison, I asked:
“Can we please try another meeting, without my feeling anxious because I have to compete with a clock.”
He had another meeting in an hour. In my intended letter, I described the limited opportunity I felt I had to explain:
“It’s too serious, and I can’t compete with a watch, the limited time of 30 minutes and another back to back meeting.”
I knew his time was finite. I recognised that our meeting had made him late for his next appointment. But my time mattered too.
Years spent seeking help. Years spent compiling evidence. Years trying to protect my family, preserve my home and recover in my job.
How was I meant to compress all of that into a short appointment, particularly when I first had to challenge the records that appeared to have shaped the understanding of my circumstances?
I wrote:
“In my case, you need to make time, to save time. And save lives.”
That was a serious recommendation. Repeated interventions that missed the underlying problem had consumed time and resources while adding to my trauma. A proper opportunity to listen could help explain why.
My request was basic:
“Just let me speak and share my experience. Take notes.”
In my message to Superintendent Cramsie, I also said that police hadn’t listened to my longstanding friends or caring neighbours who had witnessed what I was being put through.
Why weren’t the people who could help explain the context heard? Why did I feel that other accounts carried weight while mine, and those of people who knew what was happening to me, did not?
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What I actually asked police to do
My meeting brief was specific.
It asked police to investigate allegations concerning medical reporting, the conduct of employer and WHS staff, and communications from lawyers that I experienced as harassment and intimidation. I also raised serious concerns about how I had been treated during encounters involving police and health services, with an expectation that my rights and dignity would be respected from here on.
I had identified people, conduct and supporting records. What assessment did those requests receive?
I asked police to consider the articles I supplied about Victoria’s Brodie’s Law, and called for similar protection in NSW so work-related bullying would be taken seriously. In my case the “bully” were senior leaders in a nationally registered publicly funded university employer, not an individual employee! It was the employer! How do I protect myself and my family from that!?!
My brief also identified a NAB recording connected with a subsequent police attendance, which I said had taken six months of follow-up to get posted to me. That encounter occurred while I was trying to find a way to settle on my home and prevent devastating financial loss, caused by employer and insurer fraud, in retaliation for requesting a SAFE WORK ENVIRONMENT!
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I wanted the circumstances examined, and processes changed so that responses addressed the harm I was reporting.
I asked for access to the police event reports and help understanding how misleading information could be amended or redacted. I wanted appropriate support to review those records without being overwhelmed by having to revisit the experiences they described.
I wrote:
“Do not deny me what would assist my recovery and wellbeing, anymore.”
Those records weren’t harmless paperwork to me. I needed a way to challenge them, with support, rather than be confronted repeatedly by a version of events in which I didn’t recognise my own experience.
Until those inaccuracies could be addressed, I needed police to recognise the danger of relying on them without hearing me or examining the evidence I supplied.
I asked police to read the selected records in the NSW Police folder on the USB. I identified incidents and documents.
I also asked for the cost of replacing my broken door to be paid. My brief recorded:
“I was left with no security on my door for weeks.”
I had included replacement quotes on the USB. I described being left exposed to the risk of assault or theft and asked why there had been no meaningful follow-up or real duty of care, with trauma-informed care. Trauma that St. George PAC contributed to!
Where was the protection in leaving a woman alone with a door that no longer secured her home?
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My dignity mattered too
Some of the experiences I asked police to review were deeply personal. Their effects reached into my professional life, including an encounter with someone who knew me through my work at the university.
In my brief, I wrote:
“I have been humiliated in front of my own colleagues.”
I asked for an opportunity to explain what had happened and recover some of my dignity.
I don’t need to disclose every private detail publicly for that request to matter. Those entrusted with my records had the information they needed to examine my concerns respectfully.
The emotional consequences belonged in their consideration of what had happened. So did my right to privacy.
I needed a response that recognised the person carrying those consequences and took care not to add to them.
——
There were officers who made me feel heard
I repeatedly asked Mr Allison to contact certain officers at Wollongong PAC.
In my email to NSW Police Customer Assistance, I asked that he speak with them:
“to find out what they did differently that had me feel validated, valued and respected as a human being.”
I knew the difference between an encounter that compounded my distress and one that helped me feel human again. I was offering police an example they could learn from.
I wanted that respect to become part of how St. George PAC responded to me too.
See:
When Even Home Wasn’t Safe - June 2022
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Why I tried reporting this story elsewhere
On 31 December 2022, my email to NSW Police Customer Assistance asked that my message be passed to Mr Allison and Superintendent Cramsie.
I told them I was sharing my account and records with investigative journalists.
In that email, I wrote:
“I need to respectfully have a voice after so much degradation and abuse.”
I had kept asking because the need for protection hadn’t gone away. Neither had the harm.
The letter I intended to send him formed part of my compilation. I couldn’t keep retelling fragments of the same nightmare to another person, another office, another agency, hoping someone would finally connect them.
In the introduction to that letter, I wrote:
“This entire failure and disaster must be viewed holistically and I can’t repeat any of it again, to one person or another.”
The unsafe workplace conduct, the failed workers’ compensation processes, the financial pressure, the effects on my family and the responses of the authorities I approached had accumulated in one person’s life: mine.
Separating them into disconnected complaints didn’t separate their effects on me.
In that compilation, I recorded two comments others had made: “they don’t care if you’ve lost faith in humanity” and “he’s a cop he just wants the facts, you’ll lose him from the first paragraph”.
What a terrible position to put a traumatised person in. Explain the human consequences and risk losing the listener. Strip them out and lose the very context that explains the harm.
My humanity was part of the facts.
——
What happened to the documents and the USB?
I want respectful, honest answers.
What did St. George PAC do with the documents I left with Mr Allison on 28 December 2022?
Who reviewed the USB? Were the selected records in the NSW Police folder read? Were my allegations assessed against my evidence, alongside the police reports I disputed?
Were the friends and neighbours I identified approached for their accounts?
Was there any follow-up on my requests for supported access to the reports, a further meeting, the broken door, or contact with the Wollongong officers?
What happened to my requests for investigation?
If police decided not to investigate matters I raised, what were the reasons?
I shouldn’t have to guess whether the records I worked so hard to compile were ever meaningfully considered.
My brief contained this plea:
“Don’t let me live with this trauma anymore.”
As 2022 ended and 2023 approached, I was still asking for the same essential things: safety, dignity, an opportunity to speak, and action on the evidence.
I had cared for people in my personal and professional life. When I needed protection myself, I kept finding another door I had to push against.
They were all supposed to protect me.
I needed someone to put down the watch, listen to my voice, and take seriously what had happened to me.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 588.
