22 & 29 June 2022
There comes a point when asking for help becomes harder than carrying the suffering alone.
By 22 June 2022, I’d reached that point.
I wasn’t writing to strangers.
I wasn’t writing to people who didn’t know me.
I was writing to colleagues in Ministry. People who spoke about dignity, compassion, justice and community. People who knew me. People who had worked alongside me. People who knew I had dedicated more than twenty years of my life to our university community.
And yet, despite everything that had happened, I still found myself pleading to be heard.
In an email on 22 June 2022, I wrote:
“I’ve got no support and I’m very, very sick and alone… I need human support like every human person.”
Those words weren’t written to make anyone feel guilty.
They were written because they were true.
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My life had become a series of parallel crises.
My workers’ compensation claim remained unresolved.
My publicly funded university employer, who’d injured me in their decision to take aggressive adverse action for my requesting a psychosocially safe work environment, had still not made me feel safe.
The systems that were supposed to protect workers had failed to intervene.
My family’s privacy had also been violated by the University’s leaders.
That was my family’s privacy. It wasn’t something I ever expected to become intertwined with my workplace.
What distressed me most was that deeply private and tragic family circumstances hadn’t been treated with the dignity and confidentiality every person deserves.
Privacy is not a privilege.
It is part of respecting the dignity of every human person.
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Throughout those weeks, I kept returning to one word.
Integrity.
Not legal strategy.
Not public relations.
Integrity.
In that same email of 22 June 2022, I wrote:
“I need integrity not hypocrisy.”
Those words came from profound disappointment.
Because mission statements are easy to publish.
The Gospel is easy to quote.
Strategic plans are easy to write.
But integrity is revealed when someone within your own community is suffering.
It is revealed by whether people step towards that person…
…or quietly step away.
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A week later, on 29 June 2022, I found myself writing to my solicitor, not about legal tactics, but about survival.
I wrote:
“This is the outcome when no one listens.”
Those words weren’t directed at one person.
They reflected years of trying to be heard.
By my employer.
By my insurer.
By regulators.
And, perhaps most painfully, by members of a university community whose mission spoke so often about compassion, justice and the dignity of the human person.
Revisit my reflection on the Staff Code of Conduct for ALL staff: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-what-you-do-that-defines-who-we-are.html
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One sentence from that email says it all:
“I’m not here to save the world. Right now, I’d be happy to just save myself.”
That was EXHAUSTION.
For years, I found myself battling a failed regulatory system to save:
My career.
My health.
My home.
My future.
By the end of June 2022, I was simply trying to survive.
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I don’t remember those weeks only because of the legal battles or the endless correspondence.
I remember them because I was still hoping that someone would hear what lay beneath the words.
Just someone willing to stop long enough to see that one of their own colleagues was drowning.
Perhaps that is what saddens me most.
Not that I kept asking for help.
But that I kept believing someone would answer.
And all I could hear…
…was the sound of silence.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 367-368.
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Further Reading
In The Pain of Unbelonging: Why Workplace Bullying Hurts, psychologist Dorothy Suskind explores how workplace bullying damages our fundamental human need to belong. She explains that organisational silence, exclusion and institutional betrayal can leave people feeling isolated, unseen and disconnected from the very communities where they felt they belonged.
Much of that resonated with me.
The isolation has been one of the hardest parts of this journey.
But where my story differs is in what comes next.
I have never accepted that this should be the end of my relationship with the university community I served for more than twenty years.
The silence I experienced wasn’t simply colleagues drifting away. It was a culture where fear prevented people from reaching out, even when they wanted to. Workplace bullying doesn’t affect only its target. It changes the behaviour of everyone around it.
I won’t allow the abuse of power, failures of governance and breaches of statutory obligations to determine the ending of my story.
There must be accountability and natural justice. As Senator Tony Sheldon said, “public money comes with public accountability.” (See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/senate-inquiry-interim-report-university-governance/105795694).
As for “closure”, closure does not come from quietly accepting what should never have happened.
For me, this story ends when those with responsibility finally do what they should have done from the beginning: protect the dignity, safety and rights of the people entrusted to their care.
Suskind, D. (2025, 5 July). ‘The Pain of Unbelonging: Why Workplace Bullying Hurts.’ Psychology Today. [Online]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bully-wise/202507/the-pain-of-unbelonging-why-workplace-bullying-hurts/amp
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