When Dignity Becomes the Question - September 2022

9–23 September 2022

There are moments in a long struggle when separate parts of a story suddenly converge: family, work, faith, culture, grief, mental health, justice and the question of whether the values an institution publicly professes are actually lived when somebody is suffering.

September 2022 was one of those moments for me.

Two emails I wrote that month were separated by only two weeks. Reading them together now, I can see the same question running through both:

What does human dignity mean if it disappears precisely when a person most needs it?

——

9 September 2022: In memory of the Queen and my parents’ citizenship, loyalty and contribution to Australia

On 9 September 2022, the morning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II was announced, I wrote to Professor Hayden Ramsay at ACU.

This wasn’t really an email about monarchy.

It was about my parents.

It was about migration, sacrifice, loyalty, service, education, faith and filotimo — the deeply held Greek value that encompasses honour, dignity, generosity, responsibility and doing what’s right because it’s right.

I asked ACU to recognise what its treatment of me had also meant for my family:

“I really need ACU to show respect to my parents, their sacrifices, hard work, loyalty, filotimo and contribution to our country.”

I spoke of my parents’ service to Australia and their belief in education - educating their children so that we could use the gifts we had been given and contribute to society.

And I connected that history directly to what I was asking of my university: dignity, restoration and the return of what had been taken from me after approximately twenty years of honourable service.

My request was explicit. I sought reinstatement and continuity and the restoration of what I was entitled to, consistent with the mission, values and ethos I had served.

——

Why the Queen’s death brought this to the surface

The longer material accompanying that email explains why the events of 8–9 September 2022 resonated so strongly.

I shared a story from the Hellenic Genealogy Geek Facebook community about a Greek migrant who had arrived in Australia in 1960. He treasured the booklet he received upon naturalisation as an Australian citizen and British subject. He kept it carefully wrapped in plastic until his death in 2014 and showed it to his grandchildren.

The point of that story wasn’t a political argument about republicanism or monarchy.

It was what the booklet represented to a young migrant who had come from poverty, war and hardship: welcome, opportunity, belonging and dignity.

Another child of Greek migrants responded that her own father had kept the same booklet among his treasured possessions. She remembered her parents as:

“honourable hardworking and respectful people”

who instilled filotimo and respect in their children.

The original writer replied:

“Φιλότιμο and respect… they seem to be fading away… Let’s all try to maintain these values…”

That exchange affected me because I knew exactly what they meant.

That was my father. That is my mother.

And so I asked Professor Ramsay:

“Will ACU leaders and colleagues start to repair the trust I had so willingly given for twenty years?”

This wasn’t an abstract philosophical question. I was asking whether dignity, respect, trust, integrity and filotimo could be demonstrated through action - including supporting my recovery and my return to work as per statutory obligations require.

I ended with two questions for a professor of ethics:

“What is the truth?”

and:

“What defines courage?”

——

The contradiction I was trying to expose

The accompanying letter went much further.

I wrote about gaslighting, mobbing, fear and the continuing psychological consequences of what had happened. I said that supporting my recovery and implementing the injury management plan would bring an end to the fear and risks to my safety and wellbeing.

To me, this was a test of ACU’s Catholic identity.

I wrote that supporting recovery would:

“support the mission, values and Catholic ethos of the university.”

And:

“It demonstrates the university’s integrity.”

That remains important.

——

Values are not demonstrated by publishing them. They are demonstrated by what an institution does when applying them is difficult.

What are our values worth when keeping them costs us something?

——

The Justice and Peace Office

Later that same morning, on 9 September 2022, I forwarded the material to the Justice and Peace Office.

I did so deliberately.

I told them that what was happening was relevant to their commitment to social justice because the injustice I was describing was occurring within an institution of the Catholic Church.

By then, my distrust of regulatory systems had become profound. I wrote that I had received a letter from the Fair Work Ombudsman but was frightened even to open it because previous regulatory experiences had become triggers for trauma.

That detail says something about how far things had deteriorated.

A letter arriving in the mail shouldn’t have been frightening.

Yet I was contemplating travelling to my federal MP’s office in Kogarah simply so that I wouldn’t have to open the envelope alone.

I wrote:

“I’m alone, frightened and vulnerable.”

And yet I was still looking for an institution - somewhere - that would demonstrate that systems of accountability could work.

I described the Fair Work Ombudsman at that point as my “last hope of restoring trust and integrity in the government system.” *

I ended that message with words that capture much of what I had been trying to communicate:

“Hypocrisy needs to be replaced by integrity.”

* The Fair Work Ombudsman failed to restore trust and integrity in the government system - see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-fair-work-ombudsman-when-another.html

——

Twelve hours after my father’s death

The email then returned to one of the most painful experiences of my life.

I wrote about my father’s suicide and what occurred approximately 12 hours after his death.

I described my manager coming into my family home and approaching my mother about when I would return to work because it was a busy time of year and everybody was needed.

Three days?

A week?

My father had just died.

My family had barely begun to comprehend what had happened, let alone organise his funeral.

That memory sat behind my question in September 2022:

“Am I an exception for a support network from my university community?”

And then:

“I expect to return and recover in my job as a matter of principle, respect and dignity to the human person.”

I was not an exception to dignity.

“I’m not an exception to ACU’s identity and mission, nor the laws in our society.”

——

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

My email of 23 September 2022 contained a question:

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

That’s the thread running from 9 September to 23 September.

It connects my parents’ migration story with my father’s death.

It connects filotimo with Catholic social teaching.

It connects workplace health and safety with human dignity.

It connects institutional mission statements with the actual treatment of a human being.

And it connects ethics with courage.

I was asking people within a Catholic university and within Catholic social-justice structures not merely to sympathise with what I was saying, but to act consistently with the principles their institutions professed.

By 23 September 2022, I was exhausted. I wrote that I needed to pause from what I called a “battle of social injustice” because the continuing workplace situation had taken its toll.

But even then, I remained clear about what I wanted:

to return and recover in my job.

Because it was a legal obligation and dignity in the university mission should mean something.

——

The question remains

What strikes me is how many times I tried to communicate the same fundamental message through different languages.

Sometimes I spoke in the language of workplace health and safety.

Sometimes workers compensation.

Sometimes ethics.

Sometimes Catholic identity and mission.

Sometimes social justice.

Sometimes family.

Sometimes grief.

And sometimes through the Greek word that perhaps says it most simply:

Filotimo.

On 9 September 2022, I asked:

“What is the truth?”

I also asked:

“What defines courage?”

On 23 September 2022, I asked:

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

Those are not three separate questions.

They are different versions of the same one.

When an institution speaks publicly about dignity, justice, ethics, compassion and the value of the human person, what happens when living those principles requires it to confront what has happened within its own community?

That’s when values cease to be words.

That’s when they are tested.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 473, 482

 

When Mission and Identity Will Not Answer the Question - August 2022

23–30 August 2022

By August 2022, I was no longer asking an abstract question about ACU’s mission and identity.

I was asking how that mission applied to me.

I’ve worked at ACU for approximately twenty years, living the values the university publicly professes: dignity of the human person, service, compassion, community, respect for others and the common good.

My family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

And yet, after everything that had happened since I first spoke up locally on 2 July 2019, I was still trying to find somebody — anybody — within the university who would answer a very basic question:

How does what has happened to me reconcile with ACU’s Catholic identity and mission?

That question became particularly confronting in August 2022.

——

I went directly to Mission

I found the university’s Communications Officer (Mission).

The ACU webpage preserved in my records described the Communications Officer (Mission) as the person to contact for comment about the university’s “Catholic identity and mission”, or for comment from areas including ACU Campus Ministry, EthicsFinder and ACU Community Engagement.

That seemed to be precisely where my questions belonged.

So I contacted her.

On 23 August 2022, I left a voice message on her phone. It was a voice message I recorded and sent, due to the creepy nature of all this conduct, and for self-preservation from further harm, like this incident: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html

I have that recorded message and I have retained the transcript of exactly what I said.

I also sent written communications. The records include the lengthy text message I sent to the Mission communications number. The screenshot preserved in my records shows that message marked “Read.”

I also know that my emails were being received and read.

I wasn’t throwing questions into the ether. I was trying to communicate directly with my university through a position specifically identified by ACU as a contact point for comment about its Catholic identity and mission.

And I was asking for answers.

——

Listen to what I was actually saying

The voice recording is difficult for me to revisit because even through the written transcript, the level of distress is unmistakable.

I spoke about my twenty years at ACU. I spoke about trying to live its mission and values through my work and through the way I supported other people.

I spoke about what had happened after I asked for discrimination, harassment, bullying and privacy violations to stop.

I spoke about my father’s suicide and the impact upon my family.

I spoke about the loss of my financial security.

I spoke about isolation and ostracism.

I spoke about my attempts to get back to my work.

I spoke about workers compensation and the Injury Management Plan.

I spoke about being frightened.

And I kept coming back to the same question:

“So you tell me how all this relates to the mission and to the identity, and ethics and everything that is being promoted, because I lived that.”

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish.

I wanted an answer, because this had begun with something so much smaller than everything it eventually became.

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries so that I could have a psychosocially safe working environment.

That was it.

I hadn’t asked for my life to become consumed by an institutional battle.

I hadn’t asked to become isolated from my workplace, my colleagues and the support network that should have been part of my recovery.

I hadn’t asked for my family to become caught up in my workplace matter.

I hadn’t asked for their privacy to be implicated, or for members of my family to receive communications that I experienced as attempts to intimidate them into silence.

I hadn’t asked to spend years documenting what was happening because documentation had become one of the few protections I felt I had left.

I had asked for safety.

And this is where the question of dignity becomes impossible for me to separate from everything that followed.

——

The dignity of the human person

My own relationship with ACU extends across approximately twenty years of service, and my family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

It makes what followed - including the involvement of my family in a workplace matter that was mine - all the more difficult to comprehend through the lens of the dignity of the human person.

This isn’t an abstract phrase to me.

It’s not something that belongs only in a mission statement.

It has to mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

It has to mean something when that human being becomes vulnerable.

It has to mean something when an employee says: I am frightened.

It has to mean something when she says: I need this conduct to stop.

It has to mean something when she asks for a safe work environment.

It has to mean something when her family is drawn into something that began as her workplace matter.

And it has to mean something when the person asking the question has given approximately twenty years of her working life to the institution.

That’s why I keep returning to Mission and Identity.

How is any of this reconciled with the dignity of the human person?

Not as an abstract Catholic principle.

Not as words on a university website.

As something that must mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

——

The contradiction 

This wasn’t just any employer.

ACU is a nationally registered, publicly funded Australian university. It operates across Australia and has a presence in Rome.

It publicly identifies itself through an explicitly Catholic mission and identity.

That makes the question of institutional conduct more important.

• What does dignity of the human person require when an employee says she’s being harmed?

• What does the common good mean when a staff member repeatedly asks for a psychosocially safe workplace?

• What does community engagement mean when an employee and members of her family experience the institution very differently, under current leadership, from the values being publicly communicated?

• What does compassion mean when somebody is telling you that she’s frightened?

• What does ethics mean if policies and values exist beautifully on websites and in public communications, but the person asking how those principles apply to her, cannot obtain an answer?

• And what does Catholic Identity mean if the difficult questions about institutional conduct are the questions nobody wants to answer?

They require answers.

——

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people”

A week later, on 30 August 2022, I wrote again.

My email again asked how what I was experiencing, could be reconciled with the university’s:

“mission, values, ethos, community engagement, code of conduct and compliance of Australian laws”

By then, I was explicitly connecting what had happened to me with the broader public conversation about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

I wrote:

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people.”

This captures the problem for me.

An institution can have excellent policies.

It can publish beautiful statements about dignity.

It can speak about compassion, wellbeing, inclusion, ethics, social justice and the common good.

It can employ people specifically to communicate its mission.

But eventually those principles have to encounter an actual human being.

They have to mean something when that human being is distressed, injured, frightened, persistent or asking questions the institution would rather not answer.

Otherwise, what do they mean?

——

I can only speak for myself

There were broader concerns in my communications. I was beginning to ask questions about regulators, governments, workplace mental health and what appeared to me to be much larger systemic problems.

Those questions remain important.

But here I want to be careful.

I can speak for myself.

I can speak about what happened to me.

I can speak about the records I kept.

I can speak about the communications I sent.

I can speak about the voice message I left and recorded.

I can speak about the text messages.

I can speak about the emails.

I can speak about asking for help.

I can speak about asking for safety.

And I can speak about repeatedly asking how the conduct I was experiencing could possibly be reconciled with the values my employer professed.

The text message preserved in my records ends with words that are painful for me to read now:

“I’ve begged and begged and begged. No more indignity and exploitation of the human person.”

That was August 2022.

More than three years after I first asked for a safe work environment. 

——

So what’s the answer?

That is the question I am left with.

• What was the answer from Mission and Identity?

• How was what was happening to me consistent with the dignity of the human person?

• How was ignoring repeated requests for a safe work environment consistent with the common good?

• How was involving my family in something that began as my workplace matter consistent with respect for human dignity?

• How was my prolonged isolation from my workplace consistent with an institution professing community?

• How was the level of fear and distress I was communicating consistent with a commitment to wellbeing?

How could I be telling the university, repeatedly and in increasingly vulnerable language:

I am frightened.

I need support.

I want to get back to my work.

Please listen to me.

- while the public language of mission, compassion, dignity and mental health continued around me?

I wasn’t asking the Communications Officer (Mission) personally to resolve everything that had happened.

I was asking a question that the very purpose of that position made particularly important:

What does ACU’s mission require the institution to do when its own employee is telling it that the institution’s conduct towards her is causing profound harm?

And if what I documented was consistent with ACU’s mission and identity, then explain to me how.

If it was not consistent with that mission and identity, another question follows.

Why did nobody intervene?

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries for a psychosocially safe work environment.

Look at where it went from there.

That’s the question I was asking in August 2022.

And it is the question these records still leave unanswered.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 460-462.