Life Lessons From A Trauma Cleaner
I’ve always been fascinated by stories. Stories are currency; we trade little pieces of our soul with others when we share them. This is one I'll never forget.
I’ve written hundreds of stories and many thousands of words in my lifetime, and – like you – spent countless hours consuming the tales of others through the media, entertainment industry and in real life. A lot of stories we hear and quickly delete, our brains making room for more important life data. But some we never forget, and for me one of those is the story of Sandra Pankhurst.
Before I dive in, a quick trigger warning that Sandra’s story is reflective of her tough life, and while I don’t go into any great or gory detail here, feel free to park this one for later if you need to. I share it because when I interviewed Sandra in 2020, I felt a deep affinity with her. Her candour and modelling of self-assurance under the toughest of circumstances were powerful and sorely needed at that point in my life, and I hope her story holds value for yours, too. While her chapter was eventually cut from my book (you always have to ‘kill a few darlings’ my publisher said) her story has lived in me ever since. A few days ago I found out Sandra had passed away back in 2021, so I decided to – finally – share this in her honour.
Sandra was a lot of things in her lifetime. Husband. Father. Drag queen. Sex worker. Wife. Grandmother. Entrepreneur. Politician. And until I spoke to her she worked – often twelve hours a day, six days a week – as a trauma cleaner. Sandra and her team brought back to life spaces that had become stages for death, disease and devastation. Places in which darkness had ravaged the people inside and everything else along with it. Someone needed to clean up the mess, and for 30-odd years, that someone was Sandra. She frequently tackled faeces, blood and bodily matter, dirty syringes and mountains of waste; evidence of lives lived badly.
She didn’t just do the work, she saw a niche in the market and started Australia’s largest and most successful trauma cleaning business. In her own life Sandra was meticulously neat and tidy, so delving into filth – while lucrative – struck me as a huge kindness. She’d spent much of her life in the shadows and made it her contribution to the world to clean up after people who had been living in them too.
‘I feel like I’m helping people,’ she told me. ‘We don’t know what triggered the trauma [that got them there] in the first place.’
It’s the kind of empathy you can only gain from a life of the sort of hard knocks that probably should have knocked Sandra off. Born Peter, she was adopted at six weeks old through the Catholic church to an angry, alcoholic father and a detached and fearful mother to replace a son they lost in childbirth. But when her mother bore two more sons, Peter was moved out of the family home and into the shed – allowed into the main house for Sunday night dinner only. The rest of the time she would sit in her shed, hungry and alone, while her ‘family’ enjoyed meals, running water and company. She was so malnourished her teeth would snap, and all would eventually need to be replaced.
Beaten frequently, neighbouring windows would squeak shut to protect the uncomfortable ears inside when her Dad was ‘at it again’. Her mother would also cop the brunt of her father’s wrath, and while Peter would climb through the window and attempt to protect her, it never earned her love or kindness. Kicked out of home at 17, over the next few years she found a job, a home and a wife. Together they had two children and adult life appeared on track. But she had questions, and her hunt for answers would lead her to the gay scene, the drag scene and eventually to becoming an early adopter of gender-reassignment surgery to become the woman on the outside she knew she was on the inside.
Sandra’s story was meticulously pieced together by Sarah Krasnostein in The Trauma Cleaner. Looking for stories to inspire how I told my own, I inhaled the audiobook in two days and knew I needed to connect with Sandra. By the time we caught up in 2020, Sandra had severe lung disease that stole her breath frequently, and she coughed violently and often during our interview.
‘When I started this business, like, 30 years ago, I never said no to a job, I worked day and night constantly to build the business,’ she told me. ‘There was no OH&S around like we’ve got now, and the chemicals and fumes I was breathing has given me emphysema and COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease]. I had six surgeries in seven weeks and ended up losing half a lung, but I’m not on oxygen, so there’s a bright side to everything.’
She also had liver damage from ‘double dipping’ hormones to speed up the process of transitioning from male to female. She told me it was worth it, because becoming a woman faster allowed her to more quickly live the sort of lifestyle Peter could have only dreamed of, facilitated by men willing to pay for time with her. I have always been fascinated by sex work, so I asked her what it’s really like swapping something so intimate with a stranger for money.
‘It’s a bit shocking in the beginning because it’s something you’re not used to,’ Pankhurst explained to me. ‘I’m not a very sexual being, prostitution was just for the money, a means to an end, and I made the money I needed to have a good lifestyle.’
When a traumatic experience put an end to the sex work, Sandra did what she did best and adapted, working at a dry cleaners and a taxi company before becoming one of the first female funeral directors in Victoria. This is where she would meet her husband of 14 years – a grandfather in his early sixties – when, together, they buried his wife. She told me that George Alfred Pankhurst was successful, kind and handsome, and in each other they saw validation – she a ‘normal’ woman who had the chance to become a wife, and he an ageing gentleman who felt good about having a gorgeous woman on his arm. Revealing her gender reassignment to him, he accepted and loved her anyway, and – she told me – that was good enough for her.
‘George treated me like I was somebody; someone to respect, someone to treat nicely,’ she explained. ‘He gave me belief in myself and the strength to realise that I could be whatever I wanted.’
With George by her side, Sandra became a stepmother, doting wife and business owner, even trying her hand at local politics and throwing herself into charity work. I asked how she backed herself, no matter what.
‘Don’t give yourself a hard time, there’s a queue of them out there that will do that to you,’ she told me. ‘Let me judge me for who I am. I’ve got to live with me, I don’t have to live with you. Be true to yourself and realise that experiences come and go in your life but they all teach you, and you’re pretty dumb if you don’t learn the lessons along the way.’
Like mine, your story is probably a little more vanilla than Sandra’s. But even if you haven’t had more twists and turns than the scary ride at the Easter show, your story is one-in-eight-billion, entirely unique to you. Sometimes the chapters will unfold slowly, sometimes they will feel like they pour onto the page. Some will be enthralling and exhilarating, others will be full of drama and sadness and others again will be kind of mediocre; the washing-hanging, Netflix-watching, bill-paying humdrum of human be-ing. It’s my belief that these chapters are almost the most important, because they’re the ones that allow the dust to settle from what came before and set the scene for what’s to come.
No matter what chapter you’re in right now, Sandra taught me that no matter where you’ve been, where you go next is entirely up to you. And that’s a lesson (and a story) worth sharing.
Notes
If you or someone you know has experienced domestic, family and sexual violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au for online chat and video call services.
Please note I have used she/her pronouns for Sandra’s early life on advice from The Gender Centre.
Lastly, if you need a good read for the upcoming school holidays I can’t recommend Sandra and Sarah’s book highly enough.
Next Of Kin is written by health journalist Casey Beros to create a space where we can all become better Next Of Kin for each other and the world at large. If you know someone who would benefit from my musings, do me (and them) a huge favour and send this on. You can follow me on Instagram here and find out more about my work here.