It was a pleasure to attend the book launch for
Sirens - Inside the Shadow World of First Responders by Martin McKenzie-Murray back in April this year.
Sirens features the experiences of three first responders, Peter - Paramedic, Brett - Police Officer and Tara - Firefighter. Retired Police Officer Brett Kersten and I met in 2010, have been close friends ever since and he's The Copper in
Sirens. Brett has openly shared the darkest sides of his service related PTSD and difficult upbringing with me, so I was thrilled for him when he excitedly told me he was being interviewed for this book. His is a touching and incredible story, yet these projects take time and along the way I eagerly helped to proofread the chapters about his life and career and keenly awaited the launch of the finished product,
Sirens.
I was proud of Brett's involvement at the launch hosted by Gideon Haigh held at Readings Carlton and it was wonderful to receive a copy of the finished product with an inscription from both Brett and Martin McKenzie-Murray. However I did wonder whether it would feel right to review
Sirens, given my personal involvement and deep knowledge of one of the key subjects. It's been a few months and I've finally decided that yes, I will try and review
Sirens objectively, while openly disclosing my bias.
It was clear at the book launch that Australian author and journalist Martin McKenzie-Murray is a literary intellectual and brought those skills to bear when he viewed the world of first responders and the lives of these three subjects - Peter, Brett and Tara - through that critical journalistic lens.
In a helpful message to the reader at the beginning of the book, the author lets us know that difficult subjects are going to be recounted and helpfully provides a list of support services available in Australia. However the Introduction that followed instantly felt self-indulgent. As a journalist, I thought the author was going to largely leave himself out of this examination, yet he is front and centre from page one with a recurring nightmare, anxiety, intrusive memories, sexual abuse and his eventual PTSD diagnosis.
This background does serve to explain how the author became interested in first responders and their career inducing PTSD, but this could just as easily have come at the end.
Peter James is a retired paramedic living in Tasmania and is the first to be introduced. Peter was involved in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 and was one of the paramedics supporting trapped miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb in the Beaconsfield disaster in 2006.
Amongst tales of Peter's trip to Scotland, I was confused when the author started writing about William Wordsworth and John Keats, even going so far as to include poetry from Wordsworth and an excerpt from a letter by Keats. I'm sure the connection was relevant from McKenzie-Murray's standpoint, but it seemed off track and completely irrelevant to this reader.
Further on there's a lot of content about Simon Webb, a Clinical Psychologist working with emergency personnel, including involvement at Port Arthur with Peter. Presumably introduced to offer another viewpoint on Peter's experiences, the reader didn't then need to learn about Webb's upbringing, career in the Army, injuries in the Vietnam war and his own subsequent PTSD. I certainly didn't care to know about Webb's 3 failed marriages, where he lived at the time of writing or how he spent his spare time. I understand the author had his own relationship with Simon Webb, but the detailed account of his illness and subsequent passing and funeral didn't seem to have anything to do with the overarching purpose of the book, other than Peter and Martin's shared history and desire to honour a man they both respected.
Relying on black humour and drinking to cope with the trauma experienced as a Paramedic, Peter retired in 2019 and continues to suffer the devastating effects of PTSD.
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Book launch (L-R):
Martin McKenzie-Murray, Brett Kersten,
Peter James and Tara Lal |
Moving on to Brett's section of the book, the author takes care discussing Brett's difficult childhood, even going so far as to call it Dickensian. Brett and his younger brother were abandoned as children when his mother took off with their sister and left them to fend for themselves with an alcoholic father who was rarely home. Brett and his brother lived rough on the streets of Queensland before eventually being institutionalised in the Christian Brothers’ orphanage in South Melbourne.
Where Brett's experience of this traumatic upbringing morphed into a respect for authority and led him to join the Australian Regular Army and later the Victoria Police, his brother developed a deep distrust of authority and they subsequently drifted apart. As with the inclusion of Simon Webb in Peter's section of the book, the relevance of Brett's brother Adam beyond this point was questionable.
Always striving to live a life of service to others and his community, it was these shared values and career in the ADF and Victoria Police that strengthened my friendship with Brett in the early days and thankfully they shine in this book.
Brett used dark humour as a coping mechanism early on - as did his colleagues - but in the book the author recounts an occasion where an attempt at black humour aimed at easing the distress of a junior colleague missed the mark.
"I wondered if Brett wasn't also trying to induct his partner into a world where a calloused familiarity with the obscene was not only necessary but expressed with cowboy puerility. In my experience, coppers have both a fierce belief in the usefulness of black humour and a zealous sense of entitlement to its use. And with good reason. In a profession that exposes its members to macabre destructions, they don't appreciate outsiders policing their humour." Page 126-127
For some readers this won't show Brett in a good light and while the author repeatedly confirmed - at the book launch - he didn't set out to write a hagiography, I didn't believe this inclusion was necessary. It's not the only unfavourable scene to feature in the book, Peter is shown in an uncomplimentary scene as well.
Tara Lal is the final of the three subjects and joined the NSW Fire Brigade training college in 2005. The following anecdote reminded me of my own training when she was describing how much trainees sweated during the 'hot cell' training, which involved navigating an intensely heated metal maze wearing full gear while blindfolded.
"Tara would later remove her boots and pour the stuff out like she was tipping a jug of beer". Page 148
Sounds intense doesn't it? (I did NBCD training in the Royal Australian Navy and never sweated that much). Tara also experienced more grief and heartbreak than most in her life which made it downright gobsmacking when the author introduced writer JG Ballard into her narrative. We're told about his experience as a prisoner of war - like the author's grandfather, is that the reason for the inclusion? - the death of Ballard's wife, his drinking and his writing. All of this was hugely jarring and if it was an attempt to provide respite from the heavy content of Tara's story or the book as a whole, all it did was deliver a juxtaposition I found deeply distracting and somewhat indulgent.
"I'm aware of the risk, as I write this book, of numbing you, the reader, with a repetitive anthology of carnage. I'm sensitive to leavening it, truncating it, and removing things altogether. I'm sensitive to your notional appetites and stamina, as I'm sensitive to the elements of crafting a book - of building and releasing tension, for example, but also of handling macabre material in a manner that neither corrupts it, nor alienates you." Page 134
Tara retired after 20 years service and I was impressed by how much she has changed in the time since. Learning to let go of the desire for structure, stability and control and her ability to accept life's uncertainty and chaos is truly inspiring.
In conclusion, there's too much of the author in
Sirens. Even in the Afterword, McKenzie-Murray largely writes about his grandfather, gives us an interesting story from his time working with Victoria Police better placed earlier and four pages about Ernest Hemingway. Every writer deeply inhabits their project, however it felt to me that a sharp editor should have plucked out the personal content and encouraged the author to set that aside for another day. The lofty writing style also seemed incongruous with the three subjects and their chosen professions.
Instead I'd have preferred the focus to remain on the physical and psychological effects of the often terrible work first responders are called on to do each and every day. As a journalist, McKenzie-Murray was uniquely positioned to seek advice as to how we as members of the public can be kinder to the first responders we come in contact with. He could also have interrogated the ways in which we can learn lessons from the past and better manage the workplace stresses of these roles. Reading their stories I wanted to know how and what we should be advocating for to improve the career prospects of future paramedics, police officers and fire fighters.
I'm reading a book now about sleep and in it the author writes that if first responders drink alcohol after a traumatic shift, work long hours without a break - like Peter did at Port Arthur - and don't get an adequate amount of sleep required to clear the emotions from the events of that day, they will develop PTSD symptoms from just that one shift for the rest of their lives. The fact they do this on a regular basis explains how first responders are often crippled by PTSD by the end of their careers, if not before. This is an entirely new way of thinking and requires a significant cultural shift in all three emergency services and I'd loved to have seen the author discuss matters like this in
Sirens in a 'where to from here' approach.
Instead I was left with little hope for the future of those who often meet people on the worst day of their lives.
