A voice at the table

By Rosemary McKenzie-Ferguson

It seems eons back when my voice was silent, I spoke only in muffled tones and even then, only when it was required for me to speak. I certainly didn’t make a sound when all I wanted to do was be brave enough to scream. Speaking up and speaking out terrified me, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because there was nowhere for a person such as I to speak about what we were living with and attempting to live through.

Instead, I screamed in silence, I cried endless tears without allowing one single tear to fall, I wrote tomes of issues and never printed one word.

My voice was lost in and among the voiceless.

I am not able to point to one single thing that changed for and within or around me, it was more like a collective of small insignificant happenings. Tiny things that seemed not to really matter, I responded to newspaper articles, I responded to segments on talk back radio. Other members of the injured worker community reached out and I reached back.

I started to write a monthly newsletter (it had to be posted because email was still almost unheard of) Talk back radio hosts started to call me for a comment. And I started to do things in the public space. Conference organizers started to invite me to speak, and conference organizers started to send me proposed agendas with an arrow indicating where I would speak. 

At times in the midst of the dark wee hours of the morning, I would lay awake staring upward at a ceiling I could not see just pondering the journey of how and why -how had a workplace injury taken me from obscurity to wherever it is I am now?

I had always been interested in research, I had always been an avid reader and questioner. As a student at high school, I wrote letters to all manner of people asking about their lives and why they had decided to do whatever it was they were doing. I wrote once to Professor Julius Sumner Miller to ask him why he studied and worked in the world of physics. He answered, “I work in physics so that school students can learn and because it is fun.” 

It was no surprise to me that once I returned to some type of post injury balance that I started to research workers' compensation. Hence the reason I could answer newspaper articles and respond to talk back radio was simply because I was gaining the knowing required in order to speak with confidence.

I was buoyed by support from the oddest of places, I wrote to the authors of white papers asking not for the white paper summary of their work, but for their personal thoughts and insights, the interesting bits that didn’t make it into the white papers.  I was invited into the wondrous world of corporate workers' compensation, to learn first hand just what this beast was capable of doing and how at times the beast could be gentle and soothing and at other times totally without ratio or compassion. 

At times I thought my mind would break with knowing that had no real place. Other times I vowed that I could no longer go on, I had run the best race possible and that it was time for someone else to step forward and carry the baton. And then the phone would ring or a letter would arrive and once more I would answer the call, tired beaten but never able to walk away. 

Over the years I have lost count of the number of conferences and seminars I have spoken at; I have no idea as to how many articles I have written or responded to. I have sat at one Parliamentary enquiry into workers' compensation, and developed 2 Deceased Workers Memorial sites and been a part of developing a National Deceased Workers Memorial. I have spoken at and with many of the endless investigations into the workers' compensation processes here in Australia, and I have traveled to speak at the 2015 Comp Laude® Awards and Gala. 

All of it seems now strangely/oddly normal and expected within the reality that is my daily life. 

So; to the photo.

That is me holding the microphone and speaking up and speaking out and speaking for and on behalf of the injured worker community. I have gifted my voice to the thousands who still sadly believe that they are voiceless and worse they believe that they are invisible.

This photo was taken at a Symposium here in Sydney, the Symposium was discussing how claims management works (?) here in New South Wales and how it can be improved.  The room was filled with luminaries from many different areas not just workers' compensation, and I was there at Table 1; I was there making the opening comment for a day when everything was on the table to be honestly discussed.

I did pause for a few seconds before I entered the room to ponder the journey and to understand the importance of “arriving” as an accepted leader with lived experience. And yes I did carry into the room the hopes and the prayers of the injured worker community because to be their voice is an honor without measure.

I acknowledge this journey started because of my own injuries, but it continues because of the injured worker community.