Expressive: A revealing portrait of three first responders — a paramedic, a police officer and a firefighter — motivated by a desire to serve the community unfolds in Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders. Photo: Supplied.
Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders is an eloquent and compassionate portrait of three first responders: a paramedic, a copper and a firie. It’s also a book about torment, and PTSD.
Reputable journalist Martin McKenzie-Murray does not excessively exalt or exaggeratedly value the first responders. Peter, a paramedic, policeman Brett and firefighter Tara are motivated by a desire to serve the community.
However, they are drawn to their work by more complicated impulses as well: a need for control, an acute awareness of danger, and childhood experiences they are still trying to escape.
We learn about why people are drawn to intense professions, and how they survive such work. Barriers are erected between past and present, personal and professional, but what happens when their carefully built walls start to disintegrate?
Peter served at high-profile disasters including the Port Arthur massacre and the Beaconsfield mine collapse. Despite helping countless people, he is haunted by the lives he couldn’t save.
Tara experienced devastating loss at a young age. She found camaraderie in the fire brigade, but also confronting reminders of her past.
Brett survived childhood neglect and abuse. Policing offered a way to impose order, but it eventually forced him to question his rigid moral view of the world.
Sirens offers a pensive exploration of the lives of these emergency personnel. In telling their stories, Martin McKenzie-Murray draws on his own experience and his research into trauma and recovery to ask profound questions about human motivation and survival.
Disturbing recollections manifest. Each page is saturated with attentiveness, empathy, endurance and sympathy. As the two-time Walkley Award finalist and winner of the Melbourne Press Club’s Quill Award for commentary elaborates: “The poisonous thing about intrusive memories is that they introduce not merely an image, but the feeling of that moment.
“As Peter, the paramedic of this book, said to me: ‘You’re often meeting people on the best day, last day or worst day of their lives.’
“The question cleaves the professional from the personal, but there was no such separation for the three subjects of Sirens. Their work affected their personal lives just as it profoundly defined them. This wasn’t a job, or even a career — it was a way of life, a way of thinking about themselves, a way of defying earlier, grimmer assumptions about their own capacities.
“So just as intimacy is embedded in their work, I came to feel that intimacy was required in rendering their lives on the page.”
McKenzie-Murray approached those aspects sensitively because of their trust, candour and the willingness to thoughtfully disclose all manner of complicated things about themselves and their work.
Part of the formidable task of writing this book, however, was receiving his own diagnosis of PTSD. Martin McKenzie-Murray hastens to add that this outcome was not a result of the book’s authorship.
“My symptoms were something I had long denied, but writing a book about people suffering from it made it increasingly difficult to maintain my denial. Eventually, when the weight of it all finally became intolerable, I sought professional help. Naturally, this made more difficult something that would have been difficult enough: chronicling human depravity and sorrow.”
It was in a Q&A session that he elaborated on what drew him to the idea of writing about first responders.
It resulted from his first book, and an editor’s suggestion. A “work of non-fiction about a suburban murder, and while I’d reported upon the crime’s investigation and its subsequent prosecution, much of the book was effectively a history of the grief of the victim’s parents.”
Sirens explores suffering not only from the professional perspective of first responders, but also in their private lives. How does one approach writing so intimately about his subjects?
“Yes, it’s intimate. As it should be … Intimacy, sometimes of an obscenely dark kind, is embedded in the work of first responders. And whole communities, such as Port Arthur’s, can be intimately tethered by their shared knowledge of evil.”
Even though stress, chaos and tragedy are explored as realities of these professions, there are also incredible moments of heroism from these initial responders.
Essential insights? “This isn’t a polemical work. What I hope they’ll experience, though, is some serious communion with the life and minds of its three subjects. Can that be enough? Soulful communion with the lives of strangers? I hope so, but I guess we’ll see.”
Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders, by Martin McKenzie-Murray, Black Inc., $34.99
