An Evening with the Trauma Cleaner

A few months ago we read The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein in our book club. So when I found out Sandra Pankhurst was talking at Preston Library I booked tickets right away. I went and saw her speak last night.

The Trauma Cleaner is the account of the life of Sandra Pankhurst. Today, Sandra is an accomplished owner of a small successful business that performs trauma cleaning - the sometimes gruesome, sometimes tragic, always putrid task of cleaning up after deaths and in the houses of chronic hoarders.

This is worth a book in itself but the second thread of The Trauma Cleaner is about Sandra’s extraordinary journey as a transgender woman. Sandra was born a man and grew up in 50s Footscray. Her childhood was horrific, suffering acute physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her mother and father. In short: Sandra escapes, gets a job, gets married, has two children, but cannot reconcile herself to the life of quiet desperation in seventies suburbia. Things change when she discovers the Melbourne underground gay scene, she all but abandons her family in a quest of self-discovery that ends with the woman standing before a packed library last night.

Sandra’s first question to the room was who had read the book. Almost every had shot up which explains the anticipation that preceded it but does not explain why she told her story for the next fifty minutes. The real value was witnessing her presence and hearing her story told in her own words. As she sat in an armchair, cross-legged with a powdery finish of foundation never cracking a patch of sweaty sheen, I had the impression that Sandra had made her transition absolutely. That is, here sat a lady who knew herself with a surety than anyone else in the room. The question was who was that lady?

For one, she could talk to an audience. It was as if we were at her house drinking tea and eating Timtams. She also never pulled any punches. Sandra spoke about how she was horrifically raped in the same cadence and matter-of-fact tone as telling us about the how she had to explain to her elderly fiance she had once been a man.

A chilly note came from a question about whether Sandra kept in contact with the author. The main issue with The Trauma Cleaner is the relationship between author and subject. Sarah Krasnostein treats Sandra with such unquestioning affection so that many of Sandra’s questionable choices, including her relationship with her children, remain barely challenged. Sandra kept it brief in her reply - Sarah and her don’t keep in touch. According to Sandra, it was her story rather than the way it was written that had made it a success. Had Sandra been used, then discarded by a ruthless author that saw her as more a subject than a person or had Sandra pushed the author away when she had become too close, as was foreshadowed in the book itself? The answer was not revealed last night.

Lighter and more entertaining were Sandra’s digressions which bordered on a rant by a talk-back radio caller let loose. At one point she said she didn’t believe in prisoners being able to study university degrees and they needed to repay their debt of society. “If we need more prisons we’ll build more prisons.” At this one either brave or oblivious man clapped very loudly at the back. A murmur rippled through. Taking into account we were here in North North Northcote at a talk at a public library from a transgender person, it was safe to assume most attendees were expecting an inspirational display of catharsis from either a tragic victim or a heroic champion - not a potential contestant on Stan Zemanek’s Beauty and the Beast.

There is one section in The Trauma Cleaner when the author says that today Sandra and her friends are all Liberal voters. The author says this confuses many people but ventures that there is nothing revolutionary about being transgendered, and that transgender people came in all political stripes. Sitting there last night listening to Sandra’s rants it became clear that Sandra refused to be a politically convenient beacon. That is, our collective desire to have a trans person with similar politics was by and large irrelevant to her and that was Sandra’s inalienable right.