In the end he ended up hanging himself in the roof,
and they didn't find out until some months later,
when they had this body fluids dripping down the walls.
Well we got the job to do that
and we never got paid.
So, good karma to them.
My name is Sandra Anne Pankhurst,
I am in mid to late 60s
and I've been running Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services Pty Ltd, for 26 years.
We deal with death, suicide, haemorrhaging, sewerage overflows,
methamphetamine labs, hoarding, squalor,
and we also have a division that does upmarket homes.
Which is called 'We're Absolutely Fabulous.'
Today I’m here to meet Sandra,
she’s promised to teach me about trauma cleaning
and take me inside her world for a day.
This is a fogging machine which gets rid of odour in a property if someone has died and we have to fog it up.
We use white cloths also to soak up the blood.
Here is all for flooring, urine removal, we have vomit control.
-It’s like there’s chemical for every body... -There’s something for everything.
What’s involved in cleaning up after someone has died?
Well it varies, if there's lots and lots of blood there we might have to cut the carpet out,
we might have to do odour control for the smell,
there could be maggots everywhere, there could be body juices.
How destructive is a dead body to the environment around it?
It's an acid, it's an acid and it just eats away at everything.
We’ve got permission to come along and witness Sandra in action
at the house of a hoarder.
Now this room was full of rubbish up to so high.
-This high? -Yes.
This is on a hoarder rating scale of about 4 to 5.
Really?
And it can go up to a 10.
You can smell the smell from outside the house.
The smell is like mouse urine and mouse faeces.
We’ve got tin cans of food, there’s coinage everywhere,
there’s children’s toy's everywhere, children’s clothing.
Redback spiders in the kitchen.
It’s not a matter of clean at all in here, it’s just to dispose of the rubbish so they can bulldoze the house down.
Would someone be eating in this place?
Yes.
In the kitchen?
Because they become very comfortable with it after a while.
Some houses that we go through, it's so high
that we have foot/handprints on the roof to steady them walking over.
And if we have a look through here we have the toilet
and the bathroom,
by the laundry.
And
how could you possibly use the toilet?
Wow.
-Just completely inaccessible. -Yeah.
Sandra has a client in another suburb
who doesn’t want to be identified but has agreed to talk to us about his hoarding habits.
He’s a retired science lab technician, who has been living in this house for 20 years.
What is this room actually used for?
This, this is my original bedroom when I was a kid.
Is this still your bedroom?
This is still my bedroom.
Where do you sleep?
Under here.
-Oh this is a bed -It's a bunk bed, it's a bunk bed.
I sleep on the bottom
-Have you been happy and comfortable here? -No.
No, it's a terrible place.
I didn't have the mental resources, to cope with looking after myself.
And so, with a fresh start and a new house. Do you think that it will be different?
Yes. Yes it will.
There’s no postcode they could be anywhere and everywhere.
We've gone in and cleaned up hoarding situations from board of directors to well known doctors,
to the average person.
This is why we don't judge anyone because purely and simply by the grace of God it could be us tomorrow.
Whilst Sandra’s life is dedicated to cleaning up the mess left behind after a trauma,
many people don’t know that Sandra’s own life is an incredible tale of trauma, transformation and survival.
My grandmother across the road,
my aunty, aunty Dot
and this is the house that I was brought up in.
Can you remember a time in your childhood when you did feel loved by your family?
I can't say I can.
I'm the adopted child.
They told me at the age of 7 that I was no longer required, I weren't wanted, I weren't needed in their life,
I was not their child and that I would have to live in a room out the back of the house.
Which was a bungalow they had built.
-So this is the bungalow? -So that’s the bungalow
but it never had that awning across the top there.
I got into trouble for pinching tins of food out of the house
'cause that's all I could have to eat, 'cause I weren't invited to eat in the house with the family.
I was always the whipping post
I constantly had boils over my neck and my legs and things like that.
I was lonely, I was very lonely.
So this is, essentially a place where, you were tortured.
Yeah.
This is
what I consider my prison cell.
It mustn’t be easy being here.
It’s not easy.
Yeah.
17 I was kicked out of home and then 18 I was married.
By my early 20s, I had two kids.
Did you sense that you were different in some way?
I wanted to be normal. I didn't want to be anything but normal.
Up until her mid twenties, Sandra was actually living as Peter.
In order to live as herself, she turned her entire life upside down.
So you were transitioning while you were still living a life as a husband and as a father.
I knew I couldn't stay.
I just didn't think that it was fair on the rest of the family.
But the saddest thing of all was as I was leaving the house the eldest son,
was stood at the front door and just said, bye bye daddy.
And I just broke down and hopped in the car and left.
Christmas is always quite a sad time for me because I still have
and always have had a picture of my two boys in my bedroom
that I see every morning and every night.
So you burst into the gay and drag scene in Melbourne, tell me about Celestial Star.
Celestial Star was someone that was bigger than life
I used to do stripping
and drag shows.
"Welcome to the stage Celestial Star, the woman with the 40 inch butt."
She was the girl with the big personality so to speak.
They used to call me Celestial Monster.
So I worked the streets.
I always had the philosophy no matter what you do, you do to the best of your ability.
So you know, if you're going to a whore, you might as well be a good whore, you know?
At the end of your career as a sex worker you had an incredibly traumatic attack.
We were sitting down in the girl's restroom area
and we were rolling joints,
getting ready for the next client to walk in the door
then with that there was this massive, like a Mack truck just smashed into the building.
We couldn't see anything, we were just grabbed by the hair and taken to this vacant block of land
and we thought we were going to be killed there.
You’re panic stricken because there’s this lunatic here.
He wanted fellatio and that done on him.
I grabbed him by the balls
and squeezed them so hard that any normal man would have just dropped dead.
I was then running and having asthma attacks and kept falling over
and I got back to the house and then I rang the madam of the house and I said,
"Get the fucking police here straight away. We've been attacked."
And you left sex work after that?
Oh definitely. God yes.
-You became the first female funeral director -Yes
-In Victoria. -Yes.
How did it feel to not only be accepted as yourself but also to be celebrated in that way?
I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
This was a job that I felt I could excel in, I could really enjoy.
And that's where I met my husband of all things and we used to have a joke about it that,
"How did you meet your husband?" I go
"Buried his wife."
It sounded more crass than what it was.
With him you became the centre of a certain section of Melbourne society.
Yes, I was President of the chamber of commerce I'd ran for local government.
And I was on 13 different committees and ran his hardware store 7 days a week.
So all the stuff in here is something I think we should pack up.
I personally have no intention of ever being married again, or having another relationship.
I’m quite happy in myself, I'm a busy person.
Reminds me of my childhood.
Do you feel like you've made peace with other traumas that you've been through?
I think I'm a far better person for it.
Do you think that helps you relate to some of the clients that you deal with?
Yeah I'd say so,
because I don't want them to suffer as much as what I've suffered.
That's very important to me that we treat everyone with respect,
regardless of their situation.
Because as I say by the grace of god we could be there tomorrow.