![]() ![]() Driven out of home by the age of 17, she would go on to be many things: husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, gender reassignment patient, funeral director and wife, as well as the titular trauma cleaner. ![]() Sandra Pankhurst was adopted through the Catholic Church in the 1950s by a Melbourne couple who would prove to be horrendously abusive parents. Not just the compelling story of a fascinating life among lives of desperation, but an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together. ![]() Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead-and the book she has written is equally extraordinary. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. A man who bled quietly to death in his loungeroom. A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife…But as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. It's not the police, firefighters, or EMTs that clean up a crime scene-that's the job of a trauma cleaner, specifically Sandra Pankhurst. ![]()
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