“Tell me to shut up if you need to,” Judy Ryan offers helpfully over a bowl of pho on Victoria St in inner city Melbourne. “I don’t draw breath.” Then, mid-sentence, she pauses, raises an eyebrow over bright red specs. “Hear that? Nothing. No sirens. Five years ago, we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves over the ambulances.”
In this pocket of the Melbourne suburbs of Richmond and Abbotsford you didn’t have to linger long to hear a siren’s wail. Heroin overdoses were claiming more lives here than anywhere else in the state. Ryan, who lives 200 metres off Victoria St, would invite outsiders for coffee at the Quint Cafe on the corner of Lennox St. She’d strategically seat her guests with an unencumbered view of the street. “I’d sit with my back to this intersection,” she says. “I’d watch as their eyes just grew as big as saucers, as all the emergency services descended on to the latest overdose.”
