Appodjay production.

So everyone, welcome back to the Missing Matter today.

I'm very privileged to be joined by doctor Sarah Wayland, a researcher professor of social work.

Sarah has decades of experience working, supporting, and researching the lived experience of distress and trauma, particularly in this Missing space, and I'd like to welcome her today to the Missing Matter podcast.

Welcome Sarah, Thanks so much, Sally.

I just wanted to bring you on today, Sarah because of your extensive work in the Missing Space, with the hope that you can share some further insight into what you understand it means to be living in the missing world.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you've been doing over that last thirty.

Years of course, and also whenever I think about when I actually started working in Missing it's like only a moment in time, but it has been a really long time, and I think that that has kept me really curious and made me always think about what else we need to do rather than what have we done?

So by background, I'm a social worker.

I became a social worker in the late nineties, and lots of social workers because I teach a lot of them.

Now, I finished my degree and I didn't really have a strong sense about what I wanted to do.

It had just been something that I'd been interested in, but I guess I hadn't really switched on my sense of what I could do in terms of the work that I chose to do.

So, like lots of young people, I wandered around for a few years, did a lot of work in child protection and domestic violence, both here in Australia and overseas.

Social worker is a great degree to travel with.

Everyone needs a social worker, and when I finally came back to Australia about five years later, I can remember it as clear as anything and think that it's a bit like you know that Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors.

You know where you have this moment where you look back and you can see that a small decision that you made really shapes the complete way in which your life will pan out.

And so I was working on a crisis line with the Domestic Violence Service in New South Wales.

Was on the night shift and we used to work by ourselves on the night shift, and it was back in the olden days where jobs were advertised in the newspaper and there was a job that was for twelve weeks working in a newly funded service for New South Wales Attorney Generals called the Families and Friends of Missing Persons Unit, which these days is now called the Families and Friends of Missing Person's Service.

I had a background in working with people that were experiencing sudden and traumatic loss, but not in the way that missing persons presents.

So the bonus for me in applying for that job, first of all, I was a young person, so a twelve week contract was fine for me to think about is that they indicated in the job ad that you didn't have to have experience working with families of missing people because it was the very first service of its kind, but that it needed to be somebody that understood grief and loss but also was able to I guess, co design or co construct what the service could be with the families because it was so new.

So I went along had the interview, really connected with the manager of the service, Leoni Jakes, who had just done a Churchill fellowship to look at how to set up the service.

She traveled internationally and I got the job, and the very first day on my job there was a book on my desk that was Pauline Boss's book Ambiguous Loss, and that was basically my training, a small book that talked about the American approach to acknowledging ambiguous loss, and a whole heap of families that had already called and left their details because they wanted somebody to call them back.

So that started the job, and within a couple of weeks we had about thirty families that we were working with, and the position then got extended and extended, and after a couple of years became a permanent role.

So I've been working in missing since that time, and working alongside families and really thinking about not just what I could deliver to them one to one in the counseling room, but I recognized really quickly that what I was learning from them needed to also be shared with other people, not in terms of my profile, but about what it meant to collect stories and then share them with others, because I knew, given this was a new South Wales only service, that other states and territories needed some awareness about what it meant after someone was reported missing to the police.

So I've been in the field since then.

I eventually moved on from that direct service delivery after almost ten years and decided to start my PhD and since then have been working in the university research space because I recognized that you can only get so far talking to other service providers.

Making sure that I contributed to the evidence base has kind of led me to where I am today.

Yeah, well, you've done amazing things, like I've been reading up about you as well, like to get some background into what you have done pre me meeting you.

It was like three years ago we met in person in Melbourne, and I feel like that time has just flown because I think we were just I was in the inquest or we'd pause the inquest and it was just my head was spinning a million miles an hour.

But we'll talk about it that.

I can remember that really clearly.

I remember when I first stumbled across your name actually, and I was in when I was reading my brief of evidence.

Your name popped up on a handwritten document with a reference to Ashton's Removals, which is a REMOVALSS company on the Gold Coast, and it was in relation to my mum's missing belongings and her shipping container.

And I didn't know who you were at that time, so it meant I had no reference to that.

I just assumed that you maybe worked for missing persons or something, or rather in that field.

Can you tell us a little bit about when you first heard about my story or about Mum's story.

It's really interesting, you know.

I never take for granted that you don't even have to interact sometimes with families of missing people across Australia, but there's often these little connection points that means you cross the life of somebody without sometimes ever meeting them, and it's always really interesting for me.

And I talked to my social work students about this a lot, about recognizing the power of those micro moments and how you can always think about how to better support people so I can remember your name really clearly.

I often think about my career like lots of women do, in terms of the ages of my kids at the time.

I'm pretty sure that's a good time.

Exactly.

My timeline of my career is not my career, but at what point was on maternity level?

You know, what were my kids in daycare or school by then?

So my daughter's about to turn twenty this year, and I'm pretty sure she was two or three at the time, so it's a long time ago.

I was working for the Australian Federal Police at that time it was called the National Missing Persons Unit, and I was secondered from my job at New South Wales Attorney Generals because I'd done a Churchill fellowship and what my goal had been was to travel to the US in particular and spend time with Emeritus Professor Paul M.

Boss And what I wanted to do was replicate her book, but from an Australian context in terms of if you were account how could you think about the ways in which you could better support families of missing people?

And so when I came back from that trip, you have to write up your report, and the AFP said, would you like to come and work with us?

I'm pretty sure it was for about eighteen months, and what they were going to support me to do was to take those findings turn them into a resource that would be available online as well as then think about how the AFP, given they were coordinating services across Australia, how they could combine their policing response with that therapeutic response as well.

How could they support me to travel and talk to lots of counseling services so that families knew what else was on offer for them after the police.

But one of the key points was, like it still is, every year National Missing Person's Week, and each year there would be like probably six or seven months out some ideas around who would be profiled that week, who would be either the missing person's case that would be profiled, and like lots of work that I still do around the ways in which media engage with families of missing people.

Who would the family be that would receive that profile.

And it was quite a few years ago now, but I do remember that Rebecca Cots, who sadly is no longer with us, was my colleague at the AFP, and she had said that she had been talking to you and connecting with you over the phone and wanted to ensure that your mum's story was part of National Missing Person's Week that year.

So it must have been like two thousand and seven or two thousand and eight, I think, And because I was doing lots of building up a profile around what was really good practice in family media liaison, because I'm sure you know sal how traumatic it can be to engage with media if they're not well versed in understanding your lift experience.

And so part of that step was verifying which police were involved and recognizing like where the case was up to so that it meant then that you had a profile to tell your story as well as the investigative response needed to be correct and up to date and to know well who were the police that needed to be involved in media, And when I started making some calls, it became almost ambiguously ambiguous that nobody could verify exactly who was in charge of the case, where the case actually was, and what it was defined as.

And that was where that ambiguity around was this a case that had been closed without a resolution or was this an ongoing investigation that nobody was investigating.

And so that was where I first started to learn about you and start to you know, I've listened to your story over the years about where not just your great for around the loss of your mum, but that traumatic grief of engaging with police around trying to understand who is looking after this case and who is actively investigating it.

So that was my very first interaction with you, despite never having met you at that stage.

Yeah, right, So that's I had never heard that before.

Like this is where these conversations are so great, because you would know probably if you'd listened to me on the Lady Vanishers.

We talk a lot about beck Cott's She actually interviewed through the AFP.

Actually I went into the AFP building here in Brisbane, but we managed to have an interview with beck in that facility here, and I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to do that because, as you know, she was quite unwell for a lot of her journey.

Meeting me, she came up and took me out for lunch and she said she offered me to be the face of missing persons.

And then I also remember the call she made only a couple of days before we were due to fly down where she said to me, I'm so sorry, but they've pulled you.

And I said, Who've pulled me?

Because I had no idea.

And this is probably the bit I wanted to get more awareness out there for families and also for people working in that field, so they have a better understanding of how your words and how your communication can affect someone living in the missing space.

And I guess that's where you and I connect quite well because you're on the same same journey.

And you know when she said to me, well, the police have said that you can't be the face of missing persons this year because we're doing mental health and your mum didn't have mental health issues, so therefore you're not allowed to do it.

But come anyway, because we've already got your flights and everything, and they could said to me, we're going to bounce you from one state to the other.

And I think Caleb was only like six weeks old.

I just had my third sesarian.

I think she was saying, oh, well, you know, we'll go to Melbourne and we'll be in Sydney, so make sure that you know prepared.

So Chris was with me and I'm storing my breast milk so that we could he could feed him if I was on TV at the time or being interviewed.

So it was quite a layered trauma in multiple different ways.

But I think that these like exactly that you said, that these are the stories that are the hidden stories behind missing, because you know, we often think of missing around the lost and found concept, but the emotional and the physical labor of being the family and being the spokesperson time and time again is really poorly understood.

And I just think it was just such a time in life.

And then if I fast forward even to the inquest, this actual moment in time was a point of question at the inquest because we have the Cops event, which is the insertion of notes and notation through the Cops police system, and we could clearly see and my lawyer we sort of talked about this and noted it, and it was brought up at the inquest that you can clearly see that Rebeccat's rings New South Wales Police, they have a conversation and then straight away my mum's case has changed from accurrence to missing literally in the same sentence.

And the coroner did question that and say, you know, is this because you'd realize that Marion actually wasn't registered as missing And they were like, oh no, no, no, that's not what it was.

But the factsa it's right there in paper, so we can see very clearly what the timeline tells us.

Right, So that's fine, whatever you made errors, just acknowledge it and let's move on and let's do that next time.

That's my mantra.

But it did happen to me, and that was a really big moment because at that point they were then able to put a new OIC on the case.

So this is what stemmed all of that and we moved forward from there.

I then had to work with him for over a decade and he firmly believed that my mum went missing on her own account, so it was an assumption made by him, not by fact, and that's a difficult path to follow to as a missing person.

So I think that's it's rough.

It is rough, and I think and I won't labor the point, but I think those moments where someone else outside of the family asking questions of police are also really important from an advocacy perspective because asking that simple question, can you verify that this is a long term missing person because this is our intention for missing Person's Week was the catalyst for that move from occurrence to missing And I think that really connects in with the name of your podcast about recognizing that even the way that we define people is an important reflection of the fact that they're missed.

Sarah, I wanted to ask you your opinion on missing persons cases throughout Australia being handled under the one umbrella, Like what's your thoughts on that, Like, obviously we've got states and territories all over the place, and there for people who don't understand each state and territory are responsible for each case and they don't usually work together.

And this is why I bang on about being on the National Missing Person's Register and the DNA being on the national register, because Western Australia is not talking to New South Wales police if they find bodies or bones, if the person's not on the register, they're not looking at that person and they don't know that that person's missing from New South Wales.

So what's your thoughts on working together collectively to have one sort of umbrella in the missing space.

I feel like from the moment I started working and missing, the discussion around a national approach to missing person was prominent.

You know, I've spent a lot of years and I always come back to the point that I'm a social work and it's a very odd space sometimes for a social worker to work in a law enforcement setting and to engage.

Like there was always two parts very much of my job.

One side of me was being an advocate and a support for families of missing.

The other part of me was learning and understanding and then providing advice whether or not it was accepted or not, to law enforcement about the ways in which they work and how it can sometimes further the trauma for families of missing people.

You know, Australia is a really big place geographically.

I think that having a national approach is really important in terms of standard operating procedures as to how information is shared across states and territories, because, like you know, you almost lose the battle as a family member if someone that you love has gone missing near a border or has clearly traveled across that border.

I think that there's a little bit more of certainty, and this is anecdotal from talking to families of missing people that if it all occurred within that state, then you can really engage with the policies and procedures of that policing service.

If you happen to be someone unlucky where the person traveled or it's right on the edge of a border, then the need to engage with two jurisdictions means two lots of administrative burden for families, and that burden then makes people worried about what is being missed and what happens if they get one service from one side of the border and a really different service from the other who's in charge of helping them navigate that space.

So I think from that perspective, I think it's always really important to have a national approach to missing persons, and that's in terms of data collection.

Data collection is really important in terms of knowing the numbers, but knowing how many people came back and where they were found, and how they got to be found.

On what date they were found and exactly.

You know, there's so much information that's a bit skewy if I think from what we've been researched exactly.

And I think that, you know, ambiguous loss is a great term for talking about what happens to families left behind, but there is so much ambiguity in terms of investigations and expectations because of that individual response in each of the states and territories.

I've always wondered why, because I don't work in policing, why that national approach hasn't really taken off in terms of the ways in which cases are handled.

And I know that when Jody Ward in particular was it the AFP and working on that national DNA project, I felt really hopeful because it meant then that it put it on a national platform.

And I think so much of missing is explored in a local, community, state based context in terms of knowing that that young person went missing from that state, rather than saying this is the missing person's problem in Australia.

We need to look at this collectively and we need to think about a prevention as well as a better support lens.

And that can only happen from a national platform, So I think it needs to be dealt with locally, but local then needs to connect in with the bigger picture if we're going to think about reducing the amount of people that go missing.

As well as saying to families, this is the expectation of what you should be in receipt of because of the awful traumatic loss that you've experienced, there needs to be a baseline and I think at the moment it's a bit of luck sometimes as to where the incident happened and what you get in return for that.

Yeah, and I know firsthand right because my mum's case is a New South Wales case, but she lived in Queensland and I was fighting that for a very long time.

Actually where the New South Wales Police was saying, oh, well it should be a Queensland coronial inquest because she lived in Queensland.

So we had all this fight on our hands and comments like oh well, I'm not just going to dump you over the border, I mean speak, I'm like, why would you even say that?

Like, this is a case that spreads over both jurisdictions.

I don't understand why everyone kind of internationally and internationally like that.

Correct, Like my stomach would drop if I was hearing from a family for the first time in relation to how far away their loved one could be from them, because I knew that there was that jurisdictional challenge of where the person was that would create further trauma for the family.

Yeah, it just adds a load onto what shouldn't should be quite easy.

Let's talk about the National Missing Person's Coordinations Center.

They funded you actually to do an updated version of their book from your Churchhill.

So that's ignowledging the empty space.

What was that about?

And is that still a thing today within the Coordination Center?

Definitely.

I work as an academic now, so a lot of the ways in which we indicate like almost like our KPIs of Our job is where our publications are and how many people have cited them or utilized them.

So the book that I updated and wrote that was really nicely funded by National Missing Person's Coordination Center.

As an academic, we also spent half of our lives trying to locate money to explore our research areas.

So that allowed me to really consider what had I learned between two thousand and seven when the first book was published, and how had the world changed.

Interestingly, writing it in twenty nineteen, we all know what happened the year after that in the world, and I think that the pandemic has also shaped the ways in which we manage loss and trauma.

But that book allowed me to really think about I always like to imagine that what happens if you have someone missing and you don't have a counseling or support service available to you.

How could I write something that a counselor or a social worker or a psychologist or anybody who was in that kind of service delivery role could pick it up and work out immediately, Okay, what's really important in the first session with that person?

What's the evidence base that I need to connect with?

What should I not do?

With families submissing people.

That was almost an easier book to write because over the years, families have shared with me the traumatic impact of seeking support and getting the wrong support from somebody.

So that was what that book was utilized for as a bit of like a warm introduction for counselors who already have their qualifications to quickly upscill them so that families had someone to talk with.

So over the years I've utilized it in the space I hear from families still on Facebook, on Instagram, different places saying my loved one is missing and I don't know how to find a good counselor can you suggest someone.

Most of the time I can't suggest someone because I don't know everybody, but I can say, here's this book, here's this resource.

Take that with you to the person that you know, ask them to read it before they connect with you.

So that was the purpose of the book.

Yeah, amazing.

And I think what I find important in a lived experience space is that you know, when my mum went missing, there were certain terms and phrases that didn't exist or I hadn't heard of as a twenty four year old, like coercive control and gas lighting and femicide.

An ambiguous loss was something I hadn't heard about until I actually met you and Lauren and we started working on another project, which we'll talk about in a minute.

But you've mentioned before Pauline Boss.

So she's known as and described, I guess as a leading expert in ambiguity and ambiguous loss, and she's quoted as saying, is you know, ambiguous loss is described as a loss where a person is physically absent, but it is unclear if the loss will be permanent.

And that really resonated with me because and I wanted to sort of bring that back in.

I know you spoke earlier, and obviously did you actually meet Pauline when you went over to America.

I did.

I spent a whole week with her, and even yesterday I got an email from her.

So we have stayed close for the last twenty years.

She's in your nineties now, Oh blessed, she's still publishing, she's still doing a lot of work.

We collaborate on things.

So yes, I was really privileged to be able to spend a whole week with her at the University of Minnesota.

Yeah.

Wow, how that's really priceless, isn't it when you've got someone who just understands and has a deep understanding and is able to help and share and teach.

I think teaching is part of this too, right, because yes, people need to be taught things.

There is no expectation in my head that people know things straight up.

You are learning all the time.

All the time.

And you know, I still publish a lot, and I still have lots of ideas about what to write next or what to do next, because I'm also on that learning journey with everybody else.

There is no concept of an expert on anything, because human beings are weird and wonderful people.

And every time you think you've heard a story from a family member of a missing person, you'll meet the next one and think, wow, never thought you'd approach it like that.

But you've always got to be open to hearing.

Those yeah, one hundred percent.

And every story is different.

And even in this space now, I know a lot of people in the missing space through my journey, and you know, wanting to just open my door to people to come in and chat if they wanted to.

From a different perspective, I'm not an expert, but I am a friend and I am someone who has a lot of experienced myself personally through this journey.

But I think it's important, I think the learning side of it and just keeping an open mind and doing these new podcasts that I'm doing where I'm bringing people in.

I'm hating to do a little bit of deep diving into their stories because I know I know a lot of their stories, but it's important to actually have a good understanding because I want to be able to show empathy and care and kindness to these people who are you know, I always call it trauma on repeat when we're talking about your story again and again and again and again, and it is hard, and especially when you do have a lot of media or even if you just have a media poke in, you know, that can open up the door to you know, the next twenty people asking you about your missing person and where are you at and asking questions that person potentially doesn't really understand, right, so, oh, you know, so what do you think happened to your mum?

Like I constantly see on Facebook people saying I believe Marian didn't come back to Australia.

I believe her passport was used by somebody else and coming back in and everyone's entitled to an opinion, right, Like that's fine, but making assumptions we don't know for a fact, like we've actually have her passport coming back into Australia and I actually have seen the document that has her handwriting on it, making assumptions about whether somebody else gave her the card before she got on the plane to handwrite her incoming passenger card.

Like it's just extra extra that you have in your heads and it's on repeat sometimes and it can be quite hard and challenging to manage that, you know.

So one of the most pervasive memories I have from that week of being with Pauline Boss and I had my daughter with me there.

She was seven months old as a single mum.

Pauline had me in her home and would be like feeding my daughter dinner while we were chatting about all of these ideas, Like sometimes people come into your life as well where you think this person's a really good egg.

You know, I can learn a lot from this person.

I was only in my late twenties at that stage, and I think that I can remember, in terms of finishing up work that week with her, that the thing that she said to me was that the skill that I needed to work on the most in order to work in this space was that I needed to be okay with tolerating the unknown.

That I needed to lean into all aspects of my life.

Like I needed to lean into the idea that there aren't always answers for everything, and that if I'm thinking in my head all of the time when a family comes to talk to me for the first time, or I think this might have happened with their loved one, I think that that was not the point of the interaction.

The interaction was to hear the story, to acknowledge the pain, to work out the teasing journey ahead of navigating, like hopefulness and hopelessness was the really important aspect.

And that part that you said before about trauma on trauma is that people have gone on.

To do more research work over the years.

Great because it means that it also gives me a community to lean into.

And there was a work that was done by a really amazing researcher called Leniki Lenfrink, and she looked at the imagined trauma of families of missing people.

So she explored like an imagined PTSD that that constant, repetitive notion of trying to navigate what is known and what is unknown meant that all those unknown stories were just all of these traumatic layers of what could have happened that in the body feel like they actually happened when you live through those kind of imaginings all of the time.

And I think that that's the part that people don't understand on social media and commenting where they say I think this, I think the person was out walking in the desert and probably died of heat stroke.

That they don't understand that they are either adding another layer of imagine trauma or articulating an imagine trauma that the family might have already started to panic about.

I think that it tells us that as a community, we cannot tolerate the unknown.

The pandemic showed us that everyone was like, when is this going to be over?

I can cope with being locked at home if I know when it'll be over, because as a community, we don't sit with not knowing at all.

So let's talk back about when we met again.

So we're back in May twenty twenty two and I was invited along with some other amazing humans to come to Melbourne and meet with you and Lauren.

That was all about creating this project called Hope Narrative Cards.

Now I did bring them with me today, so they sit on my desk at work.

And these cards are about different elements of going through a process when someone is missing or you're living with the ambiguous loss or ambiguity of not knowing.

This one says coping.

This is from a sister who has a missing person of six years.

So we've also put those on the cards down the bottom.

And time is more precious to me now I take more photos, I create more moments, more experiences.

I hug my children tighter, never forget, and I love you.

And these are just little cards that you can pull out if you happen to be sadly in this space that give you just an element of support or a hug or just something in your own space.

You don't have to have someone sitting there talking to you or telling you.

You can just do it in your own care and space.

And I think there's a lot of power in that.

So let's talk a little bit about that.

How did you and Lauren meet and how did this project sort of start?

Lauren and I met a really long time ago a couple of months after her lovely brother Dan went missing.

Whilst I was doing my PhD.

I was on a scholarship to do my PhD, which in Australia is not the hugest amount of money.

It equates to about twelve dollars an hour, tax free to do a PhD.

And so part of that was I had a lot of side hustles, like you were talking about, in terms of other work that I did, you know, to feed my kids and pay my mortgage.

And one of those was I was doing a lot of freelance writing for different spaces, and not necessarily about grief and loss and missing, but you know, parenting articles like all of those sorts of things, because I like writing and it was an easy space to work in.

So one of the very first articles that I actually had published was on Meya Friedman's site, Mama Mia, and it was just after the location of Daniel Morcambe's remains, and I had been working with the family for a really long time, and I reflected on the ways in which the resolution isn't always a course for celebration.

It's just another piece of the puzzle for families of missing people.

So because of that article, I was connected really closely with the editor at the time, and Lauren had written a story about Dan being missing, and that editor reached out to me and said, I'm really concerned about this lovely young woman who's talking and doing a lot of media about her brother.

Can I connect to you with her?

Because she knew what my PhD was about, and so we connected via email and then we started chatting on the phone.

And I'm not Lauren's counselor we've always in those early days, I was just a sounding board for her, you know, because she was so desperate for information and how to navigate the police.

And so we've been friends ever since then.

I finished my PhD in twenty fifteen, and my focus had been like a storytelling research project around what is the space between hopefulness and hopelessness when someone's missing?

And I had worked with almost twenty families navigat their stories.

One of them had someone missing for under a year, and then the family with the longest ambiguity was about thirty five years missing.

And so we looked at this timeline around what it means to live alongside hope.

How complicated hope was.

I asked my supervisors if I could call my thesis hope is shit, but they wouldn't let me write that.

But it really was about how to live alongside hope.

And what I.

Uncovered was that people's private stories of their ambiguous loss were different from their public stories because they knew that people didn't want to hear their dark trauma, that they had their outward facing.

Yes we're holding on to hope.

Yes we're remaining hopeful.

Yes we want this person back and we believe it.

And then the dark stories were either only shared with counselors or with other family members where it was safe.

So Lauren really.

Connected with my thesis and it took us until twenty twenty two, but we found an opportunity to be able to turn the thesis into what we call the hope narratives, which is that box that you're talking about.

But as always, we wanted to make sure that we had new reflections and new opportunities to connect with more families, which became those two days in Melbourne to really plot out those four components of what does it mean to sit with those hard truths about the reality of your missing person, what does it mean to engage in ideas of hope, and what does it mean to look to the future when you know that on the horizon you might not get the answers that you want.

And so we wanted to create a toolkit that families could use themselves, but also could be used in counseling as well.

As we've had a lot of interest from police over the years as well to upskill their teams to say this is the lived experience reality in one box of what it means to exist in all of these spaces with different types of missing, which is why that description is on the back.

Yeah.

And I mean when you look at those that box of cards, there's so much in there that is just an absolute hub of knowledge and power and hope and stress that we can try and maneuver and help people understand better.

I mean, we've got forty four members, eight countries.

We had more than five hundred years of lived experience, which we referred to as l E both suspicious and not suspicious circumstances and ranging from two years to forty four years missing, so exactly.

And I think you know, the intention was not to say, let's condense this down to one lived experience.

Let's say this is the most common reality.

I mean like you would have.

I get contact by lots of media, and sometimes the questions are so simple and so reductive about oh so does it mean that all families hold on to hope or is the goal to find a body and that equals closure.

The purpose of it being such a large toolkit is also then visibly a reminder that it's an individual journey that everybody is on and these are the ways that people move through that individual journey.

So by being able to be in that room for two days and plot out, you know, we were very old school, weren't we, with post it notes and mapping the ideas in small groups.

Going out and recording ourselves talking about things in private, you know, reflection in that space.

And also for me personally, like being around those people.

It's not very often that us who have a missing person get to interact with somebody else who has the understanding that we have.

And we all have different stories, right, We've got people missing overseas, we've got people missing from all different states in territories in Australia in different ways, and it was very powerful.

We've all stayed friends and connect from time to time, which is nice to know it's there.

Exactly, and I think, you know, as a researcher and a social worker, I see firsthand the unexpected benefits of being invited to tell your story that have nothing to do with what the outcome is or what the output is, what product is made from it, or does it end up being a journal, paper or a movie or whatever, Because just that simple notion of being in that room for those two days, you could see the sparks that were created between people.

People who were nervous about being there and eased into the process.

People that have remained connected to each other.

Love the fact WhatsApp group that we have, you know, a little bit of a mascot, so that when we see a flamingo out in the community, it's our reminder of, you know, those invisible ties that connect us.

And I think that's the power of making sure that families of missing people are not forgotten, because from my perspective, it's a silent, lonely grief, and any chance to remind people that they're not alone, whether it be through a podcast or an article or those sorts of activities, that's the stuff that keeps people going.

Can you share with us, Sarah, a couple of your new projects or the latest projects that you're working on.

Definitely.

I think, as you can probably hear in a lot of my sharing about my experiences is I've always been really intrigued about the role of media and the ways in which media professionals engage with families submissing people, because I have firsthand experience of really great media interviews and really rubbish media interviews no matter how much I prepped someone about what I will and won't say.

And so a couple of years ago I got some grant funding from the University of New England to start a project that's almost at the stage where we've got quite a few papers under review in journals which I can then share, but about trying to understand what would it look like to have safe reporting guidelines around the ways in which missing persons media is undertaken.

And that's because in Australia we have safe reporting guidelines in the media for how we talk about suicide, how we talk about drugs and alcohol, and how we talk about mental health.

Yet media and missing is a huge industry and we don't have guidelines around how we make sure that we don't further traumatize both families of missing people, but also people who are currently missing, particularly in that short term stage, around how we don't further alienate them or traumatize them in the ways in which their stories are presented.

So over the last eighteen months, I undertook a survey, just random population survey with the Australian community to say, what do you think the intention of media is in missing person stories?

And the overwhelming majority of people said it's to help locate people, and that media locate people.

And so I thought, that's a really interesting perception because from my perspective, I see that media happens, yet I'm not quite sure sometimes that it's the exact link that leads to an outcome.

It leads to lots of new clues, but there isn't much data on what it actually does.

So then I took that data and I hosted a focus group for family members who had done media but that often had not been involved in research projects activities like the Hope Narratives.

We hosted a focus group.

With Missed Foundation because it's always important to have lived experience inclusion in that space.

It was a two hour focus group that actually went for five hours, and we plotted out what enables people to do media, what stops people from doing media, and if they could propose what media guidelines would be best for them, what would that look like.

So that paper is currently under review to be published at the moment, But what was really clear is that families who already had some connections in the community, or were well spoken, or were from middle class or upper class communities had more of an opportunity to share their story because people wanted to see their story, as well as people where the person who was missing didn't look like they were involved in their own disappearance, that they didn't just walk away, or that they were not the perfect victim.

So it was really.

Interesting to understand that perspective, as well as the energy that was required by families over the years to constantly put on a happy face, say yes to all media opportunities, perform in a way that meant that their story was going to be shared, that people would click on it, that they would like it.

But that what was most significant from that was families didn't say media helps locate people.

All of them said, we have to do media because we are concerned about the deficits in the police investigation.

We engage media to bridge the gap between what we know was done to find the person versus what we think needs to happen to actually find our person.

And then the third stage was two more focus groups, one with police media and then one with mainstream media to ask them what they think they are doing in terms of why they do their work in terms of media and what police media think they're doing with their media alerts.

So that paper's already under review as well to get a better understanding.

But from that it really showed that police make that decision in their risk assessment.

Yes, will do a media alert and they push it out.

Once they do that, they very much lose control because media will pick it up, and it's the editorial decisions of that media outlet that will decide how the story is told, what elements of the story they'll tell, whether or not they'll just decide nobody wants to hear that story, we just won't share it.

So there's no equity.

All families are missing, people aren't on an even playing field.

Yet media makes sometimes police more accountable or other organizations more accountable.

But if not everyone gets the chance, then it's not fair.

So that's the we're moving towards the creation of some media guidelines with every mind who's a mental health organization.

That's our big picture goal.

But it really shows that everyone thinks they're doing the same work, but the community, the families of the missing people, police, media and media are all taking different approaches as to why media is being used.

So it's been a really interesting project.

Yeah, well, very interesting actually, and I kind of got a little bit of trauma there and you were saying a few things.

I'm like, yes, yes, definitely, and yes, it is a case of like I have done a lot of media now over the years, and you know, to reflect, for twenty two years, I had no media.

I did two articles in a magazine and it went nowhere.

I never heard from the magazine to say we didn't get anybody come forward, or we did, or we've passed us on or we've done this.

So that has been interesting as a journey as well.

And you know, people do pick and choose.

You know, I'm in a position now where I would like to go and do things like I've had lots and lots of people when there was a massive flurry of things happening, and I had people begging me to come on and do stories with them on TV and whatnot, and then the flurry has finished, and now I'm at a position where I can talk to them and say hey, I'd like to come on, and they're like, oh, pass.

You know, your story is not important now because there's no trauma behind it, And that is very difficult to manage.

It is because my story is not over yet, and.

The expectations that people have about will they or won't they do media doesn't set them up well for what happens if media don't want to tell your story.

Yeah, but that's crushing for families and how manybody cares and how many stories are people are interviewed, and.

As you say, they don't make it because the editor goes, oh, that doesn't actually cut the cheese today, We're not going to put that on.

There exactly, or it's edited in a way that meets the editorial interest of the story, or it gets connected to other missing persons stories, but that's not the story that the family thought they were doing.

We did a story we Channel seven on Spotlight actually, and it ended up going over two nights and there was two different stories that I sort of were featured on the same night.

So instead of doing mum's story all on one night.

It was broken up over two weeks and probably to extend the audience.

I don't know what their mindset is, but let's just use this as an example.

And Kathleen Fulberg, she had just been released from jail, so that was the big story that then my story came in after her.

So the first part of part one, which was my side of that story, and then the second week was when Allison and the team went overseas with Rick Blum's daughter and they traveled through Belgium and whatnot.

And you know what was really interesting.

Jonie then started talking to someone who actually knew someone and she said, oh, have you seen the Spotlight program?

And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, that's the story about the daughter who's disgrunted because her dad left her a debt in Belgium.

So I think my mind just blew because I went wow.

So there was no concept or thought process in that space about my mum's actually a missing person, and this is why that story was done.

Their focus was purely about the daughter who went to Belgium looking to try and find documents and saying that she was progrungent of her dad.

Yes, and that was really telling for me, Like that was a moment for me where I went, Wow, the interpretation is so different and so important.

And I bang on about this all the time, Sarah, that you know your words.

Matter, they do well.

Listen.

I think I've taken up a lot of your time this morning.

Thank you so much.

I think that you're a true champion in my eyes, and I'm personally very grateful one that we've met in per We've had a good chat and good time.

You've taken time to hear me and listen to me and now extending that and doing more and more all the time.

And you know, I think that's awesome.

I do believe.

You've got a book coming out in twenty twenty six.

What is the book called and what is that about.

It's called Living in the Liminal Space, and it's actually a book for how to teach about ambiguous loss in social work, counseling and psychology, because as much as we can try and reach out to people who are already out there working in the field, it needs to be part of our foundational understandings.

So it's a book that explores my journey of being a social worker as well as strategies to teach, and then case studies from families to use in teaching material, because I think that we need to get people early so that they recognize that there are lots of places that you will interact with families of missing people over your career, and you should be able to link it back to remembering things that you were taught.

So that's the intention of the book.

Yeah, amazing, and I think what an important tool to have.

And I really would like to see that the older generation of the police force take time to actually listen and understand some languages that potentially weren't around as I spoke before.

Like things have changed and there's lots of new terms and things like that that have come to the space, but even today, I'm still getting language to me that is quite traumatizing for me from the older experienced detectives who are leading the cases and their language.

They just don't seem to be understanding or hearing or taking advice on better ways to manage that.

And I really would like to see that change.

Actually, it's not just about the new recruits coming in.

We need to change and help and support the ones making the calls because they're the ones usually making assumptions and making decisions that aren't good for the missing person, and that feeds back down through into those new recruits who are coming into the police force, and that needs to change too.

So, yeah, that language culture is really important.

And you would know that every family member that you've ever spoken to has their one, two, three, or four or five statements that have really stuck with them over the years.

That was said as a throwaway.

Line from an investigator that has really changed the trajectory as to how they live with their trauma.

Yeah, well, let's hope that that book and your hard work and Lauren, I know she's working hard in that space too, and you know, hopefully will have her come on the missing matter because I think she's got a lot to talk about later.

I think she said to me maybe in the new year we can have a catch up because she's so busy at the moment, But can we finish today?

Can you tell me in your own words?

You know why the missing matter.

That matter because the missing person themselves is often absent from the story.

Person that can humanize or animate that stories the people who are left behind.

So we all need to be really careful and sensitive with making sure that when we include people that we look after them in terms of how they share their story, how they live long term with not knowing, and how they get the opportunity to talk about their missing person other than being a missing person.

So that's why they matter.