CRITIC’S VIEW: Australia Uncovered: The Cleaning Company, Kids Raising Kids
★★★★★

This week’s instalment of the SBS documentary series is a film by Lachlan McLeod delving into the world of trauma cleaning and the story of the late Sandra Pankhurst, whose company Specialised Trauma Cleaning services (STC) cleans crime scenes, suicide sites and the houses of hoarders.

The late Sandra Pankhurst, founder of forensic cleaning service STC.Credit:Walking Fish Productions

There’s blood, there’s viscera, there are rats and used syringes, but also a stunning amount of compassion. Pankhurst was the subject of Sarah Krasnostein’s acclaimed 2017 book The Trauma Cleaner, and this is a sequel of sorts, following Pankhurst’s final few years (she died in 2021) and giving greater insight into her company’s employees. It also re-tells her remarkable life story: Pankhurst suffered abuse at the hands of her adoptive parents, and came out as a transgender woman after a failed marriage in the 1970s. She then worked as a drag performer, a sex worker and a funeral director before starting her own business doing “the shittiest jobs that nobody else wants” in the 1990s. Beginning on her own with one van, she grew the business into Victoria’s largest crime-scene cleaning company.

McLeod filmed Pankhurst and her employees over three years, tagging along on jobs ranging from clearing out hoarder houses to brutal crime scenes. Many of STC’s employees, like Pankhurst, have had difficult lives and this seems to imbue them with empathy for their clients. They laugh as mice leap out from decades of piled-up rubbish, they’re non-judgmental as they sift through detritus or mop up dried blood.

It’s not all blood and gore – STC also does domestic cleaning and the film takes us behind doors into unseen lives, such as those of people with a history of long-term incarceration, and people with mental health issues or acquired injuries.

The Cleaning Company features blood, gore and a surprising amount of humanity.

Pankhurst, who developed a respiratory illness from years of inhaling chemicals before she used adequate protection on the job, sums up STC’s ethos simply as “we’re human beings dealing with human problems”.

After the success of Krasnostein’s book, Pankhurst became a public figure, and McLeod follows her to speaking engagements, which she keeps up, along with running STC, while her health is deteriorating.

She remains upbeat until the end, but McLeod’s shots of her in quiet moments suggest Pankhurst has become accustomed to masking some feelings. Asked how she’d like to be remembered, she tells McLeod “as a kind human being – nothing more, nothing less”. By the end of Clean, it’s clear she was much more.

Patrick Abboud’s Kids Raising Kids follows students at Australia’s only school for teenage parents.

Next week’s film, Kids Raising Kids, from writer/director Patrick Abboud, also highlights overlooked lives, as cameras are allowed for the first time into Canberra College’s CC Cares program, Australia’s only school for pregnant and teenage parents. The program helps teen parents (with their kids in tow) complete the final years of school, even if it takes them five years.

The film follows several students in the final weeks before graduation, and it’s often sobering viewing – there’s Taila, who is trying to complete her studies while dealing with two kids and an abusive partner (at one point in the film, she has a visible black eye, and stories of the abuse she has endured are shocking); Charlie, who has a history of illicit drug abuse and struggles to focus; and Eva, whose Ugandan diplomat parents dropped her at the school telling Jan Marshall, the school’s remarkable head teacher, to take her or he would kill her.

Marshall has a special relationship with Eva, who is seeking asylum; she is the student’s only support now her parents have returned to Uganda. Marshall, who pioneered the CC Cares program, was even at the birth of Eva’s son, Ocean. Abboud’s film doesn’t sensationalise, but Kids Raising Kids is a bit of a rollercoaster – the picture it subtly paints is both maddening (several of the featured kids come from backgrounds of foster care or abusive homes) and hopeful.

Australia Uncovered is on SBS, Tuesday, 8.30pm and SBS On Demand

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Most Viewed in Culture

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article