What Two Years of Work Was Worth

When I arrived at Bulleen, I did not inherit an organisation cruising comfortably along. The Association had recorded an annual loss of approximately $280,000 in the financial year before I took over.

I threw myself into changing that position. The hours were enormous. The work crossed operations, staffing, competitions, finances, facilities, game days and whatever else landed in front of me. A role paid on the basis of 38 hours regularly became something closer to 70.

In less than sixteen months, the Association moved from that approximately $280,000 annual loss to an approximately $420,000 annual profit. That was a swing of around $700,000 in annual financial performance.

I do not say that because a balance sheet makes anybody indispensable. Nobody is. I say it because those figures show what I had committed to the organisation and what the work had produced.

There was another set of numbers that never appeared in a Board report.

In December 2022, before Bulleen, I weighed 113.4 kilograms. By 27 December 2023, nine months after becoming General Manager, I weighed 132.5 kilograms.

The Board could look at a financial statement and see the Association's transformation. I could look in the mirror and see mine.

I see those photographs now and I do not simply see weight. I see somebody who had allowed the responsibility of turning around an organisation to consume too much of himself.

Then came 19 June 2024.

That day changed the course of my employment and, ultimately, my life and my family's life. I left the workplace and never returned to work at Bulleen.

What remains difficult for me is not simply that the incident occurred. It is the absence of accountability I felt followed it. The Association continued. The Board continued. The competitions continued. My life did not simply continue in the same way.

The people around the table at the beginning of my Bulleen story would, in very different ways, still be present at its end. Derek Pangbourne and Sally Steel had been part of the original interview panel. The workplace incident involved Sally's husband, David Steel. By then Derek was President and Chairman of the Board. It was later Derek who advised that my fixed-term employment would conclude, and he subsequently occupied the General Manager position himself.

I do not claim to know anybody else's motive, and I do not need to. The chronology is confronting enough on its own.

I had committed extraordinary hours to helping turn around a long-standing Association. When a workplace incident then changed the trajectory of my health, employment and family life, I believed the Board should have treated accountability for what had occurred with the seriousness it warranted.

Instead, from where I stood, the institution moved forward while I carried the consequences.

For Bulleen, 19 June 2024 would eventually become a date in the past. For me, it became a dividing line between the life I had before I walked into work that morning and everything that came afterwards.

The difficult thing about major turning points is that they rarely announce themselves.

There is no moment where somebody tells you to remember the date because the next eighteen months will change the way you think about work, trust, health and your own capacity.

You go to work.

Then something happens.

Afterwards, the world is divided into before and after.

My period at Bulleen eventually became one of those dividing lines.

I am careful about how I describe it because the legal and medical records tell their own story, and because memory can become distorted when events are revisited repeatedly.

What is not in dispute is that by mid-2024 I had made a workers compensation claim arising from a psychological workplace injury, and on 30 July 2024 DXC Claims Management Services advised that the claim had been accepted.

The language of the acceptance email was clinical.

Claim accepted.

Administrative systems have a way of making human experiences look organised.

Mine was not.

I went from being somebody who spent his working life solving problems to somebody whose capacity to work was itself being assessed.

There were doctors.

Psychologists.

Certificates of capacity.

Claims managers.

Return-to-work requirements.

Pay calculations.

Treatment plans.

I had spent years being the person other people expected to make decisions.

Now other people were discussing whether I could work at all.

That was difficult to accept.

The first practical problems were almost absurd in their normality. Payroll had to be corrected because annual and personal leave had been used across periods that were subsequently covered by workers compensation. Leave loading had been paid when it should not have been. Leave balances had to be restored. Underpayments and overpayments had to be reconciled.

On 20 August 2024, after the club's accountant worked through the figures, I agreed the adjustments could be made in the next pay cycle.

It was administrative. Necessary. Fixable.

But every small administrative issue arrived while I was trying to recover from something much larger.

Then there was the laptop.

It appears repeatedly in the email record.

The club wanted its equipment back because the laptop contained access to software used in operations, including BrightSign and SurveyMonkey.

From the club's perspective, that was practical.

From mine, the repeated requests became part of a broader experience of remaining technically employed while feeling completely disconnected from the workplace.

My possessions were there.

Their property was with me.

My name still existed in the organisation.

But my actual life had moved somewhere else.

Treatment.

Recovery.

Appointments.

Trying not to think about the workplace while still receiving emails from it.

Those two realities did not sit comfortably together.