Carol Altmann – The Terrier 

This photo of senior Lyndoch Living staff was taken on the front lawns of Lyndoch in 2017.

Of those in the line-up, only two faces remain.

Three, if I count the CEO, pictured in the centre.

The turnover from those in this photo includes four Nurse Unit Managers, an Occupational Therapist, the Chief Financial Officer, the Director of Hotel Services, the Head of kitchen services, the Human Resources Co-ordinator, the Director of Nursing, and the Director of People and Resilience which is a title dripping with irony, because resilience doesn’t come into this.

They are all gone, regardless of their “resilience”.

Last week I posted a photo of seven experienced clinical staff who have left in the past eight weeks, but this photo dips into an exodus that has been from right across Lyndoch.

Some of those in this photo had only just started in their roles, but were gone within three years.

Why?

We have not been told why.

I have written many times now about the loss of up to 200 staff from Lyndoch Living in the past five years and still nobody has told us why.

The board, it seems, considers such a loss quite acceptable, normal even.

It is this normalisation of the abnormal which has got me thinking – was this staff purge part of the grand plan all along?

Was the idea to get rid of anyone who complained, cost too much, knew too much or who simply didn’t apply the “Lyndoch Way” of saying “yes!” even when their hearts told them to say “no, no, no”?

Maybe it has been a part of Lyndoch’s grand masterplan that, let’s face it, very few people knew much about and still don’t.

The community owns Lyndoch, but in the past five years it has been kept completely in the dark.

Who knew that Tomlinson Wing would be demolished to make way for a $22m medical clinic?

Who knew that Lyndoch had, in 2018, quietly become a Company Limited by Guarantee that would be used to cut the community out?

And who knew that so many hard-working, committed local people who worked at Lyndoch would be forced to leave in a purge that still rolls on?

The impact of these losses is already being felt and my fear is that the full impact is yet to come.

Again, for the sake of the elderly and vulnerable residents, I hope I am wrong.

Carol Altmann- The Terrier

Tonight, names and faces.

I want to share with you the names and faces in this montage, who are now among an estimated 200 people whose faces you have not seen, but who have left Lyndoch Living in the past five years.

Each of them has a name, a face and have spent years caring for our elderly – they deserve to be more than just a number.

Numbers are numbing.

It’s the names and faces that capture what has been unfolding at Lyndoch since 2015, with a trickle of staff leaving turning into a stream and now into a flood.

The seven faces here are among those, in the past eight weeks, who have either resigned from Lyndoch or taken extended sick leave.

They have been part of the backbone of Lyndoch and, between them, have decades of aged care and nursing experience:

Director of Nursing Julie Baillie, who has worked for Lyndoch for more than 20 years.

Operational Manager of Workforce Development and Registered Nurse Roselie Morey, who has worked at Lyndoch for more than a decade.

Clinical Leader and Enrolled Nurse Scott Lucas, again another decade of service.

Nurse Unit Manager and Registered Nurse Anita Plowman, who has worked at Lyndoch for almost 30 years.

Registered nurse and former Nurse Unit Manager, Maxine Lane, 20 years of service at Lyndoch.

Registered nurse and former May Noonan Hostel Manager  Jeanette Edge, another 10 years of service.

Nurse Unit Manager and Registered Nurse Cath Porter, just over 10 years of service.

All gone and unlikely to return.

So many Lyndoch staff hung in there and hung in there, until it became intolerable.

The staff can’t say that publicly, but I can: it becomes intolerable.

The Terrier has been publishing stories about this for the past two years in the hope that the Lyndoch board and the local community would sense that something wasn’t right.

The community is working it out. The board, however, is not.

As I wrote on Sunday night, the Lyndoch board was sent an anonymous letter by a group of staff way back in April last year, warning them of the changing culture, the growing toxicity, and the consequences.

At the time of the letter , about 80 to 100 staff had gone.

Since then, according to my sources, another 80 to 100 have left. There will be more.

I have spoken to dozens of these people and they all tell disturbing stories which have never been fully aired and can’t be without legal protection.

But I can tell you this – very few of them wanted to leave their jobs.

Many thought they would have life-long careers at Lyndoch.

All of them, bar none, miss the residents they cared for.

Please think of each of these 200 staff next week, on Tuesday 26 October, when Lyndoch Living holds its Annual General Meeting.

None of them will be there, they won’t be named and they won’t be celebrated, which is why I want to honour each and every one of them now.

So to all the nurses, personal care workers, human resources managers, finance officers, payroll staff, cleaners, kitchen hands, chefs, lifestyle workers, gardeners, volunteer coordinators, pastoral care workers, maintenance workers, accountants, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, executive staff, directors of nursing, nurse unit managers, clinical leaders and anybody who I may have missed in the long list of the fallen – thankyou.

One day I would like to gather all of you on the Civic Green so Warrnambool can say thank you too.

This loss should be intolerable to us, as a community which loves Lyndoch, and entrusts our loved ones to its care.

And it is why we fight on.

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By Carol Altmann

Liebig St is one of those quirky Warrnambool things – a main street that nobody pronounces properly, named in honour of a guy that few locals have ever heard of.

Certainly Justus von Liebig is not a name that rolls off the tongue and, when it does, we locals insist on saying Lie-Big instead of the correct Lee-Bick or Lee-Bish, depending on just how German you like to go with your accent.

This battle with the pronunciation is not unexpected because Justus von Liebig was a German chemist and had absolutely nothing to do with Warrnambool, other than in the same way as someone like Microsoft founder Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs from Apple.

Like Gates and Job, Liebig’s most famous works had a global, transformative impact.

Do you use fertiliser on your garden? You can thank Liebig for working out the benefits of nitrogen to soil.

Do you use beef stock or baking powder in your cooking? You can thank Liebig for “inventing” those too.

And if you have ever stepped inside a chemistry lab, with its test tubes, Bunsen burners and rows of students in white lab coats pouring this into that, you can also give a nod to Liebig for inventing the whole concept of a chemistry lab (but perhaps not the white coats, they were invented by diet guru Jenny Craig, I am sure of it).

So why is the main street in a city at the bottom of Australia, at the bottom of the world, thousands of miles from Europe, named for one of Germany’s great chemists?

RMIT Professor of Design Paul Carter has written an entire academic essay on his thinking behind why surveyor William Pickering, who laid out the grid of Warrnambool streets in 1843, chose two German scientists – the other was astronomer Johannes Kepler – among his selection of highly unusual street names.

As Prof Carter points out, most early street names were reserved for royalty, nobility or colonial officials and certainly not names like Kelp, Japan, Banyan, Lava and Timor (the latter of which, just like Liebig, has suffered from years of mispronunciation to become Tie-More rather than Tea-More).

According to Prof Carter, the choice of Liebig is inextricably linked to his work with improving soils.

“Two aspects of Liebig’s life had struck me as relevant to his commemoration in Warrnambool,” Prof Carter writes.

“Firstly, his invention of nitrogen-based fertilisers and, secondly, the assertion that his interest in securing agricultural production had been stimulated by the experience of living through the ‘year without a summer’ (that happened in 1816).”

In other words, the terrible weather conditions that inspired Liebig to pursue ways of improving farming by improving soils wasn’t lost on Pickering as he laid out a new town in blustery, blowy, unpredictable south-west Victoria.

Healthy soil meant Warrnambool’s early settlers had a better chance of surviving whatever nature threw at them and Pickering’s choice of Liebig was almost certainly a tribute to his contribution.

“….On this basis I had surmised that William Pickering, the government surveyor to whom we owe Warrnambool’s street names, had an agenda: soil improvement as a driver of economic growth,” Prof Carter writes.

Prof Carter also explores a theory that Pickering’s choice of Liebig was not in isolation, but part of a “cryptic crossword puzzle” where Warrnambool’s first street names inter-connected, with Liebig, Kepler, Lava and Kelp the science-and-soil cluster.

“A genius was not required to design this cryptic crossword puzzle, simply a well-informed, scientifically-inclined professional in the right place at the right time – with perhaps a certain determination to…shake off the expectations of family and government,” he writes.

As it happens, this digging into Warrnambool’s early street names was inspired by the Warrnambool City Council’s plan to revitalise Liebig St – now due to start next year – and provides the perfect opportunity to reflect not only the past but the future.

Just as Pickering’s street names reflected a vision of growth for Warrnambool, what is our vision now and can we dare to be anywhere as creative as Pickering was, for his time, in his thinking?

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