EPISODE 19
December 22, 2021
In 1985, Jill Henry joined the Australian Federal Police and over the next 15 years, while based in Sydney, her work involved general crime, drug seizures and fraud cases. Dissatisfied with ‘plain clothes’ policing, she applied for overseas peacekeeping roles and was offered a post in East Timor with the UN. In 2000, she was relocated to the former Portuguese colony where she was an officer in the Vulnerable Persons Unit, dealing with crimes of sexual abuse, rape, child abuse and incest. The 6-month posting in East Timor was a springboard to 7 more overseas postings, including Cyprus, the Solomon Islands, Jordan – where Jill trained Iraqi police recruits on human rights and crimes against people and property. This was followed by a posting to a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern territory and then Papua New Guinea.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:47] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to episode 19 of Women Who Walk. This is the last episode of 2021 and Season 1. Season 2 will begin in January, 2022. It’s been 7 months since the podcast launched and your interest has resulted in more than 1500 downloads in 370 cities and 36 countries around the world.
[00:01:15] Louise: It’s a delight to know that so many people are enjoying the voices and fascinating stories of the women featured here on Women Who Walk. Thank you so much for tuning in.
[00:01:27] Louise: Today, my guest is Jill Henry. Jill grew up south of Sydney in a small coastal town. In the mid ’70s, she left high school at 16 to study childcare in Canberra, Australia’s capital territory. She graduated 3 years later and began working in a preschool. Wanting to have more of a positive impact on the lives of children in abusive situations, she set her sights on becoming an Australian Federal Police Officer.
[00:02:01] Louise: In 1985, she officially joined the AFP and after 17 weeks of training, she was sent to Sydney. However, over the next 15 years, her work involved general crime, drug seizures, fraud cases, everything but child protection.
[00:02:20] Louise: For a number of years, she applied for overseas peacekeeping roles, but to no avail. On the verge of resigning, she was offered a post in East Timor with the UN and in 2000, she was relocated to the former Portuguese colony where she was an officer in the Vulnerable Persons Unit, dealing with crimes of sexual abuse, rape, child abuse and incest.
[00:02:48] Louise: The 6-month posting in East Timor was a springboard to 7 more overseas postings, including Cyprus, the Solomon Islands, Jordan, where Jill trained Iraqi police recruits on human rights and crimes against people and property. This was followed by a posting to a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern territory and then Papua New Guinea.
[00:03:14] Louise: I met Jill in 2015 at a lunch at an Australian restaurant in Lisbon. She had not long arrived in Portugal having taken early retirement from the AFP. When she told me about the work she’d retired from, I found it difficult to match her stories with a very gentle, slow speaking woman sitting next to me whose straight blonde hair was, at the time, streaked purple and razor cut into a crazy-fun geometric style.
[00:03:47] Louise: When I began this podcast earlier this year, Jill is someone I thought I’d like to interview. As we say in Australia, she’s a quiet achiever, someone who diligently works behind the scenes for the greater good, but without broadcasting their accomplishments, I imagined that this interview would be a great opportunity for her to share some stories of the challenging and incredibly worthy work she’s done on her various postings at home and abroad.
[00:04:32] Louise: Welcome Jill, you’re in Australia at the moment, visiting your mum, who you haven’t seen in a couple of years because of COVID. How are things there now?
[00:04:42] Jill: It’s good. Last time I was here, there was a really bad bushfire. Now, unfortunately there’s been flooding. So badly hit by the bush fires and now the main street’s under water. Businesses just can’t cop a break. It’s very sad.
[00:05:01] Louise: Yeah. Those fires that you’re referring to are those massive fires from a couple of years ago.
[00:05:07] Jill: Yes, that’s right. That’s, that’s when I was here last over Christmas and my mum and I were evacuated twice. And then I came back to Portugal and have been stuck because of COVID ever since. So this is the first chance I’ve had to come back.
[00:05:22] Louise: You’ve gone back and now there’s floods. And yet that’s the nature of the climate in Australia. It’s, it’s fires and floods and isn’t that part of one of our national songs, I think, the land of fire and flood.
[00:05:37] Jill: Yes.
[00:05:38] Louise: But now you’ve made a home for yourself in Portugal. And when you’re here, you live in the northern city of Porto. Can you tell us a bit about Porto? Your neighborhood, some of your favorite haunts?
[00:05:51] Jill: I was in a very traditional neighborhood called Bonfim, and I lived there for a couple of years. I’m currently selling my apartment there and I’ve moved to Matosinhos, which is right on the water. It’s a fishing village. It’s got lots of seafood restaurant. Surf schools all over the place. It’s just nice to be by the ocean.
[00:06:14] Jill: It’s really nice being amongst that Port scene In Porto with the Port barrels coming down the river. It’s very picturesque. Sometimes reminds me of Sydney by the Harbor, there’s all those trendy little places. There’s lots of green space, like Crystal Palace Gardens over-looking the Douro and out to the ocean. It’s a beautiful place, I really love it.
[00:06:42] Louise: Yes. I agree. There’s something very familiar about some of the coastal regions of Portugal. They do remind me of, um, some of the little harbors around Sydney and some of our small coastal seaside towns as well. Yeah. So thanks for sharing that. And then, um, in the introduction, I mentioned that you started out studying childcare and working with children. What was it that prompted you to transition from childcare into the Australian Federal Police?
[00:07:17] Jill: I had friends who lived in public housing apartments and there was a child that was being abused. And one night I was at my friend’s place and we could hear things happening in the apartment next door. And I said, this is terrible. What’s being done about it? And she said, I’ve rung nearly every night to report it to social workers and nothing was ever done. When I talked to welfare officers, they said often their hands were tied and it was the police that ended up going in and doing something. And I thought, well, if I went into welfare, I would be really frustrated by that. I thought, I don’t think I can help by being a social worker or a welfare worker.
[00:08:07] Jill: I left and went into childcare for a while thinking that I’d always just work in a preschool or occasional care. Then I really wanted to do more. So I started the application for Australian Federal Police, because I was living in Canberra at the time, and I knew that they did a big role there.
[00:08:27] Jill: I had to go back to school to get into the federal police because they didn’t think that my Year, 10 level English was enough to complete the law side of the course. I went back to school at the age of 22, 23. I completed that. I sent my results in and started the application again. And I got in when I was 24. And I went to Canberra for my initial 16 or 18 weeks training and finished in November, 1985. Unfortunately I was sent to Sydney where we don’t have the role of child protection.
[00:09:17] Louise: While you were working with the AFP in Sydney, you weren’t actually assigned child protection, is that right?
[00:09:25] Jill: Yes, because out of Canberra, that’s not a role that federal police do. In Canberra, we have two functions: its general duties policing and detective work, plain clothes duties. In the other states of Australia, our work is only plain clothes. So we don’t do investigating murders or domestic violence or child protection. It’s just not a role that’s, that’s done in any other state.
[00:09:56] Louise: Wow. That’s kind of concerning coz the question that comes to mind is that, what happens to those children then that are in abusive situations. And it sounds like social services are not always able to, to step in and do interventions.
[00:10:12] Jill: I really don’t know what the social scene is like anymore, because this was going back to 1985. I imagine it’s probably still a combination of the police and welfare and social workers, but I would hope that they have a lot more of a role in it now.
[00:10:32] Louise: It must have been kind of frustrating coz you’d got into the police force in order to do this work and then you ultimately weren’t doing it. And so then you began applying for peacekeeping roles abroad. So what attracted you to that kind of work?
[00:10:48] Jill: I guess it was the same sort of thing. You really felt you’re helping somebody. A lot of police work, you don’t feel like you’re helping. You’re punishing somebody for doing something wrong to somebody else. Taking drugs off the street is a good thing, but you don’t see that every day effect that you have. When you do peacekeeping, you’re there on the ground and you often see the effect of what you’re doing. You see the, the country improving, you see law and order being brought back. It’s, um, a palpable thing that you see all the time. Whereas when we’re doing plain clothes work, we just don’t see that side of it.
[00:11:30] Louise: I understand. So your first posting was to East Timor. And was that during the unrest there?
Officer Henry in East Timor
[00:11:38] Jill: That was just after the popular vote. Voting happened in 1999. I went there in November, 2000. It was still pretty hairy, but it was nothing like our first, second, and even third group that went in. I was the fifth group and we had an overlap, the fourth contingent was still there. They had had it a bit rough, but it was improving by the time we got there.
[00:12:05] Louise: And when you say a bit rough, I mean, can you tell us a bit about what was involved with the, with the work there?
[00:12:13] Jill: By the time I came, the vote had happened and they were setting up the government. But they had basically sacked all the police force and the UN took over, UN police force took over. Then they were starting to recruit and train the new police force. I actually worked in an area called vulnerable persons unit. Our role was investigating rapes, incest, child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence.
[00:12:39] Jill: Previously women weren’t really comfortable reporting to police because often, when they went into report domestic violence or, or sexual assault, they were then beaten up by the police or, or worse. So they stopped reporting. And so when we came in and they started to realize that they could report to us and we would take it seriously and we would do something about it, often we’d come to work in the morning and we’d find a lineup of people just waiting to report offenses. It was quite incredible. What people do to each other, it was very sad.
[00:13:15] Louise: Oh God, yes, I mean really intense and challenging work Jill. So how did you personally cope with some of the things that you were witnessing or having to tend to.
[00:13:26] Jill: When you’re in a situation like that you, you rely on your other teams. Aussie’s are very hard workers and very supportive of each other. For instance, there was a bunch of guys that I knew most of them were from Sydney office, and they had got a house together and out the back they put up a grass hut and they would have parties. You need to talk, you just come over, have a drink with us. So at first I probably drank my problems, because it was sometimes really hard to see these things. Then I started to tap in more to that support network to cope.
[00:14:03] Louise: That’s good. I think as soon as you said that, there were parties, my immediate thought was, oh gosh, I imagine that a lot of peacekeeping personnel, partied away the, the difficulties of what they were seeing. And so in that sense, I mean, they probably were drinking hard and partying as a response to the emotional fallout of, of dealing with what you were seeing.
[00:14:29] Jill: There is a bit of that in some of these countries. After a while you settle into it and, you start to cope better, talk to each other and support each other, and you don’t have to even like the other people that you work with. Once you join the police force it’s like a family. You automatically support each other and have each other’s back. You, you have to, if you don’t, then you really can’t stay in the job because you just have to know that the person that’s going in behind you into a dangerous situations has got you.
[00:15:04] Louise: Yeah. Yes, you’ve, you’ve got to be able to really trust one another and trust that you’ll be there for each other.
[00:15:10] Jill: Exactly.
[00:15:10] Louise: On these peacekeeping missions, when you’re abroad, you’re away from home and you don’t have your regular support system, it’s an added challenge.
[00:15:19] Jill: We make friendships very quickly. Some people just stay in their apartments and don’t need other people, but then there’s the others that seek each other out. And another thing about Timor, we had the army for a long time and the army had organized nights at camp. They’d have special pizza nights or something. There’s a lot of other organizations, for instance, in Cyprus, we had the British military and they did a lot of events and we were invited to all of them. So, if you made the effort and went out and found out what was on, it made life much easier.
[00:15:54] Louise: So If you participated in events and opened up and talked, then you got the kind of moral and emotional support that you needed.
[00:16:03] Jill: Yes, exactly. I think it’s always there. Sometimes you just got to look for it.
[00:16:09] Louise: So you were in East Timor 6 months, and then you were posted, as you’ve mentioned, to Cyprus and then the Solomon Islands and Jordan, and then an Aboriginal community in Outback Australia, as well as Papua New Guinea. Previously we, we talked a little about these postings and one of the things that was really curious to me was the work that you did in Jordan. I think it was training Iraqi police. Can you tell us a little about that?
[00:16:39] Jill: It was run by the coalition forces, by the Americans, and it was in Jordan International Police Training Center in the desert, towards the Iraqi border. And they would fly in cadets and they would spend 13 weeks at the camp and they would rotate through the different sections. So we would have a four weekly rotation through our section. I taught human rights. That was a tough one because they would say to us, it doesn’t seem to make much sense that you’re teaching us human rights when we’re seeing people pulled off the street, killed in front of us and our families kidnapped.
[00:17:16] Jill: The only thing I could really answer was that this may not change in your lifetime. May not even change in your children’s lifetime, but hopefully it will change by your grandchildren’s lifetime. And really all we can do is show you what a better world could look like. That’s subjective too. Who’s to say our way of doing things is better than yours, but at least in human rights, we try to teach respect and kindness.
[00:17:41] Louise: What was it like for you as a woman teaching the police officers? Correct me if I’m wrong, but they were mostly men.
[00:17:48] Jill: They were all men. They didn’t bring any women into the training center. Women didn’t do a policing role, they were really more like secretaries. They didn’t do regular police work, so we weren’t teaching any females at all. It was all, all male students and one time I imposed a penalty on one of my students and I was called up by the captain. He said, you can’t do this. You have to take off the punishment. And I said, no, this is my classroom. If I can’t punish bad behavior, I can’t really do my work. I said that what he did was unacceptable.
[00:18:27] Jill: He went to the security that was in charge at the camp, and he came to me and said, Madam, you must take off the punishment. A female can’t punish a male. I said, again, if I can’t punish them, I can’t do my job. Then he went to the head of the camp and it became a really big thing. They came and talked to me, again, I said the same thing. I said, you really need women here because you need to have that balance of opinions and you need them to know what it’s like for women in the rest of the world in policing. And you need the skills we have, but we can’t teach you if we can’t punish bad behavior or wrong behavior.
[00:19:05] Jill: In the end I took off the punishment and the male teacher that I taught with put it back on. That was the compromise. I said, I just don’t understand all of this. They said, well, you’re, more than embarrassing them, they’re losing face in front of all of the other students.
[00:19:19] Louise: That’s right.
[00:19:20] Jill: So yeah, it was the only way we could do it, that I had to take off the punishment and the other teacher had to put a straight back on.
[00:19:28] Louise: That that kind of makes sense in a warped kind of way. Um, what was the behavior that, that you felt you needed to punish?
[00:19:37] Jill: I can’t even remember what it was now, but probably not wanting to take my expertise because I was a female. That what I had to say wasn’t relevant or worthy, because they just don’t see women doing anything. Like they once said to me, how do you arrest somebody? I said, well, i, I do the same as any male would do. Come on, if you were up against a big male and he’s much stronger than you. And I said, well, there’s a lot of things that aren’t about strength, but about expertise and knowledge and just knowing the right way to do things. I had to end up showing them how to put someone in a rest hold. And I did that on my translator and without telling him in advance. So I immediately put him into an arrest hold and marched him around the classroom. I said, does that hurt? Is that effective? Could you get out of that? Could you try and get away from me? And he couldn’t. He was explaining it to them and then they wanted to know how do we do that? And I said, this wasn’t about showing you a arrest hold. This was about showing you that even with a disparity of height and strength, I could do it because I had the skill to do it. I felt often that I was proving myself. So that was difficult.
[00:20:57] Louise: Do you know if there are now women in the Iraqi police force?
[00:21:02] Jill: No, I don’t. Even then there was women in the police force, but it’s just that they weren’t doing the traditional police role. That was back in 2004.
[00:21:12] Louise: Almost 20 years ago, hopefully things have changed. But interesting times for you because of the gender discrepancies in the Middle East.
[00:21:22] Louise: So coming full circle back to Australia, you also had a posting in an Aboriginal community, in Outback Australia. And we have some very sad issues in, in our, Aboriginal community and clashes with, with the local police. Recently I, I read a non-fiction book published in 2008, titled, The Tall Man by an Australian author, Chloe Hooper, and on the back cover it says,
[00:21:52] Louise: “This is the story of Palm island.” And for listeners, Palm island is just off the coast of Northern Queensland, “where one morning Aboriginal, Cameron Doomadgee swore a policeman and 40 minutes later lay dead in a watchhouse cell. This is a story of that policeman, the tall enigmatic Christopher Hurley, who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia and of the struggle to bring him to trial.”
[00:22:24] Louise: It’s great investigative writing, but it’s so difficult to read because of the details of the, the tragedy or the impact of alcohol on Australia’s indigenous people. And as a result of that, the oftentimes violent clash between intoxicated aboriginals and law enforcement officers. So when you were working in Numbulwar were you aware before your posting of the inquiry into the death of Cameron and the trial of Christopher Hurley?
[00:22:57] Louise: No I wasn’t. And that was actually the same year. I went to Numbulwar in 2008. We were isolated when I went there. I was 6-hours drive from Catherine, 9 from Darwin. Just red-dirt roads. Sometimes all you would see for miles was one of the road trains bringing supplies.
[00:23:21] Louise: And just for listeners, a road train is actually a truck, isn’t it, not a train?
[00:23:26] Jill: Yeah, that’s right. A truck with, think it’s up to three or even four trailers behind it.
[00:23:32] Louise: Yeah. They’re, they’re long transport trucks. Aren’t they.
[00:23:35] Jill: That’s right. Just bringing supplies, coz there’s no trains into these places.
[00:23:40] Louise: So then, what was it like for you as a woman working there? I mean you, you’d already been stationed in some pretty extreme situations, but what was it like in Outback Australia in the Aboriginal community?
[00:23:55] Jill: There wasn’t any difference between the way you’re treated as a male or a female. But, alcoholism was certainly a problem and we were there to try and keep it out of the communities. The elders had basically got together and said they wanted to try and stop alcoholism problems. So we were a dry community and when a plane came in from say Darwin, a private charter, we had to go out and check the plane and make sure that they weren’t smuggling in alcohol.
[00:24:24] Jill: We had a alcohol-related problem one night where a family had got hold of a large bottle of Listerine mouthwash with alcohol in it, and they’d added Coca-Cola and drank the whole bottle.
[00:24:36] Louise: Oh God.
[00:24:37] Jill: Yeah. Son was 16, two adult.
[00:24:40] Louise: Were they poisoned?
[00:24:41] Jill: They were sick, not poisoned. The father and the son ran off into the Bush, but the mother was caught and brought back to the station. I had to sit up all night and every half hour, I had to go and check on her and I had to log it and then it was every hour. And then it was every couple of hours. Just to monitor that she was okay before we let her go.
[00:25:01] Jill: We had a lot of instances of petrol sniffing. Wasn’t so much going on when we were there, but the consequences, there was people that had fetal alcohol syndrome and adults that were pretty messed up.
[00:25:16] Louise: Yeah. That’s actually what I understood when I read the book that I mentioned, The Tall Man, I think what really struck me is the, the level of potential brain damage as a result of the toxic consumption of alcohol in really raw forms, whether it was something like petrol or, or as you mentioned, this family that drank Listerine and so on, and it really is tragic. It’s hard to imagine. Um, what kind of resources do, do you have as a police officer to offer support to these communities. And, is there hope, um, can you give us a little sense of hope of a future where it’s not so grim for Australia indigenous folk?
[00:26:10] Jill: There is support work there. They have a clinic set up and they have traveling specialists that come in by air. You have mental health services, which you can ring. But we did have a episode where we had a person who had a problem. We, we thought it might’ve been a brain injury that was causing it. So we ended up getting the local clinic involved and they flew him out to one of the bigger hospitals for assessment. So, we go to the local clinic and get that help when it’s really needed.
[00:26:47] Jill: It seems a strange thing to do, but In my free time I gave classes at the school in card making and scrap booking so the kids could see that the police aren’t bad, there just people and we could have fun. I gave them assignments and they went away and wrote stories about what they did over the weekend. And then we took some photos and got them developed and we made a little book for each of them. Silly things, but it’s all about, um, making them feel worthwhile.
[00:27:19] Louise: It doesn’t matter where you are, children are children, whether they’re indigenous children or white children or children of color, it doesn’t matter, children love to play and create. And it sounds like what you did was create something that gave them an opportunity to just be kids. Plus I’m sure it was sort of soothing for you too, to just do something fun and creative. Coz I know you’re actually quite a creative person. You’ve done some beautiful photography work and you’re quite a craftswoman as well. So this must have given you an opportunity to, uh, let down a little bit and have some pleasant time with some, with some children.
[00:28:01] Jill: It was nice. And it’s a hard line between being the law enforcer and being just a person. If you get too friendly in any, um, situation, whether it be within the Aboriginal community or on mission, they expect that you’ll turn a blind eye or …
[00:28:22] Louise: Oh, I see, yeah.
[00:28:24] Jill: It is a fine line. But at the same time in these communities, you do want to show people that you’re just human, we’re all the same. We have kind people and not so kind people. And we’re just not always the big, bad police officers that we are people and we are there to try and help.
[00:28:43] Louise: Yeah. Yeah. So you, you started out in childcare. Because you wanted to help. And then you end up being posted in something like 7 different countries and some pretty volatile situations with a lot of really challenging circumstances and, um, people in extreme situations. Did you ever imagine that that’s where you’d end up?
[00:29:09] Jill: When I first applied and got in, I, I really was only envisaging child protection work and I didn’t think that it would be 29 years later before I quit. I didn’t envisage that I would be doing a lot of the stuff I did, but I just found that when the opportunity came up, I couldn’t really say no.
[00:29:32] Jill: People would often ask, after I’ve been on few missions, how do you keep motivated? How do you, you feel good about it when the situation seems so dire that it doesn’t seem as anything you can do? And my answer was always, well, if you only help one person, you still help one person and maybe there’ll be a flow on effect and that person will change someone else’s life and so on and so on.
[00:29:59] Jill: You really can’t be too discouraged thinking, I haven’t really done anything because often you don’t even know what you’ve done until years down the track when you might return or when somebody else says I was over in Timor and I met so and so, and they knew you and they said because of you, they were a police officer or a nurse. It was really hard being there, but I always just try to think, well, I’ll just concentrate on helping one or two people and I feel still like I’ve done something.
[00:30:30] Louise: That makes sense. That really does. So 30 years, uh, in your role, you took early retirement and decided to relocate to Portugal. Why did you choose Portugal?
Jill receiving her UN Medal for Peacekeeping
[00:30:44] Jill: I worked with a lot of Portuguese in Timor and I’d been to Portugal in 1998 and I never thought about moving there. And then I met a lot of Portuguese police officers and they were telling me how beautiful their country was, and another Australian police officer, who I worked with, was going to get married to a Portuguese police officer she’d met on mission and sold me on the thought of going to Portugal and running a guesthouse with her.
[00:31:17] Jill: And a few years after that, the job offered a voluntary redundancy. And I put my hat in the ring, not thinking I’d get it. And I did. And so I thought, well, okay, it’s, it’s telling me something. Maybe it’s time now I went to Portugal and see if I can make that my home.
[00:31:33] Jill: Unfortunately my friend is still working in federal police, so running a guesthouse that didn’t work out, but I thought, there was a reason for me to get out and so I just enjoy this magical country. I don’t have regrets about leaving the job or Australia.
[00:31:52] Louise: Good to know that you don’t have any regrets. I’m sure that life feels way more relaxed and less stressful these days too, with your home in Porto. So thanks so much, Jill, for sharing your journey, mission-to-mission and country-to-country. If listeners would like to connect with you, where can they find you online?
[00:32:11] Jill: On Facebook um, on Facebook, I’m Jill Henry.
[00:32:15] Louise: Okay. So I will put that in the transcript to this episode that if listeners would like to reach out, perhaps they have questions about the work you did, or questions even about living in Porto. They can message you on Facebook at Jill Henry. Great to catch up with you and enjoy the Christmas season in Australia.
[00:32:35] Jill: Thank you very much.
[00:32:37] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel, Women Who Walk Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, on my website, LouiseRoss.com.