On an early Saturday morning not long ago, Dr Christine Craik opened up her computer to find an email from the Governor General’s office, and, as any ordinary person would do, deleted it. Except this time she made a mistake because it wasn’t spam and she was not an ordinary person, rather, she had been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the community as a social worker, to tertiary education, and as a volunteer.
At her home located halfway up a hill in Darraweit Guim, Dr Craik lives with her partner Wayne and faces the same problems as the rest of her community; keeping the foxes out of the chicken coop and fixing the retaining wall. It’s her happy place. Here, she can relax with her collection of teapots and seashells after a busy day of volunteering to hold barbecues at Bunnings Warehouse for the Country Fire Authority. Who would have thought that Australia’s representative for King Charles would appoint her an AM for cooking sausages at Bunnings? Truth be told, she doesn’t want to be known for this because she hasn’t fought fires like Wayne. “That’s his thing,” she says.
Dr Craik’s accolades include being a family violence accredited social worker for the past 30 years, the national president of the Australian Association of Social Workers, a senior lecturer at RMIT and volunteer with Wildlife Rescue, to name just a few of her roles. Social work has been her foremost pursuit since she became qualified in the late 1980s.
“It’s not enough to do the individual work. You really have to do the macro work too,” she says.
“You have to change the way the systems work. You have to fight for it. Have the resistance.”
After being a social worker for about 12 years, Dr Craik took up a teaching role and has since educated roughly 300 students per year for more than two decades. She missed working in the field, however, so took up weekend work at the Alfred Hospital as a crisis worker in the ICU. During this time she identified volumes of family violence victims admitted to the emergency department and was shocked it went unnoticed by paramedics, doctors and police. This informed the research for her PhD.
“My research showed what needs to happen. Every single person that comes to an emergency department needs to be asked if everything is okay in their relationship, or if they feel safe in their life,” she says.
Dr Craik’s efforts led to the strengthening of family violence detection in hospitals.
“There’s a whole range of things that are checked. They ask if you’re a smoker, if you’ve got diabetes etcetera. It’s not hard to ask another question of everybody that comes in.”
To have this mission completed by the next generation of social workers, Dr Craik made family violence a compulsory subject at all undergraduate and post-graduate levels of study when she was president of the AASW, among other changes that included subjects regarding the decolonisation of social work.
“The history of social work is complicit in the removal of Aboriginal children during the Stolen Generations. And to be honest, the rates of removal of Aboriginal children now through our child protection and legal systems is probably just as bad or worse,” she says.
“I was shocked that it wasn’t compulsory for this history to be taught. To learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is the best way forward with these communities. So, that’s now a compulsory subject too.”
Dr Craik’s uniform for the past 25 years has consistently included a streak of dyed purple hair, which she’ll wear to the day she dies.
“The colour purple is synonymous with feminism. That was the colour of strength and earlier versions of family violence walks. “I’m sticking with my purple. That’s my sign of resistance,” she says.
