Australian Penthouse

Squalor so bad it exhausts all superlatives. Blood spatter so ubiquitous you can’t help but shudder to think of the crime that produced it. Meet Gabrielle Simpson, one half of Sydney-based family company Clean Queens—specialists in forensic and hazardous cleaning, and part-time guardian angels to the disenfranchised
Interview: Tom Lee / Photos: Martin Wielecki

On her last job
I was contacted by a social worker at Concord Hospital in Sydney. They had a woman in her mid-30s who was very sick with diarrhoea, and when they looked at her living conditions, they discovered she had a blocked toilet.

The woman is delusional and suffers from OCD. Her compulsions are over-washing her hair—she had really bad lice—and feeding her body ‘good bacteria’, like Yakult. She took it on a level where it stripped all the bacteria away, which is what brought on the diarrhoea.

She didn’t tell anybody about the blocked toilet. She was on a pension and renting. The social worker contacted me, asking for help. They didn’t know what to do; the woman had no money. So I had to go in and remove the faeces with buckets, I think there was about 120 litres—about the same volume as a standard wheelie bin. It gets worse; I have to go back…I haven’t even got to the toilet itself.

On how she got into forensic cleaning
I was bored, sitting at a computer all the time. I did part-time cleaning, which then led to full-time cleaning, which led to checking stolen cars for an insurance company—checking them for syringes. I thought that was pretty cool, and now, eight years later, I’m a forensic cleaner and own Clean Queens. The company is affiliated with the police and the corrective services, and we have a huge list of contacts in mental health, aged care, disability services, and church groups. It’s endless.

On what she doesn’t like about the business
There are so many cowboys. And a lot of inside trade. There’s an operation running in Newcastle without basic computer software. How can you run a business without infrastructure? How does the owner pay the staff?

On the other side of things, the biggest problems I have are with landlords and boarding houses where they don’t have an agent managing the property. They don’t spend any money on the property, and if they have to spend more than
50 cents on getting it clean, they’re not willing to pay. I’ve had many run-ins with people like that…it’s the pits.

Some companies plunder people’s homes. One company we recently worked with did exactly that. I was referred by them to a squalor in [inner-city Sydney suburb] Glebe. It was for a woman in the worst situation I’ve ever seen. There was rubbish two-feet thick, flooding, that sort of thing. The company had emptied her unit. She was given back a bag of books. Now, this is a 43-year-old, highly intelligent woman with two degrees. She had a lot of beautiful things in her home. Some of her mother’s jewellery was never given back to her, which obviously had both financial and sentimental value. Weeks before this incident, the woman had told me: “In my unit are my degrees, but the frames are broken”. So I found her degrees and had them framed for her. That’s the kind of care and humanity I’d like to see more of.

On comparisons with the industry overseas
Hazardous, forensic and squalor cleans are handled so much better in the United States. Funnily enough, I saw experts on hazardous cleans on Oprah recently. They said the key is working with a client to clean up their living conditions and not gut the place. Something like that could send a person over the edge. We want to keep people, not lose them.

On what can be learned about an incident by what’s left behind
We recently had a 39-year-old nurse who had killed herself and no-one knew about it for three weeks. The person who found her was a real-estate agent; the woman always paid her rent on time. When the agent got to the front door, he knew from the flies and the smell.

The nurse died on the couch. It didn’t look like she did any drugs and I don’t think she was a drinker. There were a lot of sleeping tablets and an open bottle of Jim Beam that had no more than a sip out of it. Probably in a state of shock, she cut herself and defecated on the bathroom floor. I looked in the washing machine and in it was a very bloody towel. So she sat on one edge of the lounge and, as a trauma nurse, she tried to prevent her own death.

There were a lot of things in the townhouse that needed fixing. Her washing machine didn’t work properly, kitchen appliances were missing buttons. She obviously hadn’t cleaned the place in months. All signs of acute depression, I can only guess.

On how she deals with what she sees
I’m at a point where I think I’ve seen everything. Nothing truly shocks me. I’m not judgemental. I get sad when I hear the back-story and then see what happened, but the emotions I feel are the same as most people would feel.

Related articles

• Bangkok’s Body Snatchers