From fatigue and fear to quiet beauty: The secret lives of night-shift workers

Out of sight, out of mind is probably how most Australians who work nine-to-five ­regard night-shift workers. It’s easy and ­comfortable to take our growing night-time workforce for granted, particularly when they’re ­mostly invisible to us. But here’s the thing: more than 4 million Australians now work regularly at night, ­according to new research from the University of Melbourne, and without them, much of our economy and society would grind to a halt. These are the ­people who staff the ­accident and emergency departments in our hospitals, who drive our trains, trams and buses, who captain our ferries, who clean our streets, who deliver our babies, who pilot and guide our planes, who toil in hospitality or who keep our 21st-century digital economy ticking over in data centres, either on rotating night shifts or permanent graveyard duty.

Some night-shift workers handle the disruptions to their sleep-wake cycle remarkably well; others develop long-lasting sleep disorders. Some work these hours under sufferance, while others relish the peace and quiet, the lack of the peak-hour crush and noisy offices. This latter bunch are the true nocturnals – not just owls rather than larks, but workers who prefer the greater solitude and more restful vibe of the night-time workplace. Some even claim they’re more alert and on their game.

“I just love working nights,” enthuses Melissa Lindsay from the air traffic control tower at Airservices’ Melbourne ­headquarters. Out of everyone I speak to for this story, the 33-year-old air traffic controller is the one who draws the most satisfaction – even pleasure – from night work. That’s in part because it suits her domestic routine: her partner works nights as a nurse. “We have a lot of respect for shifts in our house,” says Lindsay, who usually clocks from 10.45pm to 6.15am. “They offer so much flexibility … I just find a night shift less fatiguing than a morning shift.”

Lindsay works perched on a high-backed chair facing four wide touchscreens displaying planes on the ground and in the air, several of which she’s tracking and controlling at any one time via radar. She has a panoramic view of the airport and runways around her, of one plane speeding towards take-off, another taxiing away from the terminal, while another prepares to land: a vast sea of twinkling green, red, blue and yellow lights.

Here at the tower, next door to Melbourne’s main airport, which has no curfew, a typical night shift begins with managing the flow of passenger flights, followed by a long queue of freight planes. Remarkably, there are usually just two air traffic controllers rostered: on a quiet night, one might even be able to grab a break, says Lindsay, but they’re required to be 100 per cent switched on. “You always have to be ready to work because if there’s a storm, an emergency, a power outage, then you’re going to stay busy until the last aircraft leaves.”

There are the occasional crisis-driven adrenaline surges. One night, an aircraft came in to land at 3.30am, but there were signs its landing gear wasn’t down and locked. This triggered an immediate emergency response, including a call to aviation rescue firefighters, but it proved to be a false alarm. “You ­follow the checklist all the time – but especially at 3am, so you don’t miss anything,” notes Lindsay.

For the first eight years of her career as an air traffic controller, she only worked day shifts at airports in Mackay, Hamilton Island, Sydney and, initially, Melbourne. After a period of adjustment, she now relishes her new hours. “There is something so satisfying about driving home from work on a Monday morning, knowing that everyone is starting their week and you’re getting into your warm bed on a rainy ­winter day.”

Lindsay, who for years played Aussie rules football at state level, has read about the health risks stemming from long-term shift work and is determined to remain fit by sticking to a consistent routine, which includes running 50 kilometres a week and eating well. “Just from doing nights, you’re at an increased like­lihood of getting Alzheimer’s, cancers [notably breast cancer]  …  but all the research I’ve found says … it’s not enough deep sleep that causes the issues.” (An unhealthy lifestyle associated with night shifts can also contribute to ill-health.)

Lindsay sports a health- and fitness-monitoring Oura Ring and a Garmin smartwatch. “Every single day, night shift or not, I’m tracking my sleep,” she explains, making sure she gets a regular eight hours.

The dark economy

Regular night workers – those who work mostly ­between 6pm and 6am – make up an average 30 per cent of the national workforce, according to Dr Anna Edwards, a research fellow in urban studies at the University of Melbourne. A new report by Edwards and her husband Andrew License, a fellow economist – Who Keeps the Country Running After Dark? – reveals that nearly 700,000 health-care workers, more than 300,000 in mining and manufacturing and 80,000 in agriculture, fishing and forestry work at night, which doesn’t include all those thousands driving trucks, ­running tech support and working in hospitality.

Those who work at night are by no means a homogenous bunch, notes Edwards. For some, lack of language skills might be a barrier to customer-facing day jobs, while for others, it might be childcare arrangements. About one-third of them have at least one child aged 14 or under in their family. What surprised Edwards was how many people loved working overnight, including a woman who preferred the late shift so she could spend her days with her beloved dog.

There is a myth that the increasing number of ­night-shift workers stems from an expanding gig ­economy. But according to Edwards, nearly half a ­million night workers have been in their current main job for more than 20 years.

Tash Wark, branch secretary of the Australian Services Union’s Victorian and Tasmanian branch, speculates that night-shift workers stay in their jobs longer because they come to rely on penalty rates. Such workers in general have second jobs at nearly double the rate of their daytime colleagues, says Wark, who used to work nights as a social worker. When it comes to safety, job security and underpayments, night-shift workers need all the support they can get, she adds. Among gig workers, one in five say they feel unsafe while working at night, according to the NSW Data after Dark March quarterly report.

Robert Shaw, a researcher specialising in urban and social geography at the University of Newcastle in the UK, says night shifts exact a heavy toll on the body. There is a wealth of evidence connecting prolonged night work to a higher risk of various cancers, of obesity and cardiac disease, he tells me via a video interview. And there are also social costs. “It pulls you out of normal ties in most ways. So if you’ve got friends who are working during the day, and you can’t connect with them as easily, you’re disconnected from those ­everyday social networks.”

Shaw also believes there is greater risk-taking behaviour at night than during the day. “It helps create a ‘what ­happens in nightlife, stays in nightlife’ vibe,” he ­explains. “We tolerate people going out at night and behaving in ways they wouldn’t during the day, partly because when people show up to walk to work at 6am, 7am, the mess [in the streets] has been cleaned up. It puts it out of sight, out of mind.”

Vincent Zammit knows all about those greater night-time risks. As a kid, he’d run beside the street-sweeper trucks that occasionally roamed through his neighbourhood. Now the broad-shouldered, slim-waisted 62-year-old often works night shifts operating a road suction sweeper in an industrial area for Dandenong Council, which means a 2am start.

‘It’s not a good life. We get hardened and conditioned to the stuff that happens out there.’

Vincent Zammit, road sweeper operator

Zammit has had the job for 15 years and believes the streets are a lot less safe than they used to be. “You’ve got a lot of the creatures of the night getting around, a fair proportion of them drug-affected.” He remembers the night a bloke in a big truck careened around the industrial area, speeding up, swerving in front of him, cutting him off, swearing. People throw bottles at his vehicle, they rage, they want to punch him. His biggest fear working nights are the gangs. “There’s no consequence for their actions.”

Zammit, as an Australian Services Union delegate, hears many stories from his colleagues about intimidation and threats of violence. “A couple of our boys have actually had a handgun pulled on them,” he says. “It’s not a good life. We get hardened and conditioned to the stuff that happens out there.” His advice to his colleagues: never get out of your vehicle. And keep driving if you can.

He worries about the impact of the hours on his long-term physical and mental health, the endless nights, the being away from family. “I hate it,” he says, “It’s not as bad as when I was driving fuel tankers and rotating shifts. But it takes a toll on your body.” There is a rewarding aspect of his work, however. “There’s a sense of pride in working for the community; you keep the area clean, hygienic …” The father of two also recalls the story of a young woman who was followed by a threatening partner in the middle of the night. “As much as we aren’t supposed to do this, one of the guys just put her in the little street sweeper and took her to the police station.”

Talking within earshot of his wife of 34 years, Zammit admits: “There are times when you struggle, you don’t have enough sleep; it can make you a little bit irritable. She just knows when to leave me be.” When their son, Jason, said he wanted to do long-haul overnight truck-driving, Zammit recalls responding: “Not while you’re under my roof. You’ve got two choices. You’re either going to be a plumber or a sparky.” Jason’s an electrician.

Night work has traditionally been overlooked by policymakers, says John Graham, NSW Minister for Music and the Night-Time Economy, but this is beginning to change because of the growing perception of its role in productivity growth. The ACT has a minister for the night-time economy, Tara Cheyne, while Queensland has a night-life economy commissioner, John “JC” Collins, the former Powderfinger bass player. Graham insists that most of our approaches to planning are ­focused around buildings – not the people in them. When they are at work. What they do. How safe they are. “We don’t really have a discussion about the fourth dimension – time and how the city’s used over time.”

Global warming is expected to add to the number of people working at night, as daytime temperatures make it increasingly challenging to work outdoors. “We are talking to night-time policy experts in European cities and a big part of their public discussion is the changing use of parks and public spaces at cooler times of the day and night as climate change impacts our ­cities. These are changes we will also have to make in the future,” says Graham. The task will become more challenging for governments, he acknowledges, ­centring on providing more reliable 24-hour public transport, incentives for more shops to stay open and even childcare support.

Emergency delivery

I had my own direct experience with night-time ­workers earlier this year – and it instilled in me a deep respect and appreciation for what they do. My daughter-in-law Stephanie and son Dominic were expecting baby number two. At about 9.30pm, Steph declared she was about to give birth but couldn’t get in the car to go to hospital. “You’ve got to call an ambulance, I want to push,” the 37-year-old told Dominic. The triple-zero operator dispatched two ambulances: one for the mother, one for the baby. The operator kept them on the line, issuing clear instructions to both. “Is she trying to resist the birth?” she asked Dominic.

Two male ambos arrived but were relieved when the other paramedics, Kate Holzheimer and her partner Hannah Wilkie from Central Sydney Ambulance Station, pulled up a minute later. Paramedics often get called out to false alarms, but this was the real thing. Holzheimer took charge: towels please. At 10.06pm on April 24, baby Josephine was born on the living room floor. Holzheimer didn’t know it at the time, but she was newly pregnant herself.

When I meet up with her several months later for this story with my granddaughter in tow, Josie smiles at her. Maybe, somewhere in that baby’s subconscious, she ­remembers Holzheimer’s soft hands. “I love that the door opens and people say, ‘Thank god you’re here’ and just throw their baby into my arms,” smiles Holzheimer, who believes babies love being born at night.

She has delivered nine babies, which seems like a lot to her, though the midwives at the hospital are not quite as impressed: “Let us know when you’ve done a thousand,” they tell her.

Holzheimer started as a paramedic 11 years ago, when there wasn’t as much duty of care for employees. Now, the NSW Ambulance service has caught up with the science of stressful night work, and the need to provide nutrition, exercise and sleep advice. They have whole teams supporting night workers. But she mentions how hard it is for paramedics to find childcare when they face rolling shifts, long hours and so little predictability.

There are two kinds of busy nights: the ones with good news – and the others. “But there are always some jobs that might have a very confronting scene. You will feel very heightened and alert for a few hours afterwards,” Holzheimer says. “I think it’s good to be self-aware of the warning signs that you’ve been affected by the job and to seek some help if that develops into trouble sleeping or sleep issues.”

Amy Reynolds, associate professor at Flinders University’s Health and Medical Research Institute, seems designed to be a sleep researcher. Her parents were volunteer paramedics, which is how they met. Her early research examined the impact of sleeplessness on health (four or five consecutive nights of short sleep, she explains, can lead to a glucose spike, which raises the risk of type 2 diabetes).

Now Reynolds works with shift workers of all kinds, ­including nurses and paramedics. “One of the questions I often get from shift workers is, ‘Am I going to die early because I work shift work?’ Yes, there can be relationships between shift work and some health outcomes because it’s not just our sleep that is getting thrown out of whack when we work shifts. We may eat poorly. We can lose social ­connection. What sleep we have is disrupted.”

Reynolds says that nearly half of all Australians over 50 have sleep disorders, so shift workers aren’t alone. But winding down after work can have added challenges, including trying not to disrupt a sleeping family when they get home – particularly when the families include toddlers and dogs.

Blackout at sea

Steering an Emerald Gen 2 ferry through choppy ­waters towards Manly Wharf on a recent Friday ­evening, ferry master Nicholas Baker is in his element. The 37-year-old worked on the ferries for 10 years, beginning as a cashier taking ticket money and ­working his way up. He enjoys nights but still has to be on his A-game because the water can be treacherous. When there’s a swell, he explains, it’s hard to see waves against the sky “even with all our navigational equipment”.

Sea fog rolling into the harbour, heavy rain as we’ve had up and down the east coast this winter; life on the ferries is weather- and light-dependent. “You can have a perfect night with the moon out and it’s like the street lights are on out here,” Baker says. On a heavily overcast night, he can be driving into total darkness. Whatever the weather, “I enjoy it.”

Baker has loved ferries all his life, having grown up on Sydney’s northern beaches and taken them to the city with his parents. When he was seven, he met one of the ferry skippers and his course was set.

About half of his shifts are at night. He still lives on the northern beaches, now with his wife, two-year-old son and five-year-old sausage dog. When he gets home, he creeps about, careful not to wake them, hopping into the shower to wind down and warm up. If his wife is off to work in the morning, he has an early start with a lively toddler after just four or five hours of sleep. “I do get very fatigued,” he admits.

If he’s on a day shift, he leaves home in the dark. “I appreciate the people who work at night because when I do the morning shift, I’m catching a bus at 4.20 and that’s another night worker taking me to work.”

Other negatives? He says you miss a lot: weddings, social things, barbecues. “But we do get to work on the most beautiful harbour in the world, so that makes up for it.”

Every night is different

Policeman Gabriel Bonicelli lives not far from his ­station in the suburb of Cranbourne in Melbourne’s south-east. The slender, fit 28-year-old surprises his colleagues in the Victorian police force by telling them he left a career in real estate because he wanted a better work-life balance: sales was devouring every spare moment of his life, including weekends. Shift work with the force provides contained hours and is far more rewarding, he says.

‘You start to see things that not a lot of other people get to experience. I reckon we saw 20 or 30 foxes and owls throughout the night just roaming around.’

Gabriel Bonicelli, police officer

What does he enjoy about working nights? “The quietness; not many people around. You start to see things that not a lot of other people get to experience as well. Even where I am in Cranbourne, on night shift this week I reckon we saw 20 or 30 foxes and owls throughout the night that were just roaming around. Not everyone gets to see all that stuff.”

Was he brave as a kid? “I’m a police officer, but I’m not a superhero. I still have the same weaknesses that other people do. If I’m going to a job and I don’t know exactly what I’m walking into, there’s always going to be that little bit of apprehension … something inside or around the corner I’m not ready for.”

One job Bonicelli definitely wasn’t prepared for was a car exploding on a freeway in February last year. Bonicelli and his work partner Chelsea Brown were first on the scene. They pulled over a few hundred ­metres away and ran towards the burning vehicle, where the driver was still in his seat. Other cars were whooshing past – if any caught alight, the results could have been even more catastrophic.

Bonicelli was trying to save the victim, while attempting to protect the public and keep himself and his partner safe. “I’d never had that before, a victim so severely injured,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I’m not qualified to deal with this, [this is] way beyond my scope of training.’ We are first-aid trained, that’s all.”

Bonicelli went to the hospital with the ­victim, who died later that night from his injuries, with 95 per cent of his body badly burnt. “I helped identify who he was. Throughout the whole process, the adrenaline was so high. You switch modes entirely and forget everything else that’s going on.”

He pauses for a moment. “That job was terrifying. I had time off work and was ­diagnosed with PTSD.” But he hastens to add he couldn’t have done the job without his colleague, Chelsea Brown. “Anyone else and I would have been worse off.”

Bonicelli says the bond with co-workers on a night shift can be stronger because fewer police are rostered on than during the day, which means an even greater reliance on trust. “The level of fear [arriving at some incidents] is definitely heightened. I suppose you just learn to rely on yourself and the
people around you a lot more.”

But the threat of violence isn’t the scariest part of the job and working night shift, he says. “It’s the emotional side that frightens me a lot more, the impact that has. I’m linked to the worst day of people’s lives. It is a big responsibility. You are the person they call.”

Be careful out there

Travelling home safely can be a challenge – and a risk – for some night-shift workers.

It’s night’s end in Sydney and two DJs are heading home from different gigs across town. Lauren Neko, 40, and Kwame Frimpong, 32, have both been in the music business for about a decade. Frimpong, who goes by the moniker DJ K-Time, has just got home from a national tour with Australian rapper 360.

Frimpong says he stopped taking public transport years ago because he couldn’t wait the hours between when his gig finished and when trains and buses started up again. “There were times when I finished at two or three and I couldn’t get public transport home until 4.30 or five.”

Neko, who works in the inner city, walks short distances or takes Ubers when returning home from work in the early hours of the morning.

Frimpong wants state and territory governments to recognise the value that the night-time economy and its professions – in music, arts and recreation, hospitality – brings to our country. We need entertainment zones where people aren’t hassled for having a good time, he says – where the shops are open, and where affordable transport is easily available at any hour of the day or night.

John Graham, the NSW night-time economy minister, says Liverpool in Sydney’s west is in the greatest need of improved public transport for night workers. In conjunction with the state’s 24-hour economy ­commissioner, Michael Rodrigues, he’s directed his department to see what can be improved. Bus services in the area have already become more frequent – night services are now running three times an hour.

There are no clear statistics available for the ­number of people who work at night as volunteers. Jeff Hockey, 71, of Canterbury in western Sydney, works at the inner-city Glebe Youth Service late at night supporting kids who’ve been taken into custody, helping them deal with police and hopefully returning them to their families. Hockey can receive calls at all hours. He works about five hours a week, helping ­children who have no one else to call. (A local police station has a list of trusted people who can provide the support of a civilian adult to a young ­person when they are read their rights.)

“I had a foster child who used to get into trouble,” he explains of his initial motivation to do the work. “I’d have to go to the police station. I was always down at the old Bidura ­children’s court [in Glebe]. We got through. He’s not in custody and he is living a happy life.”

Hockey has been working nights for decades. “I used to work for BHP when I left school, and I was always getting call-outs for machines that weren’t working,” he explains. “I mastered the art of waking up, fixing something, going back to bed and not letting it affect me.”

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