When June Dryburgh cleaned out her desk after almost five decades as a counsellor, it was a reminder that even though many of her consultations were brief, their impact was significant. “I found so many letters and cards. There was even a long letter from one woman who wanted to share just how much the care she received at the clinic had meant to her,” she says.

Dryburgh started at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic (FCC) less than a decade after abortion was effectively decriminalised in Victoria, Australia. She saw first-hand how access to safe abortion changed lives, and personally helped more than 100,000 women. She was also witness to anti-choice campaigners’ relentless efforts to wind back this access, weathering daily harassment of staff and patients, which turned deadly when a gunman entered the clinic in 2001 and shot their security guard.

Dryburgh began working at the FCC in 1977. She was 32 and married with a young daughter. Eight years earlier, Victorian supreme court justice Clifford Menhennitt had ruled that an abortion was not illegal if the pregnancy endangered the health of the mother. This ruling, the first in Australia, effectively made back yard abortions in Victoria a thing of the past. The clinic was founded just three years later, in 1972, by high-profile abortion campaigner Dr Bertram Wainer.

Dryburgh began working on the front desk, but it was clear that she had a rapport with the women coming in. Counselling came naturally to her, and she returned to study to complete the required qualifications. “I loved helping people. I loved the women,” she says.

Dryburgh worked at the clinic until late last year, retiring just shy of her 80th birthday. Although she rarely recognised the women she’d counselled outside the clinic, they remembered her. “Once, at the National Theatre, I met a woman who said to me, ‘I know you from somewhere’, and so I started naming places where we might have met. Finally, and I don’t know if there was anyone else around, I said, ‘Would it have been in East Melbourne?’ The penny dropped, and she said, ‘I knew I’d had a long talk with you somewhere’. Another time I was trying on shoes in a shop in the city, and the girl at my feet said, ‘You’re June, aren’t you? I saw you just the other day’.”

Most of the women who came to FCC were very comfortable with their decision, Dryburgh says. “About 80 to 90% are absolutely sure.” For the small percentage that seemed uncertain, she would suggest time away to think about the choice. “They’d come back a different person, and you’d know that they were OK,” she says.

Dryburgh’s role was to give women information about what would happen in the procedure and how they might feel afterwards. Knowing this was reassuring and empowering for them, she says.

It was Dryburgh’s friend Pippa Green who thought she would be ideal for the role. They had previously worked together at the Postmaster General’s Department in Melbourne. “You needed a particular kind of person to work there, and it wasn’t about qualifications, it was about empathy and kindness and open mindedness,” Green says.

Wendy Wishart, Dryburgh’s youngest sister, also worked at the clinic briefly in the 1980s. “June always got on with the underdog,” Wishart says. She still remembers Dryburgh’s easy rapport with the sex workers of Sydney’s Kings Cross, when she worked at a souvenir shop nearby in the early 1970s. “She was never snobby, and always aware of the inequity in life. She would just treat people well, no matter where they came from.”

Dryburgh’s community-minded parents shaped this attitude. Growing up in Yackandandah, in north-east Victoria, everyone knew everyone else’s business, she says. Her parents, Jean and Ellis Wishart, were open, welcoming and “great fun”.

Many stories from the clinic have stayed with her: the women who came to them because they had been raped, women who were in violent relationships, women who had been coerced into pregnancies, women who had no support because their families were virulently anti-abortion.

One week, after Dryburgh had seen three women who were pregnant as a result of rape, she snapped. “I was so upset about it, I went out to the demonstrators and said, ‘Do you really believe that a person who’s been raped should continue with pregnancy?’ And they just looked at me blankly and said: ‘People don’t get pregnant that way.’

“I read later that they really thought that it wasn’t possible. So I decided I would never bother to speak to them again. There was just no point.”

Sometimes the protesters out on the street found themselves on the other side of the fence. In her 2006 book, Murder on his Mind – an account of the 2001 shooting at the clinic – psychologist Dr Susie Allanson wrote that Dryburgh offered “compassion and non-judgmental assistance” when a familiar face from the protest group arrived for an appointment.

“A lot of those women never think it’s going to happen to them, but when it does they see the reasons people do this,” Dryburgh says. “That’s when a lot of them change their mind about abortion.”

For a long time, the protesters outside the clinic ignored Dryburgh. Petite, beautifully groomed and conservatively dressed, it took a while before they realised she was an employee, not a resident of the well-to-do suburb. She enjoyed hiding in plain sight.

Once the protesters realised who she was, the verbal abuse became a daily, tiresome ordeal.

In 2001, Dryburgh was in the middle of a consultation when she heard gunshots. A gunman entered the clinic and killed security guard Steve Rogers. His plans to destroy the clinic and everyone in it were thwarted by two heroic young men, Tim Anderson and Sandro De Maria, who were there to support their partners.

Dryburgh kept her client calm, locked the door and called the police. She was one of several staff members to do so. Although it only took the police eight minutes to arrive, “it felt like an hour”, she says.

In Murder on his Mind, Allanson, who worked at FCC for 26 years, mentions Dryburgh often. She was a crucial part of the team’s recovery from the trauma of that day. “June is more than just our senior counsellor,” Allanson writes. She is, “always here, always knowledgable, invincible, indispensable and unflappable … An icon of the clinic.”

The clinic shooting catalysed the staff to forcefully campaign for abortion access safe zones.

In 2016, the Victorian parliament enacted legislation to enforce a 150m safe zone around abortion clinics. Victoria was the second Australian state to do so, after Tasmania. By 2021, every state and territory in Australia had followed suit. The protesters decamped up the street to outside Jolimont station, a location completely out of context to passersby. “You could see people were wondering what the hell they were doing,” Dryburgh says. Back at the clinic, anyone entering was finally able to do so in peace.

Despite the majority of Australians supporting a women’s right to choose, Dryburgh is concerned about the impact US policies might have in Australia, and the increase in rightwing rhetoric locally.

“I am appalled about the situation in America,” she says. “Overturning Roe v Wade has disadvantaged millions of poor women and turned the clock back to the bad old days when women were forced to go to unscrupulous operators or try dangerous home remedies. This will result in the deaths of many women. It bothers me greatly that there are forces in Australia that continue to lobby governments to outlaw abortion.”

Allanson wrote that Dryburgh was the clinic’s story keeper. “I’ve always said … as have other people, June, you just need to write your memoirs.”

When Dryburgh retired last year, writing was the last thing on her mind. For the first few weeks she couldn’t stop sleeping. Now, she has resumed French lessons and is enjoying her free time.

“I retired because I thought, ‘I can’t be talking to teenagers about their sex lives when I’m over 80’,” she says. Then she pauses for a moment and smiles. “Actually, I could.”