About Series
When work changes a life, what happens next?
Most Australians assume that if they are seriously injured at work, help will be there when they need it. But what happens after injury?
Over three years, we travelled across Australia speaking with injured workers, families, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, employers, researchers and policymakers to better understand one of the most important, yet least understood, experiences in Australian life: recovery.
What began as a single documentary became a four-part series exploring the human journey that follows workplace injury. What happens after injury is not always visible from the workplace. Shattered brings those experiences into view, helping employers, colleagues and health professionals understand what people are carrying—and how their response can make a difference.
Each episode asks a different question.
Origins — Why were these systems created, and who controls what happens after injury?
Care — What helps or hinders recovery?
Value — What can compensation recognise, and what can it never replace?
Learning — What does meaningful reform require?
Together, these stories move beyond workplace injury to explore something universal: how we respond when lives change unexpectedly, and what people need from one another to rebuild.
Recovery is rarely experienced alone. It is shaped by families, workplaces, communities and the everyday acts of connection that help people move forward. Because for many families, the injury is only the beginning.
DROPPING IN 2027
1: STREAMING IN EARLY 2027
Watch all four episodes of Shattered, released together for personal viewing.
2: Workplace and community screenings are available now, with approximately six weeks needed to organise a screening. Screenings will pause over December and January and resume in early February 2027.
Workplace Previews
Four short videos in which the director speaks to camera, introducing each episode and the questions it invites workplaces to discuss.
Episode 1: Workplace Preview
Origins of Control - Workplace and community screenings are available now, with approximately six weeks needed to organise a screening. Screenings will pause over December and January and resume in early February 2027.
Episode 2: Workplace Preview
Doctor, Doctor - Workplace and community screenings are available now, with approximately six weeks needed to organise a screening. Screenings will pause over December and January and resume in early February 2027.
Episode 3: Workplace Preview
The Punishment of Money - Releasing December 2026
Episode 4: Workplace Preview
Royal Commissions Examined - Coming February 2027
About Shattered Docuseries
Shattered began with one question: what happens after someone is injured at work?
A three-year investigation revealed that no single film could adequately examine the system—or the consequences of injury for a person’s health, family, work, identity and future.
The investigation also opened distinct but connected areas requiring further research, including psychological injury, psychosocial safety, mental health care, treatment, compensation and the changing world of work.
The result is a four-part documentary series. Each episode examines a different part of what happens after injury—how these systems began, what recovery requires, how money and work shape people’s choices, and whether institutions learn from the harm already done.
Together, the episodes prompt us to reflect: when work changes a life, how should we respond?
Episode 1: Origins of Control
When work changes a life, what happens next?
Australia created workers’ compensation systems around a humane promise: people harmed through work should not face the consequences alone.
Beginning in Lithgow, Origins of Control traces how dangerous work, family loss, mutual aid and collective action helped turn that promise into law. Lithgow provides the historical foundation for the episode—but it is where the investigation begins, not where it ends.
From there, the film moves into the present to examine how control over evidence, treatment, income, capacity and decisions can shift away from injured people and their families.
Through Australian social history, expert insight and lived experience, the episode explores what happens when care, employment, evidence and liability become entangled. It asks how necessary scrutiny and financial responsibility can coexist with timely treatment, dignity and personal agency.
The experiences of five women—a lawyer, a nurse, the partner of a police officer living with psychological injury, a former real estate property manager and a former injured worker who became an advocate—bring this question into the present. Their circumstances differ, but each reveals how the consequences of injury can extend beyond the person named on the claim and into families, workplaces and professional lives.
Origins of Control does not argue that every employer, insurer, practitioner or decision is the same. It asks a more difficult question:
Can a system exercise necessary control without taking control away from the person whose life has changed?
The original promise was simple: when work changes a life, no one should face what happens afterwards alone.
Episode 2: Doctor Doctor
When care matters most.
In a world that feels increasingly fractured, how can we become gentler with one another? After workplace injury, that question becomes urgent for people navigating a system long shaped by adversarial processes.
Doctor Doctor explores psychological injury, psychosocial safety and what helps or hinders recovery.
Through doctors, psychologists and people with lived experience, it considers how injury can affect concentration, memory, communication and emotional responses. When someone is unwell, navigating disagreement, uncertainty and complex decisions can become especially difficult. How can support reach people without adding to their distress?
The episode invites employers and employees into a conversation grounded in shared concern: people’s health, dignity and wellbeing. Neither should have to navigate the challenges of recovery alone.
Employers cannot control every medical, insurance or legal decision, but their everyday responses matter. Listening, staying connected, explaining decisions clearly and consulting respectfully can help preserve trust.
Safety also matters for clinicians, colleagues, claims staff and everyone involved in supporting recovery. The challenge is to maintain compassionate care and clear boundaries when circumstances become difficult.
Doctor Doctor asks:
How can employers, employees and those supporting them find common ground, prevent further harm and make recovery a shared concern?
Recommended for community screenings
A starting point for bringing employers, employees and their communities together to talk about care after workplace injury, staying connected and supporting recovery.
Episode 3: The Punishment of Money
Returning to Work in A World Being Rewritten.
Money is meant to protect people when injury takes away their capacity to earn. Yet financial support can also become pressure when entitlement depends on demonstrating incapacity while recovery is measured by increasing capacity.
The Punishment of Money examines the changing relationship between compensation, cognitive impairment through workplace injury, work and human value. A rehabilitation assessment may identify what someone can do. It cannot create a real, suitable and sustainable job. During months or years away, roles change, skills date and artificial intelligence is reshaping the labour market.
Through injured people and families, employers, rehabilitation professionals, researchers and legal and financial experts, the episode explores how processes concerned with liability, income and return to work can pull workers and workplaces apart—even when both want recovery to succeed. Does the system design marry with the intention?
Work can restore income, purpose, identity and connection. But return to work cannot be treated as an administrative target. It may require safe and useful work, flexibility, retraining, continued connection and time.
Money can fund treatment, replace earnings and recognise loss. It cannot return lost years, ongoing harm, restore health or recreate the future someone expected. If capacity is not the same as opportunity, how can workplaces and compensation systems create a genuine path back to a meaningful working life?
Episode 4: Royal Commissions Examined
What happens after the findings? Coming February 2027.
Royal Commissions Examined asks what happens after inquiries report, recommendations are made and reform is promised.
Drawing on public records, expert evidence and lived experience, the final episode considers what meaningful institutional learning and accountability require.
Bringing together the questions raised throughout Shattered, Episode Four examines whether reform is reflected in the lives of the people the system is intended to serve.
Further details will be released closer to the premiere of Episode 4.
The Journey
To understand this story, we travelled across Australia — from courtrooms and parliamentary precincts to regional communities, memorial sites and places shaped by workplace injury, loss and recovery.
Testimonials
Too many people lose hope and connection after workplace injury. It is time to change that story, recognise the lives and families affected, and consider how we can all respond with greater care.
Rosemary McKenzie-Ferguson Suma comp Laude
Founder Craigs Table
As a small business owner, I had mainly thought about workplace injury through the cost of premiums. Watching Shattered made me realise I need to think more about the people affected and our role in safety and support.
Jo
You think that 'workcover' is for the workers but it loses its way.
Ros
This docuseries is a powerful piece of knowledge to advocate for people struggling with abuse in the workfield and workers compensation. Watching this series will trigger parts of you who were forced physically or emotionally to be quietened. This docu series is powerful and eye opening to the hidden voices around the workplace and workers compensation. Thank you all who advocated your voice for the rest of us who can't.
Adian Jackson
The true measure of a system's health is how it treats people when they are most vulnerable.
Jody
I didn't know much about this system. It's frightening to learn what can happen to people after a workplace injury.
Ben
The history was fascinating. But isn't it time we modernised the way we support people after workplace injury?
Elizabeth
What do GP's think about all of this? They must find it heartbreaking to see what some of their patients go through.
James