John's story

Senior Constable John Kenworthy: My name's John Kenworthy. I'm a Senior Constable of Police. The day of the crash was a Sunday. I was just about ready to head back home and get ready for my speed camera shift.

There was a call for anyone to respond to a serious injury traffic crash at a place called Calen, which was, I dunno, maybe 10 or 15 minutes up the road from where I was. I headed north and then, got onto the, the road that we believed the crash was on.

While I was patrolling for the car, I'm searching side to side and come up, road's going around to the right, and I just realised straight away that I wasn't going to make it.

So, I pulled on a whole heap of handlebars, front hand brake clutch, and it was just going straight off the road, down through a hedge, through a barbed wire fence, barbed wire's come up into the helmet, and, um, that's pretty much where my life changed.

Over the next week, they did like three or four operations to rebuild the eye sockets that had been broken as part of the crash. They stitched the eye, the right eye, the left eye is still there, but it's, that's never going to function again.

Senior Sergeant Mick Moate: When John got here, we did an assessment of the workplace and we started looking at what his needs were and it sort of grew from there. Since John has been here, it's been incredible. He's always been positive. Nothing's an issue for John. If there are things that impact him in the work that he's doing, well, then we look at what we can do, whether that's getting equipment with headphones or computer systems, that type of thing to make his job better.

Senior Constable John Kenworthy: The QPS, Queensland Police Service, they have done absolutely everything that they can to, to help me along and make sure that everything's worked. And it, it has, so far, it's worked brilliantly.

So I'm typing transcripts for things like telephone intercepts, things like listening devices, that sort of thing. So I feel like I'm, you know, really contributing again to the organisation.

Tegan Shuker, Case Manager: He's just, he's honestly inspirational. I know he hates people saying that he is, but he, yeah, he is just a really motivated, driven individual and it has been an absolute pleasure to be in that journey. He's honestly, he's an inspiration.

Senior Sergeant Mick Moate: What he's brought to the station and to this station has been so significant. He's incredibly experienced in, his line of policing, also traffic policing. He lights up the day room when he comes to work. He's very engaging with myself, all the staff.

Senior Constable John Kenworthy: Yeah, it's been pretty overwhelming, actually. The amount of support that I've had from WorkCover and from NIISQ (The National Injury Insurance Scheme, Queensland) has been brilliant. Without this happening, I wouldn't have met any of you. You know, and you've changed my life. You've absolutely changed my life. There's been so many people that have been just amazing.

The best advice I can give to people is, it's every second in your life is important and just make the most of it. You know, it would've been easy just to sit back and say, well, you know, why bother? But why not?

For anyone who's ever had a speeding fine through a speed camera - sorry about that - for the last couple of years, it hasn't been me! [laughs]