They couldn’t have picked a worse place for a bloke with a crook back.
Thirteen steel steps down a steep industrial staircase, followed by plastic matting and then a large slab of wet concrete.
At the bottom of the steps was a red emergency button should any worker on the underground rail project in North Melbourne come to grief and need first aid.
Welcome back to work, Daniel Andrews.
“I am fit and I am back,” the Victorian Premier declared as he launched deep into yet another achingly long press conference.
Andrews was appearing publicly for the first time in nearly four months after stumbling down stairs at a holiday house on Melbourne’s well-heeled Mornington Peninsula.
It was there he broke his back and six ribs, leading to rumours as wild as those that surrounded the disappearance in 1967 of prime minister Harold Holt at a nearby back beach.
We can talk about it as Andrews’ first appearance but in doing so you must ignore the saturation coverage in the morning press and the fireside social media chat the afternoon before with his wife Cath.
That video was designed to explain how it was a grown man could get himself in so much trouble and the rather obvious fact that the pair are very much still together.
“My spine is basically healed,” he declared before making it overwhelmingly clear that the road to recovery has been rocky but it was never pointing him to Damascus.
His clearest message is that what Victorians, indeed Australians, have had since the end of 2010 is unlikely to change at all; not on the implementation of the pandemic health advice or lockdowns.
Nor his habits: “I won’t be changing the way I work.”
For much of his first press conference since the March 9 fall, Andrews explained what had happened at 6.30am while walking down a few steps at the Sorrento rental house.
It was as simple as carrying a briefcase in one hand and an overnight bag in the other; he slipped, fell, legs straight out like a cartoon character onto his back, smashing his T7 vertebrae and six ribs, causing his lungs to collapse.
An injury so serious was never going to involve a quick recovery.
But as the Premier languished in hospital and at home, reading books on golfing architecture and battling through the final episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Melbourne was saturated with conspiracy theories about what actually happened.
There has never been any evidence they were true.
Wild, imaginary scenes on billionaires’ row at Portsea, just down the road from the holiday rental at Sorrento, were said to have occurred, roping in some of the biggest names in Australian business.
Fictitious mishaps and confrontations that, on all the available evidence, never occurred.
For Andrews, 48, and his family, they were distressing times, computing whether the Premier would ever live a normal life.
In the schoolyards his children were taunted, his mother was included in one conspiracy theory and the strength of the marriage questioned.
“It’s family, it’s kids,” Andrews lamented.
On the question of who was behind the whispering campaign, which was fuelled by the Liberal Party and disaffected businessmen, Andrews was scathing.
“I reckon they will be judged harshly for that,” Andrews warned.
Andrews is a notorious hater and it’s a fair bet that he will carry that grudge through to the next election, due in 18 months, in which he has promised to contest as Labor leader.
The political scene is so complex globally that no-one can accurately predict what might happen in 2022 but the symbolism of the first press conference on a large building site cannot be overlooked.
Hundreds of workers helping build a $12 billion cross city underground rail system using giant boring machines to transform the public transport system.
While his harshest critics might argue Andrews is the biggest boring machine of all, he is going nowhere.
Nearly four months after a potentially life changing fall, Andrews is back.
Whether you like it or not.
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