South Brisbane MP Amy MacMahon and her younger sister are hashing out logistics about their mum’s care over the phone. It’s midafternoon and the conversation, while routine, is stressful. MacMahon doesn’t recall going to an electorate event later that day, nor getting in the car to drive to her next meeting. After that phone call, nothing.

If her life flashed before her eyes when a car struck the driver’s side of her Toyota Prius about 6.30pm on February 12, 2024 she has no memory. It isn’t until a week later, bruised and battered at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, when her brain begins to take in what’s happened.

“There’s just nothing there, there’s no little glimmers or anything,” MacMahon says.

For Brisbane City councillor Trina Massey the memory of the evening is vivid.

Travelling in the car behind MacMahon, she watched her Greens colleague pull out of Baines St, flanked by the famed Pineapple Hotel in Kangaroo Point, and on to Main St.

A huge boom, then metal crunching on metal. CCTV footage captured from the Southern Cross Motel across the road shows a pedestrian running to safety and another frozen in time. MacMahon’s Prius spins before hitting a post as a Hyundai i30 expends the rest of its momentum scraping down Main St.

“When I saw it happen, the first thought I had in my head was like, ‘Shit, Amy’s potentially dead.’ That’s how severe I felt the accident was,” Massey says.

Massey began running towards the wreckage, joining pedestrians, pub patrons and passers-by who came to MacMahon’s aid.

“In my mind at that point was I had to get the ambulance as quickly out to the accident site as possible,” Massey says.

MacMahon was unconscious but would begin to rouse as she was loaded into the ambulance. Massey stayed behind, opting to hit the phones and ring MacMahon’s chief of staff to get on to the MP’s family and housemate. It meant MacMahon’s mother, sister and two younger brothers who live in different parts of Brisbane would be with her in hospital within minutes of her arrival.

Her father would fly in from Darwin to stay by her side for three weeks.

With a bad knock on the head resulting in a big bruise, a dislocated shoulder, and elbow and ankle joints bent too far, MacMahon, 38, also suffered ligament and tissue damage and her physiotherapist has warned her collarbone might never return to its original position.

But there were no fractures, no broken bones, and no open wounds. There is lingering fatigue but that should resolve itself. All in all, no lasting physical impacts.

The knock on the head would cause initial concern but MacMahon’s most serious injury would be a carotid dissection – a tear in the inner layer of an artery in her neck. Blood is able to leak in between the layers of the artery wall and separate them, causing a bulge that slows or stops flow. The worst case scenario is a stroke. In her case, a course of blood thinners and time should do the trick.

MacMahon’s family had held intense vigil in hospital once before – 12 years ago when matriarch Sally, now 63, had a stroke brought on at least partly by a carotid dissection. The injury was sustained, unknowingly, on the chaotic roads of Bangladesh.

Sally had been in the South Asian nation – one of the world’s most densely populated – visiting MacMahon during a year-long stint for a not-for-profit organisation as an Australian Youth Ambassador in 2012.

It was a minor prang in a rickshaw and no discernible injuries, but MacMahon’s mother would fly home to Brisbane and suffer a stroke within days.

It was severe, leaving her with weakness on her left side including paralysis in her hand. She has problems with her eyesight, fatigue, and walking can be difficult.

“I think our experience of Mum being sick has made me and my sister and brothers very close,” MacMahon says.

“That has been one of the silver linings of Mum’s illness … we’ve had to stick together, to get through that and to be supporting Mum and be supporting each other.”

How MacMahon emerged from the crash relatively unscathed is a mystery. Her quick recovery, she believes, could be attributed to the tight bond with her family.

“I mainly just feel very grateful,” she says.

“The outcomes for people after an accident like this are so varied … I’m at the extremely lucky end of the bell curve.

“There’s definitely people who’ve had similar injuries to me who have had a much tougher time and definitely people that I crossed paths with in hospital who were on a much longer recovery pathway than I was.

“People who I knew weren’t going to have the kind of support and stability that I was able to rely on … it’s very distressing. I think about them a lot.”

There was a man in his 20s, injured after coming off his motorbike, who would have to give up his rental and move back in with his parents because he wouldn’t be able to afford the payments through his recovery.

And a grandmother who had a stroke and had to be flown to the Princess Alexandra Hospital from her regional town because the small hospital there couldn’t do clot retrieval. The tyranny of distance meant she was paralysed on the left side of her body.

Perhaps the young motorbike rider would heal better if he didn’t have to worry about paying to keep the roof over his head. If the grandmother had suffered a stroke in a major centre like Brisbane perhaps she would have surrendered less of her physical function.

It was viewing this inequality up close and interacting with the guts of the system – with its doctors, nurses and allied health staff battling the ever increasing patient workloads – that has made MacMahon “more committed than ever” in the fight to make public health services better.

She returned to work, based at her electorate office in West End, on April 11, a full two months after the crash. There were moments when MacMahon, extremely exhausted and in a lot of pain, wasn’t sure this would happen.

“When I was first getting my head around things, I thought, ‘Am I going to make a sufficient recovery to be able to come back and be able to do my job?’” she says.

“The doctors felt very confident from the beginning that everything was going to be okay, that it would take some time. I think for anyone who’s been in hospital there are definitely some dark times and some dark moments.”

She was desperate to get home to her dog Buddy – a seven-year-old greyhound whose lack of speed cut short a brief racing career – and back to work.

MacMahon won the seat of South Brisbane at the 2020 state election, and she had to vanquish a Labor giant to get there.

It would mark only the second time since 1932 that South Brisbane would not be held by Labor. This seat which produced Labor premiers such as Vince Gair and Anna Bligh (or potential premiers like Jackie Trad) had been lost to the Greens. Accounts in the aftermath invariably focused on where it all went wrong for Trad and Labor, and not on the woman who would take the seat in parliament.

MacMahon was born in 1986 to parents Sally, an artist, and Phil, an engineer whose job would take the family to the other side of the southern hemisphere.

Aged 10, MacMahon and her younger siblings Sophie, Ben and Campbell would pack up their childhoods in Everton Park for a two-year stint with their parents in the north of Chile while her father worked at a copper mine.

A return to Queensland would happen in year 8. MacMahon, enrolled at Brisbane State High School, took her studies seriously on top of an extra-curricular list that included rowing, drama and Scouts.

A plan to do a journalism degree lasted a semester, replaced after a six-month stocktake of her future by a social science course.

MacMahon spent a year of her four-year undergraduate degree at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. It was 2008, with the war in Iraq, the treatment of prisoners at the notorious US-run detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, and fights about civil liberties dominating the Zeitgeist, when MacMahon would get her first taste of the Greens.

The university-based Greens outfit MacMahon experienced during the era of then-prime minister Gordon Brown’s reign in the UK would be distinctly different to Queensland’s version of the minor party today.

But MacMahon had found her people. She joined the Greens when she returned to the University of Queensland and kicked around with now-familiar names like federal Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather and former Brisbane City councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan.

After university, MacMahon would spend 2012 in Bangladesh as part of the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development program – where a contingent of Australians under 30 are dispatched across Asia, the Pacific and Africa for three to 12 months to further the country’s aid efforts.

She returned to a tattered job market swollen with ex-public servants looking for work in Campbell Newman’s Queensland. MacMahon picked up work tutoring at her alma mater the University of Queensland and after an approach from a professor jumped into a PhD focused on food security that would take her back to Bangladesh.

Academia could have been it, but by the time MacMahon got to the end of the PhD process she felt “very disconnected from the people that we were claiming to be helping”.

Helping Sriranganathan in the successful campaign to become the first Queensland Greens Brisbane City councillor opened the door for MacMahon to make the impact she hoped for through politics.

She would emerge successful in the Greens’ preselection race for South Brisbane in 2017. Trad would feel the heat on the proposed Adani coal mine in the Galilee Basin in a campaign the Greens were confident could net them their first seat in state parliament.

The Greens threw the majority of its resources and hundreds of volunteers at winning its first Queensland seat via South Brisbane, buoyed by their win in the adjacent Gabba Ward during the 2016 Brisbane City Council election. Trad held on, her two party-preferred margin sliced to 4.65 per cent from a previously safe 13.5 per cent.

The loss was “bittersweet”, MacMahon says, a valiant effort by a legion of volunteers but ultimately not enough.

“2020 was magnitudes harder than the 2017 election and was much more intense,” she says.

The pollsters had suspected it and the voters cemented it – a comfortable but not outlandish swing to the Greens of 3.5 per cent after the dent made in 2017 was enough to push MacMahon above former deputy premier Jackie Trad.

MacMahon became the second Greens MP in state parliament – joining Maiwar colleague Michael Berkman.

“I love this. It’s very challenging, and it consumes most of my life. But I feel so lucky to do this,” MacMahon says. “I often see my team working so hard and think, ‘You guys have great jobs’, but I have the best job … this opportunity to be making change in the world in this way and be connecting with so many amazing people and this amazing community.

“It blows me away all the time.”

It was meant to be a typical Monday.

MacMahon and Massey, like most of the past year, had been at Raymond Park, Kangaroo Point, helping at a weekly community barbecue and speaking to whoever had time to stop for a chat.

Next stop was a Neighbourhood Watch meeting at the Story Bridge Hotel less than a five-minute drive away.

Massey says: “And I remember distinctly on the way to go we had a chat like, ‘Do you want to go together, do you want to come into my car or go into your car?’ And on the walk to the cars I remember Amy stopped and said, ‘Trina, I’ve just got to take a picture of the park, it looks so beautiful this afternoon.’”

Massey would make it to her vehicle first. It was a Brisbane City Council car which meant she would need to boot up the system, punch in her username and wait for it to spit out a code. In the time that took, Amy MacMahon had pulled in front.

“Of course you think of these moments, undeniably – had I offered my car to go with Amy, had I left first and just didn’t wait for the code, of course these moments you think about, but you have therapy for that,” Massey says.

“The reality is these things happen randomly, there’s no control over it.”

Moorooka woman Rani Paige Lowry, 26, has been charged with dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. Lowry, who has not entered a plea, is on bail as the case progresses.

MacMahon has had to pull together what happened through her family, doctors and nurses, Massey, and a man who was walking along nearby when the crash happened.

“I feel somewhat grateful that I can’t remember the accident, because there’s nothing for me to sort of dwell on,” she says.

“But it has been a real journey to try and put these puzzle pieces back in place to work out what has happened.

“I just feel really lucky.

“I think it’s kind of miraculous.”