Last week John and Ange Maher celebrated the 21st birthday of one of their granddaughters. But they couldn’t help feeling like someone was missing.
“It’s times like that when you think she should be here,” Ange says of their daughter Carmen, the birthday girl’s late aunt.
The Mahers lost Carmen 27 years ago in a road accident near Bendigo. Fatigued, Carmen fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree. She was 18.
The moments after the crash remain as vivid in the Mahers’ minds as when it happened almost three decades ago.
“We were home waiting for Carmen when we saw a police car drive up our driveway and a young policeman got out. He was crying so much,” John says.
“Our eldest daughter Michelle had gone into town to work and was third on the scene of the crash. She stepped out the back seat of the police car with tears streaming down her face and I’ll never forget what she said: ‘Dad. Carmen’s dead.’”
John Maher is the founder of Carmen’s Road Safety, an organisation that educates people about road safety and the effects of road trauma on loved ones.
It was launched two years after Carmen’s death when four youths died in a car accident in Eaglehawk, Victoria.
“That was the catalyst for me to stop feeling sorry for myself and start thinking about what I could do to help other parents never go through what we now live with,” John says.
After speaking at five regional schools in his first year, Maher now visits up to 70 schools and other events each year in regional communities and cities across Australia.
“When I started giving talks at schools, Carmen became part of everybody’s lives. She is empowering them to be safer road users,” he says.
A community affected by tragedy
Just this week, Australia has been shocked by the bus crash in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, hitting the small towns of Singleton and Branxton particularly hard.
Last month, four people, including three teenagers, were killed in a car crash in Bochara near Hamilton, 300km west of Melbourne, after their car lost control and hit a tree.
Maher regularly presents at schools in Hamilton including Baimbridge College, which was affected by the Bochara tragedy. He says the entire community is “absolutely devastated”.
“A community like this is interlinked. If this tragedy affects a child, it affects the family, it affects the next-door neighbour, and it grows and it becomes a community that is affected by tragedy.
“That tragedy grows to become support.”
The Southern Grampians Shire Council chief executive officer, Tony Doyle, says the crash has deeply affected the community but also galvanised a “generosity of spirit”, with people keen “to contribute in any way possible”.
“People in smaller communities are more familiar with each other in their surroundings, such as schools, communities, workplace, sport and community activities,” Doyle says.
“In many instances, local history connects generations of people. So even when people do not know the person directly they may know other family members or know of them through local narratives and stories that connect them as a community.”
Doyle says a multi-agency support and counselling response has been put in place for students, families and those who are dealing with the Hamilton crash.
“When tragedies like this happen it can ripple across whole sections of the community. Many people in Hamilton would know or know of the young people who died in the accident and their families,” Doyle says.
‘More needs to be done’
The Victorian road toll as of 12 June was 143, up 34.9% on the previous year.
“Now that’s just criminal,” Maher says.
While “safety” is taught in Victorian schools as part of the health and physical education curriculum, Maher is lobbying for a mandatory road safety subject in all schools.
Having published a book about the impact of road trauma last year, he is applying for funding for it to be used as an educational tool in every year 10 classroom in Victoria.
He says spending billions of dollars on road infrastructure, transport and safety is not enough to reduce the road toll.
“If we don’t change what’s happening right now, which is very little education, we can expect more of the same on our roads. Someone has to be brave enough to make the decision to educate our future road users,” Maher says.
Des Hudson, the mayor of Ballarat, has spent years as the Victoria police youth resource officer delivering road safety and other community safety education programs including Fit2Drive.
He says more needs to be done to “target harden our young kids and new drivers” and that all schools should deliver compulsory road safety programs.
“Factors such as open roads, darkness and oncoming vehicle glare, combined with driver inexperience, all contribute to the increased road toll on regional and rural roads. It’s a sad reality,” Hudson says.
“We need more education to give kids the ability to think more deeply about driving. Ultimately it comes down to the attitude of the individual. They might think that they’re bulletproof but that’s not the case.”
In 2021, 1,116 people died on Australian roads. Of those, 65% were from regional and remote communities and more than 40% were aged between 17 and 39.
The Australian National University reported the estimated cost of a fatal crash between 2016 and 2020 to be $3.2m.
Maher says young people need to think seriously about the repercussions of driving dangerously before taking to the road.
“When something as traumatic as [a road fatality] takes place, it’s going to devastate the whole area for so long.
“Think of what it will do to your family and your friends should you be seriously injured or lose your life on the roads, because in fact Carmen was the lucky one in our life. We’re the ones who have lived without her for 27 years.”
Dellaram Vreeland is a freelance journalist based in Ballarat, Victoria.
