It’s unfortunate, Suzy Brandstater says, but the close-knit New South Wales communities of Picton and Buxton know something about grief.
The former high school teacher says she can never forget the trauma experienced each time the area loses young lives to car accidents. There has been great loss.
In 1985, in her first year teaching at the local high school, two 16-year-old girls lost their lives when the car they were in was hit by another car near Razorback, an eight-minute drive from Picton.
“They never go away, there’s a cumulative impact each time,” Brandstater says.
“All the memories, all the emotion, all the grief comes piling back at us.
“I’ve never forgotten their little faces.”
When she received news this week that five lives had been lost in Buxton, all of them students or ex-students at the same school, Brandstater says her initial reaction was “unreality”.
She also recalled another major crash, 20 years ago, that shook the small hamlets, tucked some 100km south-west of Sydney, to the core.
Back then, a Holden Nova crashed into a power pole on a right-hand bend of Bargo River Road, just 5km from where fresh flowers were placed on Wednesday morning.
The driver, a 17-year-old Tahmoor boy, was among the fatalities. Two of the six passengers also died – a 15-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy. A further three passengers suffered serious injuries.
Less than a year later, in 2003, two 19-year-old Buxton women died when a male driver crashed his Falcon into a tree at an intersection near Bargo River Road.
Brandstater was at the school during the car crash of 2002 and taught the three teenagers who died, including a 16-year-old twin who was in the car with his brother. The surviving brother sustained permanent injuries.
“I was just trying to be very caring, not get hysterical, not shut the students down,” she says of the days following that crash.
“But things have gotten much better since then. We had counsellors at the school at 9am [on Wednesday].
“Twenty years ago, that wouldn’t have happened.”
While car crashes are less common in regional areas, when they occur they tend to be more fatal. More than half of Australia’s road deaths in 2018 and 2019 were in regional areas, despite only 30% of the population living outside cities.
“Our community has been through so much. I think of our resilience after the bushfires … it wears you down,” Brandstater says.
“It’s terrible, and it triggers memories.”
As the telltale whir of helicopters descended over Bargo River Road on Tuesday evening, local man Jasper got chills, as he does every time he hears that sound overhead.
Their presence only signals one thing – trauma, another fatality for a tight-knit town still rebuilding.
“It’s been tough for the community,” says Jasper, who requested only his first name be published.
“Unfortunately any emergency in Buxton always results in the Toll rescue helicopter due to its distance from the hospital. As soon as I hear one now, I fear the worst.”
The reality, a single-vehicle crash that resulted in the deaths of five teenagers aged between 15 and 17, was hard to come to terms with.
A first responder on the scene of Tuesday’s crash had spoken about carrying the scars from previous trauma, Jasper says.
She had been forced to shelter at the Balmoral fire station just two years earlier when the town was surrounded by fire during the black summer bushfires.
Two local volunteer firefighters lost their lives in the fires, dying a week before Christmas after crashing their truck into a tree.
“She only just survived and was getting over this,” Jasper says. “We spoke to her as soon as we heard the accident location and she was in shock.”
The weight of trauma in small towns
Michelle Roberts, the head of ANU’s Australian Child and Adolescent Trauma, Loss and Grief Network, says trauma often hits particularly hard in smaller communities, which tended to be highly connected.
“I can’t imagine how hard it is for first responders to know the children,” she says. “There’s an immediacy and an intimacy for those people we don’t often get in big cities.
“Communities travel a journey together that’s part of its identity, including previous instances of loss – and that little community has had a lot of adversity. It’s catastrophic, and there’s a cumulative component to it.”
Roberts says one silver lining is that the shared experience of grief can have a rallying effect.
“When people are reminded of other instances of loss it can be with different framing. You can take some messages of hope – that we’ve been through this before and our community stayed strong.
“But there has to be a pause. It’s a long road.”
For Brandstater, communal grieving, in the initial stages, is all the community can do.
“We need to support each other – we are connected,” she says.
“But these students will be forced to face a reality they weren’t [facing] before.
“When the roll comes up, they’ll know the child’s name that isn’t there.”
