Chapter 4

Shockwaves

Even before the first threads of dawn appeared over Winchelsea, news of the terrible accident had spread through the town. Local fire-fighters, police and SES workers had returned home that night and poured out the horrific story. Everyone was trying to make sense of what had happened.

The bereaved parents were both in hospital. Rob seemed to be bearing up surprisingly well, but the doctors in Geelong decided he should remain under observation for 24 hours at least.

In Winchelsea, Cindy lay sedated, her mother still by her bedside. The drugs she’d been given the previous evening had calmed her moans and involuntary thrashing. When she opened her eyes, she asked in a small, distant voice, ‘Have they found the children yet?’

Bev’s shoulders shook as she took her only daughter in her arms. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. Cindy dissolved into sobs.

She was aware that Stephen was somewhere in the room. While she’d been sleeping, he’d returned to her bedside.

‘I want my babies back…my babies,’ Cindy groaned, staring into his eyes, her own fogged with a new dose of sedatives. The pain, Stephen thought.

From that moment, time stood still for Cindy. Minutes, hours and days blurred into one awful reality. Nothing held any purpose or meaning. She’d lost her entire world in a single night.

People came and went, trying desperately to hide their tears. When Cindy woke, she saw familiar faces hovering around her bed. People were speaking from a distance – sometimes to her, sometimes about her – their hushed voices filled with pity. It was like a horrible dream, but when she woke she was still trapped inside it.

Her mind closed down on the trauma of the previous evening – a protective mechanism employed by a brain desperate to blot out pain. It was as though she were watching herself, a reluctant actor in some awful movie being run in slow motion. A series of images played out in her mind – children screaming and thrashing around in the darkness, fighting for air, bubbles in black water – images so terrifying that they cast her consciousness from her body. She saw herself hovering above the bed, gazing down on the figure under the sheets. She closed her eyes again.

By dawn, the small media contingent that had gathered in the cold beside the highway was swelled by city news crews, who arrived in vans with cameras and sound equipment. The story was making headlines everywhere. Journalists scoured the little township for information, hungry for background stories on the three victims who were the human face of this tragic accident.

Stephen left Cindy in hospital to check on his children. His attempts to find the car were already being discussed across breakfast tables all over Winch. On his way home, desperate for a packet of smokes, he stopped off at the local milk bar, where Peter Lomas, a man he knew, was sitting at a patio table on the footpath.

Lomas extended his hand. ‘How are you going?’ Stephen said.

Lomas looked him in the eye. ‘Better than you, I think,’ he replied. He knows, Stephen thought.

When Cindy’s neighbour Kathy turned on the television to catch the early morning news, she was shocked to see footage of police rescue workers hauling a car from the dam. ‘Glen…quick!’ she called to her husband, beckoning him to join her. ‘Isn’t that Rob’s car?’

The couple stood staring at the television. Then Glen’s face went white and he dashed over to the window. The house next door was unusually quiet, and the garage door was shut.

‘Have you seen Jai opening Cindy’s garage door this morning?’ he asked. Their sons, Nathan and Ashleigh, stopped eating their breakfast and looked at one another.

‘No,’ Kathy said. Every morning, Jai would bound out of the house to open the garage door while Cindy dashed around fastening Bailey into his baby seat. Jai had also taken on the job of piling their schoolbags into the boot. Sometimes he waved to Kathy as she gathered her own children for the daily run to the primary school. You could almost set your clock by him.

But today there was no sign of Jai, or of Cindy’s car. In fact, there was no sign of life at all. Kathy collapsed into a chair. She turned up the volume on the television, her mind racing as she tried to process the devastating images in front of her. Could the boys who had lost their lives really be Jai, Tyler and Bailey?

‘I can’t comprehend what’s going on – it’s too much,’ Kathy later told journalists from Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper. ‘We always see Jai opening up the garage when it’s time for school, and it didn’t happen this morning. My son is in hysterics.’ She described the Farquharson children as ‘the best boys in the world’, telling of their love of sport and recalling how Jai had played in the football premiership just three weeks earlier. ‘Our kids were over there all the time, or they were over here. I can’t imagine what Cindy is going through.’

Kathy couldn’t stop thinking of little Bailey, who’d mastered the art of clambering over the fence and letting himself into her kitchen, where she’d find him helping himself to an icy pole or two. It didn’t feel real.

As Stephen had suspected, many of the children at the primary school stayed home that Monday. Staff wiped tears from the faces of the few who turned up, and the principal, Judi Fallon, announced the school community’s loss at a small morning assembly. Later, she contacted the education authority to organise counselling for the staff and students, especially the older boys’ classmates. Recess that morning was eerily quiet as children wandered around the schoolyard, many of them in tears.

Judi told journalists who called at the school that Jai and Tyler were ‘fun-loving, enthusiastic, exciting, gorgeous’ children. ‘They are two boys that were just full of life and had everything going for them,’ she said, battling her own tears. She said many parents had telephoned that morning, saying their kids were too upset to attend school.

At the suggestion of two of Jai’s classmates, the school’s flag was flown at half-mast, where it could be seen from Cindy’s room in the hospital across the road. The hospital administration issued a brief statement confirming Cindy’s admission and describing her as being in a state of shock.

By now, the whole of Winchelsea had woken to Cindy’s nightmare. Locals on their way to Geelong slowed down near the overpass to see the broken fence and the tyre tracks across the paddock. A steady trickle of people made pilgrimages to the site of the accident, kneeling on the wet grass to pray and placing flowers in memory of the three young victims. By daybreak, a colourful assortment of bouquets had appeared beside the water and along the highway’s grassy verge.

On the surface of the water, bright yellow wattle mingled with the blood red of crimson proteas drifting in the wind. Around the dam, the bouquets scattered petals like confetti across the muddy tracks left by the emergency workers. Yellow arrows, painted by investigators the night before, marked the car’s path from the highway into the dam. Many people left the site in tears, saying little to the waiting journalists.

Alan Floyd, the co-ordinator of Winchelsea’s junior football club, had taken over the junior football clinic from Robert Farquharson. Just two nights before the tragedy, he’d presented the under-12 team with their premiership pennants and shaken hands with Jai. The coach choked back tears when he told journalists that the talented little full forward ‘could kick goals out of his backside’.

Back in Winchelsea, 83-year-old Barney Parsons, who had known Robert for 31 years, spoke on behalf of his shattered community. ‘It is like losing your own,’ he said. ‘We know what kids mean. To lose one would be drastic – to lose three would be just unimaginable.’ He showed reporters the front cover of August’s Winchelsea Star, the paper he’d once run, showing the under-12 premiership side. Jai’s face beamed out of the photo, full of life.

Parsons told reporters that Robert had coached the junior football team and helped with the cricket. His father, Don, was president of the Lions Club. The Farquharson family had been involved in the Winchelsea district for generations, and the Gambinos had made a big contribution in Birregurra. Cindy’s father Bob had been just 3 when his Italian parents settled in Colac, about 30 kilometres to the west, and his cousins and brothers were well known in the surrounding area.

‘They were really top little boys – there was never a dull moment,’ Cindy’s uncle Tillio told the press. His brother Bob, still in shock, paid tribute to his ‘three great little mates’. It was a loss, he said, that his family would never recover from.

The community’s heart was bleeding for the bereaved families. ‘We can’t return lives,’ Barney Parsons said, ‘but we can help the parents who will be grieving so greatly.’

In Geelong Hospital at 10 a.m. on Monday, an unfamiliar face appeared at the door of Rob’s observation ward. Leona Daniel, a social worker, was a counsellor with the national charity SIDS and Kids, which helps grief-stricken parents deal with their children’s sudden deaths, whether from cot death or other causes. Leona had already been to see Cindy in Winchelsea Hospital, and now she had come to see the bereaved father.

As she approached, he suddenly began thrashing his arms and legs around under the sheet. Leona paused for a moment, then approached him and gently gripped his hands to stop him jerking.

Rob appeared flushed and began coughing and sweating, she later recalled. He told her that people would blame him for this accident. He blamed himself for failing to protect his family. He should have drowned with them. Even the police suspected he had deliberately killed his own children.

‘There was nothing you could do,’ Leona whispered, trying to comfort him. She was sure people would never blame him. This terrible tragedy had happened so quickly that he couldn’t have saved the children. ‘You aren’t Superman,’ she said.

Leona spent twenty minutes reassuring the dishevelled father that his family loved and cared for him and that his community would support him through this terrible time. She passed on a message from the Gambino family, who’d asked her to say that they were all keen to see him and didn’t blame him for what had happened. She left promising to visit him again when he was home.

Later that day, Rob was discharged from hospital into the care of his sisters Kerri Huntington and Carmen Ross.

His father Don told journalists his son had been sick. ‘He’s been in bed crook for a week with this shocking flu that’s going around.’

He detailed the story about the coughing fit that had caused his son to black out. ‘The hospital thinks it could have been a blocked artery,’ Don said. ‘Next thing he can remember, he was in the water trying to get his kids out. Then once he opened his door, the car fell and sank.’

Don said his son lived only for his children and was shattered by his loss. ‘It’s just ruined Robbie’s life,’ he said. ‘It’s ruined my life…it’s a terrible thing.’

Rob’s close friend Michael Hart recalled Rob as a ‘fantastic father’ who had fostered his sons’ love of football. He described the weekly training sessions Rob organised at the Hart home, where he’d train Jai and Tyler with Hart’s sons. Hart told the media the tragedy was beyond comprehension.