Chapter 3

Summer Tragedy

Jennifer Long

Jennifer Long’s eyes snapped open. Instantly awake, she sensed immediately something was terribly wrong as the car slewed around, sickeningly so, throwing her and the other occupants around like socks in a dryer. And then for a second … nothing; as if time and motion had stopped and she was in a state of suspended animation. Perhaps they were safe now. Maybe she was just waking from a dream, having dozed off under the spell of the warm January air, a full stomach and the gentle rhythmic motion of a car on a country road. But this was no dream. It was a nightmare, and it was only just beginning.

In that twilight second, the car was flying in the empty space between the bridge above and the water below. With a walloping jolt the yellow Falcon hit the water about four metres below, water gushing over the bonnet and against the windows. Luckily it remained upright, quickly settling back and floating as if it were a duck landing on a pond.

Jennifer looked around at her grandma, Florence, sitting in the driver’s seat, staring and unmoving. Her great-uncle Doug was in the front passenger seat similarly frozen and her aunt Jill next to her in the back. Everyone seemed OK. They were all silent, shocked for sure, but miraculously no one seemed hurt. All they had to do was get out and scramble to safety. And quickly.

 

Standing out like the veins on a strong brown forearm, Victoria’s water channels fan out over the flat dry plains of the state’s irrigation districts. They bring life and hope to hard-working farmers during the hot summers that sap the moisture from the land. Their lifeblood flows from the giant dams in the hills of the Great Dividing Range, and like blood vessels, form a network of ever diminishing branches, delivering their precious life-giving contents to individual farms. Here they finally spill out onto flat paddocks, refreshing pastures for dairy cows or sating a lucerne crop’s thirst during a long, dry summer that can stretch well into April.

One of these veins is the Waranga channel, which runs all the way from a dam near Murchison westwards along a minute fall line. It snakes its way along the plains to Corop and onto Colbinabbin before continuing on all the way up to the eastern edge of the Mallee.

A dirt road follows the length of it between Corop and Colbinabbin and it was on this road Jennifer Long found herself bowling along on the afternoon of 6 January 1986. She was dozing in the back of the car beside Jill, with Florence behind the wheel.

When you are 12 and enjoying the freedom of school holidays it was the perfect place to be, especially so when you are with three people you love. Florence doted on her daughter Jill and her brother Doug and she did whatever she could to make their lives a little better. A difficult birth had left Jill intellectually disabled and institutionalised.

Doug, physically but not intellectually disabled and now in his 70s, similarly spent most of his life in institutions. Florence wanted to make a difference. She was a key figure in Jennifer’s life and she had a special relationship with her. They were together as often as things allowed and she doted on Jennifer as grandparents do. Jennifer remembers her grandmother picking her up from school each Thursday. She would often have a treat hidden in the car somewhere for Jennifer to find. She stayed over at her place often and she would make breakfast in bed

for her.

So for Jennifer’s grandmother, all her treasured fam-ily members were together, out spinning along a country road on a balmy summer afternoon. You could not ask for better. And today was a special day as well in the Long family calendar: Jennifer’s mum Christine was having a birthday.

The family always celebrated birthdays with a special dinner, usually seafood. Everyone in the family loved it. Everything was prepared but it was still early and Christine would not be home from work from her hairdressing salon in Bendigo, where the family lived, until late afternoon. Jill was home for the party and Florence decided it would be good to take a spin to keep her excitement contained. They collected Doug from his aged care accommodation, prepared some fruitcake and biscuits and a thermos and set off, heading out of Bendigo along the Midland Highway north-west towards Colbinabbin.

It wasn’t a hot day: one of those mild January days Victoria experiences often, after a cool change, a bit of cloud and a cooling southerly breeze. It was perfect for a drive and picnic.

Their destination was Lake Cooper, a popular waterskiing venue near Corop, about 10 kilometres north of Colbinabbin. They enjoyed their snack and cups of thermos tea before heading back, taking the road that follows the Waranga channel, travelling south to Colbinabbin.

The area is flat, with mainly grazing and cropping farms, but not far to the west the plains give way to the sharp rise of the Colbinabbin range. On a January afternoon the paddocks have all dried off, and the crew-cut stubbles from the recent harvest are grazed by sheep, their backs dusted with chocolate brown soil.

The road they were on is a minor road used only by local farmers, with the busier main Colbinabbin road about two kilometres further to the west. Like most minor country roads, being gravel and relatively straight, bar the few bridge crossings, it’s easy to get to a speed that is potentially treacherous. One slip of concentration and a driver can soon be in in trouble.

The road follows the channel below the embankment but rises sharply and to the right to cross the channel at Taylor’s Bridge, a simple concrete crossing with no guard rails. Too much speed in the approach and a car can get a fish tail going fairly easily.

Jennifer thought there might have even been a shower of rain about as they approached Taylor’s Bridge across the main Waranga channel not far from Lake Cooper, making the road a little slippery. But being asleep she is not sure. As they turned onto the bridge the car slid sideways, jolting Jennifer awake as the car lurched from side to side in a fishtail motion. It then hit the right hand side and speared over the side to the channel below.

In shock, Jennifer took a few seconds to process what was happening. The channel is about 30 metres wide, equivalent to a small river, and while not fast moving there was a current pushing the car along as it gradually sank.

‘If the car had landed on the roof I would definitely have been dead for sure,’ she said. And given the lucky landing it is all the harder to comprehend what happened to the others. Jennifer pauses, staring at her hands, eyes brimming as she tells the story.

‘I am still in disbelief they all died. Doug would have had big trouble trying to get out but Grandmother could have. But she just sat there in a trance.’

Jill was agitated and quite uncharacteristically began muttering and swearing under her breath no doubt in shock as well. Jennifer’s first instinct was to get out but her 12-year-old body was no match for the car door squeezed shut by the water pressure. She wound down the window and clambered out into the channel. Later she thought how lucky it was that the windows were not electric and even now when she gets into an unfamiliar car she checks to see if the windows are electric or not. If they are manual she rests easier.

Dressed in light cotton pants, white sandals and a yellow and white-striped T-shirt she swam round to the front of the car and hung on to the windscreen wiper and told everyone to take off their seat belts. ‘Grandmother did but she did not speak to me. She just sat there, staring vacantly. She was in absolute shock. She became totally non-functional.’

The question of why she did not or could not move haunts her even now. It could only be that the shock and fear completely immobilised Florence and her brother. ‘She was fine physically she gripped my hand through the window but apart from that, nothing,’ Jennifer said.

As Jennifer held onto the car and Florence’s hand, the car began to turn and slip under the bridge, gradually sinking engine first. Jennifer still suffers from lingering doubts that she may have contributed to the car sinking after being perched on the bonnet. ‘For a long time I thought I caused the car to sink. That was pretty hard. I sometimes think if the car had only jammed itself into the bank it wouldn’t have sunk…’ Jennifer pauses, eyes red.

No one witnessed the accident and no one came along, leaving Jennifer to deal with the trauma completely unaided. All the time she was looking for traffic on the road but nothing ever came.

The nearest house was some distance away. Jennifer was alone, surrounded only by curious livestock.

But she did not want to leave her family while she tried to run and get help. She would stay in the water or close by the car for the next hour trying, hoping, to find some way of getting them out, and growing increasingly frustrated at her powerlessness to help.

Despite her distress and being overwhelmed with grief, she never gave in to panic and had the presence of mind to stay relatively calm, never thinking for one minute about her own life. An excellent swimmer, Jennifer had won school swimming events, so even by the end, when she was exhausted from her efforts, she never felt in danger herself. ‘The trouble was I couldn’t think how to get them out.’ She did try several times to open the doors with the idea of trying to pull them free but the pressure from the current was too great for her.

She focused on getting her grandmother out but it was so frustrating because she just would not respond. A couple of times she lost her grip on the car and was swept downstream some way and had to swim back. At the end, Jennifer remembers holding her grandmother’s hand through the window feeling the skin on her hand and her watch. And then it went limp as her grandmother drew her last breath, the rising water finally claiming the car and its occupants.

Jennifer can’t understand why presumably it was the shock, but when she finally did get out of the water she swam to the bank on the far side of the channel, about 25 metres away. Quite a feat after about an hour and a half of frantic effort in the water.

‘I remember looking at the bank and thinking can I make it and I just ploughed on hell for leather.’

By this time she thought all had been lost and she could do no more. But after climbing out of the channel and walking back onto the bridge she noticed Jill’s face pressed up against the glass of the rear window, clinging to the last bit of air in the now nearly submerged car. With one last desperate effort she jumped off the bridge onto the back of the car and desperately tried to smash the rear window with her only weapons her feet and legs. But it was impossible. For Jennifer that was the worst moment watching her poor Aunt Jill take her last breath.

‘I remember her staring at me as if I was her only hope,’ Jennifer says, her voice trailing off.

Somehow she managed to step back onto the bridge without entering the water again. After swimming helplessly in the channel for so long the thought of going back in chilled her to the bone.

Realising nothing more could be done and by now emotionally traumatised Jennifer looked around for help. She saw a bunch of trees across a stubble paddock that she thought might be a property and set off towards it barefoot, as her sandals had slipped off in the channel. When she eventually got to the house, shaking and disoriented, she was confronted by a menacing barking dog.

Jennifer remembers thinking, ‘I don’t care if you bite me; you can eat me for all I care.’ To her immense relief a woman answered her knocks and Jennifer was alone no more.

‘I was so relieved to see someone and I just blurted out, “They’re all dead”.’

She recalls ringing her mother at her salon to tell her the tragic news. In some ways her mother’s response could be expected, but to a 12-year-old it was nothing short of bizarre. No doubt unable to take in the enormity of what she was being told her mother said, ‘I can’t come now, I have to finish this lady’s perm.’ For Christine it was a grim re-run of events 11 years earlier when she lost her husband in a car accident. Jennifer had been just eight months old.

 

Mixed in with the cocktail of guilt, loss and grief is a slight feeling of resentment towards her grandmother because of her inability to do anything to help herself. Jennifer’s sense of powerlessness was overwhelming. ‘I resented that for a long time. I thought, why didn’t you talk to me, why didn’t you say something? No one was in pain, no one had hurt themselves.’

Jennifer comforts herself with the thought today that if her grandmother had survived and Doug and Jill hadn’t that Florence would have been consumed with grief and guilt.

If it is hard to analyse why an adult would risk their life to help another, what are we to make of a child that does it? Jennifer at 12 had just finished primary school, a time when kids are only just beginning to learn about responsibility. It is perfectly understandable for an adult in that situation to be frozen by fear and hysteria; for a child it is almost expected.

But then to stay that long in the water in an effort to help her family and not to give up on them is a truly heroic effort. She was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s bronze medal and the Rupert Wilks trophy the nation’s highest award for children’s outstanding acts of bravery.

But Jennifer said there was no question of her not staying with her family and trying to help. She could not even think of setting off to find help. Neither does she feel it was particularly brave as she felt there was no real sense of danger to herself. She was a good swimmer and was confident in the water. No doubt the family factor, and the great love for her grandmother, was a major motivating force in Jennifer’s heroism. She felt no fear for her own life, which was removed from the equation.

Jennifer, now a psychologist, sees some inherent qualities in her make-up that may have contributed to her bravery. When some people fall apart under stress, others like herself remain ostensibly calm and focused and that is how she was on that day, despite the natural feelings of distress.

She says she is a strong-willed person and very determined. ‘I can be a bit of a bulldozer when I want to be.’

 She has very clear expectations of herself and others and tends to be very task-focused, which she links to her determined and wilful childhood behaviour.

She found herself in a difficult situation years later when living in some flats. A woman was being threatened by her abusive husband, who was chasing her down the street after beating her. Jennifer grabbed her car keys, went downstairs and took the woman by the arm and told her she would take her to the police station. She remained calm and focused right through despite the husband approaching the car and kicking the door.

As an organisational psychologist she sees certain behaviours as positive in a rescue situation. People who have, in the psychologist’s jargon, ‘internal locus of control’ generally tend to take control of situations, believing they can influence their outcome.

None of this though lessens the emotional impact of such an event. The loss of people she loved and the trauma involved did take a toll. She received no counselling in the aftermath of the tragedy and on top of that she started at a new boarding school in Melbourne away from her family just a few weeks after. It was a terrible year, she said. She found it difficult to settle in and got into trouble with teachers and fellow students.

She was being sent to boarding school, her mother was about to remarry and one of the most important people in her life was gone. These would be big events in any little girl’s life, let alone one who had suffered a major trauma. She felt totally abandoned. Ironically, despite her incredible act of bravery Jennifer said she had low self-esteem in that first year. She found it difficult to make friends, got into trouble and was bullied. She is sure now she was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Against this background the bravery medal was awarded and Jennifer was publicly acknowledged for her act. In one way her strongest emotional reaction was relief when she received her award. It was a reason for, and acknowledgement of, the way she was feeling and behaving in that tumultuous year following the accident.

In later years she suffered bouts of depression. But today she is happy and well adjusted, living a rewarding and successful life. Horrendous as the event was, it had not scarred her permanently and in many ways she believes it has sharpened her love of life and appreciation of good relationships. For a little girl though, it was one hell of a way to grow up.