Throughout life, we find ourselves in many rooms we’d rather not be in, for various reasons.
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But, we push through the discomfort because we know we should be there.
I didn’t love school, but I’m grateful for my education and the friendships I made there that still exist today.
Funerals are awful and sad and heart-wrenching, but I’d never not be there to farewell a loved one.
And, while I love my job, I don’t do it for that love; I do it because I need to feed my children.
Another uncomfortable room I (and around 300 other people) willingly put myself in recently was at Eastbank for the Victoria Police co-ordinated young driver program, Cool Heads.
I knew it was going to be uncomfortable because I’d already taken my firstborn to it a year earlier.
Having experienced it before made it no less comfortable escorting my second eldest.
If anything, it made it more so.
My 17-year-old and I arrived and settled into our seats, chatting and laughing as we caught up with the friends we’d sat next to.
The lights went down and our smiles quickly disappeared.
I knew what was coming and it was the very reason I’d stuffed a purse packet of tissues in my hoodie’s kangaroo pocket before leaving home.
The Cool Heads presentation opens with a traumatic video made up of a montage of vintage TAC ads from 1989 onwards.
REM’s haunting Everybody Hurts is the backing track, though you can still hear the voices of anguish and grief, terror and pain, the screech of tyres, the bang of heavy metal impact, the smashing of glass.
The visuals take you from people celebrating before leaving locations tired or drunk, teenage passengers horsing around in cars distracting drivers, to crashes.
To heads smashing dashboards and windscreens, lifeless or injured bodies lying on roads, distraught family members pacing hospital corridors before breaking down when they’re told their loved ones didn’t make it.
It’s a journey of more than five minutes that escalates while illustrating the most unimaginable scenarios.
They’re ones harder to watch now, as a mother, than they were as a child and teen at the time, who was used to having those brutally unfiltered ads on our free-to-air TV screens.
The theatre fell deathly silent, apart from the quiet sobs coming from anyone who wasn’t able to stay staunch watching the harrowing opener.
I was one of them.
That fight or flight response we have?
Yeah, every part of me wanted to get up and leave immediately because I thought I’d already taken more than I could.
But, I have a learner who hadn’t seen it and who only has 100 hours of supervised driving experience, who, in less than a year, will be behind the wheel of arguably one of the world’s most dangerous weapons – a car – unsupervised.
He needed to hear the factors that contribute to dangers and death, the penalties for using vehicles and our roads irresponsibly.
This program is heavy and hard to sit through, but that’s what makes it brilliant for young drivers.
Sure, not all learners will pay attention or take on board the teachings, but there’s no doubt something as powerful as this reaches some of them.
Major Collision Investigation Unit Detective Sergeant Stephen Hill spoke about the ‘fatal five’ causes of major collisions: speeding, fatigue, distraction, lack of seatbelts and driving under the influence.
He used real case studies with real images on a slideshow to get his point across.
Ambulance Victoria’s Brent Law and Shepparton Search and Rescue’s Nacole Standfield both spoke about the impact trauma had on paramedics and emergency services personnel and how certain scenes stuck with them for ever.
Magistrate Heather Lambrick spoke about mandatory sentencing for driving offences and how leniency depending on individual circumstances wasn’t a possibility when it came to road incidents considered crimes.
And then, mother Sharon O’Dwyer told her heart-breaking story of losing her son, Mathew, on the roads in 2021.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard Sharon tell her story, but I was just as impressed with her bravery, recounting the story of the night Mathew died, his funeral, her grief, life now without him.
How she holds it together talking about her boy as she retells these painful memories is staggering.
She managed to do so for the selfless sake of helping to save another family from going through what hers had and still did.
I bawled for her because she’s living my biggest fear.
The residual sadness from the event carried over long after the event.
So yeah, it was an uncomfortable room to be in, but one necessary to project the message my son needed to hear in a way only those people who’ve experienced road trauma first hand can.