Speaker 1: Before we start these episode listeners, it's only fair to
Speaker 1: tell you that it's not really about crime. It's about suicide,
Speaker 1: and it's about some wonderful people who have been affected
Speaker 1: by suicide, who have done a lot to prevent it.
Speaker 1: If you, or anyone you know is affected by these
Speaker 1: problems of depression and suicidal thoughts, there are links in
Speaker 1: our description to help with that. And those of you
Speaker 1: who feel they don't want to listen because it's too harrowing,
Speaker 1: please feel free to listen to any one of our
Speaker 1: other four hundred plus episodes. No matter who it happens to,
Speaker 1: the grief is the same, and that is something I've
Speaker 1: noticed over all these years of writing about crime and
Speaker 1: tragedy and punishment. Lightning struck them from a totally cloudless day,
Speaker 1: and on that awful drive home through the darkness South
Speaker 1: dawn broke on the first day of the rest of
Speaker 1: their lives. I'm Andrew Rule his Life and Crimes. Today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about something very serious. In more
Speaker 1: than forty years of reporting on people who are suffering
Speaker 1: the worst days of their lives, one thing stands out
Speaker 1: to me, has always stood out to me, and that's
Speaker 1: the bottomless grief of losing a child. Sometimes it's crime
Speaker 1: that causes such a loss, but that's not always true.
Speaker 1: Although many crimes end in tragedy, not every tragedy is
Speaker 1: the result of a crime. As police and other first
Speaker 1: responders know very well, the most haunting aspect of working
Speaker 1: with the sirens and lights is not necessarily just the
Speaker 1: bodies and the blood. It's witnessing the loss suffered by
Speaker 1: the parents of the dead, no matter who they are.
Speaker 1: This could be Judy Moran after the death of her
Speaker 1: youngest son, Jason Moran, shot dead with his mate at
Speaker 1: the ods kick at the football. We used to see
Speaker 1: Judy Moran as this overdressed, brassy criminal lady outside courts
Speaker 1: and virtually posing for photographers and all that. But the
Speaker 1: day her baby boy, Jason, when I say baby, he
Speaker 1: was in his thirties, shot dead in front of his
Speaker 1: own children. She was just a crushed, horrified, appalled, grief
Speaker 1: stricken mother and grandmother and it was an awful thing
Speaker 1: to see the photos of her that day. So no
Speaker 1: matter who it happens to, the grief is the same.
Speaker 1: And that is something I've noticed over all these years
Speaker 1: of writing about crime and tragedy and punishment. Parents, their
Speaker 1: children or adult children are overwhelmed by it and it
Speaker 1: destroys them. Others somehow find the strength to go on,
Speaker 1: and of these the strongest ones use their loss as
Speaker 1: a reason to help others. They're motivated to make sure
Speaker 1: their loved one's death is not a waste. Nolan and
Speaker 1: Marcus Ward have told me their story, which is very
Speaker 1: generous of them. It's because they want the loss of
Speaker 1: their son Liam to mean something. Some families get warning signs,
Speaker 1: but the Wards did not. Lightning struck them from a
Speaker 1: totally cloudless day. It was AFL Grand Final weekend back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight. Hawthorne was playing Geelong. As
Speaker 1: many fans will remember, more than one hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: jammed into the mcg and millions more were watching it
Speaker 1: on screens all around Australia. The Wards, Rolean and Marcus,
Speaker 1: were visiting friends up in Wangaratta and they watched Hawthorne's
Speaker 1: Grand Final win on television with their hosts. You don't
Speaker 1: have to be a football tragic to remember that day
Speaker 1: the way that the Hawthorne champion Shane Crawford celebrated after
Speaker 1: what would be his last game. There, incidentally, is someone
Speaker 1: who's been touched by tragedy in by suicide, Shane Crawford. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, Nolean and Marcus's son Liam was at a
Speaker 1: grand final barbecue with his university friends. He was twenty
Speaker 1: years old. He was studying second year biomedicine at Melbourne
Speaker 1: University and he was going extra well. Everything in his
Speaker 1: life seemed to be going well. He passed first year,
Speaker 1: he was now really going well in second year. He
Speaker 1: was on track to get a good degree and go
Speaker 1: into a good job somewhere. He didn't seem to have
Speaker 1: any worries or problems personally or educationally. Liam and his
Speaker 1: friends drank a few beers during and after the game,
Speaker 1: but there was nothing unusual about that. He's twenty at Saturday,
Speaker 1: it's Grand Final, He's at a barbecue. He's going to
Speaker 1: have a few beers. According to everyone who was there,
Speaker 1: and they would tell the truth. I think there were
Speaker 1: no arguments, there were no scenes. There was no rebuffs,
Speaker 1: no romantic stuff that would cause trouble, not a problem.
Speaker 1: When Liam left that gathering that evening to catch the
Speaker 1: train home to Macedon, he sent the same pleasant, measured
Speaker 1: young man as he always was. The Ward family home
Speaker 1: is in the township Nestling under the Macedon Range. It
Speaker 1: was the only one that Liam and his younger sister
Speaker 1: Lindsey had ever known. It was the house that their
Speaker 1: parents had bought back before they had children at all,
Speaker 1: when they first moved up there from suburban Melbourne in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five to teach at local primary schools. By
Speaker 1: the time Liam got home that night from the railway station,
Speaker 1: it was getting late. He got to the house just
Speaker 1: as Lindsay, his younger sister, who was eighteen, was getting
Speaker 1: ready to go to a party. She was going out
Speaker 1: around ten o'clock at night. So, so far, so normal.
Speaker 1: There seemed nothing unusual about Liam's demeanor that night or
Speaker 1: earlier in the day. It was just another Saturday night
Speaker 1: until it wasn't. When Lindsay got home after three am,
Speaker 1: she found her brother's body. He'd taken his own life
Speaker 1: for reasons known only to himself, and not over anything
Speaker 1: that his family or friends could divine then or later,
Speaker 1: no matter how hard or how often they looked back
Speaker 1: for any clues about what motivated him. What shocked them
Speaker 1: then and still shocks them, is that this gentle, kind
Speaker 1: hearted boy who loved his sisters so much would end
Speaker 1: his life at a time and place that made it
Speaker 1: inevitable that she would be the one to find him.
Speaker 1: This is the power of the blind impulse that drives suicide.
Speaker 1: It makes people do things that they would not contemplate
Speaker 1: doing if their mind was not letting them down. When
Speaker 1: the telephone woke Nolin and Marcus around three thirty a m.
Speaker 1: They knew it must be bad news. First, their daughter
Speaker 1: Lindsay had to ring them on the mobile to alert
Speaker 1: them that she would ring them on the land line
Speaker 1: because the mobile phone kept dropping out, so in the
Speaker 1: house where they were staying at Wangaratta they had to
Speaker 1: go down to the land line and wait for their
Speaker 1: daughter to ring back with news that they knew must
Speaker 1: be terrible. And on that awful drive home through the
Speaker 1: darkness south from Wangabada to Macedon, dawn broke. On the
Speaker 1: first day of the rest of their lives. Everything had
Speaker 1: changed that night, But he's the thing. Elsewhere in the
Speaker 1: Masdon Rangers, another family had just been brushed by the
Speaker 1: Angel of Death late on the previous Thursday night, So
Speaker 1: this is not many hours earlier. A teenage boy had
Speaker 1: attempted to take his own life and almost succeeded. Now
Speaker 1: we won't describe what he did, but he almost succeeded
Speaker 1: in killing himself. A local policeman who'd been called to
Speaker 1: that had lain on the floor with this badly injured
Speaker 1: fifteen year old, willing him to live. So the ambulance
Speaker 1: came and took the boy to hospital and saved his life.
Speaker 1: The policeman went home, and he said later he got
Speaker 1: into bed with his own sons and hugged them as
Speaker 1: if their lives depended on it, which perhaps they did.
Speaker 1: But this terrible weekend wasn't over. Within hours of lamb
Speaker 1: Ward's death, police went to a house in Tilden, just
Speaker 1: outside Canton, where a nineteen year old boy had also
Speaker 1: died by his own hand. At first, the police were
Speaker 1: the only ones who knew about this suicide cluster, two deaths,
Speaker 1: one very close to death. It wasn't until a new
Speaker 1: youth worker in the district began talking to them to
Speaker 1: the police the following week that something happened concerned people
Speaker 1: turned shock and grief into action. The new face in
Speaker 1: the district was Pauline Neil, and she'd recently moved up
Speaker 1: there onto a farmlet near Hanging Rock with her husband
Speaker 1: and three sons. She'd come from working with young people
Speaker 1: down in Greater Dandinong and she thought she'd seen it all.
Speaker 1: But now she realized that she was wrong, because this
Speaker 1: slice of countryside, just an hour from the suburbs, it
Speaker 1: looked peaceful and beautiful, which it is, but its youth
Speaker 1: suicide rate back in those days was much higher than
Speaker 1: in the metropolitan area, and it had been that way
Speaker 1: all the way back in the nineties and the eighties.
Speaker 1: There was something about the Rangers that are outside Melbourne.
Speaker 1: The people were in sort of isolated towns, separated by
Speaker 1: distances and so on, and the youth suicide rate up
Speaker 1: there was notoriously high. Paul O'Neil talked to the police,
Speaker 1: and then she took to the Macedon Rangers Shire Council,
Speaker 1: and then she tooked to local school principles, and then
Speaker 1: she took to anyone who would listen, and many locals did.
Speaker 1: They realized it was time to act. Among those who
Speaker 1: listened were the Wards, these grief stricken parents who resolved
Speaker 1: to do anything they could to save other families from
Speaker 1: suffering the same loss that they had. Looking back on
Speaker 1: that time, Paul O'Neil, the youth worker, admits that she
Speaker 1: was personally invested, given that the oldest of her own
Speaker 1: three sons was just starting secondary school that year. This
Speaker 1: is I think around two thousand and nine. By this
Speaker 1: youth's suicide wasn't an abstract problem. It was very close
Speaker 1: to home. The answer to all this was the mental
Speaker 1: health education program that would be called Live for Life.
Speaker 1: This is what they came up with creating. It was
Speaker 1: too big a job for one person, Paul O'Neil says,
Speaker 1: it would not have happened without Sarah Hardy, a former
Speaker 1: nurse who joined her in two thousand and nine and
Speaker 1: who's been a driving force ever since. By twenty ten,
Speaker 1: Paul O'Neil and Sarah Hardy had worked with the Council
Speaker 1: of Police and school Principles to build this Live for
Speaker 1: Life program. They listened to people locally while they researched
Speaker 1: the subject globally. They looked up ways to do it better.
Speaker 1: They found out what had been done in other places,
Speaker 1: other communities around the world, and they distilled that wisdom
Speaker 1: and brought it here to Victoria. They boiled it down
Speaker 1: to what some might call first aid for mental health problems.
Speaker 1: The idea is to make more people more alert to
Speaker 1: early signs of Lurk depression in themselves and in others,
Speaker 1: and to speak up and do something about it. A
Speaker 1: witness to the work of those two remarkable women is
Speaker 1: a guy called Bernard Goalbili, who'd moved to wood End
Speaker 1: with his wife and sons around the same time as
Speaker 1: Pauline Neil had moved there. Galbili worked in the music industry,
Speaker 1: but as a longtime sports supporter, it engaged with the
Speaker 1: local football or netball clubs as his own sons wanted
Speaker 1: to play. Like Pauline Neil, Bernard Gelbli was shocked by
Speaker 1: the local suicide rate. He recalls hearing about more than
Speaker 1: twenty suicides in the shire in less than two years
Speaker 1: at some distant time, so much so that national current
Speaker 1: affairs programs had done stories on the Macedon Rangers epidemic.
Speaker 1: Gelbili's interest eventually led him to join the board of
Speaker 1: Live for Life in twenty seventeen, and then to become
Speaker 1: at sea as it expanded across Victoria. He said to me,
Speaker 1: we romanticize how fantastic rural places are to grow up,
Speaker 1: but the further out they are, the more isolated people
Speaker 1: can feel. The fact is that suicide is fifty percent
Speaker 1: higher in regional areas. Lived for Life emphasizes the three
Speaker 1: things that parents, family members, teachers, and friends should watch
Speaker 1: out for. The first is isolation. That sense of isolation
Speaker 1: can rise anywhere, from an empty landscape on a vast
Speaker 1: cattle station to a crowded schoolroom. You can be isolated anyway.
Speaker 1: The second is what they call burden, a sense of
Speaker 1: being weighed down with fears. Even if other people might
Speaker 1: see that such fears are a rational or irrelevant, it
Speaker 1: doesn't older the fact that someone feels burdened. The third
Speaker 1: factor is capability. That it is familiarity or fascination with
Speaker 1: a particular method of ending a life. Now, that's why
Speaker 1: we in the media never publicize, or rarely publicize in
Speaker 1: any way how someone has taken their own life. We
Speaker 1: don't illustrate that fact because we think it could lead
Speaker 1: to copycat behavior. To put it briefly, Live for Life
Speaker 1: gives young people and those who know them the language
Speaker 1: to cope with a once taboost subject and the confidence
Speaker 1: the step up. No one can be sure how many
Speaker 1: lives the program has saved since that two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight Grand Final weekend when two young men took their
Speaker 1: own lives and a third tried to. It's hard to
Speaker 1: prove what hasn't happened, only what has. What has happened
Speaker 1: is that the suicide rate in the Massidon Rangers has
Speaker 1: dropped steadily. More proof of the program's effect is that
Speaker 1: since twenty sixteen, it has spread to thirteen shires across Victoria,
Speaker 1: from Portland in the far west right over near the
Speaker 1: South Australian border to East Gippsland up past Sale. It
Speaker 1: has also been adopted in one shire in northeast Tasmania,
Speaker 1: and it is gradually spreading around the land along the way.
Speaker 1: It has already trained more than twenty four thousand young
Speaker 1: people and almost three thousand adults in mental health education,
Speaker 1: and twelve hundred other young people have volunteered to work
Speaker 1: with peers to save lives. Councils, police and schools are involved,
Speaker 1: among roughly one hundred and fifty organizations who all take part.
Speaker 1: The benefits are clear. When a friend pointed out Live
Speaker 1: for Life to Hamish Blake, the radio and television host
Speaker 1: and parent, he simply said I'm in. Whatever I can do,
Speaker 1: I'll help, And so Blake Fronts are Lived for Life.
Speaker 1: Video clip to give stigmother flick, as he puts it,
Speaker 1: aimed at encouraging worried young people to reach out instead
Speaker 1: of withdrawing or faking normality, holding up a mask to
Speaker 1: the world. Back at Macedon, where something good was born
Speaker 1: from something terrible, Nolin and Marcus Ward are left to
Speaker 1: wonder what life would have been like if their son
Speaker 1: had not been struck down by an impulse that no
Speaker 1: one saw coming. They had their daughter, Lindsey and her
Speaker 1: baby near by, and they work hard in their garden
Speaker 1: and with other members of what they call Mister Spag,
Speaker 1: which is the jokey name for the acronym of the
Speaker 1: Macedon Ranger's Suicide Prevention Action Group. They liked to talk
Speaker 1: about their son. When I called them, they were traveling
Speaker 1: in northern Victoria, and they pulled over to the side
Speaker 1: of the road in the little town of Serpentine and
Speaker 1: talk to me for half an hour about their boy Liam.
Speaker 1: If that brings tears and a lump to the throat,
Speaker 1: so be it. When they talk about him. Sometimes one
Speaker 1: of them will sob, but then they get on with
Speaker 1: it and talk some more. They stay in touch with
Speaker 1: Liam's school friends and sports team mates. They say that
Speaker 1: one of them, now father himself, still cries about his mate. Liam.
Speaker 1: Noline said to me, we're in an exclusive club that
Speaker 1: no one else wants to be in, and she and
Speaker 1: her husband Marcus and many others are working to keep
Speaker 1: the membership down. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is
Speaker 1: a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go
Speaker 1: to Heroldsun dot com dot au forward slash andrew rule
Speaker 1: one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold
Speaker 1: at news dot com dot au. That is all one
Speaker 1: word news podcasts sold And if you want further information
Speaker 1: about this episode, links are in the description