By Kath Gannaway
“The picture you see on the screen is the very one we used for his service”.
The 500 or so people at the 2018 Teenage Road Information Program (TRIP), most of them young people, were looking at a treasured photo of Charlie Robertson.
His mum, Sally Millar, was the final speaker on the night and once again was bravely standing at the front of the room at Heritage & Heritage Funerals in Woori Yallock.
There would have been a time in her life when she could never have imagined standing in that room, but it was twice now.
“The last time I stood up here the room was full, overflowing,” she said.
“It was the 23rd of April, 2015, and I was up here farewelling my son. It was his funeral.”
It was three years, three months and nine days since that day. She counts the days.
Charlie was the passenger, along with five other people in a 4WD that crashed and rolled on 10 April, 2015. He was 21 years and two months old.
She spoke of the circumstances. The group had been at a local pub celebrating a mate’s birthday and decided to continue the party at a house in Hoddles Creek.
The car was overloaded and apparently none was wearing seatbelts.
“Charlie has been brought up to wear his seat belt. I thought it was a given,” she said.
All the details around the crash came out in horrific detail in the County Court in 2017. The graphic details of Charlie’s death, the injuries and life-long effects of the other passengers, and the prison sentence for the driver. The driver was over the limit and entered the fatal bend on Milners Road, Launching Place, faster than the advisory speed.
Sally was doing a sleepover shift at work when she took a call in the early hours of the morning. A young girl, a stranger, asked if she had heard from Charlie.
She started to make calls.
Her description of those first hours was chilling and heartbreaking, especially for any parent in the room.
“No-one could give me a concrete answer.
“Charlie would not answer.
“The police said they would call back, no-one could tell me where he was.
“Yes, there had been an accident.
“Yes, Charlie may have been involved” and the dialogue went on.
Charlie’s sister Jacci was making her way home from a night out with friends and was stopped at the road block.
She didn’t know; had sat in her car at the road block now knowing that her brother lay dead on the road just ahead of her.
Sally spoke of every emotion, every physical response – shrieking, crying, breaking, and demanding to know why the police were lying to her.
She told of the pain to telling Jacci, Charlie’s father, uncles, cousins, grandparents, friends and workmates.
“The reality became a hell ride of unimaginable loss and surviving each impossible moment.
“It still seems unbelievable, unbearable and I often feel I am only one breath away from breaking completely; but I don’t, “ she said.
She spoke of the ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’.
She has been told the crash took only four seconds to unfold from the moment the driver entered the bend to the car coming to rest on its roof.
“I think it started sooner than that,” she said. “It’s just that none of those kids were paying attention and none of them saw it coming.
“I often wonder at just what point did the likelihood of the crash become inevitable; was it when the driver entered the corner, probably too fast? When the driver lost control, when they all piled in, overloaded, no seat belts and the driver over the limit?
“Was it when the driver decided to have the drink that took him over the limit?” she asks.
“When they all had that one drink that affected them so they stopped thinking about their safety?
“Was it when the driver ignored suggestions he was over the limit?”
It’s hard for her to get through these and other questions, but she takes some deep breaths and asks the question no parent ever wants to contemplate, and which will never go away.
“I also often wonder when, or if, Charlie ever realised he was in deep trouble and things were not going to be OK.”
“I’ll never know – but every time, the one thing I come back to is the decisions those kids made – each and every one contributing to the tragedy.
“It never had to happen. It needn’t have happened,” she says imagining what it could have been – laughing about the near miss and how the driver nearly lost it on the way.
“This time they paid deeply … we all did,” Sally says softening her voice and adding that none of them meant any harm.
She paid tribute to her beautiful boy and explains the daisy tattoo on her arm which reminds her of how quickly the seemingly simplest trip can become an irreversible tragedy and the need for constant vigilance as a driver.
“It reminds me of my beautiful, lost boy and how the crash changed my life forever.”
TRIP is a combined response by Yarra Valley emergency services – CFA, SES, Police and Ambulance to the tragic loss of young lives on Yarra Ranges’ roads.
Other speakers on 1 August were Paramedic Jason Callanan, Detective Sgt Mark Amos from the Major Collision Investigation Unit, Gruyere CFA volunteer and Group Officer Andrea Bigham, and Magistrate Tim Walsh.
