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Teacher Yvonne Bradford was eight months pregnant and returning home to Brisbane with husband Alan after a trip to Britain. A plane strike meant everyone had jumped on buses at Sydney airport to get home.
It was about 4.30am on the Pacific Highway near Cowper, 26 kilometres north of Grafton, when their Sunliner Express coach collided with a semi-trailer travelling towards them on the wrong side of the road. The truck sliced down the entire right side of the bus, spilling passengers onto the road before it rolled. The crash on October 20, 1989, which claimed the lives of 21 passengers, including Yvonne’s unborn baby, was at the time the worst road crash in Australian history. The coroner found the truck driver had 80 times the normal therapeutic level of ephedrine in his body.
Yvonne Bradford lost her unborn baby in the 1989 Grafton bus crash.Credit: Dan Peled
News of the Hunter Valley tragedy rekindled emotions for Yvonne she has carried for almost 34 years. They are the same emotions that will confront those passengers and rescuers in the latest tragedy.
“Alan, who was in the army, had PTSD because he witnessed more of it,” she said. “In some ways, it was easier for me to be a bit hurt, I had something to focus on, I had to get better …
“The baby was probably viable, but she was killed by the impact. We had a little nickname for her, we used to call her Yeti because she was conceived in the Himalayas. When I got to Brisbane hospital and out of ICU she was brought to me and I had a little time with her. Then the family took her to the funeral because I couldn’t get out of hospital. ”
Yvonne Bradford with the three children she went on to have after she lost her baby in the bus crash.
Reflecting on the Hunter tragedy, Yvonne, who later had three children, says time does help. “When it first happens it is the focus, it is everything, it sort of envelops you, but as you move away from it, it is not as though it is less, it is more that there are other things around it. They slowly overshadow the big, deep pain.
“It doesn’t make it go away, but it is as though it is padded with other things that are good.
“You have to try and find your own solace. That may be doing something for others, some religious thing, whatever it is, but you have to find something that helps to recalibrate that balance.”
She added: “I worry for the driver; his life is ruined. For the sake of the other people it won’t heal them to be vicious to him. That’s not the balm that is going to heal the hurt, it doesn’t assuage your grief.”
GP Ray Jones was first on the scene at Grafton and credited with saving Bradford’s life. “I still remember the scene as clear as a bell,” he said. “I see that scene vividly, frequently. Some rescuers weren’t affected at the time but many years later they were.
Ten people were killed in Sunday’s bus crash in the Hunter Valley.Credit: Nick Moir
“I am 67 years old, and I don’t think I’ve slept through since 1989. I suffer from chronic anxiety, depression from time to time. I acknowledged that and I sought treatment. The effects of these accidents are not something you can measure in months. I am still working, I am still functioning as a GP, I’ve just been up to Kakadu working in an Aboriginal community. I enjoy working in remote places, maybe that is a result of the accident.”
Jones, who lives in Woolgoolga, north of Coffs Harbour, added: “The emergency services have learnt over the years that they have got to address these issues and provide adequate counselling and follow-up for their employees.
“All we had after the accident was a briefing by a psychologist sent up from Sydney who briefed the ambulance [crews] on their experience, and he was there for a day and never came back. I think people have learnt since then that’s not satisfactory. They need to address these problems now, not in five years time when the problems arise.”
GP Ray Jones, who was first on the scene of the Grafton bus crash.Credit: Lindsay Moller
Professor Alexander McFarlane, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide and an expert in PTSD, said research since the Granville train disaster in 1977, in which 83 died, had resulted in an enormous amount of knowledge in the treatment of first responders.
“The problem that has plagued the care for emergency service workers was the belief that debriefing in the immediate aftermath had a significant preventative value,” he said. “There is very little evidence that it makes any difference at all.
“The problem is once they [employers] have made that effort they then forget about the long-term consequences. I don’t think the systems have become as good as they should have at predicting the long-term costs to individuals who have to go into these horrific circumstances.
Professor Alexander McFarlane, psychiatrist and disaster psychology expert.
“If you are an emergency service worker and you have been into a horrendous scene, you don’t want somebody immediately sitting down with you focusing on the gore and the horror. You need to focus on what you have done well – you have used your professional skills – and to withdraw from that scene and to withdraw back into the normality of your normal life and a sense of safety.
“Often the people they get in are not very well trained. You can imagine if you are a very experienced police officer or ambulance officer and some 25-year-old psychologist walks in to speak to you. The psychologist can be more upset because they can’t cope with what you are telling them.
A survivor is lifted clear of the rubble above the crushed carriage at the Granville train disaster, January 18, 1977.Credit: Russell McPhedran, Fairfax Media
“Stirring up the memory of the scenes that you have witnessed can make the memories worse and are really misplaced. They come out of the provision of acute battlefield care for psychiatric casualties in World War One with the idea of getting the soldiers back into battle again. When you are fighting a war of attrition, keeping people on the front line has got a certain logic to it, but applying that logic in the circumstances we are talking about doesn’t work.”
McFarlane believes there is the misconception that people who develop PTSD become acutely unwell. He says the evidence is that many people will cope in the immediate aftermath, but it is in the following months that symptoms emerge.
“The real issue is with the cumulative exposure that you have [in the emergency services]. I think people underestimate the challenges of day-to-day policing, of ambulance work and of being a firefighter. There is now a large body of evidence suggesting that with time, a significant percentage of those workforces progressively develop low-grade symptoms and are at particular risk if they go into an accident like the one that has just happened.
Barry Gobbe, first ambulanceman on scene of the Granville train disaster.Credit: Gene Ramirez, Fairfax
“If they have been to an event like that one previously where it has been highly distressing, but they have managed it, the next event that has some similarity can really reactivate their memories, and that’s what the emergency services really need to think about. Sometimes you have actually just got to take them out of that front-line role – the trouble is that these organisations are not structured to have those roles to allow them to escape into. In the police, many of the roles that older police officers would have gone into have been civilianised.
“These organisations need to, on an annual basis, monitor people. If there is an incident like the one we’ve just had you might want to speak to those people at three months, and you need experienced people who understand how people might try to hide their distress.”
Barry Gobbe was the first ambulance officer to arrive at the scene of the Granville Train Disaster and author of Revisiting the Granville Train Disaster of 1977.
Now retired and aged 76, he said: “I suppose secretly I’ve got PTSD [from Granville] but I’ve had a lot worse treating people over the years. I’ve seen many scenes after Granville; they might not have been as big but were also tragic. Ambulance officers are doing it every day. I class it as being on the front line.
“It’s a big thing that has been overlooked. Ambulance officers are under a lot of pressure, basically, their whole career. I wake up in the middle of the night, and I’m thinking about one of the jobs that I did. PTSD, if you know you’ve got it, and you are able to handle it [is one thing] … but it’s the things that creep up on you that you have got to watch out for. Of the people I spoke to writing the book, I would say 80 per cent of them are divorced.
“Police, fire and ambulance have now got a lot of chaplains, and they respond to scenes. There’s a lot of follow-up and a lot of counselling taking place. We made it known to the commissioner of ambulance that the Granville responders were never thanked or given counselling.
“Last August we were brought in to a presentation and were given the ambulance commissioner’s commendation for courage. They decorated us with a medal and colours and all that, but that’s 46 years later that four of us were finally recognised for our courage.”
A spokesperson for NSW Ambulance said it was committed to recognising those involved in challenging incidents. In 2018, the Commissioner introduced the NSW Legacy program for former officers and established a historical awards process.
Gary Raymond, chaplain and counsellor to emergency services.
The nominations for the recent commendations regarding the Granville train disaster were received by NSW Ambulance last year so were considered by the committee, and awarded, last year, he said.
Gary Raymond, chaplain, former ambulance officer and the first Police Rescue worker at the Granville train disaster, has spoken to first responders at the Hunter Valley crash.
“Some retired ambos who have covered multiple incidents get flashbacks. The brain stores memories like filing cabinets but, once something like this happens, the brain alerts you to a similar tragedy, and it opens the filing cabinet and brings out the memory.
“We try and stick in the present tense because if we start probing, we call it traumatic probing, it brings out brain responses again, physiologically and emotionally. We try and talk about now and coping with the future. Talking about it is really big, physical exercise helps to burn out the stress chemicals, deep breathing, and switching off all screens, phone, [and] television to allow the brain to switch off for a while and deal with it.
The tribute left by Cessnock ambulance workers at the site of the Hunter Valley crash.Credit: Nine News
“Some get a bit of fear and anxiety about the future. Will I have to face something like this again? Part of chaplaincy and the other wellbeing services is reassuring them that they will deal with the future as well as this.
“One particular ambo, retired, [was] sitting on the edge of the lounge watching coverage of the Hunter crash and his wife said to him, ‘It’s OK darling, you aren’t there, and you can’t go there.’ And he turned around and said: ‘I want to be there. I want to help my colleagues, like I’ve done for years.’
Ken Peterson, in his 70s, was the second ambulance officer at Granville and was badly injured, then spent 45 years in rescue. “I never returned to the scene of Granville until the 20th anniversary. It took me 20 years to go back,” he said. “I only stayed a short time because I didn’t want to be involved with the very painful memories.
“In the early years there was no counselling. Absolutely no counselling. Nowadays, the services provide the counselling and I think that is absolutely wonderful.”
He sums up the thoughts of many after the Hunter crash. “I was extremely proud of the ambulance officers attending the scene. They broadcast the call from the scene. That took me back to memories of Granville. Barry and I were the ones who put the call out 46 years ago over the radio declaring it a disaster.
“The emergency services at the scene last week were absolutely magnificent. I felt extra proud of all the services. I hope they get some recognition.”
A spokesperson for NSW Ambulance said discussions were already under way in relation to recognising the responders to the Hunter bus crash.
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