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When two young men die in an apparently needless incident almost in the heart of Ballarat we have to ask the wider questions about how it could have been prevented.
Whether you knew them or not, such young lives cut short represent an incalculable loss to someone, the waste of all that was to come. This is a family's grief but it is a community’s problem.
There would be few drivers in Ballarat who don’t know that gently descending stretch of Soldiers Hill, a stones throw from the Eastern Oval, a stroll into the heart of the CBD. The familiarity probably makes the unreality of yet another dreadful car-borne death all the more potent.
It might be a temptation for outsiders looking at the social media pictures of them and with a cursory understanding of the facts, to say any high-risk behvaiour is bound to end badly but that inspires little sympathy and even less of a solution.
The reality is these boys could have been almost anybody’s sons. It might have been any one of hundreds of powerful utes on the road, their driver’s pride and joy that ended up as their coffin.
Ballarat-based Inspector Trevor Cornwill is just one more veteran policeman standing at the scene of carnage and widespread debris again making the oft-repeated plea to the driving public to try to avoid these dreadful repercussions; “Two local boys, both 21, would have been friends and obviously the ramifications...that ripple effect on their families and their friends, it has a huge impact on a town like Ballarat.”
We all know young men take risks and, despite the countless pleas of the police, carry an elevated sense of invulnerability that is little more than a tragic illusion. But how to satiate that thirst for risk without mundane deaths?
Community advocates like John Maher have worked tirelessly to talk to school children about the dangers they face. He knows the tragedy too well and his own story of loss resonates with young people. But how long does it stay foremost in their mind? How long before the car culture again takes over; the easy thrill of engine torque, the unreality of what speed is when cocooned within a modern car and the shattering reality of what it can do in a cataclysmic moment of forgetfulness?
As long as we fail as a community to communicate that consequence, young people will continue to die on our roads.