Underbelly 5 Page 19

  Even on his ‘day off Bromley took the Mack to the depot and spent hours washing it with a broom, bucket and high pressure hose. For men whose options are the factory floor, the warehouse, or the dole queue, driving trucks seems to promise freedom, an illusion of ‘being your own boss’ that in reality shackles them more tightly than any nine-to-five job.

  Once at the wheel, pride and necessity make it hard to let go. To keep his job, Bromley was under pressure to drive as far and as often as demanded – regardless of the law or, tragically, the risk to other road users.

  And, with the big stick there dangled a small carrot: the more he drove, the more he was paid. But it was never enough, given the meagre rates that grossed drivers about $300 for a trip from Melbourne to Sydney and back, which meant driving more than 5000 kilometres a week to gross $900. Take out tax and food costs and there wasn’t much left.

  He once drove 9000 kilometres in a week and took home $700 clear. It stunk, but it didn’t stop him coming back.

  It all meant that when Myles Bromley hitched ‘his’ big, white, Mack prime mover to a refrigerated trailer load of hams and strawberries, and rolled out of the Brisbane depot about 1pm on that Saturday, he was under the usual pressure to make good time and bad money.

  AS drivers go, Bromley wasn’t a bad one. His father was a tanker driver and he’d grown up around trucks, worked in truck depots and driven around Brisbane before starting interstate runs three years before. For a while he’d made good money carting yachts to Perth, but that had petered out. In his time he’d seen some awful crashes, but he’d never been in one. And his driving record was clean – apart from the logbook offences.

  It happened that two other drivers for the same firm were also leaving Queensland that afternoon. He caught up with one of them, Shane Wright, 39, at Gatton, near Toowoomba, around sunset. The pair crossed the border at Goondiwindi and stopped at Bogabilla.

  There, a third Brisbane Market Freight Brokers truck was already pulled up. Driving it was Donald Bell, 54, who’d started from Bowen in far north Queensland. The three spent ‘a couple of hours’ at Bogabilla, then pushed south.

  Wright and Bromley had a break at Moree. Bell went on to Narrabri, where they caught him later. They stopped for a rest and a snack at Dubbo, then headed through the Riverina, via West Wyalong, to cross the Murray at Tocumwal.

  On the way they also stopped for two hours in Forbes and an hour in Jerilderie – but mainly to shower and eat, not to sleep, according to a police reconstruction of the trip. Police were also to suggest that the trucks drove in a convoy most of the way. A woman who saw them at Invergordon, near Shepparton, later testified they were so close together she could not have fitted a family sedan between them, a claim the drivers were to dispute.

  By the time they reached Shepparton, police believe, Bromley had been driving 29 hours with little sleep, although he was to say later he had slept during various short breaks. What is certain is that he falsified his logbook to hide the fact he hadn’t taken a seven-hour rest break from lam on Sunday, as required after 12 hours driving. He preferred to take short breaks as he felt like them, he was to claim.

  Bromley had been driving behind the others for some hours, but when the convoy reached Shepparton, he caught a changing set of lights that had stopped Bell and took up second spot behind Wright.

  Police believe the trucks were travelling much closer to each other than the 100-metre minimum required by law – a risk some drivers take to conserve fuel. To do this they take turns in front to make a wind break, as racing cyclists do, a technique known as ‘slipstreaming’. There is no financial incentive for hired drivers to do this, however, because they don’t pay for fuel like owner-drivers.

  Against that, it’s believed some drivers like to ‘follow the leader’ when tired, on the lethal logic that it’s easier for a fatigued driver to follow tail lights than to watch the road. Another reason for travelling together is that drivers can talk to each other easily on UHF radio sets.

  No-one can prove how close the trucks were when they left Shepparton, but they were together. It was about 6.15pm.

  AFTER four babies of her own, Jo Ferguson had decided she wanted to specialise in midwifery. Part of the training was to attend the midwifery ward at Shepparton Hospital. A call came that Sunday afternoon: a baby was to be delivered. Would she come in?

  Jo drove herself in the family’s second car, leaving Chris with the red six-seat Falcon sedan they used for the children. Their eldest daughter, Amy, who’d just turned 11, had to go to Shepparton to play hockey. That left Tom, Dan, and Laura, then nine, and her friend Ashleigh, who had to be dropped in Kialla West on the way home from Shepparton.

  It was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Chris stayed for a cup of tea with Ashleigh’s parents before telling Laura and the boys it was time to go.

  Dan beat the others in the competition to sit in the front next to his father, but Chris said it was Laura’s turn. He was pleased at how willingly Dan obeyed, swapping seats to make way for his sister.

  The sun was setting behind the river redgums across the paddocks. As Chris Ferguson backed from the drive, he paused and looked at the unusual roofline of the new mudbrick house next door. Being a plumber, he was to explain, he automatically looked at new roof work. It is the last thing he remembers of the following four days. Which, in some ways, is probably a blessing. What Chris Ferguson doesn’t remember, but knows, is this. He drove out onto the Goulburn Valley Highway, turning right to head away from Shepparton towards home. He drove steadily south in the gathering dusk, down the arrow-straight road.

  About eight minutes later he would have seen the familiar fingerpost for Noonans Road, the short cut to Quirks Road. He would have slowed, flicked on the right indicator and stopped, hugging the white line, to wait for a break in the Sunday traffic streaming towards Shepparton. Had he looked in the rear-vision mirror, the last thing he would have seen was the headlights of a semi-trailer, approaching fast.

  Whether all three trucks were behind the Fergusons’ Falcon at that point is unclear. The police and, subsequently, a judge, concluded that the first truck, driven by Shane Wright, veered around the Falcon. But the truck drivers say the Falcon had been travelling between the first and second trucks, before stopping to turn right.

  The police case was that the three trucks, moving at just under 100kph, were so close neither of the two drivers behind the leader could see anything but the tiny patch of road between his truck and the next.

  In this scenario, the front truck veered slightly to the left to miss the Fergusons’ Falcon. If so, either Shane Wright didn’t make any indication to the driver behind – or Bromley didn’t see it.

  Either way, one thing is certain. Bromley’s Mack ploughed straight ahead, the bullbar crushing the Falcon like a toy. The fuel tank ruptured and the sedan burst into flames. Dan Ferguson was thrown clear of the burning car, but a white Toyota Camry coming the other way hit the Falcon, then ran over the eight-year-old boy, killing him.

  His little brother, Tom, was already dead or dying, and his father was crippled with a spinal cord injury, that was to put him in hospital for two months and leave him physically disabled. Laura Ferguson suffered head injuries, a fractured arm and fractured ankle, although it was the invisible scars that later worried her parents.

  In the Canary was the Kocmar family, returning to Shepparton from a family picnic at Goulburn Weir. The driver, Nabi Kocmar, 31, was killed. His wife Esra and son, Burah, 5, and 13-month old daughter, Merve, were all badly injured.

  The Fergusons’ friends in the Arcadia fire brigade were among the first to get to a scene they’ll never forget. The brigade captain was Gavin Doyle. Earlier that afternoon his son Brenton had been playing with Dan. Bromley’s truck left no skid marks before the impact. It hit the Falcon at full speed, then veered right, braking hard, across the lane of oncoming traffic and into the roadside trees. Miraculously, it didn’t hit any more cars in the 140 metres it took to stop.

>   The truck behind followed Bromley’s truck across the road and struck a tree, injuring the driver, Don Bell. Police took this as evidence that the drivers were tracking each other.

  Shane Wright saw the accident in his rear-vision mirrors and stopped several hundred metres away – a distance he later claimed was a kilometre, which seems at odds with the fact he reversed back to the scene. He called his employers on a mobile telephone. They told him to drive on to Melbourne, to deliver the load on time. He did.

  Myles Bromley was not hurt. He, too, called Brisbane, then jumped down from the truck and ran back to the wrecked cars. He pulled a little girl from a pool of water by the roadside, and looked at the carnage he had caused.

  ‘I dream about it. I see it every day and every night,’ he was to say three years later, voice cracking.

  FROM the moment she got to work that afternoon Jo Ferguson had been uneasy. When another nurse remarked ‘You don’t look as if you should be here,’ she had answered: ‘I don’t feel I should be here.’

  Then news of the crash came, followed by the ambulances carrying Laura and Chris, and Esra Kocmar and her two children. For Jo, seeing her husband and daughter so badly hurt was bad, but wondering what had happened to her boys was worse. She waited and waited for Dan and Tom to arrive. ‘But they never did,’ she says, her steady eyes filling with tears. Her husband hits his arm in anguish, then puts his head in his hands.

  Jo keeps talking softly. For what seemed a long time, she says, no-one would tell her the truth about her sons that night. ‘It was terrible. They thought they were doing the right thing.’ At last, an ambulance driver steeled himself to break the worst news a parent can get. Her boys weren’t coming back. Twelve days later, an ambulance brought Chris Ferguson from the Austin Hospital’s spinal unit for the funeral at St Brendan’s church in Shepparton, where he lay on a stretcher.

  About 800 people came to the service, and it cast a pall over the town. It was one of the biggest funerals in Shepparton since Abina Madill and Garry Heywood were murdered 30 years before. But, in this case, the killer wasn’t hard to find. Shocked and remorseful, he had made a statement in an all-night interview at Shepparton police station.

  Back in Brisbane, Bromley didn’t work for a month. He left Brisbane Market Freight Brokers (‘They dropped me like a bucket of sh—,’ he says, bitterly) and went back to the depot where he’d worked for ten years after leaving school in his early teens, loading and unloading trucks. He was depressed and drank heavily.

  One day another worker jeered at him and called him ‘a childkiller’. Bromley pulled him from a forklift, punched him, and was sacked. He got a job delivering trucks around Brisbane. A year after the crash, Sergeant Chris Carnie, of the Victorian Accident Investigation Squad, telephoned Bromley to say they intended to charge him with culpable and negligent driving.

  He flew to Melbourne, at his own expense, to be questioned, and admitted his logbook entries for the day of the crash were wrong. He seemed relieved to talk about it. Armed with the fact Bromley had not taken the required seven-hour break, the police charged him.

  Sergeant Carnie, a quiet and careful policeman who grew up around Shepparton, has befriended the Fergusons and eased their ordeal in ways far beyond mere duty. He visited, he explained, he advised and counselled, earning a gratitude that he shrugs off. None of which prevents him from also feeling a pang of sympathy for Myles Bromley.

  The sergeant thinks Bromley is unlucky in that any of the three trucks might have hit the Fergusons’ car. And, he believes Bromley is genuinely remorseful. He tells the story of how, after Bromley’s committal hearing in the Shepparton County Court, he was driving him back to Melbourne to catch his flight when Bromley asked to buy flowers and a card. Then they stopped at the crash site 20 kilometres out of town. Bromley got out and put the flowers underneath the cross the Fergusons had built.

  Geoffrey Steward, Bromley’s barrister, has had hundreds of clients in 16 years in criminal law, but no case has touched him like this, he says.

  ‘No client of mine has shown the remorse that Myles Bromley has,’ he says. ‘The word remorse doesn’t do it justice. It’s anguish.’

  The unique thing about negligent driving charges, he adds, is that a momentary lapse by an honest person with no intention of hurting anyone can draw a sentence as severe as manslaughter does. But being sorry isn’t enough, and Bromley knows that. He was sentenced to five years and six months jail with a minimum of four years and six months, after pleading guilty to three counts of culpable driving causing death, five counts of negligently causing serious injury and one of possessing a drug of dependence.

  In sentencing, Judge Duckett stated: ‘It was said that you believed that you would be given little or no work if you complained of excessive hours. I accept that your employer knew and expected you to break the law in this regard.

  ‘In one sense this accident was caused by a moment of inattention … in another (it) was the outcome of months of reckless and irresponsible driving …

  ‘I find it difficult to distinguish between the culpability of a driver who drives negligently because he is moderately affected by the consumption of alcohol and a driver who drives negligently as a result of self-imposed fatigue.

  ‘It is my intention that the sentences imposed in this case are to act as a deterrent to other drivers, that they will be a matter for comment at roadside eating places and transport depots and in the community generally. It is just possible that as a result, lives in the future could be saved.’

  Before sentencing, Bromley and Jo Ferguson embraced in court, an acknowledgment that he, too, is a victim of a brutally competitive transport industry that bends and breaks laws passed to save lives. But he realises, as many defendants do not, that the Fergusons’ burden, like the Kocmars’, is far greater than his.

  MYLES Bromley is tall, broad-shouldered and, at a distance, looks young for 31. He has big, strong hands, and decayed bottom teeth that denote a neglected childhood and, in recent years, the truck-driver’s habit of sipping endless cans of Coke and cups of sweet coffee to stay awake. His hazel eyes roam distractedly around the contact visit area of the Melbourne Assessment Prison, where other prisoners in green security overalls chat animatedly to their once-a-week visitors. He looks less happy than the others, many of whom are used to being locked up. He looks haunted.

  He talks a little of an appeal, but next minute agonises over what happened. Part of him wants to be punished, to suffer pain, as if that might somehow make it better for the families of the dead.

  While Bromley is in prison for a few years, the Fergusons are in purgatory forever.

  His anguish will fade with time and his sentence will end; they can only hope to live with theirs. Chris Ferguson hobbles painfully, swinging a shortened leg from the hip. Laura has the lingering effects of head injuries. The emotional scars are worse.

  They still face the legal cruelty of an adversarial system that means they have to fight to win compensation for Chris’s obvious disablement – and for Laura’s not-so-obvious one.

  Jo has taken up district nursing. She visits the ill at home, away from hospitals and their traumatic memories. For Chris, plumbing is out of the question. He does what he can ‘poking around the farm,’ with the help of relatives, friends and neighbors whose support makes them choke up to talk about.

  They are brave and decent people who bear the unbearable with dignity. But, behind the mask they hold up to the world is the wariness, the weariness and the shock of those who see ghosts. They see two of them every day and night. Their names are Dan and Tom.

  Chris and Jo Ferguson are torn by the question of punishment for the monstrous wrong done to them. ‘We were pleased he pleaded guilty,’ says Jo. ‘It’s probably a severe sentence but …’ She trails off, shaking her head and staring into the garden where her boys still play, in her mind. ‘How do you measure their lives?’

  Nothing can.

  ON the highway two kilometres away, traff
ic streams past the little white cross at Noonans Road. There are a lot of trucks. Two of them are travelling nose to tail, barely 20 metres apart.

  CHAPTER 15

  King of the road

  ‘When you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you are angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.’ – William Saroyan

  FRANK Green spent a lifetime meeting challenges. As Australia’s best-known traffic policeman, he helped halve the road toll and change the culture of drink-driving in Victoria.

  But now he sits in a favorite cane chair, in his immaculate home in the outer Melbourne suburb of Eltham, facing a challenge he knows he will not beat. He has cancer and only days to live.

  After 35 years in the police force he is, by nature and training, a realist. He knows there will be no miracle cures and no last-minute remissions.

  ‘There is no treatment,’ he says. ‘It’s aggressive and progressive – pretty bloody rapid really. You just have to go with the flow.’

  It’s a few days before Christmas, 2000. Just over a year earlier, he hurt his back while gardening, after returning from a holiday in Ireland. It was a twinge that was to lead to surgery. In September 2000, he had another scan to find the cause of further pain. The next day there was a message on his answering machine to come in urgently to see his surgeon. It didn’t sound good.

  It was on a Wednesday, after his regular radio spot as ‘Cranky Franky’ on radio station 3AW’s breakfast program, that he headed to see his surgeon in Prahran. The doctor produced the scan results that clearly showed cancer spots in his back muscles and vertebrae. ‘He told me I had secondary bone cancer and there was no primary source. I knew then I was in trouble.’