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