The Sinister Shadows

“Happy birthday, dude. Have a good one. I’ll see you next weekend,” is all I said to Glen when I walked out the door of the pizza shop on a warm Sunday night in November of 1999. It was the end of high school and the start of summer and all things to come. I drove home that night in my midnight-blue XD Falcon; a nice car till I got hold of it and systematically destroyed it. The smell of pizza swirled around the car, driven by air rushing through the hole in the floor that brought me to the point of hypothermia in the winter. Guttermouth’s High Balls played at a heroic volume as I drove past the paddock behind Dave’s place on my way home. Glen loved that song.

It was the following Wednesday and we were at Alana’s place enjoying the sun by her pool, lavishing the last few weeks of childhood before we’d be expected to get jobs; get lives; grow up; get boring! As adolescent conversation goes, topics changed direction with manic unpredictability. This game of tongue roulette eventually landed on the subject of radio scanners (I have no idea how that happened). As it turned out, Alana’s father had one because he was an air traffic controller and apparently they are required to keep them. Because we were nosy teenagers the general consensus was that we should immediately exploit this technology for any and all amusement possibilities.
Wrapped in towels, we headed inside and into the study where the scanner was locked in a cupboard. Alana, like most teenagers who aren’t blind, deaf and dumb, knew the whereabouts of secret keys to such cupboards. The cupboard was opened with great care and calculation. We could not leave evidence that we had been tampering in business not of our own. Our afternoon entertainment was quickly on the table as we prodded buttons like Rhesus monkeys. The scanner erupted into hissing white noise as we scanned for interesting chatter. We lived in a town of about 3000 people so chatter of any kind was rarely interesting.

Channel 4:
“…so when you see that dickhead I want you to take a crowbar and…”
Channel 8:
“…she just wouldn’t stop screaming and throwing beans and onions at the…”

Channel 17:
‘…reckon it was that little prick from next door…”

We began to wonder if only hicks owned two-way radios.

Channel 15:
“…crashed in a paddock off the Gisborne/Kilmore road. Appears to be no survivors.”
“Emergency crews are onsite? Please confirm.”
“CFA and police are onsite. SES not required.”
“Please confirm, SES required?”
“SES not required. We can confirm that all four occupants are deceased. Repeat: all four occupants are deceased.”

Action, we thought. It wasn’t often that our small town saw drama, asides from the odd car accident, and a murder and accompanying siege a short time later. But we had an inside scoop and didn’t want to miss out. The scanner went back in the cupboard, and the secret key went back to its secret hiding place.

Alana drove. We made our way out of town. Past the primary school that I had attended and hated every minute of. Past the lake where we used to swim out to the small island that was more duck shit than dirt. Past the enormous arch train bridge that I’d once abseiled off for a dare. Past the houses and paddocks that all seemed to hold some part of my history.
As we came over the bridge on the edge of town we could see something in a paddock to our right. It didn’t look like a plane. It looked like a pile of smashed white-goods in a field. We rounded a tight bend that took the road north towards Gisborne, and we could see an open gate surrounded by cars and emergency crews. The excitement we felt hearing a movie-like story from the scanner suddenly turned to a cold and terrible concern. All the colour seemed to drain out of that beautiful summer day. All talk and laughter ceased as we realised that four very real people were really dead in that very real wreck in the paddock. We began to feel like voyeuristic ghouls. We turned back.

We arrived back at Alana’s house and unable to withstand the hurricane force of curiosity blowing through us we headed back to the scanner. Nothing but official talk and obscene chitchat bled into the airways. No answers. Just rednecks, white noise, silence, and the hope for some news of a plane crash involving people we’d never heard of.

Hours passed as we sat huddled around the scanner like it was a wartime radio. No names. No news. Just walls of nothing behind walls of emptiness behind walls of absolute zero. By six o’clock we’d usually have been drunk, but on this occasion we substituted alcohol with water soluble words, convincing each other that everything was okay. In such a small town the victims of the crash could have been anyone we knew. As the clock ticked on with painful fatigue we arrived at the rickety and transparent conclusion that the mess of metal in the paddock was the end result of some old drunk pilot who’d been to the Clarkefield pub, staggered to the Sunbury airfield, and taken to the air with his drunken pilot buddies. The matter rested there, each of us stoic in our reasoning, but still choking on uncertainty.

The sun had not yet set. The meandering chatter of the scanner had gradually subsided before providing any answers, so we made our way back to the pool’s edge and dangled our feet in the cool water. The heat of the sun was dissipating and conversation had become sporadic as the twilight approached from the east over the ranges.

As the sun began to drop over the horizon, the peace of dusk was broken by the monophonic musical ring-tone of Alana’s mobile phone. The three of us froze in a moment starved of air. Alana answered the phone. Nath and I watched her face as she listened to the caller.
‘Who?’ she said with a deeply worrying upward inflection. ‘Do you know which one?’
We waited, poised for the worst. Alana was off the phone quite quickly and seemed to be trying to hold in her mind a thought made from water. I would have thought her eyes would fall upon Nath – her boyfriend – first. But she looked at me without speaking. I held my breath because I knew there was a horse kick to the guts coming my way.

One of the Tisdale boys was on the plane.’

There were three Tisdale brothers. One of them was my workmate, Glen. The youngest was Cory. He was in my year level. The other was Brad, the eldest. It could have been any one of them. So I’d gone from not knowing but having some comfort in the fact that it could be anyone in the world, to knowing that it was one of three people. That was so much worse. And knowing it was one of three, there was a good chance we would know the other victims.

Dusk faded into darkness and the cold swept in, so we made our way inside, still waiting for a phone call to confirm what we hoped was wrong. We were growing restless and impatient so Alana began to do a ring-around to anyone who might know something, but no one seemed to know. News usually travels at light speed in small towns but for some reason this huge event was being kept secret like it was a government conspiracy.

Wanting a distraction I turned on the television. Mal Walden was just kicking off the evening news. I wasn’t even paying attention, really. I just wanted the background noise. Nath and I were talking over the top of Mal, and Alana was facing the TV, still on her phone. Then she stopped in mid-sentence, her eyes suddenly drawn to the TV screen. I turned to see what had arrested her so abruptly. As I turned, the photographs of four young people appeared on the screen. Three faces that I knew very well, and one that I had seen in passing in the school corridors. And in that moment we got our answer.

Glen had just turned 21. He was celebrating his birthday with a broken arm from a motorbike accident the week before. The last time I saw him he was in a cast up to the elbow. Eighteen-year-old Sean, another one of our workmates, had recently received his pilot’s license and as a birthday present to Glen was taking him on a joy flight. At the last minute, Sean and Glen decided to invite another workmate, nineteen-year-old Dave, and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jodie.

We would later be told that the crash was caused by pilot error. Eighteen-year-olds are prone to pushing the boundaries when they first get a car and license, so I guess it’s reasonable to assume that an eighteen-year-old in the pilot seat of a Cessna 172 would be no different. Sean was doing an aerial version of doughnuts over Dave’s house. Witnesses said the plane circled about five times over the house before it came down. As it turned out, on the sixth circle, Sean banked too sharply and the plane stalled. He did not have the altitude to recover and the plane fell from the sky like a dying bird. They crashed into the paddock behind Dave’s house.
That was my first real lesson in the fragile nature of mortality. I had endured the deaths of people on several occasions before that day, but four lives snatched from the world so dramatically, so unexpectedly, so irrationally, and most of all, so unfairly: it changes your perspective on life with malicious, ravaging force.

In the year following the accident, funerals became as common as birthday parties. In stifling January heat I sat shoulder to shoulder with friends and acquaintances as we said goodbye to our good friend, Shan. He had been found hanging from a rope in the shed he lived in behind his parents’ house, his toes dragging on the floor. All he had to do was stand up. Those who found him were only minutes too late. People often say that many questions remain after a suicide. While this is true, I think Shan was providing an answer to a world that didn’t understand him.

Some months after that terrible incident, two boys I’d grown up with, Brendan and Shane, were wiped out in a car accident near Mansfield. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this accident was the victory Brendan had just wielded over brain cancer. For the first time in several years he was able to look to the future with no lingering doubts that he had one. It was like the cruelest of jokes delivered by a diabolical universe. I still visit Brendan’s grave from time to time, and every year Shane’s parents put up big banners reading “Happy birthday Shane” in the front of their property. They live two doors up from my father so I see this annually.

A month or two later the community suffered another blow when Beck was taken in a car accident. She was killed when the van she was traveling in, being driven by Alana’s neighbour, rolled on a tight bend. We hung out in the same smokers group at school, even though I didn’t smoke. Beck’s grave is not far from Brendan’s, and only a few paces from Aaron’s. Aaron died in a car crash around the same time, just a few years before his father, John (my old scout leader), was laid to rest beside him. Not long after Aaron was taken, Paul (my sister’s very close friend) drove his car into a power pole on the way to the Anzac Day dawn service. I still think of him every time I pass the pole on that dead-straight stretch of road and wonder what happened that cold Anzac Day morning.

With so much death occurring in such a short space of time it seemed that death itself had materialised in our close rural community and set up camp with the intention of taking lives that were just beginning; lives that never had a chance to be lived; lives that deserved much more time on this earth. The point came when people were asking ‘Who’s next?’ And tragically we would usually get an answer.

I escaped Riddells Creek. I got out when I could. I go back to visit my father on occasion, but driving into that town I always feel I’m being stalked by some invisible sadistic hunter; like something is watching me from the sinister shadows. From my father’s back doorstep I look over the town and it looks like Rivendale. It has a fictitious beauty. There are ancient maple trees in deep meditation in the lush, green paddocks on my father’s property. There are the bluestone, heritage-listed arch train bridges just at the end of the road; the creek winding through farm paddocks and under bridges; the red tin roof and steeple of the Church of England stretching upward in the distance, and the surrounding mountains that hug the township like a mother. I can never understand how in such a storybook setting so much tragedy could unfold.

By: Aidan Hogg