Dying on the roads is not just a young man’s game anymore | David Penberthy

Young hoons are no longer the ones paying the highest price to impress mates or have a poorly planned midlife crisis, writes David Penberthy.

When that poor bloke got taken by a Great White on Eyre Peninsula last week the story ran on the front page for consecutive days and made headlines nationally in print, on radio and on TV.

In the same week three people were killed on the roads in SA and in a relative sense no-one batted an eyelid.

The discrepancy in the coverage says a lot about human psychology, where the rare event of a fatal shark attack occupies all our minds and attracts intense media attention.

Conversely, the more relatable and likely occurrence of being killed by another motorist while popping out to buy some milk has somehow become the most digestible news item of all.

In our daily chats to police on radio at 6.45, SA Police often chronicle the latest sad details from a fatal crash, and five minutes later the conversation with our listeners has turned back to sport or the weather, house prices or the latest festival that’s on in town this weekend.

The scale of the road toll is not something on which we deeply reflect.

The biggest cause of premature death outside of physical and mental illness is treated with the shrug of a shoulder, as if it’s something you can’t control.

It is a maddeningly defeatist attitude.

You can have a lot more control over a car accident than you can a shark attack.

And it’s time we thought harder about how we do control it, given that there have been almost five times as many fatalities on our roads this year alone (97) as there have been fatal shark attacks in the entire modern history of South Australia (22).

The search for a man’s body at Granite Rock near Streaky Bay. Picture: Andrew Brooks

The detailed police statistics documenting this year’s appalling road toll conceal dozens of human stories of loss.

No doubt they conceal many stories of regret.

The drink you didn’t need to have, the appointment you didn’t need to rush to, the text message you didn’t need to glance at.

Perhaps also the lifestyle you shouldn’t have been leading.

There was a bizarre send-off in Queensland last Friday for a young bloke who died in a motorbike accident.

It stood as a disturbing testament to the pervasiveness of hoon culture in Australia, a culture which undoubtedly explains some of the deaths and injuries on South Australian roads this year.

Jaydan Doorley was just 21 when he collided with a ute while riding his motorbike in Bundaberg last month.

At his funeral last Friday around 300 mourners decided to pay tribute to him in the manner they said he would have wanted – chucking burnouts outside the funeral parlour and uploading the footage of the screeching tyres and burning rubber onto social media.

There were so many people making so much noise and driving so erratically that celebrant Michael Brown from Browns Funerals drove his hearse into the crowd in a bid to make them stop.

Instead, the crowd urged Brown to drop the clutch and chuck a few burnouts in his hearse too.

“I had hoped that this might discourage them, having a hearse in the midst,” the 30-year funeral veteran told the local Bundaberg paper.

“Well, that only lit them up more, and in retrospect it was not the right thing to do; I should have just stayed put, because I lost my cool.

One kid said to me ‘light it up granddad’.

I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life before.”

There was a kind of warped logic to it all, where the kind of risk-taking behaviour that cost a young man his life is celebrated on the occasion of his death, even a good seven decades before he should have rightfully expired.

A crowd of over 300 people attended Jaydan Doorley's funeral at the Branyan Gardens Crematorium.

Some of the crowd celebrating the life of Jaydan Doorley by filming burnouts after his funeral service.

The case of Jaydan Doorley is the most extreme example of a kind of behaviour that exists to varying degrees among many blokes on the road.

At the risk of sounding like a wuss, I would argue that even riding a motorbike with the best intentions and safest approach is still a recipe for disaster.

You can have all the training in the world but you remain at the mercy of others due to the innate and unalterable risk you take sitting unprotected and driving at up to 110km/h.

On the face of it, this year’s statistics are notable mainly for the increase, a surge to 97 up from 60 at the same time last year, already well above the annual average of 79 deaths.

The serious injury stats are just as bad – 714 so far this year, up from 594, already exceeding the annual average of 673.

But when it comes to gender, age and form of transport, other stories emerge from the data.

The first is to reinforce how dying and maiming yourself on the road is an overwhelmingly male experience.

This obviously reflects the fact that there are more male drivers than females – but despite that discrepancy it is men who are still proportionally more likely to land themselves in serious strife by a factor of roughly three to one.

If you look at the age of victims, the current statistics show that the likes of young Jaydan Doorley are something of an outlier on the roads this year.

The rate at which younger South Australians die and injure themselves has remained stable this year.

The biggest increases have been in the over-40s, especially in the category aged from 50 to 59 where the death toll has jumped 300 per cent from four people to 16 people in the last 12 months.

And as for the mode of transport, the most over-represented people in the death stats based on their road use remain motorcyclists – almost all of them men – with the number of deaths up 58 per cent from 12 to 19 in the past 12 months.

How much of all this is avoidable? Half of it? Almost all of it?

One thing is clear, from Bundaberg to Adelaide to country SA, one good way to drive those numbers down might be to have a conversation about how we define ourselves as blokes.

It is a terribly high price to pay for trying to impress your mates or having a poorly-planned midlife crisis.