‘I was pinned for 37 minutes’: Noosa mayor Clare Stewart reveals horrific accident
One minute Clare Stewart was running, the next she was crushed under a bin truck - conscious, in agony and pinned by her legs. Her journey from there to Noosa Mayor is nothing short of incredible. GET THE FULL STORY
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Occasionally – very occasionally – Clare Stewart allows herself to wonder.
Wonder what might have been if, on that particular, particularly cold morning, she had snuggled back beneath the covers, and allowed herself a day off from her usual, morning routine.
If she had given herself a few more minutes in bed, instead of putting her running gear on, splashing her face with cold water, and heading out the door?
If, in that sliding door moment – whether we turn left or right, look up or down, say yes or no, stay in or go out, alters our destiny – Stewart had hit the snooze button on her alarm clock, or flung out an arm out to turn it off?
But on that particular morning – August 18, 2000 – Stewart, then 23 years old, headed out the door of her Bondi apartment, and began her regular, 50-minute run through Sydney’s streets.
Roughly 300m from her flat, she ran towards the Curlewis Street pedestrian crossing at the bottom of her street’s hill, checking as she always did, on approach, for any traffic.
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Looking right, then left, then right again, she stepped out onto the crossing, and just as her foot hit the ground, an unseen bin truck lurched out of nowhere in front of her. Stewart knew, in that moment, as she glimpsed the driver’s horrified face, and heard the squealing grind of the brakes, that she was about to be hit.
And if anyone had told 23-year-old Clare Stewart that morning, as she lay trapped, both legs crushed beneath the 10-tonne truck’s left front wheel, that one day she would become a barrister, a wife, a mother and the first female Mayor of Noosa – and that she would do all of these things on her own two feet – she would not have begun to believe it.
Because all she knew, lying fully conscious for 37 excruciating minutes while the police rescue squad worked frantically using giant, inflated airbags to try to lift the truck off her, was that her life – the one before she stepped through that sliding door – was over.
“Hello,” Stewart, now 43, smiles broadly outside a cafe on Noosa’s Hastings Street, the famous strip buzzing with its heady, beachside glamour. Increasingly known around these parts as “Mayor Clare” since her March 28 win against incumbent Tony Wellington, the only hint of what it has taken her to get here is in the slight limp as she walks.
The 2020 Noosa Council mayoral election was a nailbiter, coming down to just 355 votes between Stewart and Wellington, and it is probably fair to say that Wellington might not have known just what – or who – he was up against.
Then relatively unknown in Noosa’s tight political circles, Noosa’s newest Mayor is married to Campbell Stewart, the director of a food import and distribution company, and has three children, William, nine, Joseph, seven, and Amelia, four.
A Noosa local for 10 years, Stewart decided to throw her hat in the ring after “sounding out” family and friends, including former pollie Bruce Davidson.
Known as “Davo”, Davidson, a long-time Noosa local, was a Liberal member of the Queensland parliament for nine years, serving as Tourism Minister in the Rob Borbidge government.
He was also the original “Davo” in Davo’s Bait and Tackle, an angler’s institution still operating after 35 years in Noosaville. Davidson, Stewart says, was “instrumental” in her campaign strategy, with Stewart understanding that to stand a chance against the well known Wellington, who was running on a platform of “safe hands”, she had to “get out there and let people see who I am.”
To that end, Stewart hit the road, pounding the pavements in the 870sq km shire encompassing Kin Kin and Boreen Point in the north, sweeping through Noosa and Sunshine Beach to Peregian Beach in the south.
“I decided I had to walk everywhere, through all the communities, and just meet people and say: “I’m Clare, and this is why I’d like to be your Mayor. I hit 30 coffee shops in 30 days, visiting a different coffee shop for those 30 days, and just having a chat.”
The results were pleasing – Stewart says that even if she hadn’t won, she made many new friends as she set out from her Noosaville campaign headquarters – but the cost was high.
Beneath her smart trouser suits, “You will never, ever see me in shorts,” her heavily scarred legs and fused ankles were burning with searing pain after being on her feet for hours.
“It was probably too much,” Stewart muses.
“I remember (husband) Cam saying to me, “Clare, you need to survive this campaign”, but I just really, really wanted to keep going.
“My legs were incredibly sore and swollen, but I wanted to be able to say on election day, whatever the result, that I had thrown absolutely everything I had at it, both mentally and physically, that I had given it my absolute all.”
And what her opponent Wellington might not have known, is that once Stewart decides to give something her all, nothing, not even a 10-tonne garbage truck, can stop her.
Stewart has two ankles that don’t move at all,her right knee cannot bend, the other one can barely move, her legs are extremely prone to infection and cellulitis, and their appearance, she says, “is not really like legs at all”.
Beneath her signature long trousers, Stewart says her limbs are heavily disfigured and twisted, the end products of 37 separate operations to save them – one involving using most of her back’s left lateral muscle to cover her left leg, nothing left of it after the accident, except bone.
“Rightly or wrongly I don’t feel comfortable showing my legs at all,” Stewart says.
“They are a reminder of all those surgeries on them”, including ongoing procedures to protect and cover the circumferential degloving (where all or most of the skin and tissue is gone) of both legs from her knees to her ankles.
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The first operation, performed soon after her arrival in Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital after the accident, was a 13-hour marathon, her leg injuries so horrific the head surgeon would comment that Stewart: “Looked like someone you would normally find in the anatomical dissecting room of a morgue.”
Following that first operation, Stewart was put in an induced coma, waking up, days later, to her parents Bill and Noelene Sultmann by her bedside, and one question on her lips. “Do I still have legs?”, Stewart remembers asking her parents, who had travelled from Toowoomba in Queensland to be by their daughter’s side.
Yes, they told her – but it would be a marathon effort to keep them.
The next six months in hospital were a daily blur of operations, skin grafting, wound washing, dressing and re-dressing six times a day, and relentless pain, while a team of about 30 staff worked with the young woman to support both her physical and mental health.
“There were occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, nurses, changing my dressings and my bed linen constantly, rolling me out of bed, working with me on my upper body strength, helping me cope after surgeries, treating all the infections in my skin grafts,” Stewart remembers.
“There really aren’t any words to describe how hard they worked for me. There were 20 to 30 people in my room every day, fighting alongside me to save my legs and my sanity.”
And by her hospital bedside always, her mother Noelene, who had quit her then job as a teacher in Toowoomba to move into her daughter’s Bondi flat so she could make the daily trek to St Vincent’s.
“She’d catch the Bondi Beach 389 bus,” Stewart smiles. “She got to know my neighbourhood really well, the local cafe staff knew her as “Noelene from Queensland”.
For Stewart, the days, although hard, went quickly – the nights, however, were another story. “Oh, they were long,” Stewart remembers.
“My friends were amazing, they just came all the time, and I loved to see them, but when they walked out the door, back to their normal lives, I’d lie in bed at night, unable to move, not sleeping, and those were the times where I did think: “Oh my God, what’s happened to me?”
Tougher still, Stewart says, was when she was finally allowed out of the hospital on a home visit.
“I was in the wheelchair with legs like planks straight out in front of me, and when Mum and Dad wheeled me into my old apartment, all those months after I had left it the morning of my accident, I saw my old room, all my clothes, my alarm clock, all there, as if nothing had changed, when everything had.”
Like a still life from an old life frozen in time, Stewart saw that day what she once was.
A young, fit woman with killer legs – “I’m not going to lie, they were my best asset” – with the world at her now bruised and swollen feet.
So, how to get it back? How to claw – or crawl – your way back to who you once were? What to do when your dreams have been snatched from you? For Stewart, the answer was to find some new ones.
“I was finally discharged from hospital on February 26, 2001, and I did go back to work, and I was able to walk without crutches, wearing special built-up shoes and pressure stockings, but it was pretty difficult.
“One day I said to my Dad, ‘I just want to get back to my old life’, and he said, “Well, that’s probably not going to happen, so you’ll need to get a new one.”
Stewart smiles. “So, with the support of family and friends, I did.” Stewart decided to complete her Master of Laws at the University of Sydney, and was admitted as a lawyer in the Supreme Court in April, 2001. For the next two years, amid ongoing legal battles surrounding the accident, Stewart continued to undergo regular operations and physical therapy. She also decided to move back to her hometown.
“Once a Brissie girl, always a Brissie girl,” the former All Hallows’ student smiles.
“I realised that I needed to be with old friends and my family. At the time, lots of my friends were moving out, or coupling up, or buying their first home, and I was living at home in my old room with my parents,” she grins, “which was not exactly what I had imagined my future to be.”
But in 2006 one of those old friends introduced Stewart to Dave Conry, a business executive then launching a little-known organisation with three of his mates called Youngcare.
Now a well-known and highly successful not-for-profit organisation which provides residential and other support for young people with high care needs, back then, Stewart laughs, “It was just one phone, and one computer with a very small team working out of a small office.
“I couldn’t really work because I was still battling the ongoing legal case and still continuing surgeries, but I could work pro bono, so I took on the funding and legal aspects of Youngcare three days a week and it changed everything.”
Youngcare, Stewart says, gave her something else to think about “besides myself”.
“It just woke me up, seeing all these young people who had been living in nursing homes because there was nowhere else for them to live, and that so very easily could have been me”, she reflects.
“Working with the founders, four of the greatest human beings you will ever meet, and all the young people who were just striving to live independent lives woke me up to how lucky I had been.”
Stewart stayed with Youngcare – she is now a board member – until 2008, the same year her legal battles for damages finally came to a close. In the same year she was called to the bar, and became a barrister.
Through her work with Youngcare, Stewart would also meet her future husband, Cam, who she would marry in June, 2010, with the couple settling in Noosa, and Stewart maintaining her chambers in Maroochydore.
“Becoming a mother was just lovely,” Stewart smiles, “And when I see my kids growing up in this beautiful part of the world, I just feel blessed.”
So blessed in fact that Noosa’s first female Mayor says that, if asked, given the chance of going back to that chilly morning of August 18th, 2000, and not going for that run, she is not sure if she would take it.
“Gosh, that’s a hard one, because I look back on that 23-year-old girl and think if I told her what was going to happen to her, all the pain and sacrifices and the life changes, would she even believe it?” Stewart muses.
“Would she choose to do that in order to get to where she is today?”
Stewart shakes her head.
“I don’t know for certain, but what I do know is that I would hope she would be proud of herself.
“I would hope that she would know the value of, in amongst all that heartache and despair, resilience and of course, love.
“And I hope that she would be immensely grateful for all the arms that held her up when she fell.”
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