Tim and Gina Connolly of Newhaven Funerals, Gold Coast, on horror reality of road deaths
Amid rising road deaths, a veteran Gold Coast funeral director has lifted the lid on the grim reality of what happens when a young person is killed.
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They call it “the ripples”.
Tim Connolly is the owner of Newhaven Funerals. For decades, his team has attended the scenes of fatal accidents across the Gold Coast. He says they are the “last responders”.
“It’s not the responsibility of the police, the fireys or the ambulance crews to move somebody that has passed,” he says.
“It’s us that actually has to go and attend that and collect the pieces, to be completely blunt, from the side of the road and package them together and take them off to the morgue.”
The victims are sometimes drivers, sometimes passengers, sometimes pedestrians. They come from all walks of life.
And sometimes they are children.
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Gina Connolly, Tim’s wife, was a teacher at schools across the northern Gold Coast for 12 years.
What she saw in the classrooms left her deeply disturbed.
“There’s a lack of accountability,” she says.
“The way we have to speak to our children now, as students, is they can’t ever do anything wrong. You talk to them in a different way, it’s all, ‘is that the best choice?’
“But they can never be wrong, they can never be badly behaved.
“Consequences are not the same as they used to be when we were in school and so we’re finding there’s a lot of really high level behaviours going on in schools.
“I’d be coming home with desks having been thrown at me and, you know, in quite a state a lot of the time.
“I’ve got a concern as an ex teacher that we’re not saying to our young people that you’ve got to own your choice and own the outcome.”
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Tim and Gina are accustomed to dealing with grief. Newhaven Funerals, from its base in Staplyton, has been serving the Gold Coast since 1979.
Providing comfort to families is in their DNA.
But there is one thing they cannot get used to, that plays constantly on their minds. The deaths that did not need to happen. The deaths of young people as a result of poor choices on our roads.
“There’s nothing worse than presenting a child to a parent who’s died as a result of something that could have been avoided,” Tim says.
“You couldn’t think of anything worse, could you, than your child being involved in an accident that could have been prevented.
“It’s like tearing the carpet out from underneath you.
“Not just for losing that child, but for the surrounding family and the community because at school age, when kids are just out of school and having accidents, there’s the whole school that ripples off that accident, that flow the whole way through the school as well.
“You’ll be at a funeral ceremony here where the two or three hundred schoolkids are here at the funeral, but they don’t actually grasp the reality that that’s final, that person is never coming back, they’re never going to grow up and have a job and a family and take that legacy on. They’re gone.
“That’s the reality that kids just can’t grasp, that it’s the end, that it’s the real end.”
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In December 2012, 18-year-old Jordan Hayes-McGuinness made a bad choice.
He decided to drive home to the Gold Coast from a party in Brisbane, where he had been drinking and smoking marijuana.
Jordan crashed his car at speed into the back of a vehicle that was broken down on the side of the M1 near Coomera. Jordan and four other young people lost their lives.
In the years since Jordan’s parents, Melissa and Peter McGuinness, have founded the You Choose program, which goes into schools to warn students how their choices can have consequences.
Tim and Gina Connolly have now joined them.
“Since I’ve finished teaching full time, I’ve started studying grief and loss,” says Gina.
“The way that grief plays out is different when something could have been prevented.
“Grief’s got so many elements to it. One of those is anger. That plays out so much with regards to preventable death. You try to grieve the loss of the person that you loved but you’re also angry with them as well for the choices that they made, and it makes it complicated, it makes grief very complicated.
“Jordan was a good kid. We’ve got good kids but they make bad choices, and in that moment their whole lives and other people’s lives change.”
Gina says that when You Choose goes into schools, and Melissa tells her story, students are stunned into silence. Many break down crying.
“It is the most astounding reaction,” she says. “I’ve been to hundreds of assemblies, I’ve never been to an assembly where 500 students – this was at Pimpama State Secondary College – they’ve sat there for an hour and a half in silence, crying.
“It hits them on a different level.”
* * * * * * *
You Choose presentations don’t just move teenagers to tears. Adults often react the same way.
Residents in the northern Gold Coast are being invited to find out for themselves at a free information session being held by Melissa McGuinness at Gainsborough State School on December 8.
Tim and Gina, horrified by statistics showing ever more fatalities on our roads, say our culture has to change.
“A throwaway comment that a lot of parents make is, ‘ah well, we all did it in our day’,” Gina says.
“We got in a car with someone that was speeding or drinking, we went to a party and really we didn’t think about it and we got in a car, and we knew that they’d been drinking.
“This sort of language that we have around our kids that we say, ah we all did it and that sort of thing.
“It’s quite toxic in a way. Making it OK that we all did it, or we all used to do it, or we’ve all done it at some point in our lives, is really sort of putting the message out there that we can all get away with one mistake. But we don’t know when that mistake is going to turn into a fatality.”
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Newhaven Funerals no longer attend the scene of fatal accidents on the Gold Coast. They gave the contract up in April. It had become too much.
“We were finding it difficult to find staff to continue on. We were going through a lot of people,” Tim says.
“We are always talking to our own people about how they are managing their own grief and how it’s affecting them personally and you know, giving them the tools to actually understand what it is.
“Long term, funeral people manage that very well, but some don’t and that’s where we got to with the contract. It was just very difficult to staff.”
But as with so many people on the Gold Coast, the trauma of road accidents continues to touch them.
Their children attend Rivermount College in Yatala, where Julia May was a teacher’s aide.
Ms May died in a horror accident at Cedar Creek this week. Her husband and two children were seriously injured.
Gina, a teacher herself, knew Ms May for 12 years.
“It was such a shock,” she says.
* * * * * * * * * *
Gina is keen to stress we do not yet know what caused the Cedar Creek tragedy.
But both she and Tim are sure of one thing – that the You Choose program can help young people avoid being victims of road accidents.
“It’s about changing that culture, shifting to let kids be brave enough to stand up and be different,” he says.
“To be bold enough and brave enough to make the choices that other young people haven’t been brave enough to make.
“... I’d rather be doing funerals for people who have lived a long life than somebody who hasn’t had a life at all like Melissa’s son.”
They want young people to know that their choices have consequences, not just for them, but for their families, their schools, the whole community.
After decades as a funeral director, Tim has a term for it.
“I call that the ripples.”
To reserve your seat at the You Choose Coomera Electorate Community Evening, visit www.trybooking.com/events/landing/828449
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