Black Saturday mum Carol Matthews up for local hero award
EVERY day is still painful for Carol Matthews, who lost her son on Black Saturday. Her inspirational advocacy and charity work for fire victims have now earned her a local hero award.
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EVERY day is still painful for Carol Matthews, who lost her son on Black Saturday. Her inspirational advocacy and charity work for fire victims have now earned her a local hero award.
The Brunswick resident lost her 22-year-old son Sam when fire engulfed their family home in St Andrews on Black Saturday in 2009.
Ms Matthews was on the phone to Sam when he noticed a tree had caught fire on the property.
“He said ‘Oh my god, a tree is on fire’ and I told him he knew what to do to put the fire out but then he said ‘Oh god there is fire all around me’,” she said.
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“The next thing I heard was this loud popping. It was all of the windows breaking.”
The last words she spoke to her son was to tell him she was hanging up and calling triple-0.
Following his death, involvement in a class-action lawsuit and an attempt to build a program to prepare people for the horrors of bushfires has seen Ms Matthews being named Victoria’s 2019 Local Hero of the Year.
The honour means she is the state nominee for the Local Hero Award at the Australian of the Year Awards.
Ms Matthews said her activism began with a fight with the coroner to release the body of her son after the fire.
She then went onto lead the lawsuit against the electricity distributor that caused the fire, resulting in $500 million in compensation for families who lost loved ones.
As the lead, she was liable for more than $10 million in legal fees if the 16 month trial failed, but she was determined to see it through.
“That money has really helped people with their physical and mental injuries,” she said.
Ms Matthews said the pain of losing her son remained at the front of her mind every day.
“It’s still really, really hard,” she said. “When you lose a child you never get over it because I lost the potential of what he would become.”
Ms Matthews, a former teacher of deaf children, has now turned her attention to prevention, starting a project to transform a bus into a sensory experience of a fire to teach people how to react under pressure.
She said she was still seeking funding to complete it.
Governor of Victoria Linda Dessau praised the winners for their “creativity and kindness.”
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