Pippa Devine rescues brother Ned from drowning in Langwarrin dam
PIPPA and Ned Devine are not only siblings, but also best mates. And in saving Ned from drowning, Pippa proved she would do anything for her little brother. Here’s how she rescued him.
South East
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WHEN her four-year-old brother and best mate Ned was floundering in the water after falling into a dam, young Pippa Devine didn’t even think before she leapt to his aid.
It was a soggy Sunday in September, and the inseparable pair were with their mum, dad and seven-year-old brother Max at a friends’ home in Maryknoll.
The kids were playing at the edge of a dam, 60 metres from the house, with their parents watching.
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Throwing rocks and sticks into the water for their friends’ dogs to fetch, Pippa and Ned were having a ball.
But things turned sour when Ned slipped and fell off a jetty into the dam.
“I threw a stick and then I fell in,” Ned recalls.
His feet sunk into thick mud at the bottom of the dam and he gasped for breath as his head dipped in and out of the water.
Seeing what was unfolding, Pippa and Ned’s parents, Kendra and Stewart, jumped to their feet and began running toward the water’s edge.
But by the time they got there, Pippa had already pulled her brother to safety.
“I felt his feet sinking in,” Pippa says of the struggle to save Ned.
But the six-year-old stresses she is easily able to lift her younger brother off the ground and so the experience wasn’t as difficult as it may sound.
“I can even put him on my shoulders,” Pippa says with pride.
While Ned’s mishap was an accident, he still felt remorseful.
“We had to hop straight into the shower and then [Ned] said sorry to me,” Pippa says.
When her parents asked her what was running through her head when she rescued Ned, Pippa simply replied, ‘I had to help my brother’.
An emotional Kendra says the “enormity” of what her daughter did only hit her a day later.
“[Pippa’s] very empathetic. She’s a good soul,” Kendra says.
“I whinge and moan sometimes about swimming lessons — but I won’t do that again.”
Kendra says the fact her and Stewart’s three children are so close in age means they’re a tight-knit group.
Pippa and Ned, she says, do everything together.
Kendra thinks this is why Pippa didn’t hesitate when she knew Ned was in trouble.
“They couldn’t cope without each other,” the proud mother says.
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