How the worst nightmare for a group of Macedon Ranges parents became a beacon of hope called Live4Life
When a group of young people took their own lives in a suicide cluster in the Macedon Ranges, local parents vowed to give kids the language to cope with the once-taboo subject of mental health.
Andrew Rule
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In more than 40 years of reporting on people suffering the worst days of their lives, the most haunting thing you see is the anguish of losing a child.
Sometimes it’s crime that causes such a loss but that is only sometimes true. Although many crimes end in tragedy, not every tragedy is a crime.
As police and other first responders know only too well, the worst aspect of working with sirens and lights is not just the bodies and blood, it’s witnessing the loss suffered by parents of the dead, no matter who they are.
All parents are equal, facing that cruellest of all grief. Some are overwhelmed by it and it destroys them.
Others somehow find the strength to go on. Of these, the strongest use their loss as a reason to help others. They want to show their loved one’s death is not a waste.
Noelene and Marcus Ward are like that. They want the loss of their son to mean something.
Some families get warning signs but the Wards didn’t. Lightning struck from a cloudless sky.
It was the AFL Grand Final weekend, 2008. Hawthorn was playing Geelong, 100,012 fans had crammed the MCG and millions more were watching it on screens around the land.
The Wards were visiting friends in Wangaratta and watched Hawthorn’s win on television with their hosts.
Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Noelene and Marcus’s son, Liam, was at a Grand Final barbecue with university friends.
At 20, Liam was studying second year biomedicine at Melbourne University and going extra well. He was tall and friendly, a handy basketballer with the Gisborne Bulldogs team. He loved music and had broad tastes, from easy listening to punk rock. He would sneak earphones on in class and burn CDs for his mates.
On that Grand Final day, Liam and his friends drank a few beers during and after the game but there was nothing unusual. No arguments, no scenes, no rebuffs.
When Liam left the gathering to catch the train home to Macedon, he seemed the same pleasant, measured young man as always. If he was nursing a bruised or broken heart, there was no sign.
The family home in the township nestling under the range was the only one Liam and his younger sister Lynsey had ever known. The one their parents had bought “before children” when they’d moved there from suburban Melbourne in 1985 to teach at local schools.
By the time Liam got home from the railway station, it was getting late. He got to the house just as Lynsey, 18, was ready to go to a party around 10pm. So far, so normal.
There seemed nothing unusual about Liam’s demeanour then or earlier in the day. It was just another Saturday night — until it wasn’t.
When Lynsey got home after 3am, she found her brother’s body. He had taken his life. For reasons known only to himself, not over anything that his family or friends could divine then, or later, no matter how hard or how often they looked back for any clues.
What shocked them then, and still does, is that the gentle and kind-hearted boy who loved his sister so much would end his life at a time and place that made it inevitable she would be the one to find him. Such is the power of the blind impulse that drives a suicide.
When the telephone woke Noelene and Marcus about 3.30am, they knew it must be bad news. On that terrible drive home through the darkness, dawn broke on the first day of the rest of their lives.
Elsewhere in the Macedon Ranges, another family had just been brushed by the angel of death: Late the previous Thursday night, a teenage boy attempted to take his own life and almost succeeded.
A local policeman had lain on the floor with the badly injured 15-year-old, willing him to live. After the ambulance came and went and the policeman went home, he said later, he’d got into bed with his own sons and hugged them as if their lives depended on it. Which perhaps they did.
But the terrible weekend wasn’t over. Within hours of Liam Ward’s death, police went to a house in Tylden, outside Kyneton, where a 19-year-old had also died by his own hand.
At first, the police were the only ones who knew about that suicide cluster. It wasn’t until a new youth worker in the district began talking to them about it the following week that something happened: Concerned people turned shock and grief into action.
The new face was Pauline Neil and she had recently moved into a farmlet near Hanging Rock with her husband and three sons. She had come from working with young people in Dandenong and thought she’d seen it all but soon realised she hadn’t.
This slice of countryside an hour from the suburbs looked peaceful and beautiful but its youth suicide rate was much higher than in the metropolitan area.
Pauline Neil talked to police, then to Macedon Ranges Shire Council, then to local school principals, then to anyone who would listen. Many locals did. Among them were the Wards, who resolved to do anything they could to save other families from suffering the same loss they had.
Looking back on that time, Pauline Neil says she was “personally invested” given that the oldest of her own three sons was just starting secondary school. Youth suicide wasn’t an abstract problem. It was close to home.
The answer was the mental health education program that would later be called Live4Life. Creating it was too big a job for one person. Neil says it would not have happened without Sarah Hardy, a former nurse who joined her in 2009 and has been a driving force ever since.
By 2010 Neil and Hardy had worked with the council, police and school principals to build the program. They listened to people locally while they researched the subject globally.
They came up with what some call first aid for mental health problems. The idea is to make more people alert to early signs of lurking depression in themselves and in others — and to speak up and do something about it.
A witness to the work of those two remarkable women is Bernard Galbally, who had moved to Woodend with his wife and sons around the same time as the Neil family. Galbally worked in the music industry but, as a longtime sports supporter, had got involved in local football and netball clubs.
Like Neil, Galbally was shocked by the local suicide rate. He recalls hearing about more than 20 suicides in the shire in less than two years, a virtual epidemic. His interest eventually led him to join the board of Live4Life in 2017 and then to become its CEO as it has expanded across Victoria.
Live4Life emphasises the three things that parents, family members, teachers and friends should watch for.
The first is a sense of isolation, which can arise anywhere from an empty landscape to a crowded schoolroom.
The second is “burden” — a sense of being weighed down with fears, even if other people might see such fears as irrational or irrelevant.
The third is “capability”: familiarity or fascination with a particular method of ending a life.
Live4Life gives young people and those around them the language to cope with a once-taboo subject and the confidence to step up.
No one can be sure how many lives the program has saved since that 2008 Grand Final weekend when two young men took their lives and a third tried to. It’s hard to prove what hasn’t happened, only what has.
What has happened is that the Macedon Ranges suicide rate has dropped steadily. More proof of the program’s effect is that since 2016, it has spread to 13 shires across Victoria, from Portland in the west to East Gippsland. It is also in northeast Tasmania.
Along the way, Live4Life has trained more than 24,000 young people and almost 3000 adults in mental health education, and 1200 young people have volunteered to work with peers to save lives. Councils, police and schools are involved, among some 150 organisations who take part.
The benefits are clear. When a friend pointed out Live4Life to Hamish Blake, the radio and television host (and parent), he simply said, “I’m in”.
Blake fronts a Live4Life video clip to “give stigma the flick”, aimed at encouraging worried young people to reach out instead of withdrawing or faking normality, holding up a mask to the world.
Back at Macedon, where something good was born from something terrible, Noelene and Marcus Ward are left to wonder what life would have been like if their son hadn’t been struck down by something no-one saw coming.
They have their daughter and granddaughter nearby and when not working hard in their garden, they are helping other members of what they call “Mr Spag”, the local Macedon Ranges Suicide Prevention Action Group.
They like to talk about their son. If that means tears and a lump in the throat, so be it.
They stay in touch with Liam’s school friends and basketball teammates. One of them is Leigh Thornton. These days, Leigh is an engineering manager in a manufacturing plant, a father of two, a homeowner.
But he often thinks about his school friend and basketball mate, the one who talked to him about music and bands.
When Leigh works at home in his shed, he pulls out a disc that Liam gave him and plays it. It still has its original hand-scrawled title: “Liam Mystery CD.”
For Liam’s family, his death is still the mystery it was on that first unspeakable Sunday. It’s the same for all the other parents marooned with a grief that doesn’t fade.
“We’re an exclusive club that no one wants to be in,” says Noelene Ward.
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