Roozi Araghi’s force of love

They lost their son in the Dreamworld tragedy. Now they’re finding solace in the stories told by those whose lives he touched.

TWAM-20170225 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 25 FEB 2017 Roozi Araghi with Luke Dorsett, Dreamworld casualty Pic: supplied

He apologises for not being able to believe in God right now. He apologises for not being able to entertain romantic notions of fate and things happening for reasons beyond our understanding because if it was fate that brought his son, Roozi Araghi, together with his true love of 10 years, Luke Dorsett, then maybe it was fate that placed them on that six-person raft on ­Dreamworld’s Thunder River Rapids ride. But he knows there could be no mystical force deranged enough to construct the tragic series of events on Queensland’s Gold Coast that took the lives of Roozi, Luke, Kate Goodchild and Cindy Low a little after 2pm on October 25.

Behrooz Araghi has been conducting a kind of life investigation these past few months, a subtle and quiet quest to learn more about what his son Roozi meant to those who came into his spectacular orbit. God and fate and the future bring him ­little comfort but he finds solace in the past, in the things Roozi did with the time he had. People have been coming to his house with flowers and home-cooked meals, friends of Roozi’s from 10 years ago, people who knew Roozi 20 or 30 years ago, to tell stories of how they loved him.

“I am personally flabbergasted,” Behrooz says softly; his wife, Gay, is sitting beside him in their home in Cherrybrook, northwest Sydney, where Roozi was raised. “He had an effect on people which was unbelievable. I mean, I never realised. I just looked at Roozi as my kid. It’s something we were extremely surprised about, just how much friends and colleagues thought about him.”

Not so long ago Behrooz opened his front door to find Roozi’s ballet teacher from three decades ago standing in his doorway with a ­bouquet of flowers. “She came in and she started telling us ­stories we hadn’t heard before,” he says. “One of the things she mentioned was when Roozi was in a ­ballet class of maybe 20 girls and I think he was the only boy and one day the kids were talking about the Tooth Fairy and how much money the Tooth Fairy had left them. One child said, ‘One dollar’. Another said, ‘Five dollars’. And Roozi turns to the ballet teacher and says, ‘How much did the Tooth Fairy leave for you when you were a kid?’ ‘They didn’t leave us much’, she said. And Roozi comes up to her and says, ‘Inflation is rife in Tooth Fairy Land’.

“She was surprised for a kid that age to talk about inflation and that story stuck in her mind. She’s carried that story for 30 years to come and tell me that.”

Behrooz pauses to swallow his tears. He picked up his mobile phone that day with the ballet teacher and pressed the voice record button. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you please repeat that story?” Because he wanted to keep that story forever. “And this is what we’ve got from friends, young people, old people, people who knew him only a short time,” he says.

Stories. Behrooz realised there was no way to process the events of October 25 beyond listening to the stories told by people who knew his son. And soon he had heard enough stories to know for certain that it wasn’t fate or God that brought Roozi Araghi and his partner Luke Dorsett to Dreamworld that day. It was plain old true love.

Sam Walker is a Brisbane public relations ­consultant and social worker who keeps a photograph of Roozi beside his work computer. He’s 38, the same age Roozi was when he died. Sam spent a day at Dreamworld with his friend just three days before he died. “It was the most ­extraordinary set of circumstances,” Sam says. “Roozi had bought a season pass to Dreamworld.” Roozi was up from Canberra, holidaying in Broadbeach on the Gold Coast with Luke. With them were Luke’s younger sister Kate Goodchild, 32; Kate’s partner David Turner, and their daughters, 12-year-old Ebony and eight-month-old Evie; and Luke and Kate’s mother, Kim Dorsett.

“We hung out, jumped around on rides and stuff, and talked about everything and everyone and I drove him back to Broadbeach and I’ll never forget that extraordinary drive,” Sam says. “We really talked about where we were at in life. For both of us, our 20-year high school reunions were coming up and he was so looking forward to his because he was so happy. He was with Luke, who he was in love with. They’d bought a place in ­Canberra. He was doing well at work; he was ­killing it. He was so deeply, deeply happy.”

They organised to have lunch again in the coming days, after Roozi enjoyed a long-planned return trip to Dreamworld, this time with Luke’s family. On the night of October 25, Sam heard a news report saying four people had died on Dreamworld’s Thunder River Rapids, a 30-year-old ride that sent adults and children down man-made whitewater rapids on six-seater circular rafts.

“I woke up in the morning and there was a ­Facebook post from a mutual friend of ours and she said, ‘Just a quick warning to anyone, for God’s sake, don’t turn on the news’,” Sam says. “‘Two of those people who have died are Roozi and Luke’.”

In that groggy, fever-dream week, Sam pieced together the details of the terrible accident. “And it was all tinged with this surreal aspect of just ­[having been] with him at Dreamworld.”

Kate Goodchild’s partner, David Turner, waited by the ride’s exit, holding young Evie, who didn’t meet the ride’s two-year-old age requirement. Kate and Ebony and Luke and Roozi filled four seats of the raft and the two remaining seats were filled by others who’d waited patiently in line, 42-year-old Cindy Low and her 10-year-old son Kieran. After mere minutes of twisting and turning and splashing down the man-made river, the group of six and their raft were hauled onto a conveyor belt near the passenger unloading area. But the empty raft ahead of them was jammed and stationary on the conveyor belt. Roozi and Luke’s raft collided with it and the moving raft, it is believed, then flipped backwards, dropping the group of six onto the conveyor belt and into the surrounding water.

Sydney art dealer Sandra Brookfield was sitting in her home office that afternoon when her lifelong best friend, Luke and Kate’s mum Kim Dorsett, called from her Gold Coast accommodation. “Sand, the kids are dead,” she said. “They drowned.” And that was the only way a mother could summarise the brutal detail in her children’s fate. Years from now, long after the harrowing and ongoing legal proceedings and the microscopically detailed inquests into how her beloved children died, Kim Dorsett will likely summarise it all the same way. They drowned.

Explaining how it was that the children aboard that raft — 12-year-old Ebony Goodchild and 10-year-old Kieran Low — managed to survive, Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Brian Codd drew on forces greater than his understanding. “Maybe through the providence of God,” he said. “From what I’ve seen, it’s almost a miracle that anybody came out of that.”

Sam Dastyari, the NSW Labor Senator, searches for a quote on his computer from ­the late Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “Here it is,” he says. “‘A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.’” He dwells on this for a moment. “Roozi was the first of that post-Revolution cohort of young Iranian migrants who came to Australia to be buried here,” he says. “He felt like a first for our generation.

“Roozi’s father and my uncle, Kamal, came out from Iran together after the Revolution. They were business partners. They had an accounting business together back in Iran. When the Islamic regime took over in Iran, because they had done public service work under the Shah, they faced quite a bit of persecution. They fled after the ­Revolution and they came to Australia, largely because Australia was taking migrants at that time. But, just like many migrants, when they got here it was very difficult for them to get jobs in the accounting field. They ended up getting involved in ­bookstores together. They owned a handful of Angus & Robertson bookstores across Sydney and we all used to work in these bookstores when we were kids. That’s where Roozi used to work.”

“This is the guy who came from a very rich ­family, went to Sydney University, very hard left,” Sam Walker says of Roozi. “And when I knew him in student politics he ran on a ticket called ‘Daddy Bought Me a Pony to Ride in the Revolution!’ He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Barbie. He loved pop.” A Madonna fan so rabid that the ­Material Girl was played before, during and after his crowded memorial service.

Luke Dorsett possessed the same offbeat sense of humour and the same brand of fierce egalitarianism. They were both public servants in ­Canberra, Luke for the Department of Human Services, Roozi for the Australian Electoral ­Commission and, most recently, in the communications team at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They were champions of diversity, gay rights and justice. Behrooz Araghi knew Roozi and Luke were well liked in Canberra’s gay community but he never knew what those two men really meant to that community until they died; until he started reading letters from gay men whose lives were changed by their compassion and guidance; until roughly 50 members of that ­Canberra community stood up at an AIDS Action Council Fair Day, four days after they died, and sang a soaring rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone, in thanks for what they did in the time they had.

“Look, one thing that was so remarkable about his life was that Roozi led the way for a whole lot of young gay Iranians from migrant families in what had been a fairly conservative community in ­Sydney,” says Dastyari. “There is quite a prominent young gay Iranian migrant community in Sydney and Roozi really paved the way for them.

“In the mid-90s, when Roozi came out, his father, Behrooz, and mother, Aunty Gay, couldn’t have handled the situation better or more tolerantly. And that really became the example set for how the community could deal with issues like sexuality. As tolerant as this community was ­trying to be, in the mid-’90s, his coming out was really kind of pioneering. His contribution to that can’t be understated.”

Behrooz remembers, clear as day, the moment he approached his then teenage son (the youngest of three) with a ­delicate question about his sexuality. “I wasn’t aware,” he says. “He was 14 or something when I finally picked it up. I was always sorry that I didn’t pick it up four, five years before then. I guess fathers are always the last people to know and maybe that’s the heaviest burden on their shoulders. I just had a vague idea, I don’t know why, that he might be gay, and I asked him.”

“Are you straight?” was how he put it.

“No,” Roozi said promptly. “Why?”

“No reason,” said Behrooz.

And that was that. “My other boys had double beds so a couple of weeks later I said, ‘OK, Roozi, you need a double bed as well’,” he recalls. “And I got him a double bed.”

“The hard stuff,” Sam Walker calls it. The sink or swim moments of acceptance that almost all gay men face in a lifetime. “It was extraordinary what his dad did.”

“The Persian migrant community had a real tendency to be conservative on these issues,” ­Dastyari says, “but because Roozi was so proud of who he was and was so open and he never hid who he was or his ­sexuality, he forced the community to confront it.”

“Because he had a very easy coming out he was able to help people who had difficulties coming out,” Behrooz says. “I know for a fact he stopped at least two people from committing suicide.” Friends suggest one could add eight, nine, 10 more lives saved to get a clearer picture of Roozi’s ­contribution to his community.

Patricia Karvelas needs her best friends back. The Radio National and Sky News presenter, a mum to two girls aged seven and five, met Roozi when she was 19, back in her student politics days. Roozi and Luke stayed at her house over ­Christmas nearly every year for the past decade. She walks into her daughters’ bedroom today and she still sees her best friends, “the uncles biology cannot deliver”. “Pretty much their entire bedroom is filled with stuff from these guys,” Karvelas says. “They were real uncles to my girls.”

“The gay uncle role is a very special thing,” says Sam Walker. “It’s a bond with your family and these kids that is unique. I can’t tell you how many nieces and nephews of gay men are going to be extraordinarily wealthy in about 40 years when they inherit all of our money. It’s often the only children you have in your life so it’s a bit deeper than just being another uncle.”

“They always said their dream was to take my girls to the Gold Coast theme parks,” Karvelas says. “They loved theme parks. I never liked them and I won’t set foot in one again. But the reason they were there that day was their commitment to Ebony in particular. They were committed to all our kids, but to Ebony, Luke was a second father. She’s now suffered a double hit: losing her mother and an uncle who was like a third parent.”

She pauses a moment to collect her thoughts. “And the fact she had to watch them die …” She trails off. She can’t finish that sentence. And not for the first time today, she needs her best friends back.

It’s late January and Roozi Araghi’s words are still rattling in Kim Dorsett’s head: “You do whatever you think is best, Kim.” Kim’s best friend, ­Sandra Brookfield, has spent the past three months raising $65,000 for Kim’s grandchildren, Ebony and Evie, through a MyCause online campaign. Kim’s been agonising over how to best use those funds. “She understands the funds will run out,” Sandra says. “The things that are happening legally around this will take years and years and years. She’s helped pay off credit cards. Money was spent on Roozi and Luke’s home so it could be sold in coming months. She bought new summer clothes for baby Evie. Ebony will be a teenager soon. She’s been buying school shoes, school uniforms, paying school fees and these are things that were discussed on the holiday. Kate said to Kim: ‘When we get back, Mum, I’ve got to look at daycare for Evie’, so Evie’s now booked into daycare.”

And when she’s confused, when she’s lost over what to do next, Kim listens to Roozi. “She says, ‘I just know what Roozi would be saying to me. He’d say, ‘Kim, if you think that’s right, you do it’.” Kim loved Roozi like a son.

“She spent Christmas Day only at the grave site,” Sandra says. “She had no other contact with ­family. She just went and sat with the three most important people that she’d lost. Kate, Luke and Roozi. It was heart-wrenching. No Christmas presents. She didn’t want any. She didn’t send out anything. Her words to me were, ‘It’s not a ­celebration. I just want to spend Christmas with my kids’. And she did. She cooked herself a little baked meal and she took it and she sat there in the morning.

“Sometimes she doesn’t even know if she can keep going,” Sandra adds. “Some people have said, ‘She has to be the adult in this situation’, but she can’t get through to some people, you know; what does being an adult matter? She’s lost her daughter and her son.”

In Cherrybrook, Behrooz and Gay Araghi are preparing for a trip to Canberra. They’re accepting the ABS’s top award on Roozi’s behalf, for what Deputy Australian Statistician Jonathan Palmer calls his “tremendous contribution” and the ­“legacy” he left for his colleagues, the ­people so moved by the guy’s loss they cry over the phone when you mention his name.

“We didn’t know,” Behrooz says. “We didn’t know he did all these things.” He pauses for a long moment. “They are giving him their highest award. That says something.” And all these things, all these stories combined, say something bigger. He knows the despair Kim Dorsett speaks of. “We lost one,” he says. “[Kim] lost two.

“Having said all these things, it doesn’t make my son come back,” he adds. “But maybe sometimes it’s good to have something to cling onto.”

He won’t cling onto God or romantic notions of fate and things happening for reasons beyond our understanding. He won’t cling to hatred or rage or despair. He’ll cling to Roozi.