By Tony Wright
“Kiss and go”, orders the sign at the Auburn South Primary School’s drop-off lane. “Stay with your car – 2 minute limit.”
It says too much today. No vehicles stop to deliver children.
A parent and child bring flowers to Auburn South Primary School alongside the “kiss and go” drop-off lane.Credit: Joe Armao
Not here, where overnight-erected steel mesh and a tarpaulin enclose a small section of the school playground where children sat only yesterday, idling away their afternoon recess at a garden table beneath a shade sail.
Before the unthinkable intruded.
Occasionally, parents hurry by on the footpath, clutching flowers. Clutching children, too – a father’s hand on a small shoulder, a mother’s and daughter’s arms entwined.
It is a day to hold children close.
The floral tributes grow outside South Auburn Primary.Credit: Joe Armao
Auburn South Primary is open, but its classrooms are quiet. There is no carefree shouting in the playground.
Many parents, it is clear, are holding their children at home.
The clanging of the school bell at the high school across the road, where VCE exams are under way and cannot be postponed, cuts through a stillness.
A small shrine of flowers grows by the school fence.Credit: Joe Armao
A small shrine of flowers builds in a nook by the primary school fence as school-time nears. Some who have come with offerings of roses or chrysanthemums have attached cards bearing that style of words composed by those who know words can only be inadequate, but who find themselves compelled to express something.
“We will hold your sadness gently between our palms and hold you up in warmth, love and care,” says one, from the administration team at Auburn High School.
“To the ASP community and the darling boy who passed into his next life,” begins another, unsigned.
And there it is. The unthinkable.
A loved boy, Jack Davey, aged 11, is dead. His schoolfriends – three girls and a boy – are in hospital.
We gather on Burgess Street opposite the covered wound in the school fence, speculating about how an SUV, its driver said by police to have been attempting a U-turn, had leapt the raised median strip – a divider of concrete and stone - before surging across the street and through the steel fence.
Speculation, however, serves no purpose and leads nowhere.
The driver, a woman aged 40 who, police say, had just picked up her own child, is captured within this tragedy, too, her life story changed abruptly and permanently. Arrested and released, she was admitted to hospital, presumably consumed by shock.
The school principal, Marcus Wicher, approaches the gathered media’s small forest of microphones and cameras, and in a soft voice thanks us for “being here and for your continued sensitivity in allowing our community the space to come to terms with what can only be described as a complete tragedy”.
What vast space, we wonder, must be required to enable any community – and more to the point, any family – to come to terms with this level of abrupt calamity?
“Kiss and go,” advises the sign across the street. But not today.
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