... a bus full of my Brisbane Girls' Grammar School classmates and a teacher and his wife, went over the edge of a cliff ... near christmas creek (? i may be remembering that wrong) ... two girls were killed and so were the teacher and his wife. quite a few injured.
it's funny how some dates just stick in your mind, eh?
i think perhaps it was the columbine high school 10th anniversary that triggered this remembrance in me, this time around. although it's fair to say that not too many april 21s go past without me remembering.
i remember getting a phone call from a classmate, telling me about the accident, and naming the dead, and walking out to tell my parents and just falling in a heap on the floor, crying.
there had been talk of me going on the trip the week before, but it had all been a bit last minute, and i'd opted out for lack of forethought. good thing.
i was 14, in year 10. i didn't know the two dead girls very well at all. our year was kind of split geographically in the school, and they were in the other group that we never really saw much of. oddly.
but the injured were sprinkled through our year and the ones above us.
there was a lot of pschological trauma. a lot of counselling. a lot of god-finding.
a very weird week of assemblies and hymn singing and hugging and conversations with the school counsellor and blah, blah, blah.
lots of good came out of it, although it sounds strange to say it. the school became much tighter, a lot of respect grew for judith hancock, the headmistress who started the same year i did, in 1977, and the school acquired an outdoor activities facility in the name of the dead teacher.
30 years ago. wow. where the fuck did that go?
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