Email from the coroner

One day early in January 2025 two friends and I trailed along the clifftop at Airey’s Inlet, on the Victorian west coast, heading for the surf. When we reached the carpark above Sandy Gully Beach, an ambulance and a couple of police cars stood waiting. A small crowd had gathered at the top of the wooden stairs. From there we could see two paramedics leaning over a man who was lying by the water’s edge. The man wasn’t moving. I stared and stared, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. Was he alive? We couldn’t tell.

I told a stranger standing next to me that my father had drowned at a surf beach sixty years ago. Her eyes widened, then her gaze returned to the man lying below us. I wanted to stay. I wanted to leave. My friends and I left, found another beach for our dip, but the image of the prone figure stayed with me.

The next morning, I woke up still wondering. My friends had to drive back to town for a few days. I had to return to Sandy Gully Beach. There was a lone boogie board lying near where we’d seen the prone man, but no clues. The tide was out and as I swam safely in the gentle surf, I told myself he was probably okay.

Later that day, at the same beach, the tide was in and huge waves were exploding onto the shore. I swam out, trying to get beyond the breakers, but one crashed over my head, pushing me under for longer than I expected. A small mistake, a tightening in my lungs.

‘Get me out of here’, I told my legs. It took some effort, but they did. Back on dry land, I thought perhaps that man wasn’t okay.

The next day I drove further west along the coast, another old beach house, another group of friends. Reclining on the balcony, we watched as young lifesavers tried to corral the crowd, blowing their whistles, gesticulating towards the flags. I kept a close eye on the swimmers who’d made it out beyond the breakers.

Three days after I’d seen that ambulance waiting, I was checking my emails on the beach house balcony. There was an something in my inbox entitled ‘Coroner’s Report’. My brain skidded into confusion. The man on the beach?

Wrong man. The attached document was 60 years old and had come from the ‘Acting Deputy Registrar, Courts, Tribunals, and Service Delivery, Tweed Heads Court House’:

Glenthorne PRIOR - date of death 18/11/1964

My sister had been sleuthing on our behalf, trying to find out more about our father’s drowning. A month earlier she’d contacted the NSW Coroner’s Office, asking for information. She’d been told we might have to wait up two years for them find the relevant documents. My sister’s reply was polite, patient. She would wait. After all, we’d already waited 60 years. What was another two?

But now, just a few weeks later, here it was: Report of Death to Coroner. Type-written, on an actual typewriter. Small mistakes crossed out with xxx’s. Letters straying under the printed lines on the official document. Four pages long, including three eyewitness accounts. I wanted to read it. I wanted to not read it.

The opening page was economical.

SUBJECT: Death of Glenthorne PRIOR

Time, date and place of death: about 2 pm   18.11.64   Fingal beach

Questions were rendered as passively constructed statements.

By whom found: FG, Fingal

By whom reported to police: LG, Fingal.

By whom and when last seen alive: JF and LH

In the ensuing description of the day he disappeared, our father was named only as The Deceased.

‘… The Deceased came to Fingal in company with several men and women and their families… several of the party went into the surf for a swim… got into difficulties…’

– a small mistake, a momentary lapse –

‘… and The Deceased went to their assistance…’

- I picture a dead man walking like a zombie, arms out-stretched, his wife and three children watching him lurch towards the water –

‘…all members of the swimmers reached safety with the exception of JF and LH. The Deceased … got hold of them, but they were pulling each other under, so they drifted apart…’

– drifting zombie, but where is he going? -  

‘… H and F were rescued by by (sic) lifesavers including Cadet Lifesaver B P, aged 18 of Fingal…’

 - this was new information. Growing up, we had only ever been told that our father had swum out to save the two swimmers’ lives. Now BP suddenly entered our family story. But where was our drifting zombie father?  

‘… an extensive search of the sea was carried out by the lifesavers… on surf boards and surf boats, also an2Aeroplane searced the area, for the deseased (sic), but he could not be located…’

It wasn’t until eight days later, when our father’s body washed up on Fingal beach and was ‘removed to the morgue at Murwillumbah Hospital’, that his name was retrieved from the surf and restored to him. Except the typist mixed up the e and the l – Gelnthorne PRIOR - and had to type over them again, this time in the correct order. A small mistake. A momentary lapse.

The next three pages were harder to read. Vivid first-person accounts by BP the lifesaver, and by JF and LH, the struggling swimmers. The chronology was back to front – BP’s account came first, although he arrived later to the scene. The eighteen-year-old lifesaver was earnest, meticulous. He described seeing several people lying prone on the beach, a woman trying to give one of them ‘artificial respiration’. He swam out with a rope around his waist, to where H and F were still struggling to stay afloat in the huge surf. A lack of commas added urgency to his account.

‘I signalled to be pulled in but there was no response from the people on the beach… the rope became taut I could feel the pressure pulling me toward the beach but they were pulling too fast and pulling us both under… when a wave crashed I would lift the girl up and over it I was under the water a fair bit but I managed to get the girl up.’

Next, the two struggling swimmers described what happened in the moments before the lifesaver arrived. How Glen suddenly appeared in front of them and took hold of their hands with his big hands. The same hands that might have been holding my five-year-old sister’s hand just a few minutes earlier. Or cradling me, a three-month-old baby. Before he made that split-second decision to go into the water. Was it a mistake? A miscalculation?

L said ‘we realised we were pulling each other down we let go of each other and we drifted apart…. I looked back and saw Glen behind us down to the south… he was treading water and did not seem panicky… that is the last I saw of him.’ 

A wave of relief washes through me. I had always imagined panic. A sudden realisation he was trapped. Legs and arms thrashing as he struggled for buoyancy, for air, for life. But here he was, calmly treading water in the moments before he disappeared.

Glen was 29 years old. His father, our grandfather, lived to 102. This moment of heroism (this small mistake?) possibly robbed him of seven more decades of life. But he did not seem panicky.

(This column was first published in The Saturday Paper.)