there by the grace of god go i

by dorothy henderson, western australia-based media stringer

In November 1997, I was working as a journalist for The Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper as its Esperance reporter. As a daily publication, the paper provided scope for storytelling. During this time one story I covered haunted me long after the words I wrote faded from my memory and the paper they were printed on has yellowed and crumbled with age.

An A4 sized “news, scraps and cuttings” file contains some of the stories written after a family not far west of where we now live lost their 13-year-old daughter in an accident on their farm.

She had been playing with her brother. Despite the warnings and cautions aimed at instilling in her a regard for the dangers on the farm, the two children had climbed into a grain silo. Both were trapped in the grain; the young girl died, but her brother was saved.

The accident caused the grief such incidents always bring in their wake, but when the body responsible for policing the physical welfare of workers, Worksafe, pursued legal action in its  quest to achieve redress for the dead child, it further added to the trauma experience by a shattered family already grappling with the unimaginable.

Over a period of weeks and months, I wrote stories with headlines that summed up their content: “port farmer charged over silo fatality”, “call for review of WorkSafe’s operations”, WAFF demands legal action be dropped”, “decision to continue with charges disappoints WAFF”, “suffering was intensified: family”…and so on.

Throughout the whole saga, the family who had lost their child was supported by the wider Western Australian farming community. When I asked why he thought that there had been such vocal support for the family as it meet the dual challenges of grieving for a loved child while dealing with the legal ramifications of an on-farm accident, the father said that he was “…sure that they felt that compassion should be an element of the law…”. He also said that “…they were probably also thinking that there by the grace of God go I…”

As National Farm Safety Week starts in Australia, and we turn our minds to the ever-present issue of danger on the farms some of us choose to live on, that line in that story comes back to haunt me. Only now it is emblazoned on my mind for another reason.

The empathy I feel for that family is now no longer theoretical. It is a shared pain, one borne of the loss of our own daughter in a farm accident almost three years ago, on July 31, 2017. National Farm Safety Week will now always be personal for our family.

In our case, our child was a young woman working in an environment she had chosen to be in; she was happy and felt comfortable in her workplace and doing the work she did. Her accident involved a bull, and as such, the unpredictable nature of animals came into play. There was little that could have been done to avoid the situation that she found herself in, though WorkSafe has recommended that people working stock don’t do so alone. She was by herself, and we presume unaware that the bull she was moving had turned on her. The rest is history that we cannot change but that we can learn from.

Treasure those you love and avoid the accidents that can be prevented. It breaks my heart to think that people are still dying in situations that could have been avoided. The loss that can be borne is not worth the cutting of corners, the avoiding of responsibility or the failure to recognised that farms are, and always have been, dangerous work environments. We should all be working as hard as we can to ensure that our loved ones return home to us. The gap they leave is far too hard to fill.

There are all sorts of resources available to help improve farm safety, on your farm or on places where you work; it is worth looking at the FarmSafe website.

With the focus on child safety on the farm, this source is worth a peek.

And this link will take you to some great tips on developing a farm safety risk management strategy.

Those of us who work on farms tend to enjoy the work we do: let’s keep on trying to keep ourselves, our children and the children of others as safe as we can be while encouraging their involvement in agriculture.