Excerpt from Part One: Meeting Adversity Head On

THE ACCIDENT

I had a great childhood. Some would say I was an active kid; I spent a lot of time outside running around. Any sport I played, I loved, until I wasn’t the best and then I would quit.

At one point I was kayaking, which I really enjoyed because this was something I was good at. My brother, Brett, and I would be up at 6 am in the middle of winter, out on the river paddling. We both loved it.

When  I  went  to  the  Australian  Championships,  I  won  one  gold,  two silver and a bronze medal. After that I took six months off due to injury and bad health. When I came back to the sport I was no longer winning. This was the late 1990s and by the naughties, I had given up. I had quit because I wasn’t the best anymore. Now some of the guys who paddled with me then have competed in the Olympics.

It’s easy to look back on your life and think, What if? This question has  crossed  my  mind  so  many  times  in  the  last  decade  and  I  have  spent hours thinking about it. The conclusion I always come to is that I can’t do anything about it, so just move on. I can’t change the past, so I must move on.

I got my first job when I was fifteen, flipping burgers and making coffee at the local McDonald’s. In my opinion, this was the best job around because not only did I get to work with 120 other kids my age, I also made some lifelong friends. OK, granted, the work was hot and greasy and I hated getting up at 4.30 am when I had to set up in the morning. But it taught me what real work was and that in itself looks unbelievable on a résumé.

After  five  years,  it  was  time  to  move  on.  But  when  I  finished  my  tertiary  education,  I  was  jobless  and  I  had  no  direction.  I  had  done an Advanced Diploma in Digital Graphics at JMC Academy in Melbourne. My big dream was to work at the marvellous Pixar Studios in California. I could imagine being a part of the next big Toy Story flick. That was until I discovered this was a dream shared by literally thousands  and  thousands  of  other  people.  With  a  ‘fixed’  mindset,  I  believed that the competition was too great, so gave up. I lost interest.

Being lost, I was starting to wonder where my life was going to go from here.

I found a job working at a cafe serving ice cream at Melbourne’s Federation Square, but when winter came around I had no real income because winter in Melbourne is cold, miserable and no one is on the search for ice cream.

After six months I was jobless again until my brother came to the rescue. He is an electrician and his boss was on holidays. They were in need of hands and any hands would do, so I put one up and helped out.

I  fell  in  love  with  it.  I  worked  for  three  weeks  and  earned  more  money  than  I  had  ever  seen  in  one  paycheck.  So  when  the  boss  returned, I asked him if I could do an apprenticeship.

I  started  working  full-time  all  over  Melbourne:  from  high-rises  to  industrial  estates  to  private  homes.  We  worked  in  many  of  the  manholes  on  the  side  of  the  road,  connecting  fibre  networks  across  the city of Melbourne, sometimes Sydney and even Perth. We did a lot of work in new and old buildings, including old schools from the 1860s. You can imagine how fascinated a young man like myself was climbing through roofs and under buildings that were over 150 years old.

My job was so diverse that I could be working in an old building on  Monday,  building  a  new  factory  on  Tuesday,  and  then  every  Wednesday  I’d  head  off  to  trade  school  with  an  awesome  group  of boys. We would put our feet up and have some fun. Our classroom was jam packed with young men all full of testosterone having a day off work together; it wasn’t all that productive but I loved it.

Thursday we’d be under the city working and Friday we’d knock off early. Knocking off required going back to the factory in Eltham and having a beer to recap the week. My life consisted of no responsibility, no worries and all the freedom in the world. At the time, I liked the idea  of  working  for  ‘the  man’  and  not  taking  life  too  seriously.  Oh,  did I mention the RDOs? Yes, every second Monday we got a rostered day off, just because it was fair; that is what the trade union argued, anyway.  

This was in 2006 and by 2008 I was loving what I did every day of the week. I loved my work because I made some great mates, I made some great money and I had the weekend to do what I wanted. At that stage, I started to think a bit about what would happen after I finished my apprenticeship, which was the first grown-up thought of my life. I considered travelling overseas and working abroad for a year, as my sister had done years before.

It  was  coming  up  to  the  Spring  Racing  Carnival  –  Melbourne’s  premier  horseracing  event  –  which  I  had  attended  for  the  past  two  years. That year I went along with a great group of people. We had been  mates  for  years  and  I  had  the  best  time  I  had  ever  had  at  the  carnival. I remember that day so clearly.

I got up super early, just as I had on the first day of the carnival in the past. I woke up before my alarm and felt great from the early night I’d had to prepare myself. If the day turned out to be anything like the previous years, it was going to be a big event. I jumped out of the shower as quick as I had jumped in. Grabbing my race attire, I got in the car ready to go, all in the space of about ten minutes. I had a tendency to get overexcited about things I knew would be fun; that’s just who I was.

I was the first to arrive at my brother’s house and he had a beer waiting  for  me.  Brett  was  already  dressed  in  his  suit  and  was  just  as excited as I was. I changed into my costume, a perfectly tailored grey suit from Thailand. I put on my new Prada sunglasses and a few sprays of cologne, looked in the mirror and quietly thought, it’s going to  be  a  good  day;  you’re  looking  OK  today,  mate.  I  went  out  to  the  kitchen and said to everyone, ‘Let the games begin.’

While I’d been self-obsessing in the mirror, Ange and Celeste had arrived to join the party. Shortly after, Dave, Chris, Trav, Oki and Kate walked in and really got the ball rolling. It was about 7.30 am at  this  stage,  which  was  rather  early  to  be  starting  the  antics,  but  to  get  a  good  spot  on  the  grass,  smack-bang  in  the  middle  of  the  riffraff, you had to be early. On top of that we still had to find a cab and make our way there. Really, the reason we started so early was because we all knew what was in store for us that day. And this was the first time in three years I was going there as a single man, with no  one  looking  over  my  shoulder  and  no  one  to  answer  to.  I  was  prepared to get loose.

Beep, beep, ‘Everyone, the cabs are here,’ was the call to head off to Flemington Racecourse. We got there just after the gates opened and  made  our  way  to  the  300-metre  mark  at  the  end  of  General  Admission on the home straight. The grass looked so fresh and the people looked so clean, but you knew that in just six hours time the bomb would go off and everyone would leave the venue looking like there’d been a meltdown. It did every other year – what would have changed? Nothing. To our delighted surprise, solid tables had been installed on the grass that year and we were lucky enough to snag one and enough chairs. It was still a few hours until the first race, but  we  didn’t  really  care  because  we  were  there  in  our  position,  ready to take on the day.

Once the bar had opened, things became very blurry in my mind as to what actually followed. My only memories of that day were the photos that were taken and the fact that I knew I had fun, I knew I was with my friends, and I knew that my wallet was crying due to  weight  loss.  I  was  hoping  for  another  box  trifecta  like  I’d  won  the previous year. In my total gambling career I was definitely up, as I had won $1000 the year before and I’d never spent that much on  gambling  in  my  life.  I  really  wasn’t  a  big  gambler;  the  Spring  Carnival  was  the  only  time  that  my  wallet  came  out  to  gamble.  I  knew  that  it  was  dead  money  as  soon  as  it  touched  the  bookie’s  hand. On top of the gambling, which wasn’t all that much in the end, there was the cost of drinks that seemed to go up and up and up each year. I guess that’s just the price you pay when participating in one of Melbourne’s great festivals.

In what seemed like less than a microsecond, I was in a hospital bed, a month later, looking up at Jaclyn, who was my brother’s girlfriend at the time, who was playing ‘Here comes the aeroplane’ with a spoonful of slop. Confused? So was I.

A  couple  of  weeks  after  the  Spring  Carnival  Derby  Day,  I  had  a  motorbike accident that resulted in the worst day of my life. This was the  absolute  hardest  time  for  everyone  in  my  family  too.  They  are  forever haunted by the sixteen days I was in a coma, unsure whether I would wake up, let alone be able to live a normal life again. For my part, I was not consciously present and had no memory of it at all.

I was with my mates on Saturday, 15 November 2008, riding my dirt bike  on  a  property  in  Smiths  Gully  in  Melbourne’s  outer  northeast.  It was at the very end of the day when I decided to go down for one last lap of the paddock before heading back to the house. I was going to meet another group of mates there for some springtime fun in the sun around the pool.

I got to the end of the paddock, turned around and rode back up the hill. It was not a tricky hill at all, but it had a little bend in the track  before  opening  up  to  a  landing  about  100  metres  long.  I  was  going fast. If you’ve ever ridden a motorbike you will know the rush I would have been feeling at the time. The best way to start that hill was to give it full throttle and keep it pinned all the way to the top, because the top was my best chance to pop onto the back wheel and nearly wet my pants with excitement.

We had touched on the idea of riding down another track on that hill to avoid having an accident, but this wasn’t a rule and it wasn’t set in stone. I chose the one with the bend. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong day of my life. I ran right into my mate who was riding down the same track at the same second that I was. Boom. Lights out. Hindsight’s a bitch when it wants to be.

The carnage looked like two angry wildebeests had fought in the wild, except our wildebeest were two KTM 450cc dirt bikes. Another mate was following behind me and saw everything happen. He said it was like watching a finishing move in Mortal Kombat in slow motion. He could see what was happening but was helpless to stop it. We hit each other head-on and when I say ‘head-on’, I mean ‘HEAD-ON’. Our front wheels were aligned perfectly and you could see the imprint of his wheel in mine. The mate following threw his bike down and ran to help.

He knew that both of us were in serious trouble. He was shouting in  my  face,  ‘SCOTT,  SCOTT,  SCOTT...’  No  response.  He  ran  over  to our mate and did the same thing, like a sequel to a horror movie. Neither of us was responsive. Another two mates, brothers who lived at the property, finally caught up with us. The first guy to arrive felt his  heart  sink  because  for  a  split  second  he  thought  it  was  his  own  brother who was in trouble on the ground and not moving.

From the time of the accident until the air ambulance flew me away, everything ran like clockwork. One mate, Dave, rode off straight to the  house  to  ring  000,  his  brother,  Ryan,  rode  to  the  front  gate  and  our other mate stayed with the two of us to make sure we were still breathing. There were five of us riding that day, and two of our lives depended on the teamwork of the other three. I am so grateful that I had the mates I had with me, and I am really proud of the teamwork that they put in that day.

Sam, the mate I hit, stood up at one point, took one step and then hit the deck. He was extremely lucky because, unknown to anyone, he had broken his neck. A few more steps could have left him bound to  a  wheelchair  for  the  rest  of  his  existence  on  earth.  I,  contrary  to  popular  belief,  was  the  luckiest  at  the  time  because  I  was  knocked  out cold and didn’t budge. With the state my neck was in, any slight movement  could  have  left  me  writing  this  book  through  a  voice-activated dictaphone.

The  ambulance  arrived  within  fifteen  minutes,  only  to  find  that  there was no way to drive down through the goat tracks from where they  were  to  the  other  end  of  the  property.  Right  then  another  star  moved  into  alignment.  Out  of  four  air  ambulance  helicopters  that operate in the whole state of Victoria, the two that were close enough were told to turn around and come to our aid. This was perfect because time was definitely not on our side. It took them only twenty minutes to get there, which, if you think about it, is amazing because there are only  four  helicopters  covering  237,629  square  kilometres  of  land  in  Victoria. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly England, Ireland and Switzerland combined.

Once  they  had  landed,  it  was  time  to  remove  my  helmet,  which  was  the  only  thing  holding  my  skull  together  and  stopping  it  from  exploding. I still have that helmet, with a coating of crusty blood on the inside. It’s a token from God on a day in history that could easily have resulted in many lives destroyed.

There  were  many,  many  people  that  saved  my  life  that  day.  Four  paramedics, four police, many doctors, many nurses, dental surgeons, neurosurgeons,  neurologists,  radiologists,  a  whole  plastics  team;  the  list goes on. But the guys that I truly owe my life to on that dark but sunny, spring day are my mates. The three boys that were there with Sam and me came together and put in some pretty amazing teamwork, and for that I am truly grateful.

The  accident  wasn’t  just  brutal  on  me;  Sam  had  intense  damage  to  his  body  too.  His  injuries  included  several  fractured  vertebrae  and  bones,  a  punctured  lung,  lacerations  and  a  dislocated  knee.  He  experienced severe blood loss, resulting in seven blood transfusions. Sam has also been recovering both mentally and physically from this accident and has since changed his career path. This accident made him realise how vulnerable and fragile life is and he no longer wanted to  waste  his  time  doing  anything  that  didn’t  make  him  happy.  He  decided his passion was flying aircraft so he got his pilot’s licence and now flies planes for a living. How cool’s that?