By Tyler Wright
In early January 1995, two teenage boys were killed in a road accident in Cockatoo.
Anthony, 15 and Travis, 13 were brothers, and both members of the Upwey Junior Fire Brigade with Anthony the Junior Captain at the time of the accident.
The loss of the sons of the then Upwey Fire Brigade’s 1st Lieutenant Peter Hall and wife Liz was a shock to the community; with the pair having been successful in brigade competitions throughout many areas of the state.
Decades later, Anthony and Travis’s memory still lives on through the Anthony & Travis Hall Memorial Driver Education Fund, which provides young adults in the volunteer fire service in the Dandenong Ranges and the local community the opportunity to participate in Defensive Driver Training Program conducted by Murcotts Driving Excellence.
Operating for over 20 years, the fund has awarded around 100 courses to young community members, and is managed by prominent members of the fire service and the Dandenong Ranges community; Captain Cliff Pancutt (Upwey), Peter Hall, Graeme Legge, Bob Horner, Richard Cromb, Geoff Champion and Peter Marke and Jody Yandle as Convenor.
This year, 10 participants aged between 18 and 25 throughout the CFA’s District 13 area, including Knox, Maroondah and the Yarra Ranges, will join each other in a group session at Sandown Raceway; applying learned theory to common errors made by drivers on the roads and how to learning how mitigate the errors.
“Ideally, I think every young person should have the opportunity to do a defensive driving program, because we know they are overly represented in the road toll from inexperience and a lack of knowledge and appreciation of the driving environment,” Anthony & Travis Hall Memorial Driver Education Fund Convenor Jody Yandle said.
“It’s valuing those young people in particular who are putting up their hands to participate in emergency response in their community…these young people have already shown they are community minded and giving up their own time to protect life and property in their area, and I’m really pleased to be able to give something back to them; to not only make them safer in general on the roads, but also to make them better aware driving to and from the station,” Ms Yandle said.
“And if they become drivers of our appliances, they have some basic understanding and recognition of all the things that can go wrong in a car, let alone a truck.”
This year’s Defensive Driving Program will be held on Sunday 27 November, with participants grouping together for the first time rather than selecting times for an individual session.
“In the future, if this goes, we’ll probably do a group next year, get some feedback from those attendees, see how they feel and take it a year at a time,” Ms Yandle said.
“We tend to try and do it towards the end of the year but before the fire season.”
