Unmitigated horror, grief and mourning at a fun park. Children bearing witness to things they should never even have to imagine. Fiction is rarely this cruel.
It’s hard to know where to begin contemplating the unimaginable circumstances surrounding the deaths of Roozi Araghi, Luke Dorsett, Kate Goodchild and Cindy Low at Dreamworld on Tuesday. “The world has gone insane” wrote Jeremy Dorsett – who lost a brother and sister in the accident – in an email to The Project.
Even the police, who we expect are more prepared for situations like this than most, seemed lost for words.
Assistant police commissioner Brian Codd told media: “Somewhere along the line we anticipate tragedies that cause such loss of life in other circumstances … But coming to a place where families want to come and enjoy each other’s’ company and just have fun doesn’t really equate to such a tragedy as we’ve seen.”
Later, in trying to understand the “miracle” in which two children survived the accident, Codd went as far as invoking “the providence of God”.
It’s not surprising people look to the divine or supernatural in the absence of any discernible reason. For many people there’s consolation in being able to find meaning in what’s happened or at least to understand it as part of a much larger story – especially when the alternative is apparently random, cruel happenstance.
Tragedy has always been a subject humans have sought to understand and explain. For the Ancient Greeks, the victims of tragedy were guilty of harmatia – a fatal flaw that explained their circumstances. For Stoics in the West and a number of mystic traditions in the East, detachment from the physical world frees us from feeling tragedy.
Regardless of the merits of these, they can serve as a smokescreen to a deeper, simpler and more uncomfortable point. Each of us is vulnerable to unfathomably bad luck beyond our imagining or control; to some extent, we are in the hands of a fate which isn’t always kind.
Being made aware of this can be nauseating. Recognising the inherent risk and unpredictability in so much of what we do can encourage us to batten down the hatches and ensure those we love are safe from the bludgeonings of chance. Robyn Ironside gave voice to this instinct earlier in the week, asking, “How could anyone ever have the confidence to go on a theme park ride again?”
It’s a fair question, though if applied consistently it would also lead us to abandon other high-risk activities like getting behind the wheel of a car. Tragedy makes us aware and afraid of risks we usually pay no attention to – to feel the fear and act anyway demands courage. It requires us to accept our vulnerability.
It seems clichéd to suggest we need to “embrace vulnerability” in response to events like these, but if there’s anything to be learned from Ardent Leisure’s response over the last couple of days, it’s that seeking to retain total control of our circumstances can have calamitous consequences.
By seeking to “get back to work”, as Chairman Neil Balnaves said, the business response has been to regain a level of normality – of control. “We can’t return the four lives”, he said which, although heart-wrenchingly true, isn’t really the point. Like each of us, the company needed to accept vulnerability and a lack of control.
The best crisis management always puts the victims first: legalistic or risk-aversive responses rarely end well. Planned, guarded responses may provide the illusion of control but they also appear insensitive and out of touch, which is probably a misrepresentation of both their intended message and their actual emotions at the moment.
Crucially, recognising our limited control mustn’t blind us to the things within our power. We aren’t entirely passive to circumstances. We have a moral obligation to do everything within reason to minimise tragedies like this. Justice requires us to see if what happened could have been avoided: Was the maintenance up to date? Were staff members adequately trained? Could anything have been done to avoid what transpired?
These are things Dreamworld does have control over and responsibility for, so it’s both necessary and appropriate to see whether their procedures were alive to that responsibility and to hold any failures to account.
But investigations like this take time and justice also requires us to be responsive to fact, not speculation. Tragedies like this touch each of us because at their core they remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality, at which point our decision-making isn’t always at its best.
It’s worth being careful our pursuit of justice doesn’t become a quest for feelings of security and control by setting up false scapegoats for our collective anger and mourning. Discussions of corporate bonuses – based on financial performances for a financial year long passed – might be a false flag.
As difficult as it is, the pain and sorrow many of us are feeling needs to be directed to appropriate outlet. Hold your loved ones close, weep, mourn – but in assigning blame we have an obligation to be patient.
In his email to The Project, Jeremy Dorsett asked us to “please refrain from pointing any fingers”, noting “authorities have a lot of work to do.” To do so in the face of such abject personal tragedy is nothing short of heroic on Dorsett’s part. If he can do it, maybe we can too.
