This story takes place in the early days of a relationship where young love, infatuation and the desire to impress got the better of us and put us in a situation where we could have easily lost our young lives.

It was 2008 and I was living in Hervey Bay at the time. I had recently met a young woman we will call Lisa at a mate’s 21st, who was living in Rainbow Beach, a small beach town about 90 minutes away with a population of just over 1,000. We started seeing each other every other weekend, some weekends she would come up to mine, others I would go down to hers.

One Sunday afternoon we were at her’s in Rainbow Beach drinking at her place and doing what young lovers do. We had lost track of time and it was about 8 or 9 pm. We didn’t have anything to eat and decided to go out for dinner. I remember we had made a conscious decision that she should drive as I was still on a provisional license and wasn’t allowed any alcohol in my system, whereas she was on her opens and was allowed some leeway. Over the course of the afternoon, we had drunk just under half a bottle of vodka between us, I was a little bit drunk but felt fine to drive, I assumed she was the same. We drove into the one street town, and everything was shut. The fish ‘n chip shop, chinese takeaway, IGA, and even the local pubs. We tried one last ditch effort for an expensive restaurant that was a couple of minutes out of town.

It was a long straight road out to the restaurant, the road was elevated with tall swamp grass either side of it. At the end of the road there was a 90 degree bend, we were probably approaching it at about 80 km/hr and I remember telling Lisa to slow down. In retrospect this probably should have been a warning sign that I should drive, however I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. We got to the restaurant and it too was shut, so we headed home. On the way back the shoulder of the road was under some repair with the edge not sealed with bitumen. Lisa was driving with the outside two wheels on the dirt and the other two wheels on the bitumen. It made me a bit nervous but I sat back and tried to relax, I was used to being in cars with drivers who liked to push things to the limit and would often take on a nonchalant attitude.

As I stated before the road was straight and Lisa was slowly gaining speed. I noticed at the end of the construction zone where the road repair wasn’t occurring there was some tree in our path that we would have to get back onto the bitumen to avoid. I assumed Lisa would do this, however we kept approaching them at speed. I grew more uneasy and at the last second I screamed out “watch out!”. She quickly turned the vehicle off to the right back onto the road but over corrected, she tried to recover but we went skidding off the road into the swamp land. The car rolled and we both had our seat belts on but I remember a weightless feeling as we got flung in all directions, not being able to discern anything out of the front windscreen and thinking “okay, so this is what it feels like to flip a car”. We finished up with the car on its roof, I had adrenaline pumping and unbuckled quickly and went around to Lisa’s side of the vehicle to help her get out. We were both fine physically but Lisa was in a bit of shock. We had water up to our ankles and tried to make our way back to the road, we did this by making our way through the tall swamp grass at the back of the car, but we didn’t get very far at all. The grass was thick and its edges sharp, giving us paper cuts as we tried to push through it. After about 5 minutes we had only made it about 1 or 2 meters, so we decided to give up, get some rest and wait for another car or daylight to come. So we lied down in the cold, wet, uncomfortable grass for a bit and Lisa started to cry. I comforted her, and asked her what she wanted to do. She wasn’t sure but she knew she didn’t want to stay there all night. So I suggested that she stay by the car and I would have another attempt at finding the road. This time I followed the track that the car had left in the swamp, I followed it for about 15 m and came out at the road. I turned out that the car was pretty much right next to the road but at a perpendicular angle with the headlights shining onto the embankment. Thus, in our original attempts we were actually going in the complete wrong direction.

I helped Lisa onto the road and we walked back to her house.

In the morning, we returned back to the car and noted two things. There were 3 distinct divots in the swamp which we suspected each represented one revolution of the car. The other thing of note was there was a solid power line pole pretty much right on where we left the road. How we missed it, we have no idea, and if we didn’t things could have turned out very different.

After the crash I felt responsible, I thought the car was a write off, although it did eventually get back on the road. We looked up its market value at the time, which was $8,000, I insisted Lisa take $4,000 from me as I believed I should pay half. It was a substantial part of my life savings at that time in my young life, but I simply felt it was the right thing to do.

Following the incident when questioned what had happened? Our response was that something just jumped out in front of us, people assumed it was a bush turkey. From then on bush turkeys got a lot of the blame for things that went wrong in our relationship.