| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| Pitched into Homer’s “wine-dark” Aegean, they live with the memory of voices that cried out in the dark and the silence of corpses lit up by flares after the Greek ferry Express Samina ran aground against rocks near the island of Paros late last year. Twelve Australians among the survivors remain captive to the trauma of the night. Some talk of oars broken as they desperately tried to ram a lifeboat free. Others, adrift in the water, reveal the fear of being struck by debris and left defenceless in an ocean that claimed 82 people that night. They talk of floating up to the crest of a swell in seas made turbulent by the gale, looking down on dark forms that might be baggage or might be yet another corpse from among more than 500 who had been aboard the vessel when it sailed from Athens at 5pm on September 26. Almost a year later, some are pursuing legal action over the sinking of the 4407-tonne ferry, off course by up to 500 metres, that crashed into huge rocks known as the Portes just over five hours later. Each survivor spoken to by The Sunday Age is receiving counselling. None would appear to have emerged unscathed. “Unless you’re not into examining life at all, there’s no way that you can’t be changed,” says Susan Bell, 22, who had leapt into the water within seconds of her then boyfriend, Ross Hynard, slamming hard against the hull. She would sustain burns to her left hand while grabbing at a rope in a failed attempt to clamber aboard a passing yacht in an incident in which Western Australian Tara Foreman, 21, lost a finger. Bell’s hand healed. But there are other, unseen scars. “Definitely there are scenes just imprinted in my dreams and my thoughts,” says the Sydney law student, who remained afloat for hours alongside Hynard, also 22, until rescued by a fishing boat. She remembers the stranger who swam up to them, his hands beneath the midriff of a woman she assumes to have been his wife, calling out in Greek, then English. “He asked us to shine our torches on her, and she was totally blue. Her face was in the water and I just told him that she was dead and we just swam off. But if it had been Ross, I know I would have been that guy just staying with her because you’re not going to leave her just because she’s dead.” Ross Hynard has been deeply affected by the ordeal. “Mentally, it just changes you,” he says. He and Bell had taken time off work at a farm in Kent, England, for a dream cruise to a Greek isle. They’d paid the least expensive fare to stay up on deck. “It was cold but it was a beautiful sunset,” says Bell, remembering the departure from Athens. “I remember thinking `this is so romantic’ and it was serene. At night it got rougher. But I remember just sailing out looking at it, just going, wow, it’s impressive.” Had she not overslept that morning, Tamara Peart, 30, a Melbourne IT recruitment officer who had planned to work in London, might have been on the earlier, 8am ferry. Instead, she met up with Argentine baker Diego Santillan at an Athens travel agency. She knew no one, understood no Greek and welcomed the stranger who suggested he accompany her and who would save her life on at least three occasions. After boarding the ferry, they had a Canadian passenger photograph them mimicking the moment in James Cameron’s epic Titanic in which Leonardo DiCaprio holds Kate Winslet as she leans forward, arms outstretched on the prow of that doomed vessel. She and Santillan sat on their backpacks alongside a dining area on a lower deck in the five-hour journey. “It was too similar to the movie Titanic,” Peart says, noting parallels between Express Samina and the fateful April, 1912, voyage of SS Titanic. “I can recall seeing the rocks on the side of the ship and I’m thinking, no way. This is not for real. “Unfortunately enough it was. It started sinking and it was on an angle and we had to struggle to climb to get out the narrow doors.” She and Santillan had met up with Tara Foreman, 20, and her boyfriend, Damian Wilson, 25. They were separated from the Perth couple in the commotion. Ross Hynard was sitting on a bench, reading Dickens’ classic David Copperfield. “It just hit and we looked over and the rock was just scraping down the side of the vessel,” he says. Susan Bell was in her sleeping bag with her head on his lap. “I just remember hearing this crunching metal sound and I looked up and saw the huge rockface scraping past, only about four metres away from us,” she says. They had met a Melbourne couple, Marcel van der Schoot and Moana Weir. “I remember looking at them and seeing they were still asleep and thinking I’ve got to wake them up,” Bell recalls, “and then I saw Marcel stir. Apparently he saw our torches and came and got a life jacket.” Also on the top deck were Melbourne models Ruth Jackman, 24, and Nicole Wattie, 23, and Wattie’s boyfriend, Darren Grass, 27. An industrial designer, Grass had been travelling through Europe for several months and was looking forward to relaxing on a beach. Instead, he found himself clambering on to a life raft with Wattie and Jackman, who had arrived in London from Melbourne days earlier and were hoping to work in Greece, Germany, Spain and Britain after a brief holiday. Grass remembers: “The ferry was probably eight storeys high or something like that. By the time they released the lifeboat, we only dropped a metre or two into the water. The ferry sank that quickly. “Everyone was trying to have a go at pushing away and oars were snapping. There were people trying to jump from probably another three levels up. There was a little baby being held over in some parent’s arm threatening to throw it in. A man who had died was pulled into the boat. A guy’s leg was squashed between two boats.” “It was strange how we just went into survival mode,” Jackman says, “when there was no warnings, no bells or sirens or anything. There wasn’t any of the crew to be seen. It was a matter of your own instinct.” She remarks on the composure of Bell and Hynard, who had taken it upon themselves to alert and assist others with lifejackets. “I saw a big steel cupboard and after struggling with the handle, I opened it,” Bell says. “Some of the people had lifejackets but not many. After a while they started panicking. So I started handing them out.” Bell believes their failure to understand the Greek language made them less likely to await instruction that was not forthcoming anyway. Some of the older passengers stood around until it was too late. She saw a crew member who she thinks might have been the captain. “I said to him, `Should we get off?’ He could have nodded at me. I asked him again. Then his phone rang and he just looked straight past me.” They had to move fast. “By this time the ship was tilted towards the side that hit the rock. We were towards the side that was furthest up in the air. It was just about to sink. You could get on the other side of the railings and lean back. We spent a couple of minutes resting against the hull of the ship.” They tried to climb down a rope ladder but people below had halted. “We slid down the side of the ship because a man was face down in the water and nobody was turning him over. “The waves were huge. It would be quite scary to jump off. The guy fell from above us and hit his head and slid down the ship past us and he was obviously unconscious. I was yelling at people in the water to turn him over and nobody could. He was getting smashed against the hull. So Ross just said, `I’m going’ and jumped off and I went straight after him.” Determined to swim away from the vessel as quickly as they could, they first tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the man. “There were groups of people that we tried to avoid because they were hysterical,” Bell says. “There were people who were holding their partners who were unconscious …” They thought they might remain afloat until daylight. But a fishing boat approached. “It was quite a distance away from us. But it looked small enough and it had a spotlight. So we swam towards it hoping it wouldn’t turn away by the time we got there, yelling `help us’, blowing our whistles and holding the lights on our lifejackets up. Then they spotlighted us and pulled us in.” Hynard remembers “heaps and heaps” of people in the fishing boat. “It was very overcrowded. We virtually couldn’t pick up anyone else. The boat was really in danger of going under itself. It was taking on water.” He estimates it might have taken 20 minutes to reach Paros but says “it seemed like a hell of a long time though”. Tamara Peart had lost her spectacles as she leapt over others from Express Samina and into the wooden lifeboat. She feared she might not make it on to the fishing boat that rescued them hours later. “The waves were quite large. I kept slipping and I just kept thinking, ‘Oh my God I’m going to die here.’ I thought I was going to fall between the two boats. Diego helped me again. My champion.” After medical assessment and treatment where appropriate, survivors were billeted in local hotels. Some packs had washed ashore. But most had lost passports, money and possessions. Officers including Ross Burns, then Australian ambassador in Greece, flew to Paros. Two days later, the Australians were flown to Athens. A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade representative says such was the anxiety in Australia after news of the ferry disaster had broken that its 24-hour operations centre had received 1800 calls by the early hours of the following morning, mostly from concerned parents whose children were thought to be travelling in the region. Susan Bell telephoned her mother from Paros. Ross Hynard’s parents were watching athletics at the Sydney Olympics when alerted by his elder sister, Adele. His mother, Margaret Hynard, believes children try to spare their parents from knowing too much. “I don’t know how they both are emotionally about it,” she says, “because they don’t discuss it with me.” Her son started work recently as an insurance claims officer. “It’s hard to quantify the damage, I guess,” he says of his own predicament. “But certainly I’m not the same person that I was. That’s the crux of it, I guess.” The Sunday Age, 05-Aug-2001 News: VOYAGE TO DISASTER Young Australians still scarred by ferry fiasco – Four seek compensation LARRY SCHWARTZ Four Australians who were among the survivors when the Greek ferry Express Samina ran aground in the Aegean late last year are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. Melbourne model Nicole Wattie, 23, says the four have hired a Melbourne law firm to sue the shipowner for the trauma they suffered. The group has already rejected a proposed settlement as inadequate. “They offered us something which we found quite insulting,” she says. Her friend, Ruth Jackman, 24, fears trauma that led to a 15-kilogram weight loss within a week of the disaster, and subsequent gains that left her 12 kilograms heavier than a year ago, have ended her modelling career. “I’m going through a major, major sense of loss (over) where I am now as opposed to where I was 12 months ago,” Ms Jackman says. The two women were travelling with Ms Wattie’s boyfriend, industrial designer Darren Grass, 27, and had hoped to model in Europe. “I just want the money side to be sorted out and to get on with my life,” says Mr Grass. “Preferably we’d be looking to several hundred thousand (dollars), but it depends on what they want to come up with,” he says. Twelve Australians were among those rescued in heavy seas after the 4407-tonne ferry, owned by the Minoan Flying Dolphin Company, struck rocks off the island of Paros on September 26 last year. Eighty-two people drowned. Tamara Peart, 30, who had hoped to work in IT recruitment in London, attributes her survival to Diego Santillan, an Argentinian companion she had met hours before embarking on the ill-fated voyage. “Why I’m angry more than anything else is there weren’t any announcements,” she says. “Nobody helped us. The crew just saw to themselves.” Law firm Woodhams O’Keeffe & Co says it is keen to negotiate settlement “without the need for recourse to the courts of Greece”. “The shipowner does not appear to have contested liability,” a spokesman for Woodhams O’Keeffe says. |
Larry Schwartz Writer 