(Left to Right) Tony Egan, Sue Vanderheul, Dianne Egan, Dawn Williams and Mayor Des Noll with the BBQ the Wattle Range Road Safety Group donated to Millicent. Photo: supplied

On New Year’s Eve in 1993, Dianne and Tony Eagan lost their teenage daughter in a triple fatality drink-driving road crash.

“It’s the kind of event that sends ripples through small communities like these,” said Dianne, a longstanding member of the Wattle Range community.

The tragedy was the catalyst for local volunteers to form the Wattle Range Road Safety Group, which has raised road safety awareness in their region for more than 30 years.

“We actually joined the group 10 years after the accident. It takes a long time when you’ve lost a child,” Dianne said.

“It’s a personal journey… we did it because we were living it, for the community and for our daughter. If we can help save one person then all of this is worth it,” she said.

“It makes awareness so much more personal when someone is passionate about it and for us it comes from our daughter.”

After deciding to direct their grieving into positive change for the community, Dianne and her husband Tony became secretary and treasurer of the Wattle Range Road Safety Group.

“We promised her, her death wouldn’t go in vain. We decided that we would honour her life and bring something positive out of a huge negative… this just can’t happen again,” Dianne said.

The group established the Driver Reviver program for long-weekend motorists, a “Moving on from Road Trauma” weekend, and collaborated with Millicent High School to create the Road Crash Victims Memorial in Millicent’s Centennial Park.

Their goal has been to keep the conversation about South Australia’s road safety alive.

Dianne stressed the importance of rural groups like these who struggle to maintain their membership.

“In the country it’s a little tricky… you know in the city there are so many more resources for road safety,” Dianne said.

“We used to get funding from state government, but it changed each time the head of state changed, and it just got tricky.”

After three decades of raising road safety awareness the group decided to wrap things up after volunteer numbers declined.

“The same ones stuck with us for years, but we just got less and less volunteers. We tried to push but we saw the numbers go down,” Dianne said.

The group has used their residual funds to donate a public barbeque to the Millicent Road Safety Centre – a community hub established by the Lions Club in 1968 to teach children basic road rules.

Wattle Range Council Mayor Des Noll said the group’s members had spent many years supporting the community, some of them through sharing their personal experiences of tragic loss.

“We thank them for volunteering their time and energy in their commitment to protecting the lives of our loved ones on the roads,” Noll said.

With the closure of the Wattle Range group, there are only 12 Community Road Safety Groups remaining in regional SA.

Dianne said that when she joined there were 30 groups across the state.

“I just hope it doesn’t take another tragedy to start one again,” she said.

Words: Xenia Hackett