The Anguish Of Adam
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 15, 1998
ADAM'S father describes the dense Otway scrub where his son was found as Adam's tomb.
The 21-year-old Adam Dougherty - the oldest boy of a high-spirited and close Catholic family of five children, who his siblings always described as "our second father" - had driven his beloved four-wheel drive up a dead-end walking track in deep forest behind Anglesea.
He pushed the car as far as it would go, until the vehicle was covered by branches and trees. Then he got out and broke off more branches, more bracken and covered it further in greenery.
When Adam was found in his car, eight days after he disappeared on the morning of Friday 25 July 1997, in his green and quiet tomb, he held in his hand a message of love to his family that set him free. But lying beside him on the seat, were three hand-written pages. They were notes about his workplace, the Grant Street City Link construction site, and they alleged serious breaches of safety on the site and the failure to use correct work practices.
They were the matters that had weighed up so heavily on his for so long, and that had driven him to take his own life.
The religious call it scruples - an almost debilitating sensitivity to wrongdoing, a highly developed sense of responsibility that can lead someone to feel enormous anguish at unrighted wrongs. The scrupulous and astonishingly mature young man who took his own life in the wilds of the Otways carried the burden of his responsibilities to his grave. In the end, Adam did the only thing, in the only way he believed he could, to free himself from his burden.
Adam's notes are the final testament of a talented and loving young man, weighted by a sense of helplessness and despair that he felt he could not reveal to anyone. When a co-worker, Justin O'Connor, died on the site in a horrific accident just two months before Adam took his own life, his father says in his letter to the coronor that Adam repeatedly tried to get the site operators, Transfield Obayashi Joint Venture (TOJV), to take his safety concerns seriously.
Adam's frustration was such that he raised the issue of safety on the site as a nightly topic of conversation at the dinner table. When it appeared to Adam that little was being done, his frustration and his grief over the death of Justin opened up in him a well of despair that even his closest friends and brothers were never shown.
His father, Terry Dougherty, clenches his hands tightly when he talks of his son's high sense of responsibility. He, like the other members of the family, have tried so hard to understand what Adam's actions meant. In the end, his son's moral strength provided the answer.
"There was a sense of helplessness that he felt about the circumstances. I think that the pain that he was feeling led him to believe that this was the only way he could make a statement about what he saw was a terrible tragedy, and the pain that Justin's family endured, and still endure. So he wrote out his notes."
The coronial investigation into the death of Adam Luke Dougherty is closed. The coroner found that he contributed to his own death, leaving handwritten notes testifying to "work practices and possible safety breaches or concerns". The matter of the death of Adam's workmate, Justin O'Connor, is still outstanding. The case is being investigated, but no coronial inquiry is yet planned.
IN A terrible irony, Terry Dougherty's company, Nationalpile, which was contracted to the project and employed Adam and Justin O'Connor, has been charged with three breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety Act over Justin O'Connor's death. Transfield and Obayashi have been separately charged with four breaches each of the act.
What the family is left with is a message, a statement from Adam, that they feel must be heard. In his letter to the coroner, Terry Dougherty writes: "I sincerely hope that through your review and investigation, something can be learned from these tragic events."
Adam's note to his family, written on a paper takeaway food carrier, read: "To family . . . I loved you all . . . All my money goes to Simons roses . . . 11.40 . . . I am free from myself."
THE Dougherty family home is perched high on a ridge and looks straight out at Mount Dandenong on one side, and over Melbourne on the other. The eldest child of the family is 20, but the family still sticks to its Sunday ritual of all four children wandering in to spend a couple of hours in the morning lolling on mum and dad's bed, shooting the breeze, "solving the world's ills," says Terry, before a big, late Sunday breakfast.
Janie, the family's youthful mother, remembers that Adam had always loved Sunday mornings, but she had begun to watch his emerging maturity. Instead of lying every which-way on the bed with the rest, Adam now sat up straight and sober in a chair in his parents' room.
"He became very manly," she recalls. "You could see that he was growing to be a man. As young as he was, I could see his growing wisdom."
Adam's room has been left exactly as it was the day he disappeared. It is the functional, bright room of a young man who loved the outdoors, his cars and his country and western music: a taste that led one of Adam's brothers to decide to drive his own car to work, rather than listen to his brother's dreadful music.
Over here are his engineering books and his work safety manuals. Here is the chin-up bar his startled father discovered attached to the door jambs one day. Over there, his body-building books, maps of central Australia and four-wheel-drive magazines - the three great loves of his life. Terry and Janie eagerly point out his teacher's grateful comments, inscribed on a Central Australia excursion folder, as evidence of their son's kindness.
Adam Dougherty, like his brothers Lucas and Simon, studied at Xavier College. Their sisters, Natasha and Emily, went to Mandeville Hall. Their father, Terry, has spent his life in the construction business, and none of his children had expressed a real interest in it until Adam one day, while he was in the final semester of an accounting diploma at Swinburne, came home and announced that he was throwing it in to join his father in construction.
Terry was not too happy, but Adam? "He loved it," says Terry. "He loved the action every day, he did a lot of courses. He explained to me that he couldn't see himself sitting behind a desk all his life."
And it meant Adam was outdoors. His family is curled up on couches and chairs in their airy and comfortable living room, describing the Adam they knew. They fall about laughing when they remember his mischievous passion for four-wheel-driving, his love of getting any vehicle he could lay his hands on bogged, and then devising ways to get it out.
Janie remembers a day when one family member's car after another was taken down by Adam and Simon into the hills and bogged. She called Terry at work: "They've taken my car, Adam's car and Simon's car - you better come home."
The other side of Adam was the second father that his siblings still adore. A considerate and responsible young man he was, in his father's words, always the first to volunteer for work, and the last to finish, attending to his elderly grandparents or chopping wood for neighbors.
"He was never thinking about what he was feeling, but about how everyone else was feeling," says his sister Natasha.
Simon, always the closest to Adam, was already working for his father. Adam took to the job with gusto, starting in July 1996. He worked as a dogman, in charge of lifts and cranes.
"We had been overseas at one stage," says Terry, "and he picked us up from the airport. We were driving back and we came over the West Gate Freeway, and he said 'Isn't that fantastic - look at that, dad, look at what we're doing.' All the cranes! The more toys, the more construction equipment the better for Adam! He really liked that."
ADAM, with Simon, continued to like what he was doing, until May 1997. That was when one of his co-workers, Justin O'Connor, 28, fell down a hole on the site and became wedged in the dirt. He was only two metres down, the workers could actually touch him, but they could not get him out. Adam was one of the workers who raised the alarm, and in news footage of the incident he can be seen dragging emergency equipment to the scene. Justin was in the hole for two hours but died in hospital five days later.
"The boys were as white as ghosts when they came in," says Janie of that day. "I just tried to instill in them that everything would be all right, that Justin would be all right."
The death of Justin affected the boys badly, but it affected Adam worst. He spoke to counsellors about the matter, says Terry, but he spoke about it only occasionally with his family. But he started to become very concerned about safety on the site.
In his letter to the coroner, Terry describes a young man who becomes, after Justin's death, increasingly agitated over safety issues on the site, particularly the importance of filling all holes to the surface with stabilised sand. His lengthy and detailed letter describes a boy desperate to get his boss's attention.
"Adam had been distressed by the reluctance of TOJV to address these issues until force had been applied via the men refusing to work . . . (Adam believed) it was just a matter if time before another accident occurred." Night after night, Adam brought up safety concerns with his family at home. "He had indicated to me," Terry wrote in his letter. "that he believed TOJV had not learnt anything from Justin's death, that safety incidences were still happening on site."
Terry asks himself the question of why he, as Adam's employer, did not take on his son's grievances himself. "I guess when he was telling me these things at the dinner table, I was urging him to take it all to the safety committe meetings and get it minuted," he says. "I believed that this was happening and that his ongoing concerns was his frustration at that process."
In the weeks following the death, Terry says Adam resigned from the TOJV safety committee, a position for which he had undertaken a safety course. Janie recalls that her son remained very much the same boy she knew, but he became quiet and would not talk about Justin. "He would never burden you with it."
Adam's close friend from childhood, Stuart McGregor, recalls Adam as no different in the weeks before his disappearance. "I knew that he was the kind of person who held things in," says Stuart. "He kept a lot of things private. When I found out he was missing I just thought he'd gone to think things out for a while."
On the morning of 25 July 1997, Simon and Adam worked on the site together as usual until smoko. Simon remembers his brother asking him what he wanted from the shop.
"I remember he was looking down at me with that big cheeky grin on his face like he was up to something," says Simon. "I said he could get me a donut and he just smiled and he walked off and I walked back to the shed. And he didn't come back."
Simon raised the alarm that morning when Adam didn't return. This was something that Adam, the family says, would never do. They spent the weekend hoping and believing that Adam had taken off to the bush, up country, to Fraser island, perhaps to central Australia, which he loved so much. He would call Saturday. Definitely Sunday. By Monday morning they were despairing.
Notified that the Otways were one of his favorite places, the Anglesea police conducted an air search without success. On Sunday 2 August, a bushwalker came to the Anglesea police station. He had found a four-wheel drive covered in bracken on an impassable track. Two rubber hoses ran from the rear exhaust into both the left and right vent windows. A coroner determined that Adam died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Terry still remembers, indeed he seems haunted by a memory of Adam just two nights before he disappeared. Bedridden with flu and fever, he remembers Adam coming to his room and pacing around his bed.
Terry clearly remembers thinking that there was something on his son's mind. But he simply did not have the strength to engage him. "Whatever the burden was that he was carrying he was more concerned to see how I was." The next night Terry came home late and went in to see his son. They said good night, and the next morning he disappeared.
Adam had no history of depression. Terry says he has scoured the literature on suicide, the apparent signs to watch out for in younger people, but he says his son did not present that way at all.
For Janie, the explanation for the inexplicable is found in her son's nature. "If he'd only had a little bit of selfishness it might have saved him. He wasn't thinking of himself."
ADAM'S notes are opaque. Written in an urgent shorthand form, they are a frantic list of his worries and concerns. He outlines a "near-miss report" and points to "lack of quality supervision . . . absence of appropriate management systems and procedures . . . incorrect performance of a task by any person involved in the incident."
He writes of the need for TOJV to produce job safety analyses and inductions for hired subcontractors before work begins on a job. One point, "worked within 2m (two metres) of PTC line", is an apparent reference to crane work close to Public Transport Corporation tram lines.
Repeated references are made to "S21", the section of the Occupational Health and Safety act that covers the duties of employers to provide a safe workplace. "No risk assessment" is written in bold down the bottom of one page; "Crux is procedure was not followed" is another heavily underlined point. In written form, they sound like the kind of thoughts, those endlessly bothering thoughts, that you can never get out of your mind.
A spokeswoman for TOJV declined to respond directly to the notes. She said that Adam Dougherty was an employee of a specialist piling contractor, Nationalpile, which was engaged by TOJV to carry out piling work on City Link. "Since the matter is subject to legal proceedings it is appropriate to comment further," she said.
But the spokeswoman did say in regard to safety that: "The project's performance is constantly benchmarked againt national best practice and City Link is achieving pleasing results."
Terry has pored endlessly over these notes. They make sense to him. What he has come to understand more slowly now is Adam's state of mind.
Having gone through the abysmal depths of grief and sorrow, he now knows how low his son must have sunk in his feelings of helplessness.
He wrote to the coroner: "I believe that the death of his workmate had a profound effect on Adam, this was compounded by his high sense of responsiblity and his inability to obtain response from the TOJV safety committee members. His belief that nothing had been learnt from Justin's death and the possibility of further death and injury was too much for him to bear. I believe that in his pain he determined that the only outcome was to take his own life and leave these notes as testimony to his struggle."
The note that he left his family contained one last touch of Adam's desire to protect. His brother Simon had spoken of wanting to start a hydroponic rose business. All Adam's money was left to "Simons roses."
"That is Adam's gesture for Simon not to be in the construction industry," says Terry, "because he couldn't bear for anything to happen to him."
So, on a large square of land just to the right of the house, Simon has started his rose business. He has cleared and prepared the land, which snuggles into the ridge and stares straight at the spectacle of Mount Dandenong. He is also hastily terracing and landscaping the sides of the patch to mollify his mother who blanched when she saw such an expanse of bare earth. By about next Autumn, more than 21 months after his brother's death Simon's roses, along with Adam's memory, should be blooming.
© 1998 The Sunday Age