Originally published March 18, 1966
FIVE people died in the worst road accident ever in Sunraysia.
All were occupants of a car which came into collision with a five and a quarter-ton truck loaded with eleven and a half tons of road metal.
The accident happened at the intersection of Fourteenth Street and Benetook Avenue.
There are no “stop” signs at the intersection.
Four of those killed died instantly. The other died in Mildura Base Hospital two and a half hours after the accident.
Police used a tractor to pull away sections of the car to reach those inside the tangled wreck.
Records show it was the worst road accident ever in Sunraysia, and the worst involving people in one vehicle since six people were killed in a level crossing smash at Irymple in March 1928.
The only woman among those killed was Louise Christine Edwards (51), of Red Cliffs.
She was the woman who styled herself the “Queen of the Red Cliffs Riot” — the riot in which fruit pickers were involved at Red Cliffs in March 1939.
Others killed were the driver of the car James Ryan Martin (32), formally of Red Cliffs, but recently of Thornside, Queensland, and Leonard Bernard Plank (62), also of Red Cliffs.
The other two men killed were believed to have been Queenslanders in Sunraysia for the fruit harvest. They are believed to have been grape picking at Red Cliffs.
Plank was the man who died in Mildura Base Hospital two and a half hours after the accident.
His brother, Albert Kenneth Plank, of Pine Avenue, Mildura, was working on a fruit block near the intersection where the accident happened.
He went to the scene of the accident and saw an injured man being loaded into an ambulance without knowing it was his brother.
A policeman who recognised him among those at the scene later asked him to identify the dying man.
Driver of the truck in the smash was Alan McGrath, of Mildura, a driver for Mildura Quarries and Ready Mixed Pty Ltd.
He was injured, but not seriously. He was taken to Mildura Base Hospital where his condition was described as satisfactory.
Those in the car had been in Mildura and were travelling along Fourteenth Street toward Red Cliffs.
The truck was travelling in Benetook Avenue bringing crushed stone from the Koorlong quarries to the concrete mixing plant in Mildura.
The truck had entered the intersection and was across the centre of the road when the vehicles collided.
Marks on the bitumen surface of the road suggested to police that the driver of the car did not see the truck.
There were skid marks left by the truck, but none by the car.
Damage to both vehicles and marks on the road indicated that the car ran beneath the truck, striking it in the front wheels.
The impact somersaulted the heavily loaded truck into the air, strewing the crushed stone over an area of about a square chain.
The car was crushed and came to rest on its wheels at the front of the truck.
Parts of the truck were embedded in what was left of the car’s engine bonnet.
