GRAEME Tulloch was a great footballer and a successful senior coach, but his greatest team would be a group of people he'd never met.
On a stinking hot Mildura day eight years ago, the former Richmond, Red Cliffs and Merbein player, Merbein and Sunraysia coach and respected school teacher was riding a bicycle on Walnut Avenue when he suddenly felt unwell and dismounted. Soon after, he collapsed.
Mr Tulloch, then 61, was suffering a cardiac arrest. His heart had stopped. He was minutes from death.
But then his team stepped up.
Seeing what had happened, Seher Ozonal Ozer, a social worker, rang for an ambulance while in her car and her husband, electrician Garip Ozer, began CPR. Then came Helen Morris, a child and family health nurse, then air-conditioning mechanic Ashley Power, and then Zorb Safak, a Mildura police officer. With guidance from a 000 operator, this team worked for eight minutes, applying hundreds of chest compressions, until the ambulance arrived.
Mr Tulloch was unconscious by this time and doesn't remember everything that happened that day, but he'll never forgot the team that saved his life, nor the fairly simple, but literally vital, work they did.
He knows he was lucky that has saviours arrived immediately and rapidly worked out what to do, but he also knows that thousands of people die because they are not so fortunate. He wants to change that.
Mr Tulloch has been working with the Mildura Lions Club to create a program that can teach emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, to anyone who wants it, free of charge. With the financial support of Mildura Connected Communities, a trust funded by Bendigo Bank and which two years ago sponsored the installation of nine automated electronic defibrillators in the region, along with backing from Mildura Health, that program is now up and running and its first students completed their two-hour course this week.
The program is called Hands on Heart and it's hoped that it will train 1000 people in its first year. Mr Tulloch and Lions hope it will then go national, and perhaps even beyond. "These people saved my life and executed textbook CPR," Mr Tulloch told Sunraysia Daily this week.
"Sudden cardiac arrest has a low survival rate of between 6-12 per cent in Victoria (where) 6500 sudden cardiac arrests occur per year," he said.
Mr Tulloch said 30,000 Australian people would suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in any given year, and that 27,000 would die, in many cases because no one was able to apply CPR in the vital first minutes after collapse.
Mr Tulloch said the recent high-profile tragedies of cricketer Shane Warne and Senator Kimberley Kitching, both of whom suffered fatal cardiac arrests in their 50s, had reminded him of how fortunate he had been and "it became evident to me that I could be proactive and I decided to explore ways to provide free CPR for people in Sunraysia".
"I approached an old school friend (children's author) Phil Kettle, and we decided something needs to be done."
Mr Kettle lost a brother to cardiac arrest and is especially keen for young people to have CPR training as a safeguard for older relatives, so the pair approached Mildura Lions Club, which now administers the new program in conjunction with Angela Izard First Aid Services in Mildura.
At its launch this week, Mr Tulloch was joined by two of his saviours, Leading Senior Constable Safak and now-retired nurse Mrs Morris. As they chatted, he reflected on events such as a daughter's wedding, a son's graduation, the births of two grandchildren and three Richmond premierships, all of which he would have missed if not for their help.
"Someone has saved your life so that you can have things in your life ahead of you. It's just amazing, really," he said.
As a nurse, Mrs Morris knew what needed to be done and "instinct just took over", but she wanted to stress that "anyone can be trained in CPR".
"It's such a simple thing to do ... and if this (program) saves one life, it's worthwhile," she said.
Leading Sen. Const. Safak, who in his work has successfully administered CPR several times, said what had happened to Mr Tulloch had been tragic, "but it's absolutely wonderful that the community came together to make it possible for him to continue and now he's giving back to the community".
"There aren't enough police, there aren't enough ambos, there aren't enough nurses, there aren't enough people that are CPR-trained," he said.
"We are a community and we have to look after each other. It really does take a village."
The other members of Mr Tulloch's life-saving team couldn't make it to the Hand on Heart launch, but Mrs Ozer, who with her husband was first on the scene and started the rescue, sent a note which in part said: "In that moment we only cared that you were a human in need and nothing else mattered."
"We knew that if we didn’t help, that may have been a life that left earth early," she wrote.
Mildura Lions president Doug Harry said the club was proud to back the program and that "I think it will spread", explaining that he had already received interest from Lions interstate and could see potential for it to go around the world through the service organisation.
"We see this CPR program as a great community thing ... it could become a Lions International thing," he said.
HOW TO SIGN UP FOR FREE HANDS ON HEART CPR TRAINING: CLICK HERE