A mother screaming ‘save my baby!’ was all 18-year-old Elyse Partridge needed to propel her into Angels Beach’s wild, dark surf with her younger friend, Belana Broadley, ploughing ahead.
‘We just ran,’ Ms Partridge says, nearly three years later at nearby Shelly Beach, ‘you know, it was just insane’.
Moments earlier, the two young women had been ‘just having a picnic watching the sunset,’ Ms Broadley says.
It was January 2021, but there was no one else around.
‘The sun was practically set and we were packing our things to leave,’ Ms Broadley says, ‘and this woman came up to us and said that her girls were drowning and she didn’t know how to swim’.
‘She asked if we could help and then me and Elyse just kind of jumped into it,’ she says. ‘I grabbed an esky lid – we brought an esky with us for dinner – and I used the esky lid as a boogie board.
‘I swam out to the first girl, gave her the esky lid for her to come into shore with, then I swam out to the farther girl.’
Meanwhile, Ms Partridge helped bring in the first girl.
Police and paramedics soon met the women and girls on the beach and one of the girls was taken to hospital.
All four youths survived the near-drownings without major injury, but were battered, bruised and exhausted.
The two girls rescued were locals aged ten and eleven at the time, Ms Partridge says.
Awarded medals
The two women have recently returned from a trip to Sydney, where they received Australian Governor-General’s Bravery Medals (for acts of bravery in hazardous circumstances), in a ceremony at Government House.
The formal occasion was a rare reunion for the former teen rescuers, who haven’t seen one another much in recent times, each young woman busy working and living on the Northern Rivers.
‘I don’t think like that day will ever really leave me,’ Ms Broadley says, ‘when I go swimming with my little brothers, I’m always worried and I say, “please don’t swim out too far”’.
Ms Partridge acknowledges her time with the surf life-saver youth service, Nippers, when she was younger.
‘I guess maybe the Nippers did help a little bit in running out,’ Ms Partridge says when asked to consider how others might have felt too frightened to enter the surf in her situation.
‘To be completely honest, I just watched a little Bondi Rescue,’ Ms Broadley says of her resourcefulness in using the esky lid, ‘I know you need to take something to float on, that’s the key’.
The women describe feeling their bravery medals as undeserved.
‘I kind of felt wrong getting an award for doing something that is like a natural instinct,’ Ms Partridge says, ‘you would just save anyone, I don’t really feel like I deserved it’.
The two women are calling on everyone to learn skills in surf and swim safety.
‘I definitely encourage every parent to put their children in Nippers,’ Ms Partridge says, ‘you are going to not regret it. Do it, do it, do it’.
Ms Broadley also suggests swimming lessons and learning about rips, ‘and when not to go swimming, because the conditions that day were very rough and rippy’.
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