Last night after the LGBTI meet and greet
Last night I joined the management committee and other lawyers at a meet and greet to help get up and running Brisbane’s LGBTI Legal Service. The service will be the first independent LGBTI legal service in the country, and is expected to commence operations early in the new year.
The meet and greet went well, with a good number of lawyers turning up keen to help out, and some well known and not so well known faces in attendance. President Merran Lawler greeted all, expressed her profuse thanks to all who had helped so far, and expressed her hope to get the service up and running quickly.
And now for the rant…
That was the good part of the evening. Now I digress. Afterwards I was in my car in the Valley waiting at some lights to change, when at the intersection in front of me a pedestrian fell and stumbled flat- smack onto the asphalt. Hat went flying. Out cold. The lights changed and the people in the car beside me pulled up on one side of him and I on the other.
Well that was the case until the man in the 4WD behind me abused me for holding up a public road, and to get the car off the road. I was in shock about what I had seen and this bloke’s attitude, but thought better of it to abuse him, and pulled the car over to the side. The big black 4WD roared off.
000 was soon called, and in the meantime we three bystanders tried to help the man, quickly helped by a nurse from Sullivan and Nicolaides who happened to be there, and the operator from 000. The man’s pulse was taken. We rolled him onto his side to make sure he didn’t choke, and stayed with him to make sure he was OK. He was still out to it.
And in the meantime, with this man down on the road, cars, buses and trucks continued to roar past. No doubt the drivers thought it had nothing to do with them.
The ambos turned up, followed by the firies, who brought a huge truck that thankfully blocked the road. Police. More police. More ambos. Flashing lights all over the place. Other people also phoned 000. They were told by 000 to block the road. Impossible to do without official help. Abusive other drivers- whose right to own the road they believed was more important than the fact that there was a man down.
The man, who was conscious by this time, did not speak English or Chinese- as a Chinese man had come up and tried to speak to him- without luck, and had became very aggressive. He reeked of booze. Ambos and firies manhandled him to the side of the road.
I gave a statement to police. The man was being led away in the ambulance as I left. And I can’t forget the high points of humanity- the people in the other car, who stopped first, the nurse from S&N, and the people whose job was to help this man; and the low point of humanity: other drivers, but especially the man in the 4WD abusing me for the temerity of stopping to check if this fallen man was OK.
