In January, on a Sunday afternoon, a fatal crash highlighted the vital role they play in helping others. After hearing a crashing sound, Lisa discovered a car had driven off the road and down an embankment. She tried to flag down passing cars to ask them to call emergency services or alert her husband.
Traffic was busy with weekend travellers driving between Canberra and the coast, but no-one would stop. More than 50 cars drove past despite Lisa’s attempts to wave them down. “I even got down on my knees on the road pleading for them to stop,” she says.
A driver finally pulled up, allowing Lisa to reach the car. She found a barely conscious woman in a critical condition. After assessing her injuries, she knew her outlook was not good.
Lisa stayed with the woman for two hours, holding her hand, wiping the sweat from her face and talking with her. “I was telling her, ‘I'm here. I won't leave you’,” she says. “I could tell her that my husband’s alerted emergency services, they’re coming. I promised her I'd never leave her side and I didn’t. She was an amazing lady. Not once did she ever complain about any pain. Not once.”
The woman, who was travelling to see family members, died the following day. “I promised her that I would talk to her family,” she says. “That was really important to me. I fulfilled that promise. I felt that I had done everything I could for her.”
In the weeks that followed, Lisa – who received a Commendation for Brave Conduct in 2012 for helping two people saturated in fuel after a tanker overturned in 2004 – took time to help herself, too.
She and Darrell, a former blacksmith and martial arts expert, breed Friesian horses. They have seven horses at Black Flat. Their love for the medieval period has led to the pair participating in jousting tournaments, with Darrell wearing full medieval armour. They also run medieval skill-at-arms clinics, many for people with PTSD, anxiety or a disability.
Lisa and Darrell say they will always help others. That’s because in their situation and location, they believe no-one else will. Helping others, they believe, is to be human.
“Someone has to be there,” says Lisa. “Someone has to take responsibility. Someone has to care enough to give that person a chance. And someone has to pass on the story of what happened to that person.”
After the fatal accident, the woman’s family visited the Bossleys at Black Flat. “I could pass on to her children what their mum and I talked about,” says Lisa. “Knowing that their mum was, at that point, conscious and that she had the ability to be able to still recall her children and have a conversation with me. That was very, very comforting to her partner and her kids.”
