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Road toll highlights need to study impact of memorials

January 05, 2006

JClark.thumb.jpgAn international authority on roadside memorials says there is an urgent need to understand the impact of such memorials on the behaviour of drivers.

Dr Jennifer Clark from The University of New England was speaking today as the national road toll for the Christmas / New Year holiday period rose to 67. “Many people report that the sight of a roadside memorial brings road-safety issues to mind,” Dr Clark said, “and those who erect such memorials often believe that they will have a beneficial impact on drivers.”

“There has been, however, no scientific attempt to find a relationship between roadside memorials and driving quality,” she explained. “Whatever the outcome of such a study, it would be useful for all those who plan, maintain and police our roads, as well as for those who erect and tend memorials.”

“The current holiday road toll reminds us that we need all the information we can get on any factor that might suggest new countermeasures to help reduce the number of crashes on our roads,” she concluded.

Dr Clark (pictured here), a Senior Lecturer in UNE’s School of Classics, History and Religion, organised the world’s first international symposium on roadside memorials – at UNE in 2004. In that year, too, she joined fellow UNE researchers in forming an interdisciplinary Death Cultures Group at the University. “Like the specific subject of roadside memorials, the general field of ‘death and dying’ is receiving increasing attention from academics,” she said. “Our group at UNE includes specialists in history, sociology, health, the arts, language, and law, and has affiliates at universities in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.”

“In some respects, this increase in academic activity matches the movement of popular culture,” Dr Clark said. “The popularity of television programs with a forensic-medicine theme is just one example of the way in which scenes focusing on a dead body are becoming more common on our film and television screens.”

Late last year the Death Cultures Group held a symposium at UNE titled “Death in the Afternoon”. Papers presented at the symposium dealt with research undertaken or published during 2005, and included historical, aesthetic, and health-care studies, as well as a paper on roadside memorials.

Dr Clark said the group is already planning another “Death in the Afternoon” event, and hoping for an even broader range of topics. “We hope to increase our activities in 2006, and welcome proposals from researchers who would like to present their findings to the group and to other interested members of the University and the wider community,” she said.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 5, 2006 04:57 PM