00:01This is the first time we've heard from 69-year-old William Swale about the tragic events that
00:07took place in the central Victorian town of Daylesford on the 5th of November in 2023.
00:13Mr Swale is a diabetic and on that day he was suffering a hyperglycemic attack and he
00:20lost control of his car down a hill and careered into tables outside a pub, hitting two families
00:27and killing five people including two children aged 9 and 11 and also injured six others.
00:34Now today as part of a coronial inquest into the circumstances leading up to this terrible
00:39accident we've heard from Mr Swale himself and he said that during the hour leading up to the crash
00:47he was aware that he needed to eat in order to keep his blood glucose levels in check and he
00:53tried to go to a wine deli eatery place in Daylesford but they were booked out so he couldn't
01:01eat there and he left and the court heard that from that point on he can't remember anything.
01:07He has no memory until he was woken up in an ambulance after paramedics had given him medication.
01:15The other thing we saw today in court was that there was footage played of his car which was
01:22taken from the Daylesford Bowls Club and it shows him driving down the road and pausing for some time
01:30and he told the court he was in the midst of the hyperglycemic attack at that point and he didn't
01:37have full control over what he was doing so the car was paused for some time and then made a
01:43U-turn
01:43and drove back in the direction it had come from and he said after that he had he had no
01:49memory of
01:50making that U-turn and he had no memory of people shouting at him to stop his car. The other
01:55thing
01:56we learned was some various theories that he has as to what caused that terrible accident that day.
02:02He mentioned perhaps he'd made some errors in managing his insulin intake. He'd taken insulin
02:08earlier in the day but perhaps made some mistakes about how much he needed to have had by the time
02:15he was in Daylesford. And we also learned that he was monitoring his blood glucose levels via a
02:22program on his phone and that he wasn't seeing those alerts because he wasn't looking at his phone
02:28and he wasn't hearing those alerts because they were muted through his car Bluetooth.
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