‘He didn’t realise the danger’: the family grieving a lost son and their push to slash Australia’s drowning deaths

It was unusual for 20-year-old Jona Kinivuwai and his friends to drive an hour to enjoy an ocean sunset when the bay beaches of Frankston were just 20 minutes away. But they had seen Rye’s photogenic No 16 Beach in TikTok videos, which captured its otherworldly beauty on calm days at low tide.

There are no mentions in these captivating videos of the savage rips and deadly swells of the Mornington Peninsula’s back beaches, largely unpatrolled by surf lifesavers. Nor did the friends identify any danger when they arrived on 4 February 2024 – on a day with high winds and rough waves.

The week before Jona’s visit, four members of an Indian family who had been wading in the shallows on an unpatrolled beach in Phillip Island, died when a wave dragged them to sea.

“When the kids came to pick Jona up, he yelled out to me and I said, ‘Son, be careful’,” Jona’s mother, Luse Kinivuwai, tells Guardian Australia. “If we’d known where he was going, I would have said, ‘don’t go out there’, because we’d been reading about that family.”

Just before 7pm, Jona and his mates were running in and out of the waves when Jona, a promising basketball player, tripped.

“And a wave came and took him,” his mother says.

No one on the beach was adept enough a swimmer to attempt a rescue, nor was there any rescue equipment. Someone called 000. The rescue helicopter arrived about 10 minutes later but Jona’s body has never been found.

Across Australia last summer, 99 people drowned – a 10% increase on the previous summer. Many of these deaths occurred at unpatrolled or isolated locations. Victoria had its highest summer drowning total on record, with 26 lives lost. The last death on No 16 beach had been in 2021. The morning of Jona’s death, surfers had been talking at the strip of shops on nearby Dundas Street, worrying that it could be a deadly day. Social media videos were drawing large crowds of tourists and Melburnians.

In the following weeks, some of those same surfers and divers joined the family in the search for Jona, as his father, Ilisioni, cut a lonely figure combing the thick kelp on the shoreline with a rake.

The Kinivuwais came from Cranbourne daily, employing a paraglider and drone operator, and a search and rescue service when the official search ceased.

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Frustrated locals have started taking matters into their own hands, warning visitors of dangerous conditions and even running their own training courses on how to rescue someone in trouble.

Drew Cooper lives a 10-minute drive from No 16 and frequently hears rescue helicopters. He is a plant nursery owner but has been involved in surf lifesaving since he was a kid, and now his daughters are part of the local club.

“We’ve assisted people plenty of times,” he says, “but it’s also a risk.”

Cooper started researching beach safety initiatives and happened upon the remote rescue tube. This device hooks around the rescuer’s shoulder and torso by a leash (if you’re old enough to remember Baywatch you get the idea), so that the device can be pushed towards the person struggling. This counters the risk of the rescuer being dragged under.

“The community here is at its wit’s end” he says. “Surfers can’t be everywhere at once and these tubes could prevent further drownings.”

The tubes were a success in Kauai, Hawaii, when a spate of drownings in 2008 led locals to hang one on shrubbery. That grassroots scheme took off and rescuer drownings dropped from 60% to 13%.

Synchronistically to Cooper’s efforts, a three-year trial had begun in 2021/22 in New South Wales, managed by City of Coffs Harbour’s Lifeguard Service, funded by the Rotary Club of Coffs Harbour and Pink Silks Perpetual Trust. The City of Coffs Harbour has told Guardian Australia that, in the 33 months since the project started rolling out, there have been 13 known successful rescues involving the devices and no unsuccessful rescues.

Meanwhile, Life Saving Victoria (LSV) has established a trial of rescue tubes at Venus Bay in Gippsland. Rescue tubes will be installed with alarms and include a feature that connects the user to emergency services.

Parks Victoria, the land manager, provided approval for the trial in January 2024 and the LSV is now waiting for the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action to give the final greenlight to begin installing the stations.

Dr Hannah Calverley, manager of research and evaluation at LSV, said the project was designed based on tragic incidents at Venus Bay during out-of-patrol times or at unpatrolled areas. “And the rescuer has been the one that has actually drowned and the person that was initially in trouble has been the one that has survived.”

Dr Amy Peden, a researcher at the University of NSW who studies drowning prevention strategies, says there are various reasons why there is often a slow and cautious approach to implementing new public rescue equipment‚ including perceived risks if the equipment is misused.

“We’re not really a litigious society in Australia,” Peden says, “but [land managers] would not want to put something in that is going to have the opposite effect, of someone incorrectly deploying it or a call not going through [to emergency services], so help doesn’t get there in time.”

Peden is not convinced by the efficacy of signs. There are two identical signs at No 16, one at the beginning of each of the two beach tracks. Symbols depict dangerous conditions. Beneath is a warning: “No life saving services. Nearest patrolled beach is Sorrento Back Beach.” In the event of an emergency, the public is advised to call 000.

Parks Victoria told Guardian Australia: ​​“Safety signage at No 16 beach in Rye is compliant with Australian national standards. These sign standards have been developed by the Australian Water Safety Council, Surf Life Saving Australia and the Royal Life Saving Society to give a clear and uniform message to visitors so that they can make informed decisions about the risk in coastal areas.”

The 2022-23 Life Saving Victoria Drowning Report states that 36% of drownings in Victoria over the past decade have involved people from CALD communities. Whether or not someone can read English, Peden says, “So many people ignore signage, so we do need to think about ways to make it as eye-catching and clearly understood and as effective as possible.”

In some areas of NSW, rock fishers must pass a sign with a death tally and text translated into Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. Another idea that has been raised among the local community is a surf equivalent of a fire danger rating sign.

“I think stuff like that can be quite powerful to make people pay attention,” Peden says of the rock-fishing sign. “In terms of the fire signage, it has been around for quite a while and I think it’s reasonably well understood amongst the community.”

Luse Kinivuwai approves of signs that announce the number of deaths at a site. Something that shocked her, as she arrived in a police car at No 16 that night, was that to her the beach lacked “a sense of danger”.

Her son, she says, was not a strong swimmer. “He didn’t realise the danger. That’s one of the things that they can do, to improve the signs”

“Anything to alert people,” she says.

While the dangers of unpatrolled surf beaches are common knowledge in coastal communities, the rising death toll at these beaches suggests ocean literacy among beachgoers needs to be addressed.

“These kids don’t know anything about the dangers of the beach. They aren’t educated on it,” Kinivuwai says. “We’d be happy to pay for signs.”

Over the Easter weekend, No 16 became the backdrop for yet more social media photos. One TikTok post has had 222.6k likes, so while Jona’s brother tries to warn of the dangers in the comment sections, his pleas become lost.

The family were back in Rye to visit No 16 again. As she has since Jona’s disappearance, Luse Kinivuwai warns unwitting visitors of the danger as they pose for footage.

“Anything we can do to help,” she says, “We’d be happy to.”