https://www.nfsa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-06/Aus%20Music%20still_Molly_Mega%20Menu.png
You Just Don’t Realise…: Shocking Scenes and Sobering Statistics
Title:
You Just Don’t Realise…: Shocking Scenes and Sobering Statistics
NFSA ID
32686
Year
1975
Courtesy
Network Ten
Warnings
WARNING: This clip contains human suffering or death
In December 1975, ATV-0 Melbourne broadcast a graphic documentary designed to confront complacent audiences in the lead-up to Christmas. You Just Don’t Realise… was a searing 55-minute examination on the effects of the mounting road toll.
In the film’s opening sequence, De Montignie warns viewers of the confronting nature of what they’re about to see, followed by a litany of sobering statistics and an accident scene with a car skewered by a pole.
Written and produced by station journalist Phil De Montignie, and filmed over three months, Terry Carlyon and Barry Thomas’ unflinching lenses captured bloodied and bewildered road victims on 16mm colour film stock. ‘I have never seen anything so horrifyingly gruesome on a television or cinema screen’, exclaimed TV columnist Ralph Broom in The Sun.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.