Easter toll at 19 after three Vic crashes

Australia's Easter road toll has climbed to 19, after a spate of fatal crashes across regional Victoria.

Traffic congestion

Australia's Easter road toll has climbed to 19, after a spate of fatal crashes across Victoria. (AAP)

Three people have been killed in a spate of road deaths across regional Victoria, pushing the nation's Easter road toll to 19.

Queensland still leads as the state with the most lives lost, at eight, but Victoria's road toll jumped from one to four on Monday.

A passer-by found a woman's body inside a crashed vehicle near Ouyen, in Victoria's west, on Monday morning.

Investigators believe she was the sole occupant of the vehicle, which veered off the road and hit a tree sometime over the Easter long weekend.

Two cars also collided head-on on the South Gippsland Hwy, at Lang Lang, about 9.30am.

A woman who was a passenger in one of the vehicles died, and the male driver suffered life-threatening injuries.

The female driver, the only person in the other car, was also seriously injured.

Then, just before 3pm, a man died when his car left the road at Mt Cottrell, near Melton, and rolled after smashing into a large boulder.

Queensland is heading for its worst Easter road toll for more than two decades with the death of a motorcyclist south of Cairns, just before midnight on Sunday, taking the sunshine state's toll to eight.

The Queensland result was well above the 20-year average of three to three-and-a-half deaths over the holiday period, Acting Assistant Commissioner Mike Keating said on Monday.

"Overwhelmingly, the message is that people have made some poor decisions," he said.

"Tragically, we've seen those decisions result in deaths on our roads."

Over the past two-and-a-half years, both injuries and fatal road crashes had been declining, he said.

"What we see this weekend is clearly a spike."

The national Easter road toll stood at 19 on Monday afternoon.

In addition to the eight lives lost in Queensland and four deaths in Victoria, there have been four fatalities in NSW, two in Western Australia and one in South Australia. Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT remain fatality-free.

(EDS: The Easter road toll figures are for the period 0001 April 2 to 2359 April 6)


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