by Ann Fogarty
I realised that the power was off as soon as I got inside. The airconditioner was silent when I switched it on and the fridge didn’t hum to life as I opened the door. I picked up the telephone receiver but the line was dead. Strange, I thought, the electricity grid must be overloaded, the way it does when the whole of Melbourne has airconditioners on.
Then I saw the smoke.
The rear of the house—the kitchen and dining-room area—had a long picture window that faced the bush. A pillar of purple-grey smoke, skewed low to one side, rose from behind the trees in the direction of Beaconsfield or Berwick, to the south-west. I stood in the kitchen transfixed. The fire couldn’t come towards us though, could it? The wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Surely someone would put it out? I’ll ring Terry at work and ask him if he knows anything about it, I decided; then remembered the phone was dead. It dawned on me then that there was no way of finding out what the fire was doing—the television and radio weren’t options and we didn’t have a battery-operated transistor. I’ll ask the neighbours later. One of them will know.
I was surprised to see several neighbours gathered on the nature strip when I went out; apparently I wasn’t the only one who was becoming anxious. Carol and Alan, Procie who was a widower, and another middle-aged couple were standing in a huddle, bracing themselves and trying to talk over the strengthening wind. We turned to face the smoke rising in the distance.
‘It’s a long way off,’ I ventured, hopefully. ‘And the wind’s blowing it away from us. Someone would let everyone know if it was coming this way, wouldn’t they?’
The others shrugged and nodded. I got the feeling they’d already raked over the questions. We stood and watched.
The girls were still playing next door. Suddenly unnerved, I excused myself from the gathering to go and fetch them. It was twenty minutes before the time I’d normally collect them—five o’clock—but I suddenly wanted them with me. If only Terry would arrive home soon! He was usually home around fivethirty from his work at Bayswater but maybe he would come home earlier. Perhaps he had tried to phone and was worried that he couldn’t get through? I exchanged a few words with Fiona’s mother as we stood at her front door, asking her whether she’d seen the fire and knew anything about it (she had, but she didn’t), and left. I was too toey to chat.
I came home from school and went to a neighbour’s house to play. Mum came early to collect me. I remember doing the typical six-year-old pestering of ‘why can’t I stay longer, just for a little while more’. I realised something was wrong when Mum spoke sternly to me. Mum was generally patient, so the moment stands out vividly. I thought I must have done something bad, or maybe something had happened. I just wasn’t sure what it was.
By now, I was too distracted to carry on with the routine of getting tea ready and bathing the girls. There was still no power and the house was suffocatingly hot. The girls and I sat together by the kitchen window on the bench as I watched the smoke. It was still a long way away, billowing up like a smoke signal behind the trees. The wind had intensified; the day had turned nasty. Birds were struggling to balance on branches, battling to fly at an angle to the wind. Trees were bowing low, their limbs thrashing dementedly.
Sarah, always a little chatterbox, was sensing something, and talked and talked and talked.
‘Shut up,’ I suddenly snapped. ‘Just shut up.’
We were both taken aback by the harshness in my voice. I felt bad. It’s no good upsetting the girls, I chided myself. Stay calm, be normal.
I thought I heard the crunch of gravel over the wind, a car pulling up outside on the verge. I moved quickly to open the front door, expecting Terry, but there was nothing there or the car had moved on. It was now approaching seven o’clock and he still wasn’t home. Terry had been late before only this time he couldn’t ring to tell me, I told myself.
It was too hot to want to eat and I was too on edge to think about preparing a proper tea so the girls and I ate cold meat sandwiches, then I put them in their bunk beds, assuring them that Daddy would say goodnight when he got home.
‘But what if we’re asleep?’ piped up Rachel.
It was seven-thirty. Terry was still not home. He was now two hours late. A sickening unease overtook me. What if he’d got mixed up in the fire? He used a back route from work to get home in that general direction and what if he’d been caught in it? Even if he was working late he must have tried phoning to tell me and wondered about the phone line. And what if the fire approached our street and he wasn’t home yet? Terry would know what to do in these circumstances—he was a good person to have around in a time of crisis. I was intuitive; Terry was sensible.
I could smell smoke; I desperately needed him home.
Much later, I learnt that Terry had been held up at a police roadblock at Beaconsfield. The police were directing everyone except emergency vehicles to the local football ground. Dozens of people were arriving carrying belongings and pets.
Rachel was snuffling softly within minutes and Sarah was soundly asleep when I checked on them. Girls settled, I quickly slipped outside to check the situation with the neighbours, who were still on the nature strip.
‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’ I asked.
Everyone shook their heads.
I caught snatches of conversation above the wind… ‘hosing down the house’… ‘water in the gutters’… ‘should we go down to the CFA?’… Something about buckets.
We all strained to be normal, to keep the panic out of our voices.
We tossed up whether we should stay or go. Stay or go. It sounds so clear-cut: if you choose to stay, make sure you’re fully equipped and prepared to defend your property; if you choose to go, flee early. Stay or go were the only options, the doctrine that was enshrined later.
It was probably safer to stay, I thought. Procie seemed pretty calm. He was older than the rest of us and had been through bushfires before, and he wasn’t going anywhere. We all stood around, saying nothing, glancing at the smoke, waiting. It was reassuring to be with the others. It took my mind off Terry.
My husband meanwhile was waiting with a group of people gathered around a two-way radio in someone’s car that was picking up Country Fire Authority traffic. Terry consoled himself when he heard that the fires had skirted Upper Beaconsfield. Then one of the voices announced a wind change. The fire was headed towards his family. A call went out for help for two fire trucks in Upper Beaconsfield. The CFA line screeched and went dead. Terry knew from what was said that those fire trucks were in the bush at the back of our street.
As darkness fell about nine o’clock, the sky to the south glowed orange-red. The streetlights were out and everything was reduced to dark outlines. The headlights of a four-wheel-drive appeared suddenly along the road. A man’s voice punched out a message over a loudspeaker, a hard voice, urgently repeating the same message.
‘Leave now,’ it shouted over the wind. ‘The wind’s going to change. Leave now. Get out! Now!’
An abrupt, turbulent wind change was turning the flank of the fire—kilometres long—into its head. What had been a long finger of fire was becoming a massive wall.
We all scattered. I turned and ran to the house, flinging the front door open and knocking myself on something as I tried to adjust to the pitch black inside. I felt the dogs brush past me as they ran from room to room, whimpering. Sarah was sleeping on the top of the bunk in her room without clothes on. I tried to balance on the bottom bed and drag her out and down without hurting her, shaking her, urging her to wake. I fumbled around frantically and put on her pyjamas, back-to-front, and dragged her by the arm into her sister’s bedroom. Rachel felt leaden as I shook her awake and pulled her sideways, trying not to frighten her. I got them both on their feet and into their sandals, but it was so dark that we were bumping into everything around us when we tried to move.
‘I’m sorry,’ I gasped, telling myself to be calm. ‘But we’ve got to get out of here, now!’
&n
bsp; Adrenalin took over. I snapped the leads on Tammy and Dusky and pulled us all together, pushing and herding everyone out of the house. It didn’t occur to me to take anything else.
Mum bustled us out of the house and up to the neighbour’s house two doors from us. I was scared, but not completely. Mum was there and I trusted her to know what to do, as you do when you’re a child.
Gusts of acrid smoke hit me as I opened the front door. The wind was savage, buffeting us roughly as we made our way across the lawn and onto the street. The first flashes of fire reached us; spot fires breaking out everywhere. Eucalypts crackled and exploded. The darkness was alive with streaks of orange. Gaseous plumes writhed above us.
My mind raced. We should go with Alan and Carol and their two children, rather than attempt it alone. I tugged the children and dogs along the street, searching through the smoky haze for signs of their driveway. I could see silhouettes of people moving in front of the house. Something boomed in the distance as we ran.
‘Yes, come with us,’ Carol yelled over the wind.
We all scrambled into their big old sedan: Carol and Alan in the front seat; the girls, the dogs and me, and their daughter, Janet, in the back seat. Then, we realised that their youngest, Darren, wasn’t with us. Or anywhere outside the car. We all leapt out, panicked now, shouting his name into the wind and darkness. We could barely see beyond a few metres. Carol’s face was stricken. We weren’t going anywhere now—we couldn’t go without Darren. It was too late to leave. We had to urgently shelter the other three children.
The wind had become incredibly fierce. It was terrifying, way beyond any wind I’d ever encountered. You knew it was menacing, that something terrible was happening. Embers hammered us with the force of cyclonic winds.
What occurred next seemed to take moments.
Burning branches started to crack and crash to the ground around us as we ran down to Carol and Alan’s swimming pool and leapt in. Strips of flaming bark flew past our ears. The air thickened with the vapours of burning eucalypts. We gasped as smoke seared our throats and scorched our eyes.
‘We’ve got to get out!’ Carol suddenly yelled. ‘The branches are going to hit us or they’ll go through the sides of the pool. Alan’s gone to hose down the house. We’ve got to get wet all over and get out!’
I dunked the girls’ heads under the water and felt a pang as I caught sight of the confusion and alarm on Rachel’s face. Carol ran to the house and reappeared with two blankets. We soaked them and draped them over the children. What presence of mind Carol had, but I was paralysed with fear. We sheltered between the pool and some rocks bordering it. It looked safe. Carol crouched next to Janet in the corner of the rocks, covering them both in one blanket. Darren was still missing. My girls were next to me and I was on the outside. I leant my body over them with my head down, shielding them. They were underneath a wet blanket. I wasn’t.
I was dumb with terror. My whole body ran hot and cold with panic. It was impossible to live through what we were seeing, I thought. This is it, we will all die tonight. I felt this in a shocking, but strangely accepting, way.
We huddled together, hoping for a miracle.
Suddenly, we were overtaken by a deafening, roaring din. Shatteringly loud, like the force of a thousand jet engines bearing down on us. The wind was ferocious, but this was far, far beyond the sound of any wind.
Immediately, my body was wracked by the worst pain imaginable.
Someone started screaming. Somewhere in my subconscious I realised it was Mum, and pulled away from her.
My world exploded. For long seconds I was oblivious to anything but pain. A fireball had hit me: a rolling, roaring monster outpacing the fire front and the one-hundred-plus kilometre-per-hour wind, causing everything in its path to combust. Moments before, I’d been praying to stay alive, now all I could do was scream and plead, ‘Oh God, please let me die, please let me die’. Anything to end the terrible pain.
Alan grabbed Rachel and started taking her to the car. I hesitated for what felt like an eternity. Do I stay or do I follow my sister? I chose to follow my sister. I can’t remember seeing Mum burn, but I must have seen or sensed something dangerous or I would never have left her. I recall with great clarity, as I followed Alan and Rachel, that I couldn’t see the steps to climb them. It was dark and I told myself, ‘Why are you looking for the steps? We’re in the middle of a bushfire. I’m sure no one will mind if you climb up the rocks.’ So I climbed the rocks. I ran after Alan and Rachel, stubbing my toe twice on the way. Alan put us in the car, giving us instructions that I made sure we carried out, then disappeared. He came back a couple of times to check on us as we waited. Once he moved the car out onto the road opposite our house. I remember telling Rachel not to touch the windows as they were very hot, and telling her not to fall asleep.
Alan lifted me into the pool, burning his arms and hands as he did. This man, this act, undoubtedly saved my life. I stood in the waist-high water. Carol was splashing water over me which amazingly eased the pain.
‘Are you burned?’ I asked Carol.
‘No,’ she replied, quiet.
‘I think I must be,’ I added, ‘because all my skin is floating on the water.’
The fire was still raging around us. Carol told Janet to push me under the water each time the flames came close, while she worked to keep the pool free of falling debris. I wouldn’t realise for years what Janet had done for me. For an adult to do what she did in such terrifying circumstances would have been remarkable; for a girl of only twelve, it was truly magnificent.
Carol, Janet and I stayed in the pool for what seemed like forever; in reality it was less than fifteen minutes. Shock set in. I turned my head to look at the girls but they weren’t in the pool. I couldn’t see my children. My mouth opened and closed like a goldfish but no words came out. Where were my girls? I was pushed under water again, confused. I hadn’t seen Alan take the girls away from the sight of their burning mother. As far as I was aware, we had three missing children.
We were in the car parked in front of our house for a long time. I thought a lot. I remember seeing our house alight. I could see a bright light in Mum and Dad’s bedroom and I thought, ‘Mum’s left the light on in her bedroom; maybe I should turn it off’, but I knew in the pit of my stomach that if I went to the house I would die. I really knew what had happened and I knew what would happen if I left the car. I sat in the back seat with Rachel, believing that I wasn’t going to see Mum again, that she was dead. I tried to get this idea out of my head. No one wants to lose their parents and I was young enough to think that somehow it might still be alright. But deep down, I felt sick with an overwhelming dread.
The worst of the fire had moved on but branches were still falling from trees. Somewhere above us I heard a creaking, groaning sound, then a sharp crack as a large limb cleaved from a tree and crashed to the ground, sending up a spray of sparks. Burning leaves swirled and lifted in thermals. As the minutes dragged on in the pool, my legs became weak. I panicked, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to stand up for much longer. I couldn’t let myself sit down, I’d drown. I was going to drown.
A fire truck came down the road and stopped by the car. Ignoring my earlier instructions to Rachel, I stuck my face and hands on the window so the men in the truck would see us. They did, and a fireman came and opened the door. He asked me if there was anyone else and where were they. I gave him directions and I remember feeling that it was the most important thing I was ever going to say. I tried very hard to be clear and tell him exactly where to go. It seemed so important. Another fireman put Rachel and me in the cabin of the truck.
Just when my legs were buckling, I heard a voice from the side of the pool. A firefighter in an official-looking jacket and yellow overalls appeared out of the smoke and confusion, like a vision. He beckoned to us to come to the side and climb out. I struggled to wade over to where he was, swivelling one hip at a time through the water, but didn’t have the strength to
get out.
‘Quick, quick,’ he said, reaching out. ‘Come on.’
‘I can’t,’ I replied weakly. ‘I can’t.’
He looked closer at me, and gasped.
‘Oh, my God!’
I could not know what he saw in that moment. Tony, from a brigade further afield, recalled looking at a woman with skin hanging off her ‘like candle wax’. He swore under his breath as he saw the bone of my left arm.
I couldn’t get out of that pool but somehow he reached an arm around me and hoisted me over the side. I clung onto his neck with all the energy I could muster. He carried me to the cabin of the fire truck and yelled instructions to the crew inside.
‘There’s police on point duty stopping traffic. Take her there.’
The firefighters continued searching for other people along St Georges Road, picking up about twelve people, including Alan.
Here I was sitting next to my burned mother. I have never been able to remember what she looked like, but I know it was horrific. My brain was clinging desperately to the fact that Mum’s hair didn’t seem to be burnt. It was matted and messy, but surely Mum couldn’t be burned! Wouldn’t her hair be the first thing to go?
It was hard to hang onto the belief that Mum wasn’t hurt when I could see it, and any time anyone touched her it was excruciatingly painful. I don’t know if she even knew we were there. She didn’t acknowledge us. The only thing she mentioned was could we not touch her. I was sitting next to her and although I was trying really hard not to hurt her, I did. I remember feeling so very guilty for hurting her.
The trip in the fire truck only lasted about two minutes and then we were transferred to police cars. Mum went in one, and Rachel and I in another.
I was aware of little in the fire truck beyond being high up and the crackling, fuzzy radio with its broken stream of words. How could anyone understand that? One of the firefighters lifted me down and into a police car and lay me on the back seat. I struggled to sit up but I was too weak. Everything around us was ablaze as we moved off. Power lines dangled. It looked and felt like a war zone. Dull thuds sounded like mortar shells. We rolled past a car without windows, just jagged edges of glass, then the blistered side of a van. Black tree trunks were rimmed by orange licks of flames. Black and orange, smoke and headlights. A man with a face streaked with soot appeared like an apparition out of the smoke, looked blankly into the car and walked off. I felt so completely helpless lying there watching everything on fire, thinking, ‘We could still die—we’re not out of it yet’. I closed my eyes for an instant and saw the flicker of flames.
