Again he punches the number: nothing. Who else, who else? He manages to get a radio message through to one of his senior officers, requests that somebody check on his family’s wellbeing. The operator says they’ll get back to him, but he isn’t hopeful. Every police officer in the region is flat out right now.
The CFA crew have pushed on ahead. Frank Allan focuses on the cutting, grimly determined not to look in any of the cars. The policemen don’t have that luxury: it’s their responsibility to locate victims. They come across numerous vehicles, some they recognise. Finally they get to the four-car pile-up Wood had been trying to reach earlier that afternoon and find a group of people standing nearby. One of them is leaning into a fence. As they come closer they recognise someone they know well: Rossi Laudisio, proprietor of Cappa Rossi’s Pizza Restaurant.
Rossi is weeping. ‘Papa,’ he’s whispering, over and over. ‘Papa.’
‘Oh no,’ Wood murmurs to himself. Rossi’s father, Gennaro, is one of Kinglake’s most loved characters. Wood grew close to the family the year before, when Rossi’s mother died. ‘They’re great people,’ he says. ‘Gennaro was one of nature’s gentlemen.’
The policemen inspect the accident, confirm what they’ve been afraid of: a body in one of the cars. The four vehicles have smashed into one another in the whirling chaos of the fire’s first attack. The old man had been trapped, his legs pinned. His son stayed with him for as long as he could, until he was forced to seek shelter in a nearby house when the flames swept in and the heat grew lethal. So intense was the fire it melted the mag wheels and engine parts.
For Rossi Laudisio the death of his father is only one part of his personal nightmare. He asks the officers if they’ve seen his wife and four children. The family had to flee in separate cars and lost each other in the confusion.
Roger and Cameron look at each other: her red Landcruiser is one of the ones they recognised, smashed into an embankment.
Local knowledge coming to the fore, Cameron pulls out his phone and starts making calls. He works his way through the people they’ve seen on the trip so far, asking everyone about the red Landcruiser. He manages to track down the missing family, finds they’ve taken refuge at the High Mountain water farm and survived.
Rossi sinks to the ground, overwhelmed by relief.
The two officers have no time for the procedures they’d normally follow at a fatal accident. They have to get through to Kinglake. They place flashing beacons around the pile-up and continue with what’s beginning to feel like a journey through the underworld. At one point they come across an open stretch that offers them views all the way to the distant city: a million wheels and jets of flame pierce the darkness. The hills glow with burning stumps and fallen branches. What used to be a manna gum on the edge of the road is a fountain of embers atop a whirling column of fire.
My god, thinks Wood, my family is somewhere down there. How far has the fire got? Has it wiped out half of Melbourne?
They set out once more.
Small things catch the eye, lodge themselves in his memory. Warped images: the cavity where a car-door handle was, now spitting sparks. A red-hot metal chain, a house like a livid skeleton. A sheet of iron wrapped around a steel pole. And the cars; somehow they’re worst of all. You know what’s been in them. They’re scattered at a cacophony of angles: on their sides, in ditches and drains, buckled and blurring into one another. Melted wheel rims. Metal and flesh, fused.
The tension is becoming razor sharp. They’re close to the town now, and both men dread what they’re about to find. But even before that, they come across one more accident, the very sight of which leaves Wood with cold shivers. Maybe a dozen vehicles, including a motorbike, scattered around the intersection, all of them burnt, many of them crushed by trees. Beneath the front wheel of one car are the charred remains of a dog, its teeth a bitter rictus, its back legs smoking. The scene is weirdly illuminated by light thrown out from the burning bush.
‘Jesus,’ he whispers to himself. The driver of the first vehicle must have hit the brakes to avoid the dog and been clobbered from behind; other cars rear-ended them both, blocking the road. He imagines the fearful chaos that must have accompanied this carnage: the swathes of smoke, the headlights looming, panic-driven, the squealing brakes, the photos and teddy bears flying.
There are no bodies that he can see, so by the time the fire swept through, the occupants must have scattered. He hopes so.
The CFA crew are still working their way through this jungle. Frank Allan is discovering levels of exhaustion he didn’t know existed. He’s grateful when a handful of locals loom out of the darkness offering help. Between them they drag the cut-up logs aside, clear a path for the strike teams they hope will be following.
There’s one car completely embedded in the tree-jam. A four-wheel-drive appears, and the police prevail upon the driver to help drag the crushed car out of the way. He does so, but not without a massive effort: the heat was so intense the vehicle has sunk into the melted bitumen.
Wood and Caine edge their way round the scene, make the final descent into Kinglake; they cross the last rise.
Roger Wood stares in silence.
The town he last raced through this afternoon is gone. In its place is a lake of fire ringed by a pool of stars. There is no power, of course: Kinglake is illuminated only by the reflected light from blazing bush and raging buildings. Two jets of flame shoot high into the air.
They brace themselves and head down the hill.
SILENT NIGHT
It’s the silence that hits the hardest, the emptiness. All along the road to Kinglake they’ve been coming across little clusters of survivors, often people they know. There’s been communication—traumatic communication for the most part, but still something to make them feel they were part of the human race.
Making that first run down the hill, they feel like they’re the last men left on Earth.
The wind has settled now, the blood-chilling roar Roger heard before is long gone. There’s an eerie hush broken only by the hum of the engine, the crash of the odd falling tree. The flashing red and blue lights enhance the ominous glow thrown out by the fire. Nobody comes running to greet them, no vehicles are moving. Just about every structure on that western approach is gone.
Wood thinks about the death and destruction he’s already encountered. Wonders if anybody in Kinglake is left alive. Struggles through a sense of sheer astonishment.
‘It was like my eyes were held open with matchsticks,’ says Wood. ‘I was trying to take it all in—everywhere I looked there was devastation—everything was burning. I’d been up in Kinglake for five years and I knew everything, a lot of people, and everywhere I looked it was, Ah shit, that’s gone too. It was overwhelming.’
They enter the main street. The pizza parlour, the hardware store and service station, the vet’s. Houses and houses and houses, all destroyed. The mesmerising geysers of flame turn out to be gas venting from the underground gas tanks at the servo. Wood doesn’t want to drive too close to that: who knows if it’s about to explode?
Amazingly, the police station has survived, although the verandas are beginning to ignite. They extinguish them. There’s a Landcruiser and trailer in front of it, still burning, as if some poor bugger had raced up hoping for a last-minute rescue. They drive into Aitken Crescent, where the CFA brigade is based.
The two men catch their breath.
There are hundreds of people there. That explains the emptiness that greeted them as they entered the town. The residents of Kinglake, those of them who are still alive, have come together for solace and support.
It’s too crowded to drive through, so they get out and walk.
A man comes up and stares at them. Wood thinks he looks like a stock figure in an old cartoon, the feller who’s stuck his finger in the electrical socket: he’s black from head to toe, his long hair smoking and standing on end. People are lying on the gravel, staring up at the sky, holding each other. A chubby
bloke in a singlet and shorts sits half out of a car, ash-streaked head in hands, an expression of utter weariness—or grief—on what they can see of his face. As they make their way through the crowd, the two officers—the first figures of authority who’ve made it into town—are bombarded with questions from the crowd.
‘What do we do now?’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Is the fire coming back?’
‘Where are the ambulances?’
They do their best. Try to reassure people, tell them the fire front has passed, promise ambulances and strike teams will be there as soon as possible.
As they draw closer to the CFA building, the atmosphere becomes more subdued. They see yellow-suited firefighters patrolling the perimeter, keeping an eye out for flare-ups. A tree behind the shed is still flickering. They’re disturbed to hear groaning and sobs from within.
‘They looked like zombies,’ comments Linda Craske, ‘the moment they walked in.’
That’s about how they feel: they’ve walked into a horror movie. Where the hell do you start? There are bodies all over the dirty concrete floor. Women are moving among the casualties, giving first aid, applying bandages, fiddling with oxygen tanks and masks, comforting victims who are obviously in extremity. People are crying, holding each other’s hands, staring numbly at the ceiling, cradling heads in hands. A boy with tear-stained cheeks is fondling a puppy.
The worst cases have been covered in silver blankets, but it’s obvious that the Kinglake CFA and their helpers are struggling to deal with an overwhelming number of injuries with virtually no facilities.
Trish Hendrie and Carole Wilson come over and hug both men. They feel as if somebody has thrown them a lifeline. They’ve been battling all night, not just the fire, but the maddening fear that they’ve been abandoned, that the outside world, with its doctors, fire trucks and support systems, has forgotten them. The power is out, the phone lines are down, mobile reception is random and all it delivers is bad news. The CFA radio is so frantic it’s impossible to get a word in.
With the arrival of the local cops, they feel as though an intolerable burden has been lifted from their shoulders.
‘Oh, when those boys walked in,’ says Carole, ‘I thought maybe there’s hope for us yet.’
‘Roger’s from St Andrews,’ adds Trish. ‘He didn’t even know if his own family was alive…A lot of lesser people would have said, this is too much, I’m going home. But they were doing their job. Sticking by the community.’
Somewhere in those first seconds, Trish feels the need to clear the air.
‘I’m sorry, Rodge.’
‘Sorry?’
‘We had to break into the doctor’s. For oxygen.’
He looks around him at the patients on the floor, realising what a remarkable job these women have been doing.
‘Don’t worry about it, Trish.’ He nods. ‘Breaking into the doctor’s? That’s good.’
He receives a run-down of the situation, and it’s deeply troubling. The nurses have prioritised the most critically injured, but some of them will be dead if the ambulances don’t get up here soon.
A fire tanker from St Andrews under the leadership of Kaz Gurney has worked its way up the mountain and arrived on the scene. Several of the firefighters on board are friends or neighbours of Wood’s. Jeff Purchase, who knows him well, has a quick word. He says later that Wood was so intent upon the tasks at hand that he barely registered his existence.
‘He asked how we were,’ says Purchase, ‘what we were planning to do, but you could see his mind was somewhere else, focused on the job, trying to read the situation. His eyes were scoping the crowd. Working out what to do next. He moved around like a butterfly, talking to different groups of people, seeing how they were going, doing a dozen things at once.’
Wood returns to his vehicle and reports the situation to D24, reinforces the plea for help. His heart sags at the response. Ambulances on hold; the trip is still too dangerous. He sits there for a moment, runs his hands through his hair.
Then he goes back into the CFA and speaks to his colleagues.
‘Nobody’s coming up. We’re gonna have to take ’em down.’
SAVING PEOPLE
Samuel Oliner is an American sociologist. He is also a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who, as a child, narrowly escaped the massacre that killed his entire family. He was rescued by a peasant woman who took him in, gave him a Catholic identity and sheltered him throughout the war. That woman’s heroism moved and intrigued him so deeply that he has made the study of heroes his life’s work. He has interviewed more than four hundred individuals who rescued Jews during the war in an attempt to understand what it was that made these people do what they did.
What it was not, he discovered, was a matter of religion, politics, wealth or whether they had known about what was happening to the Jews in general.
‘There is no single explanation for why people act heroically,’ he comments. ‘It’s not absolutely genetic or personality or cultural.’
Among the qualities he could discern were these: rescuers tend to have a strong relationship with their parents, a wide range of friends and a sense of empathy; they feel an inescapable duty to help others. They also tend to have a belief that they can shape their own destiny; they have what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control’. Those whose reactions to disaster are less positive—who stand and watch, or go into their shells—tend to think of existence as something that just rolls over them.
Oliner has found a useful source of information in the records of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, which rewards individuals who voluntarily carry out heroic deeds to save others. He found that 91 percent of the rescuers were male—a statistic that may, of course, simply reflect the fact that men held occupations in which they were more likely to be placed in perilous situations. Sixty-one percent of the rescued were male as well.
He also found that the rescuers tended to have trade or working-class backgrounds; of the 283 rescuers interviewed, only two were from high-status occupations. These people are already equipped for the physical demands of the rescue; they are familiar with steel and wood, with equipment. They are used to finding practical solutions quickly. They also tend to know their own strengths and limitations. Another interesting statistic: 80 percent of the heroic acts occurred in rural or small-town America. They happened in places where people knew each other.
In an attempt to go beyond the raw statistics, to find out what inner logic drove these individuals to perform heroic deeds, Oliner interviewed a random selection of them. He found a range of explanations, but the common thread was a sense of empathy derived from their families and their community. The question was not so much why they did what they did, but how they could have lived with themselves if they hadn’t.
Male. Rural. Practical. Accustomed to taking control of their own destinies. The picture painted by Samuel Oliner could almost be a portrait of Roger Wood and Cameron Caine. Wood was a fitter before he joined the force, Caine a plumber. Both have strong, supportive families. Both are accustomed to controlling situations.
And both are men with a powerful sense of empathy: active members of their community, engaged and engaging.
They would have had ample opportunity to bow out, to wait for help to arrive. Nobody would have blamed them. Nobody was telling them what to do, nobody was coming up the mountain to assist them. The ambulances, fire trucks, their own commanding officers were all down in Whittlesea. Officially, the road was impassable: trees were burning, still falling. They’d already seen more trauma than most people encounter in a lifetime.
They didn’t consider it for an instant.
When Wood was asked, months after the fires, what made him do what he did that day, he seemed momentarily puzzled. He paused, blinked. ‘How couldn’t I?’ he asked. ‘They’re my community.’
One thing Roger Wood knows how to do is drive. Five years of working in this mountain town—of leading search
and rescue missions in the ranges, of chasing hoons, of navigating those tortuous tracks and backroads—have honed his ability to handle a four-wheel-drive in tough conditions.
His senior, Jon Ellks, attests to that. He tells the story of a night he and Wood were dealing with a frantic shift in the middle of a ferocious wind storm, racing from one crisis to another. They were miles out of town when they received a report of a violent assault taking place at the medical centre. Wood floored it back to town, lights flashing, careering round the debris that was scattered all over the road, going bush when that was the only option. Ellks hung on to the jesus grip for dear life. They were heading down the final hill when he suddenly spotted a fallen mountain ash hidden in the dip ahead of them.
‘Tree!’ he shouted.
Wood had already hit the brakes, but it was obvious they were going to collide. To Ellks’ horror, Wood instinctively steered into the heavy base of the tree rather than the leafy head. They duly crunched into it at forty kilometres per hour and heard the unmistakable sound of substantial damage being inflicted on the vehicle. Undeterred, Wood backed up, made a quick check of the front end, spotted a local with a heavy winch on his truck. He persuaded the fellow to drag the tree off the road and carried on with their wild ride.
‘Why the hell did you do that?’ demanded Ellks.
‘What?’
‘Hit the thickest part of the tree? This vehicle is brand new.’
‘Rather kill the car than us,’ Wood replied calmly. If they’d driven into the head of the tree, he explained, any of the branches could have smashed through the windscreen, converting a minor bingle into a fatality. Ellks decided that the fellow beside him was coolheaded and quick-thinking—and knew how to handle a vehicle.
In the CFA shed, Wood is discussing the situation with the firies. They decide to organise a convoy. Wood’s Pajero will take the lead; following them will be the CFA four-wheel-drive, the police Traffic Management Unit vehicle with senior constables Barron and Liddell, and at least one private car. They allocate the casualties among the vehicles; Wood and Caine take Wendy Duncan in theirs. She’s the biggest worry.
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