Without Warning

by Jane O'Connor

  Without Warning

  JANE O’ CONNOR

  Without

  Warning

  One woman’s story

  of surviving Black Saturday

  Published in 2010 by

  Hardie Grant Books

  85 High Street

  Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

  the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright © Jane O’Connor 2010

  Copyright photography © Jane O’Connor 2010

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the National Library of Australia.

  Without Warning: One woman’s story of surviving Black Saturday

  ISBN 978 1 74066 847 7

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Front cover image courtesy of Newspix/Alex Coppel

  Back cover image courtesy of RSPCA/James Walshe Photography

  Text design and typesetting by Cannon Typesetting

  Typeset in Garamond 12/20 pt

  Printed and bound in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Sean and my resilient family

  ‘When I count my blessings, I count you twice’—Irish proverb

  Contents

  Maps

  Prologue

  PART I Mountain refuge

  1 Mountain life

  2 An ill wind

  3 Black Saturday

  4 The day after

  5 The longest week

  PART II The long haul

  6 A temporary dwelling

  7 Rebuilding a life

  8 Lost landscapes

  9 A nation’s generosity

  10 ‘Trauma brain’

  11 Going home

  12 Future tense

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I’M trying to follow the voice that is screaming my name, getting closer and closer now but still barely audible over the noise. I have no idea how long I’ve been trapped here in the study, watching the monstrous force outside devour everything in its path. It’s toppling massive trees, and flinging balls of burning gas like missiles; I can see the air burning.

  Is it going to tear the roof off, blast out the windows? Or maybe it will barrel in under the verandah and set the house on fire? Is there any way I can get outside and onto some navigable, already burnt ground? Above all, I must try to keep breathing, despite the dense, acrid smoke. I’ve already watched the heat melt my car in the driveway. There’s no exit that way.

  The voice breaks through the racket again: ‘Jane, Jane, where are you?’ It’s Sean. I yell back that I’m up the front of the house. ‘Get down to the back, I’m outside the laundry,’ I hear. How he can bear the heat out there, let alone breathe, I can’t imagine. I inch down the hallway—moving fast is too big an assault on my lungs and eyes, and I’m already feeling lightheaded from inhaling so much smoke. Every window I pass frames an unimaginable inferno.

  I get to the kitchen and almost sink to my knees; it’s as if a pair of hands is crushing my lungs. The air is like liquid plastic, coating my mouth, nose and eyes. Keep breathing, just keep breathing, I tell myself, though overwhelmingly I feel I might black out at any moment. But I have to fight it, not give in; the back door is only metres away. I make it to the laundry door—I’m gasping, can’t see properly, but I’ve come this far, I’m not going to give up now.

  PART I

  Mountain refuge

  1

  Mountain life

  OUR spot in the Kinglake Ranges outside Melbourne has always been a cooler, green haven in summer. In fact it’s a bit of a misnomer to call this a mountain range, as it’s not much more than 600 metres above sea level at the highest point. But it isn’t hard to see why generations before us have sloughed off the city heat and grit, and headed for higher, lusher pastures when lowland temperatures go for that long, slow, brown summer bake.

  There are remnants of that quest for summer respite. Quaint weatherboard and fibro guesthouses dating back to the 1920s and 1930s nestle among giant tree ferns and eucalypts on ridges and in gullies. More the preserve of the wealthy—those who could afford the car needed to make the journey less arduous. Not hard to imagine them lumbering up the steep, rough track, hoping the radiator didn’t boil; it wasn’t a day trip then. But it was a popular destination for honeymooners and picnickers who came to marvel at the forests, fern gullies and waterfalls of the 22 360-hectare national park. Those early buildings were supplemented over the years with less salubrious weekend cottages, converted sheds and camping spots that echoed with the laughter of schoolchildren on holiday while the adults fanned themselves under the spreading European trees that thrive in the deep mountain loam. Breeze catchers, shade givers. The park, created in 1928 to stop the rampant clearing of land for farming, is only around 65 kilometres north-east of Melbourne, an accessible day trip these days.

  It has often entered my head, while pushing some zippy little car up the final 13-kilometre stretch of winding road between St Andrews and Kinglake (known to the locals as ‘the Windies’), what extraordinary feats the first farmers and settlers here must have achieved, reliant as they were on horses and buggies to get them through the rocky, precipitous bush. Nothing sealed and bump-free in those days. However, the lure of gold was a strong incentive and long-abandoned shafts can still be found in parts of the national park and on private land. It remains a narrow road, chipped out of bedrock; native fauna in search of roadside green pickings or water bound or scurry across your path without warning. These days, though, there are luminous white lines and large reflective arrows to chart your course.

  It’s easy to spot a first-time visitor or tourist on this road. The sheer drops off one side, tumbling down into the seemingly bottomless gullies of the national park, make drivers nervous and they crawl gingerly as close as possible to the middle white line; they have barely a brake lining left by the time they get to the top. Some locals never get used to it either, choosing to take more roundabout but less demanding routes. It is a dramatic landscape and perhaps the temptation to drink it in, coupled with very few spots to pull over and stop, compounds visitors’ slowness. The lower-lying contoured farmlands give way to archetypal, parched struggling bush: the type of sparse, scrubby flora that has to punch its way up slowly from flinty bedrock, clinging tenaciously to the steeper folds and gullies. Topsoil is hard to find; the sounds of birds ping through this sort of bush. It’s murder on a hot day, almost as though the rock reflects the heat and throws it back in your face. Crunchy and twig-snapping underfoot; the constant hum of insects.

  Yet as you start to climb, once ‘the Windies’ are in sight, all thoughts of a sweaty workday in the urban jungle start to fall away: in ten minutes the familiar landscape of home will bring relief. Then, approaching the apex, there’s a sense of relaxation. The horticultural strugglers on the southern side of the mountain cede territory to massive, ancient mountain ash trees—the world’s tallest flowering plant—which tower over the roadway, their crowns reaching for the sky out of gully floors. The ferns change too: here they are tall enough to stand under, with succulent green fronds. Wind down the window and breathe in the damper, cooler air. Drive in under a huge green umbrella that filters the sun and gives life to denser, more diverse undergrowth.

  At the top of the mountain road, the preserved green zone gives way to people and a built environm
ent. Houses nestle in the bush or perch on ridge roads to capture stunning views that range from the city skyline to the beautiful contours of the wine-growing Yarra Valley. Kinglake township, with its service station and takeaway pizza shop on the left, the stone café and supermarket and group of shops on the right. Straight ahead sits the Country Fire Authority (CFA) station and the National Park Hotel—the latter more than a century old, and refurbished over the years but still screaming of the 1960s.

  Even from the township, the once-extensive farmlands are still evident. The deep, rich, red mountain soil has produced endless tonnes of potatoes, carrots, leafy green crops, luscious berries and chubby sheep. Once it became obvious that the gold lode wasn’t as rich as expected, the settlers turned their attention to logging the eucalypts. But that started to slope off as early as the 1930s, to be superseded mainly by potato and berry farming. In the sixteen years my husband Sean and I have been here, the ploughed furrows, sweeping pastures and plentiful water have increasingly been given over to housing. The streets surrounding the town are now a suburb and new estates have sprung up as tired farmers have sought retirement and subdivided their land rather than persisting in the battle to sell produce in a monopolised market.

  When we arrived, back then, jinkers loaded to the gunwales with long, straight timbers bound for the mills still regularly traversed the town. For me, the sound of their engine brakes roaring as they came down the main-road hill was a sad one, heralding an ignoble end for the fabulous trees ripped out of nearby coupes. Then, as anti-logging pressure mounted and industry prices dropped, the trees found their way into woodchip piles a long, long way from home.

  Sean and I had long hankered after this quieter, cleaner, greener place. Logistics and work requirements saw us start our joint life in inner Melbourne—close to the city, with markets, restaurants, cafes and shops all within walking distance, but not our natural habitat. When we first contemplated moving to the distant hills, friends and colleagues thought we were barking mad to want to exchange a café latte on the doorstep for a very long commute to a place most of them hadn’t heard of. Family and income needs made our relocation a gradual process: we inched further and further out until we found ourselves at the bottom of the mountain, looking up.

  We took to heading up the windy road for, of all things, a parcel of freshly cooked fish and chips. Those sorties led to explorations of the roadways, backblocks and lookout points with a view to finding a property to buy. One Saturday afternoon we turned into Deviation Road, which loops off the main road that runs west from Kinglake towards Whittlesea. Originally the main road and then known as The Deviation, it meanders through a mixture of undulating paddocks and native bush before rejoining the Whittlesea–Kinglake Road.

  As we rounded one of the bends, we saw a ‘For Sale’ sign tacked at the front of a property on the left-hand side, Number 59. We’d been watching the real-estate ads and had looked at another property on this road, rejecting it for its poor structural integrity and the residual dieldrin in the soil from potato-farming days when such toxic additives were the norm rather than the exception. At that time we’d noticed the nearby properties, including Number 59—an older-style, tin-roofed house that had been reskinned with Hardiplank and extended, with a verandah that ran across the front and down one side. An extensive cottage garden carpeted the understorey of soaring mountain ash. A sweeping lawn beside the house boasted a grand old sycamore tree; the front verge offered up the sort of massive ash that belonged in a colonial landscape painting—priceless trees that take decades to reach such noble proportions. A couple of cows were languidly grazing on a verdant paddock that rolled up one side of the property and around to the back boundary. The ‘For Sale’ sign was the kind that goes up before the agent has had the chance to produce a swankier board for the roadside.

  ‘Looks like it needs a fair bit of work. There’s not much to the fences,’ Sean said. He went on to itemise water tanks in need of replacement, a roof that probably leaked, how many metres of fence would be needed, old sheds, and blackberry about as big, healthy and tenacious as a noxious weed gets.

  ‘Look at the garden, though. It’s a very pretty spot and it’s got to be cheaper than the same sort of land area closer to town. It doesn’t cost anything to ask,’ I retorted.

  We took the contact number and rang from the nearest phone. The agent, Alan O’Gorman, made an appointment to show us through straight away. He was a delight to deal with: no hard sell, just professional, honest and nice, and he knew the area and the property backwards. He drew particular attention to the quality of the deep artesian bore near the house, which had been installed many years ago. Kinglake has long been noted for its accessible groundwater, but the cost of sinking a bore can be considerable. To have one on the property already was a bonus. Less than a week later we’d bought ourselves a home, warts and all. We had no romantic illusions: it was going to be a bit of a slog, with no quick fixes—the O’Connors had acquired a work in progress.

  We moved there in the middle of a Kinglake winter—howling gale, teeming rain, freezing temperatures. The vendor’s bank had lost the title documents and scuttled the late-Friday settlement, so we sat in the driveway in despair as the solicitors worked out an after-hours deal, while two disgruntled furniture removalists griped about the time and sloshed through the mud with our worldly goods. Our cream lounge suite ended up in the mire and we faced a night with no gas or electricity. But it didn’t matter.

  Once the legalities were sorted out, the sleeves got rolled up. The unglamorous things begged for attention first: fences, new tanks, septic system, driveways, gutters, rubbish, animal shelters, overgrown garden, sheds, paint. Gumboots and Blundstones, oilskins and beanies became the weekend uniform. But we took to it like ducks to water, as did our dogs—there have always been dogs. When we weren’t digging, rebuilding or straining something, we could walk up the road uninterrupted or meander through the bush. The dogs would come too—roaring into wombat burrows, leaping into a stream or dam, running free, never chained up. An integral part of our entertainment was the birdlife: listening to lyrebirds going love-crazy after rain, counting the generations of kookaburras, laughing at mother magpies teaching babies to pull worms from a damp lawn, marvelling at the spinebills hovering for nectar from fuschias and Chinese lantern flowers.

  After the first two or three years, we’d become familiar with the way the garden behaved and had renovated parts of it. A vegetable plot emerged and we took great delight in scoring a truckload of cheap Colorbond sheets to build ‘Chookingham Palace’ for the hens. On those working Sundays we became used to the sound of the CFA siren going off down in the township. It gave us a bit of a fright at first, but over time we came to know that it usually spelt the fire crews having a practice session. Unless the old red truck ground its way up the main-road hill, we didn’t pay much attention, and even that often signalled some emergency other than a fire, such as a car accident. We often remarked on how long it took that veteran vehicle to grind its way to the top of the rise, straining in first gear.

  The daunting tangle of blackberry gradually succumbed to the grubbing, chopping, burning and rotary-hoeing, with help from our pet goats. The native seeds that Sean’s father Mick religiously collected on his long walks and propagated for us were planted as a grove that swept from the main road right through to the much-loved sycamore tree. After he died, we took comfort and pleasure in seeing ‘Mickey’s trees’ grow like topsy in their new home.

  As the budget allowed, we tackled the interior of the house. Apart from the kitchen and bathroom renovations, Sean did most of the work. It was a tour of discovery: wrenching out an old wall oven revealed an original chimney cavity, which we lined out to form a large cupboard; yanking up vinyl floor coverings brought to light Baltic-pine floorboards bearing the scars of old potato sacks. The sacks would be piled on the floor and stencilled, one by one, with the grower’s name before being filled and sent to market. No amount of sanding removed th
e stencil ink and in fact we didn’t want to.

  Family and friends formed a constant flow of through-traffic at weekends. For some, the pull of the mountain was particularly strong. My niece Jo-Anna, who had left New Zealand for her first bit of travel, ended up staying with us for a year. Her brother Brad would hop across the Tasman for regular catch-ups too, or detour through on his way back from elsewhere. Jo would fill us with dread, hurtling down ‘the Windies’ on her racing road bike to a weekend job. The ride back up was tougher, especially in winter, but once past the last bend before home in Deviation Road she was greeted by the verandah lights shining through the mist: ‘It’s like Battlestar Galactica,’ she’d say, ‘guiding you in for a landing.’ The name stuck. The Battlestar was a safe place to be.

  While we worked on the property, the people in our orbit became an integral part of life: once on the mountain at weekends, there was little desire to travel long distances for entertainment. From housing a sparse population of permanent residents, the road gradually began to fill up. Hanging over a fence for a natter was normal, though in our neighbourhood it wasn’t that cheek-by-jowl proximity that you find in more urban environments. The properties ranged in size from around 1 hectare up to 16.

  As you head west out of Kinglake on the main road, Deviation Road branches off to the right. This lower end was defined by three smaller holdings with views out across fields and bush, and further on to the Great Dividing Range. At the beginning of this section were Lynne and Barry Southern, among the few permanent residents here when we arrived. A little further along was a small white cottage on around 13 hectares, which remained unoccupied until an elderly couple moved in as caretakers for a cattle-farming operation. The road meandered around bends, revealing homes and larger acreages, before beginning to climb towards more heavily treed properties in the middle section, where the dense foliage shrouded some houses from view. The point where the bitumen joins up again with the main road was defined by the pristine fields farmed by the extended Singh family, who worked day and night to turn a rabbit- and blackberry-infested wasteland into a productive vegetable farm.