Without Warning

by Jane O'Connor

  I tell Carissa there’s a chance of her getting out on an evacuation bus. Sean has got through to Tania: she will go to Whittlesea and wait, she says, as they’ve set up a triage centre and evacuation point there. ‘There’s no guarantee they’ll get out,’ Sean tells her. ‘We’ll just keep trying to contact you and keep you posted.’

  More waiting. I suggest to Brad, Sarah and Mike that they might be able to get on a bus as well, that Tania could get them back to the city and they can go home. They go away to discuss it.

  ‘We’re not going, Aunty,’ Brad says when they return. ‘Other people are of higher priority than us. We can be of much more use here, and we’re all okay. We’re not going.’

  In the late afternoon, as the sun is starting to sink, the strike team appears again. They pull over next to the carport. ‘We’ll take your granddaughter and any others down to the CFA station,’ the team leader tells us. ‘Don’t know how long they’ll have to wait there,’ he adds.

  The Cahill brothers, Robert and Alan, bring their sister and her partner and baby boy across. The strike-team captain approaches me: ‘I can’t really describe what they’re going to see when they go down that mountain. It’s horrific. Are you okay with that?’ But I’d rather have Carissa back with her mother, not breathing in this toxic smoke, safe in her own bed. She climbs onto the back of the truck and they put a red blanket around her. She’s still taking photos. I give the crew Tania’s mobile number and ask Robert Cahill if he’ll stay with Carissa on the way down, make sure she connects at the other end. He says he will. They climb on and I want to cry as the truck heads out of sight. I’m torn between wanting to protect her from any further horror and getting her to safety. I know she has to get off this mountain if she can, and I have to accept that I can’t shield her from whatever she comes across on the way.

  Another truck, a crew from Wattle Glen, has pulled into the roadway and they’re firing water at the base of John and Julie’s pine trees. Trying to damp things down, keep the sparks and embers under control. They’re homing in on the houses that are still standing, to make sure they stay that way. I race to the back fence and ask one of the crew if he’s got a burns kit in the truck. ‘Is one of you injured? I’ll call for help,’ he says. ‘No, it’s my dog. He’s burnt his paws badly and I just need to get them bandaged,’ I say. ‘No problem. I can handle animals as well as humans,’ says this smiling young man. He walks down the lawn with the first-aid kit and kneels beside Harley, who isn’t walking at all now. The young man talks to him—soothing, kind—applies thick pads and then bandages the front paws. ‘You realise that you’ll have to get me onto Bondi Vet after this,’ he jokes. I want to hug him or at least send a nice note to his parents telling them they’ve raised a gem.

  The crew leaves, telling us to call the CFA if there’s any outbreak of embers. They are still hosing the bases of the trees as they go. Julie and I retreat back to the front lawn. I feel comforted that Carissa has a chance of getting out and Harley has some respite from pain. John and Sean continue their patrolling. Sean’s mobile phone is going crazy with an endless stream of messages and frantic texts from friends, family and old acquaintances. He can read them, but can’t reply. ‘What’s being said about us in the outside world?’ he muses.

  A loud voice breaks into our reverie. ‘Oh my God, you’re alive!’ Hurtling through the gate is John Duthie, a friend who lives with wife Maddie and their two little daughters on the other side of the township. He claps his hands to his head. ‘I’ve just been past Number 59. The cars are burnt in the driveway and the house is gone. I thought you must be dead,’ he says. He had sunk to his knees in our driveway, he tells us, until Greek John happened on him. ‘I kept saying to him, “Where are the O’Connors?”’ ‘They’re over the road on the front lawn,’ John replied. There’s a group hug: me, Sean and John Duthie in a big, fierce embrace.

  John Duthie falls in a heap on the lawn. He tells us that news of multiple deaths is filtering through in the township. A lot of houses have gone down there; the ridge roads at the back of us, which run off the main road, have been particularly badly hit. John and Maddie’s close friends the Daveys are believed to be dead, along with their two little girls, the same age as the Duthies’. We are silent: this is incomprehensible, too much to deal with.

  John heads back to tell Maddie we’re alive. Sean and I walk up to the front gate, just trying to get our thoughts together. We see Mark Smith walking through the front of his property, coming towards us, kicking up blackened dirt with his boots. He too has his hands on top of his head. He slides down the embankment onto the road, flopping down on the bitumen. ‘Oh Christ, oh Christ,’ is all he can say. His eyes are filled with tears and he lets out a primal sob: ‘My best mate’s kids have burnt to death. Oh Christ!’

  We’re shocked rigid. ‘We’re all okay, though,’ Mark says. ‘Kevin got the other two to Yea. He had to drive through fireballs, but he made it—God knows how he didn’t crash into something. I saw your tenants. They were standing in the driveway, terrified. Dionne and I yelled at them to head for the pub and they left in their car. We don’t know if they made it, but they headed that way,’ he adds. ‘Whose kids are dead?’ I ask. ‘The Buchanans’ kids, Macca and Neeve.’ It’s my turn for a primal sob: Neeve, the cheeky little blonde friend of Kelsey’s. Just two weeks ago they rode their bikes across to Julie’s for biscuits and milk and then did the circuit to Number 59, where we set them up with a bag of lollies, a plate of ice-cream and Willy Wonka on our big-screen TV. I’m seeing that smiling little face, rerunning the banter, too numb to cry. Mark feels satisfied that we’re all safe and heads back to his family. Sean and I are silent. How the hell do you take that in?

  Back at Number 48 we find Rose Chandler there again. I tell her about the Buchanan kids. She puts her hands over her ears. ‘Too much, too much,’ she says. Sarah and Julie are inside making a tuna salad. They’ve chopped red onion, rustled up mayonnaise and found a lettuce. Suddenly, food seems like a good idea; I feel ravenous and realise we haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. ‘That’s a bit flash under the circumstances,’ I say, but admire their resourcefulness. We take the salad outside on the lawn.

  Julie notices there are buses heading up the main road. ‘Looks like they are evacuating people. Carissa is on her way out,’ she says. My stomach lurches and I know it will stay knotted until I hear she is safe.

  We stand there and wave, just in case Carissa’s looking. The bus lights are muted in the ever-present smoke. It’s been one hell of a Sunday.

  Sleep remains elusive, in spite of our overwhelming sense of relief that Carissa has made it off the mountain. Tania gets the message through that she’s home safe, exhausted and in bed. Our mobile phones are still warping in and out of the network; the bombardment of messages whenever we turn them on continues to be overwhelming.

  We decide to devote some generator time to the 7 p.m. ABC news. Watching it is a surreal experience. Over the years, I’ve written plenty of headlines and churned out running copy on disasters and major events, but never imagined being the subject of that sort of news commentary. There it all is: mounting death tolls, emergency crews, communities cut off, the injured being evacuated, roadblocks in place; Strathewen decimated, Marysville gone, Steel’s Creek scorched, killer fires in Gippsland, flames close to Bendigo. Full-alert fire threats are still being broadcast. It’s too much to process all at once—too close to home, too personal—and we can only absorb it in short grabs. We have no comprehension at this stage of exactly where the fire we’re still battling has come from. One thing we all loudly agree, though, is that there was no warning, that we were already burning well before Kinglake was first mentioned. We feel angry and abandoned. ‘How could they not have seen a firestorm like that coming?’ Sean asks, incredulous.

  Julie’s habit of a lifetime is to record, review and rework; she has a chronicler’s mind. Tonight she is adamant about what she has heard and noted. ‘We had to make our own decision to
get going. If Ken hadn’t come by and talked about what he was seeing in that smoke cloud, we wouldn’t have even got this far,’ she says. We don’t watch the entire news bulletin—we know only too well what we’re in the middle of. That people are dead has come as no surprise, given what John and I saw on the main road last night. What we can’t fathom is the scale of it.

  ‘People have panicked and got in their cars,’ Sean says. ‘That’s what Carissa and I saw on the powerline road. They were streaming up there or trying to get down. Most of them wouldn’t be able to deal with the steepness and gravel.’ Then he adds, ‘Oh God, I hope the Strathewen hall is okay.’ That hall has been a favourite venue for years. On Sundays Sean would load his drum kit into the Land Rover and head down there for a jam session with his brother Marty and other members of their blues band. And we’ve held birthdays there.

  Our ember patrols continue for the rest of the night, more emergency crews crawl down the main road, our mobile phones regularly beep message signals. We all hunker down again to get through to morning. Darkness is hell: we’re too pumped with adrenaline, too agitated and too restless to sleep. We count down to dawn.

  5

  The longest week

  WHEN Monday’s morning light arrived, nothing had changed. The pine trees were still smouldering, the road still blocked. Sean continued to check on the goats and horses. Harley was distressed and in obvious pain, with blood oozing through the bandages on his front paws, and he lay on his stomach holding them up off the ground. The tail still wagged, though. His hacking cough continued and I was totally agitated, wanting to take away his pain. ‘He was pretty amazing. He was stomping on the fire with his paws when he got over here, barking when new bits burst into flames,’ John told me. ‘He wouldn’t let up until I’d put them out.’

  I suggested to Sean that we walk to the other end of Deviation Road to see if Kate and Ivan Rowbotham were there. We had no idea if their house was still standing. Ivan is a highly trained first-aider and a member of Kinglake’s first-response ambulance crew: he was bound to have some serious burns preparations and bandages. It was worth a try, so we headed off past Number 59, past the Cahills’. Their house was still there, but everything else was razed—sheds, fences, tanks, trees. We continued around the bend and up past Karen and Bernie’s: nothing left, not even a blade of grass. The Mitchells’ mudbrick house had been blown apart as if a missile had sliced through it, and its surrounding stand of old mountain ash was decimated.

  The entire left-hand side of the road was a black, smoking mess, no structures left standing. The right-hand side was a bomb site. We were flabbergasted: the trees weren’t just burnt, they’d had the life sucked out of them. Fences had vanished, even the white lines in the middle of the road had melted away. We punched on towards Kate and Ivan’s. We were walking through a disaster movie; I felt cold. The Lawlesses’ house was still there—nothing else, just the house.

  Kate and Ivan’s house and sheds loomed up in front of us where Deviation Road rejoins the main road. So too did the next shock: sitting in the intersection was a car on its side, and a further six were resting where they had landed in the middle of the road. They’d either hit head-on, or rear-ended the vehicle in front. A fatal demolition derby. A BMW was lying on its side, the paint stripped off it—no colour left, just the shape and badge identified it. Police ribbons fluttered off door handles. Both ends of our road were cluttered with scenes of human horror.

  ‘Jesus, nobody would have been able to see a thing in the smoke,’ Sean said, his voice echoing in an eerie way. The surrounding silence was palpable; it was a scene frozen in time—it had happened while we were fighting for our own survival. We had no ghoulish desire to go any closer. The emergency crews would have had to pick their way through this to get to the township: they knew it was here.

  We headed down Kate and Ivan’s driveway. They answered the door and ushered us in. We were thrilled to see each other, to know we were all alive. They hadn’t left the house since Saturday night. I burbled about how I’d come to get bandages and burn cream for Harley. We swapped stories about what had hit us and how we’d got through the firestorm. Ivan put the kettle on: a hot cup of tea—what bliss. Their gas bottles had survived, though all the PVC water pipes and tanks had come off second-best. We were amazed that they had fared pretty well given they were in a heavily treed area, right in the path of the fires that had been propelled up the slope by the south-west wind change. Fire can be an indiscriminate beast.

  We talked about the lack of warning before the fire. Ivan was used to being on emergency alert, as part of the ambulance service. ‘Once we realised what was coming towards us, when we saw that column of smoke, we went out to the shed to put our fire gear on,’ he said. ‘In the time it took to get from the house into the shed, the fire had hit and we were trapped in there.’ Their beloved dog Anna had followed them. They’d crawled under a workbench as the terrible heat seared through the metal of the structure. ‘I haven’t got a clue how long we were there,’ continued Ivan. ‘The flames were coming in under the roof. It was a toss-up whether the radiant heat or the smoke would get us first.’ Kate described how he lay on top of her, shielding her, urging her to breathe. We joked about men never missing an opportunity. It was good to have a laugh.

  Until they could escape the shed and get back into the house, Kate and Ivan were unaware of the destruction and horror occurring just metres away on the intersection. The fire noise drowned out everything. They’d been living in the midst of a landscape of panic and death since dawn broke on Sunday—you can’t drown that out. At least they knew that the Lawlesses, next door, had survived: Craig had suffered burns while fighting to save the house and keep his parents safe, but they were all alive. We walked back to Number 48. It was impossible to describe to the others what we’d seen. It came out in bursts—the cars, the devastation, who had survived. God, we were ticking off a list of our neighbours.

  Sean and I went across to Number 59. It was the first time I’d had a close look—for the past two days I’d skirted the house area, heading straight for the animals. This one was a slow journey. The driveway remained blocked by the tangled trees and bent front gates. There were gouges in the red gravel, caused by the deluge released from water tanks as they melted. The Land Rover was crushed under the carport roof, its melted windscreen wrapped around the skeletal steering column.

  ‘What sort of heat can do that?’ I asked Sean.

  ‘Hot enough to melt aluminium,’ he replied. ‘Not to mention my drum kit.’ The loss of the drum kit stung.

  Our other cars in the driveway were equally wrecked. We decided to see if we could retrieve CDs and whatever else was in them. The rest of the trip was an obstacle course: we had to pick our way across the roof iron and up the side brick path to get further onto the property. There was shattered glass everywhere; the disintegrated house crumbled to dust as we walked over it. ‘So much for the theory about non-native plants being fire-retardants,’ Sean said. The entire garden, particularly at the front, was stripped bare: established camellias and rhododrendrons, large stands of hydrangeas, European trees, Norwegian spruce—all gone. The denser, greener, less oily characteristics of European flora are supposed to render them more fire-resistant. ‘If that fire melted cars,’ offered Sean, ‘it could burn anything.’ Then, in the backyard, we stopped dead in our tracks and laughed. The stainless-steel barbecue had survived, not a scratch on it, and the enclosed gas bottle seemed to be intact as well. Great! If it worked, we’d be able to have a hot meal and boil some water. The cheap, glass-topped outdoor table had made it as well, despite having been picked up and blown into the vegie garden area, where it now lay.

  Sean was still upset about his inability to save the house and kept analysing what went wrong. ‘Nothing went wrong,’ I told him. ‘There was no plan that could have coped with what hit us.’ On the side lawn, he started to laugh. Standing under the sycamore tree was our old deck table, which we’d parked there afte
r Sean had built a fabulous new one from recycled timber. The new one had gone up in flames; the veteran, with its bowed legs and fifteen years of use, hadn’t been touched.

  ‘I’m going to sift through the rubble later. Some things might have survived and your jewellery might still be okay,’ Sean said. I wasn’t hopeful and anyway, at this point, material things seemed utterly irrelevant. We decided to walk down the road and check out Number 1. The only remnants were the chimney, a small castiron potbelly stove, and the Hills hoist standing at a crazy angle. As we’d seen earlier, the tenants’ pet goats lay blackened, belly-up. ‘They must have had them tethered on the lawn,’ said Sean.

  Suddenly, the ground seemed to be shifting beneath us. We looked down: we were standing on a carpet of seething maggots— bloated white maggots. Clearly, the blowflies had come in for a breeding frenzy. ‘We’d better try and bury the goats as quickly as possible,’ I said. There must be dead livestock all over the mountain; the thought of a blowfly invasion filled me with dread.

  We left that task for later and instead wheeled the barbecue back from Number 59, feeling like a couple of kids who had scored a major prize. The looks on the faces of the others was worth a thousand words. The barbecue fired up first time, water went on the wok burner and we all engaged in watched-pot syndrome. How long the gas would last was another matter, but for now we were coveting a hot drink and a cooked meal. The men collected our outdoor table and chairs, and set them up on the front lawn. The vinyl covers were pocked with burn marks and holes, but they were usable.