‘You promised we wouldn’t be here!’ sobs Grace, while Lucy gasps that she can’t breathe.
Drew, 193 centimetres tall and up where the smoke is thickest, is having even more problems, sucking at thin wisps of air as if they were his last. Every breath tears at his lungs.
‘When you’re that terrified,’ reflected Ange afterwards, ‘it’s like all your senses disappear. All that adrenaline and cortisol pumping through your body, you think you’re going crazy. Even the noise of the fire disappears. You can only focus on one thing.’
For her, that one thing becomes the corner of the room where the flames are threatening to break through. Like many other people in the region right now, she sees the fire in anthropomorphic terms. She swears at it, screaming, leaping onto the table and blasting it with the hose.
Survival inside the building is rapidly becoming impossible. The room is thick with acrid smoke. The air rattles with a deafening chorus of shrieking smoke alarms, kids and dogs, venting gas bottles, exploding cars and cans of fuel. Above it all, the fire itself roars with a noise to wake the dead. Their eyes sting, their throats ache, their faces are racked and hollow with fear.
They’re caught in the deadly game of chance being played by families all over the district. It’s a balancing act: the killer outside against the killer within. The atmosphere out there is irradiated, but the roof is about to fall in on them. You have to judge the right moment. Make the wrong choice and you’re dead.
In many a location across the ranges—particularly around the top of the escarpment, where the vegetation was thick and the incline vertiginous—you’re dead anyway. The dice are loaded, there’s a horseshoe in the glove: the moment never comes. Inside and out coalesce into an infinity of heat and light, darkness and smoke.
This family are fortunate to have that gravity-fed hose, something few in the region have; it gives them precious minutes. So many others are relying on electric pumps that give out when the power goes, or petrol pumps that cease operating when the fuel evaporates. But it can’t keep the fire at bay forever. The smoke grows thicker, more bitter. They’re groping around on their knees, still pouring on the water, swatting and smashing. They get the closest thing they’ve had all day to a stroke of luck—a tree smashes a large plastic pool near the back of the house and releases a stream of water. Most of it flows under the house.
Somewhere in the chaos, the thought shoots through Drew’s head that this isn’t going the way they said it would. We’ve done everything the experts told us, we were well prepared. It’s supposed to last for fifteen minutes. What the fuck’s going on? When will we be able to get out?
He cracks the door three or four times, but each time the radiant heat drives him back. Death to go out into that. But they can’t stay in here much longer either: they’ll suffocate. Or be burnt to death. Or be crushed by the roof. He tries it one more time. Bearable?
Maybe. ‘I’m going for the pump,’ he yells, praying it will give them another weapon, buy them some time. He’ll attack the fire from the outside.
‘Daddy, don’t go out there!’ the girls are screaming. Ange has to drag them off him as he crashes out the door. She catches a glimpse of him through the window, a blurry figure racing through blinding light. She finds herself thinking, This is the way Drew dies. Goodbye, she thinks. Thank you.
They’re no longer fighting for the house, they all know that. The building is doomed. ‘And we are too,’ Ange says to herself. ‘We’re dead.’ She wonders if it will be quicker for the girls if she embraces them.
Drew comes staggering back, fire hose in hand. ‘Out now!’ he roars as the flames burst through the roof.
They unleash the dogs, grab a few beloved objects; Lucy clutches her teddy bear as they give themselves a last soak and rush out onto the patio. They jump to one side as a burning tree crashes onto it. The dogs bolt. Drew sprints back inside: if they do make it out alive, they’ll need something to convince themselves that their lost world was not a dream.
The girls watch, horrified. Breathe sighs of relief when he re-emerges with a photo-album box in hand.
They reach the shelter of the massive oak tree that is yet to ignite.
A pause. But they can’t stay here. It’s too close to the shed, full of explosive items: cars, mowers, paint, fuel. They’ll have to go through the front hedge. Drew soaks the photos—he’s too exhausted to carry them—and they set off.
It’s a nightmare trek. They’re shocked, scared and soaking wet. Grace burns her hand as they crawl through the red-hot wire of the fence. They scramble down onto the Kinglake road. Creep downhill, fires raging on every side, trees crashing. They can’t bear to look back at the house, the only home the kids have ever known.
They trudge over burnt ground, blistered asphalt, thank god they had the foresight to put on heavy footwear. They’re having enough trouble just breathing without worrying about burnt feet.
They stagger down the road, shoes bubbling, the world in flames around them. They see cows up against the fences, dead or dying, gaping mouths, beseeching eyes. Every house is on fire. Are the neighbours all dead? They cannot envisage how anybody could have lived through that.
‘Flatlining,’ says Ange. ‘That’s what it was like, that walk— you’re moving through this weird, weird world.’ Interviewed in their living room months later, she is momentarily overwhelmed by the memory. ‘It was so lonely…We thought we were the only people left alive.’
Through a gap in the smoke they spot red and blue lights spinning.
A tanker from Wattle Glen has run up the hill to attack the fire in Olives Lane. They crew have just survived a bad burnover, sent out a mayday, gone into crew-protection mode, found themselves trapped in a paddock.
Kerrie Redmond, a local St Andrews CFA member who’d come along as a guide, looks up in disbelief as the four ghostly figures wrapped in blankets, one of them carrying a teddy bear, come stumbling through the smoke.
The family are ushered aboard, treated for burns and smoke inhalation. Angie speaks almost lovingly of the CFA team: ‘There was one older fellow, Wombat they called him, he was so sweet and caring to the girls. He had first aid experience and he treated Gracie’s burnt hand, washed out their eyes. He told them they’d be okay, said it was all right to feel afraid because he was too.’
They’re stuck there for hours. When the crew eventually chainsaw their way back down to St Andrews, the truck loaded with victims of the fire, they have to shield the children from the sight of the motorbike rider’s body, the one whose progress Drew had followed as the fire struck. At Mittons Bridge Road, they cross over the fire line, move into the unburnt, unreal world on the other side.
In body, at least, they do. The fires behind will haunt their dreams for a long time yet.
Snapshot 2: A Martial Art
Tim Huggins is coming home from work in his 1970 HG Holden. He cruises through St Andrews at around 5.15, is troubled to see a police roadblock at Mittons Bridge.
He’s been worried about the smoke drifting in from the north. The radio says there’s a fire at Kilmore, but this looks a lot closer than that. He pulls over to speak to the sergeant in charge.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Fire up on Jacksons Road.’
That’s, what? Four, maybe five kilometres to the north? ‘What about Kinglake?’
‘No, Kinglake’s still okay.’
‘I need to get back to my family.’
She waves him on, but his threat detector is ratcheted up a notch. His wife, Linda, and their two young children Aaron and Alexandra are at home. He narrows his eyes, accelerates away.
Huggins has spent a lifetime in situations that call for alertness of mind and awareness of risk. He’s an Australian tae kwon do champion, has been for five years in succession. He specialises in sports fighting and once reached the final four of the US Open.
‘Sport like that,’ he explains, ‘where you could get your head smashed in any moment, your nose bro
ken, you develop a sense of danger.’
Seconds after leaving the roadblock, he sweeps round a blind corner at Wild Dog Creek Road and runs headlong into the fire.
‘What the hell?’ He reflexively plants his foot down and zooms through the flames. Being stuck behind an inferno with his family on the other side is something he will not allow to happen.
Interviewed over a cup of herbal tea in his office, where he edits Mountain Monthly, he expands. ‘The secret of martial arts is to see the threat coming—and to not be there when it does.’
He’ll have a hard time not being there when this one comes. He’s going to need every scintilla of the Zen mindfulness he’s developed over a lifetime’s practice to bring his family through the next few hours.
Huggins floors it up the mountain, just about cooks the motor. He’s worried when the temperature light comes on—visions of breaking down on the road swarm through his head. But the old HG holds true, as they tend to do. Twenty, maybe thirty cars pass him coming down the mountain. People are getting out of Kinglake, but do they know what they’re heading for? He flashes his lights and waves, does his best to warn them, but he can’t hang around.
Finally he swings up over the last ridge and flies through the town. He’s struck by the eerie silence: at this stage the CFA shed is open, empty; presumably the trucks have gone down to the fire.
Huggins’ home is a beautiful split-level mud-brick house he and Linda have been working away at for eight years. It’s nestled in thick bush less than a kilometre from the town centre.
When he pulls into the drive, the kids come running out to greet him, Linda close behind. She’s worried; there’ve been phone calls from the neighbours, troubling smoke clouds. The town is on edge. Nobody knows what’s going on.
Huggins doesn’t need to know what’s going on, he can sense it. He knows a southerly change is due this evening, assumes that the flames he’s just driven through might well be coming up with it. Every warning siren in his head is going off, but part of his strategy is not to alarm Aaron and Alexandra. If the fire does come, panic-stricken kids could kill them all.
He plays briefly with the youngsters, has a cup of tea and a quiet word with Linda. ‘It’s looking really bad,’ he says. He tells her about running the gauntlet at St Andrews.
They listen to the radio, check the web: nothing about Kinglake. Then again, there’s nothing about St Andrews either, and he’s seen it burning down there. They discuss making a run for it, but are well aware of the danger of that; the open road is no place to be this late in the day. Their only option is to stay where they are.
They take a last sip of tea, put the cups down, get to work.
They swept the place clear this morning, but the gutters are already full of debris stirred up by the wind. They clean them out, plug them and fill them with water. They wet everything down, block up the house as best they can: wet towels on doors and windows, curtains drawn.
As they race around, Huggins keeps an eye on the plume gathering over Strathewen. He’s alarmed but not surprised to notice a change in its angle: previously it was leaning to the south. Now it’s vertical. By his reckoning, that means it’s coming straight at them. They up the tempo of their preparations.
He’s puzzled when the wind dies down. For maybe five minutes, there’s silence.
They stand for a moment, stare to the south, ears pricked. Then they hear it. A distant rumble. They can almost feel it: the earth shakes, their bones tremble in sympathy. It comes in swiftly, the thousand-jet-engine roar everybody on the front line heard.
All sportspeople know about the zone. From that moment, Tim Huggins says, he was in it. ‘If you focus hard enough,’ he adds, ‘you generate your own zone.’
He sees the first flames: a swirling red chaos rushing through the treetops. It’s crowning, coming straight at them, fast and furious, twice the height of the trees—and the trees are forty metres tall.
Huggins calls upon all the instincts honed by a lifetime’s commitment to his discipline. The essential components of his strategy are to minimise the expenditure of energy, to expect the unexpected—and to stay focused. In reality, he’s been doing those things since he first drove into the fire at Wild Dog Creek. Everything he’s done since, even the hugging of the kids, the cup of tea, has been part of the plan. Linda and the children rush inside; Tim sprints around outside, getting out all the water he can, fighting the embers that are beginning to split the air, fizz against the walls.
The front is still seventy metres away when a ball of fire shoots out in his direction, its trajectory low and flat, like something Viv Richards might have belted off the bowling of Dennis Lillee. It carves a flaming parabola through the air, never more than ten metres from the ground. Smashes into the bush alongside the house. The whole patch—maybe a hundred square metres— instantaneously bursts into flame.
‘I was stunned by that,’ he says. ‘It was like an incendiary bomb had landed.’ Another fireball appears, arcs past the other side of the house.
Outside is clearly not a place to be, not in a barrage like this. The next one could take him out. He rushes around the back, tries to open the door. Can’t. What…? He’s locked out. A heave of the shoulders and it budges. Slightly. Jesus—Linda and Alex have jammed wet towels against it. ‘Lemme in!’ he screams and thumps, thanks god when the door is wrenched open, because suddenly the outside world explodes.
He and Linda form a team as fire starts to overwhelm their home. Linda, like Tim, is a black belt martial artist, blessed with the same cool head and smooth coordination. Despite their fears, the couple never stop thinking, moving, looking ahead. One decision they make is to tell the kids to get onto the concrete floor and stay there: a seemingly simple instruction, but there were families who died that day because the parents were trying to find their children in the chaos of smoke-filled houses.
The kids are huddled under wet towels in a central position, midway between three exits. Tim’s plan is to fight what he calls ‘a slow, staged retreat’ as the house catches fire, always making sure to leave themselves an escape route. At one stage the children get up to go to the toilet.
‘Stay there!’ he yells. ‘How can I keep you safe if I can’t find you?’ Embers insinuate themselves through weak points in the upper level. A window breaks and in they shoot. Tim and Linda recognise this as their Achilles heel. They dash up there with mops and buckets, but carefully—the stairs, the water—this is no time for a broken leg. They have some success in extinguishing the flare-ups, but the smoke is so bad you can only stay up there for a minute or two. They take it in turns. Another window smashes: the wind, the heat and the pressure are cracking glass everywhere.
The alarms go off, scream through the house. So do the children. ‘Stop screaming!’ he yells at them. ‘The only person who’s allowed to scream is me!’
Months later, reflecting upon the comment, he shakes his head: ‘Stupid man.’
‘Mummy, are we going to be dead?’ asks Aaron.
‘No darling.’ She cuddles him.
Not if I have anything to do with it, thinks Tim. But one of the upstairs windows is jammed open. More windows crack, give entrance to embers. The room turns from a smoky twilight to a pitch black, illuminated only by the flames licking against the windows, the sparks spitting through the cracks.
The noise—alarms, kids, the indescribable roar of a billion cells exploding in the bush outside—grows to a climax. The house is nestled into an area of the thickest bush: the fire is crowning around them, reaches the full 1400 degrees, subjects the building to a blistering radiation.
‘You’re not getting my family, you fuckin beast!’ he roars out into the inferno, and a kind of madness descends upon him. ‘I found myself attacking embers that were trying ignite a timber venetian blind and I was singing—a Wurundjeri song an elder had taught me: Wandit Kundawa, Kundawa Wandit. Figured they knew a thing or two about fire.’
Huggins finds time to reflect on the ca
re he’s put into ensuring that the house was relatively secure: the packing in the ridgecap-ping, the space-filler products used to close corrugation gaps under the flashing’s edge. The house is built on a slab: nowhere for fire to get underneath. Cathedral ceilings, so no roof cavity for the flames to invade. All that effort is paying off, but will it be enough?
An anxious glance at the window: nothing out there but red angry flame thrashing in the dark. How much longer can it last? How much longer can they?
Then, magnificently, a glimpse of sunlight. It’s been about an hour, by Tim’s reckoning. Certainly not the ten minutes they’d imagined. He opens the door once or twice, but it’s still painfully hot out there. He’s desperate to see what’s happening to the exterior. They catch sight of the neighbours’ house engulfed. He waits a minute or two, then has another go at the door.
A sigh of relief: it’s bearable.
He staggers outside. The roof is ablaze. He sprints around with the water backpack, extinguishing it. Looks around. Sheds, cars, fences and tanks: incinerated. The trees are fired up and crashing down.
He takes a deep breath. Splutters. He doubles over, sucks air. Then stretches himself upright, punches the sky and lets out a rebel yell: ‘Whoo hooo!’ They’ve survived. By christ, he hadn’t thought they were going to.
His family creep outside. They huddle together in shock, comfort each other with their breath, their arms, their beating hearts.
The silence. A strange, unearthly hush, the likes of which they’ve never known. As if a giant vacuum cleaner has sucked all noise from the air. They gaze around, anxious. Is everybody else dead?
Tim tries the phone. Amazing—it works. He rings Kinglake CFA and gets Trish Hendrie. They’re alive; can somebody come round and lend a hand? The bush around them is still raging.
‘Nobody here just now,’ replies Trish. She sounds under a lot of stress. ‘We’ll send somebody when we can.’
The family bunker down in the house, holding each other, grasping for the small things that assure them the world is still revolving. They look at each other in a new light. They seem reborn.
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