The policemen’s radios and mobiles are running hot with messages and requests.
The most worrying is a report of a mini-bus gone into a dam off Parkside Road; multiple fatalities. They cruise along the road, sweeping its smouldering margins with their spotlights. A trail of devastation, but no sign of a mini-bus in any of the dams.
They drive into the last property; everything is still burning viciously, impossible to approach. There’s a car sitting there, and a trailer loaded with fire-fighting equipment, both vehicles burnt. They will come to recognise these as ominous indicators. The hoses are laid out, but everything is melted. Whoever was here put up a fight.
They circle the house with their torches, searching for signs of life. Find none. A chilling silence envelops the scene. Nothing to be done, though: whoever was here is either dead or fled.
They drive back out, pause at the corner of Parkside Road to discuss their options and a face suddenly looms in the window. Both men jump: a pair of Indian men are looking at them. They are workers from Singh’s, the market garden Wood visited earlier in the day. The beautiful cool farmhouse he was so impressed by is now a smouldering wreck, but the family and their employees fled for the broccoli paddocks and survived. These men have only minor injuries. The policemen direct them to the aid stations being set up in the town.
They resume their patrol, encountering scattered little groups of desolate individuals, offering what support, solace or advice they can. They receive an urgent message that somebody is lighting fires down in the Hawkins Estate, scream down there, find only a group of locals putting out fires with wet hessian bags, conclude that every nerve on the mountain is shot to hell.
On their way back along Glenburn Road they encounter another of the eerie bushfire sights that will lodge in their memories: an abandoned fire truck. They get out and stare at it, bewildered. You don’t just get up and walk away from a million-dollar vehicle. They check out the brigade name painted on the door: North Warrandyte. It’s about forty kilometres from home. The appliance is badly battered, a windscreen smashed, stuck in a ditch. They poke around, see no signs of life—or death, thank god. Scratch their heads.
They have no way of knowing it at the time, but that vehicle is another indicator of how swift and brutal the fire has been. Later they find out that the North Warrandyte tanker, with Rohan Thornton in command, had struggled up the treacherous Kinglake– St Andrews Road when the fire was at its peak; other CFA members describe them as having almost ‘surfed’ the fire front. They’d come from St Andrews to rescue people trapped in a house, found their escape route back down the hill blocked, Kinglake the only option.
Crawling up the track in virtual darkness, they were battered by flying objects and blasting heat, struggling to see anything other than the lines on the road. Soon their brakes were gone, their drive-shaft snagged in power lines. They spotted at least one body on the side of the road. As they reached the top of the mountain, they had to batter their way past the burnt-out vehicles cluttering the road— presumably cars that had tried to get down before the roadblock was set up.
Suddenly two cars came careering out of the smoke, panicky drivers at their wheels: they avoided one but T-boned the other. Wild fire surging in front of them, they managed a crazy turn by bouncing off a farm gate and drove back the way they’d come. A tree crashed; dodging sharply to avoid it, they plunged into a ditch with an impact so severe it broke Rohan’s back. Immobilised, they put out a mayday as the fire swept over them; they turned on the crew protection system and lay sprawled out in the cabin. Gasping for air, blasted by radiant heat, slipping in and out of consciousness. When their crew protection water ran out they thought they were dead.
Incredibly, another truck, from Wonga Park under the leadership of Andrew Wright, managed to respond to their mayday. They followed the same nightmarish path, battering trees out of the way, inching through that blackness, ultimately locating their colleagues and bringing them back down the other side of the mountain.
Some residents of the ranges were angry that there were no tankers on hand when the fire struck. They felt they had been abandoned; that perhaps the town’s destruction might have been less complete if the trucks had been there. Volunteers from Kinglake West report being abused, and the Flowerdale CFA was graffitied by locals annoyed that the truck was away.
The fate of the tanker that Wood and Caine found deserted like the Marie Céleste in Glenburn Road encapsulates why, even if the local tankers not been down the hill trying to defend their hometown against the fire coming up from St Andrews, their presence on the mountain would probably have had minimal effect. Indeed, many of the firefighters interviewed suggest that if they had remained on the mountain, they would most likely have died somewhere along the top of the escarpment as they struggled to intercept the fire.
It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic illustration of the fact that, if you are going to make your home in a fire zone, the only person you can rely upon in an emergency is yourself. Like most country towns, Kinglake had hundreds of houses, and only two tankers to defend them. As was seen again and again, from Kilmore East to Kinglake West, from Steels Creek to Marysville, even the best-equipped, state-of-the-art fire appliance is struggling to save a single house when it is under attack from a fire the size of the Black Saturday inferno.
The CFA does its most important work in attacking minor outbreaks before they become conflagrations. Despite the shocking loss of life on Black Saturday, it could have been a lot worse. Around the state there were some five hundred outbreaks that day, and the vast majority of them were suppressed before they did much damage. Experienced firefighters speak with great admiration for the gutsy work done by their colleagues in suppressing a fire in Ferntree Gully in Melbourne’s outer east that, had it got away, could have devastated the heavily populated Dandenong Ranges.
Wood and Caine climb back into their vehicle and continue their ghostly patrol, with the reported mini-bus playing on their minds: they never do find it, but they find a lot of other things, most of them in flames.
They’re troubled by the dearth of survivors. What the death toll is going to be they have no idea. The number of people who found shelter at the CFA gives them some hope, but the forbidding silence that hangs over the burnt-out properties they inspect chills them to the core. And they know it will only get worse. The deaths they’ve already seen are but a forerunner. There will be many, many more and, as the local police officers, they’ll play a critical role in uncovering them. But that will be over the next few days. Right now, most buildings are still too dangerous to approach.
They make a short run down the St Andrews road, but it’s completely impassable: they get about a kilometre down the road before they’re blocked by falling trees. Roger Wood sits staring at the road thinking about his family, somewhere down there on the other side of that inferno.
They’re alive, that much he knows. Or they were a couple of hours ago. But there are still fires burning along Buttermans Track, on the edges of his property. Who knows what the hell’s happening anywhere tonight? Those ruined houses and burnt-out cars are playing havoc with his nerves.
They turn the car around and get on with it; but some time around 4.30 am they get a call from their boss, Senior Sergeant Laurie Parker, in Seymour. He knows about Wood’s situation, orders him to knock off, to get home and see his family. There are other officers on the way up, they can take over.
Wood relents. The urgency of the work to be done here is ebbing, and this driving round in the dark magnifies his feeling of helplessness, his feeling of insignificance in the face of the monstrosity. Time like that, family’s really all you’ve got. His fears about them have been biting away at him all through the emergency. He’s been on the go for eighteen hours and there isn’t much more he can do right now.
It’s time to go home.
He assures Cameron he’ll be back later in the day and sets off in his private car. It has been sitting in the station gar
age all day and turns out to be unscathed.
Cam takes the opportunity to check up on his family too. He drives back to the Kinglake West CFA, where they are still sheltering; joins Laura for a cup of coffee. While he’s there, Des Deas from the SES comes over and casually asks what happened to Cam’s own house.
Cam looks at him blankly. ‘Dunno, mate. Gone, I guess.’ But he has no idea. In the chaos of the past few hours, he hasn’t given it a thought. They drive round to have a look. Many of the nearby houses are gone, the fences and trees are still alight, but the Caine house is pretty well untouched.
Roger Wood, meanwhile, continues his solitary journey down the mountain. Because of the blocked road, he takes the roundabout way, back down through Whittlesea.
He drives, once more, through livid orange forests, past fire trucks and ambulances; reaches Whittlesea, takes the road that goes the long way to St Andrews.
The sun is coming up as he drives along the curving dirt track to his property. On the left-hand side, to the north, there are scorched paddocks and slopes. On the right, where his home is, the land appears untouched. His family—himself, really—have been saved by the same wind change that turned the fire around and drove it up into Kinglake.
He pulls into the drive. Jo is still awake, as are most other adult residents of St Andrews. All too nervous to close their eyes in case the fire comes back.
She looks up at him, smiles wearily.
‘Kids?’
‘In bed,’ she says.
Arm in arm, they walk into the children’s rooms, where he stands for a moment, watching them, lost in the gentle murmur of their breathing. Then he bends and kisses their sleeping heads.
BITTER HOMECOMING
When Dave Hooper and the crew of Kinglake Tanker One crawl back into what’s left of their home town, they look around with the same feeling of disbelief that everyone has experienced.
‘It was just…fuck, what do we do now? I mean, give us a fire and we’ll put it out, but what do we do with this shit?’
They’re barely back in the station when they head out on patrol, trying to see if there’s anything left to rescue in their tormented town. Much of Kinglake is gone, but there are large sections that remain unburnt and with so many fires still raging close by, they have to remain on their guard.
When they’re driving down his own street, Sycamore Avenue, Dave spots the familiar wicked glow near his house and comments, almost casually, ‘There goes my joint.’ But he’s mistaken. The fire has taken out his fences and sheds—and his much loved Harley Davidson—but by some quirk of nature the house survives. He searches for his dogs, is relieved to find them still alive. He runs them down to the station, then they resume their patrol.
Later they will be able to identify only one Kinglake house they can be sure they saved that first night, but given the amount of burning debris and vegetation they extinguished, indirectly there would have been many others.
The crew of Kinglake Tanker Two also spend the rest of the night at work, battling the fire, saving houses, witnessing death and destruction. Gradually working their way back home. The St Andrews–Kinglake Road is blocked again, so they make their way around the mountain. Through Christmas Hills, up the Melba Highway, cutting through back tracks and burning roads. It’s around two in the morning when they limp back into town.
At the CFA Ben Hutchinson runs into a neighbour who tells him his house has been destroyed. He’d half-expected it, but it’s a blow nonetheless. Trish Hendrie asks him what’s wrong.
‘Me house has burned down.’
‘You’re not alone there, mate,’ she says with that growling Australian humour. ‘So’s Carole’s, Phil’s, Wendy’s; Steve’s too. Half the town’s gone.’ Later, when the losses are tallied up, they will find that among all the CFA brigades across the ranges, some twenty-five volunteers have lost their own homes.
For now, hearing that bleak list reminds Ben that he’s part of a team. The crew catch a quick drink—they’ve been on the job for ten hours—then climb back onto the tanker to see if there’s anything they can do to prevent further destruction.
The convoys from Whittlesea have arrived by now, so they have support, but there’s no shortage of jobs to choose from. They patrol the town, extinguishing whatever they can. They hose down a plastic tank they find burning furiously next to a house—it would have taken out the building if they hadn’t got to it in time—and they’re reminded of ‘normal’ fire fighting.
‘A good clean save,’ Ben calls it, wryly. ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to go.’
Sometime during the night, Ben suddenly realises he’s so exhausted he can barely stand. The fire-lit roads are wobbling in front of him. He needs to knock off. Other CFA members relieve them, take over the truck.
Ben goes back to Barry Byrne’s house and collapses onto the couch—covered in ash, eyes stinging, throat aching. It’s still not safe out there: there are fires burning almost up to the veranda and trees crashing in the distance.
Ah fuckit, he thinks, and falls asleep. Some inner voice assures him that, after what he’s seen that day, the fires won’t touch him and he’ll wake up with the dawn. Which he does.
First thing in the morning Ben makes the sombre journey back to his own home and trawls through the ruins, astonished by the thoroughness of the destruction. The massive redgum beams supporting the upper storey have simply vanished; the engine block of his car is melted.
When he goes to check on his neighbours, a middle-aged couple, he’s disturbed to see their Magna still in the driveway, burnt out. He inspects it anxiously, but to his relief there’s no sign of bodies. He checks the property; still nothing. He recalls hearing that they’d been planning to leave in the event of a fire, so maybe they hitched a ride out to the Melba Highway?
A few days later the Disaster Victim Identification Team discover their incinerated bodies in the house.
Ben goes back down to the CFA, jumps onto a truck and works non-stop for days. Keeps going until his superiors order him to stand down. ‘Felt like telling them to bugger off,’ he comments. ‘What else was I supposed to do? Not like I had a home to go back to.’
For most of the CFA volunteers, it is simply not possible to stand still. They just want to keep going. If you stop, thoughts come flooding in. Better to exhaust yourself, dull the pain, hope that the waking nightmare will be less vivid than the ones that await you in your sleep.
Virtually every member of the brigade will spend the next few weeks on the go, putting out spot fires, organising food and emergency supplies, assisting with enquiries from the public. CFA members who hadn’t been there on the mountain—John Stewart, who was in India, Darryl and Michelle Lloyd, who were in Sydney, Trish McCrae, down in Melbourne—come racing back and get stuck into the job, even though all of those just mentioned lost their homes.
They can’t stand still. It’s the adrenaline, the shock. The guilt: the creeping, unshakable, completely unjustified feeling that it was somehow their fault. That they’d failed.
NIGHTMARES
Roger Wood’s day dawns grey, distasteful, dreadful. His hair is full of ash, his nostrils full of smoke. His mind is full of death. His eyes are killing him, he has the mother of all headaches and an ache in his neck that he doesn’t like the feel of.
He tries to get some sleep but the phone begins ringing early and the news is all bad. About as bad as it could be, really, particularly from Strathewen, where the kids go to school and where he and Jo have many friends. A terrible number of those friends haven’t made it.
Having experienced tragedy in their own lives, with the loss of their first child, Jo and Roger feel the pain of their friends and community all the more. ‘I felt I knew what people were going through,’ explained Jo.
Wood returns to Kinglake that afternoon, where the mopping-up continues and his colleagues are frantically struggling to cope with a battery of aftermath activities. The most ominous are the euphemistically named ‘welfare
checks’.
Wood began the previous day with a welfare check: an anxious father wanting to know his daughter was okay. She was fine, but he knows that the requests he’s getting now aren’t going to be so happily resolved.
This is one aspect of the job that people who get their idea of country policing from cosy rural soap operas would not appreciate: the cops have to find the bodies.
Victim identification teams and army personnel will eventually move in and take over, but that doesn’t happen for some time. Even when the outside experts do arrive, they still need to make use of the Kinglake police. So many distraught relatives and friends want ‘somebody local’ to search for their loved ones. It seems the closest you can get to a personal touch in this monstrous business. Because of Sergeant John Ellks’ policy of community involvement, many residents have the officers’ numbers in their phones; they make their calls for help directly.
Then there is the simple practical problem that many of the street signs, house numbers and other markers have been destroyed. The outsiders might receive the request, but they need the locals to come along and help out.
Usually the locals can indeed help. And sometimes they know the people whose bodies they’re uncovering. It all adds to the mounting trauma: the next few days are a procession of soul-shattering tasks for all of the police officers involved.
This is a job nobody should have to do, particularly somebody who knows the victims. Nobody should have to do it, but somebody does have to, and it is upon the weary shoulders of the local cops— and of the CFA, who are in a similar situation—that the task falls.
At one stage Wood is walking into a burnt-out property when he receives a call from Mandy Crowley, an old friend from the Mounted Branch.
‘Rodge,’ she says, ‘just calling to check that you’re all right.’ She’s working in the Command Centre at Victoria Police. ‘I’m recording all the bodies that are discovered; where and when. Who by. Your name keeps coming up, so, you know…Just wanted to see if you’re okay.’
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