Kinglake-350 (24 page)

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.’

‘Thanks, mate.’ He stares into the charcoal landscape and thinks about it for a few seconds. ‘I’m right.’

For Cameron Caine and Sergeant John Ellks, the permanent officer in charge of the region, the darkest moment comes early on the Sunday after the fire. Ellks has come back to Kinglake at first light. He was on leave and has been fighting all night to save his own property in Whittlesea, then reported back for duty as soon as he was able.

The two officers meet at the site of the crash that claimed the life of their friend Gennaro Laudisio. Cam gives his senior a sad debriefing from the night before.

They spend the morning doing more welfare checks, often with the CFA—sifting and searching through gutted homes. Whenever they find bodies, they cover them with a blanket, try to afford them some dignity. But often there’s very little left: a skull, maybe a few bone fragments. Sometimes what they believe to be two bodies later turns out to be four.

They reach the house in Reserve Road where they make the discovery they’ve both been dreading: the Buchanan children, Macca and Neeve, as well as Bec’s brother Danny, and family friends Penny and Melanie Chambers.

‘It was a terribly emotional experience,’ says Ellks of that period. ‘We all broke down occasionally.’

Roger Wood arrives back in Kinglake that afternoon, gets straight back into the grim task.

The police have been ordered to exercise caution: work in teams and restrict their searches to the daylight hours. The houses are still smouldering, and sifting through a building reduced to rubble or dragging aside sheets of twisted corrugated iron is not a task for a couple of cops working with their bare hands.

But they’re under enormous pressure: they have grief-stricken friends and relatives on the phone begging for information, struggling to deal with the agony of not knowing. Most searches are carried out during the daylight hours, but such is the pressure they are under that they sometimes have to stretch the rules. By the second day there are more officers on the mountain, though still not as many as the Kinglake staff would like. Late that night Wood receives a call from a mate asking if he could check up on some family friends.

It’s after midnight and he’s due to knock off; he’ll be going against orders. But there’s a family somewhere, racked, desperate to know, hanging onto a sliver of hope. He decides to do this one last job.

He goes out with Mark Williams, one of the constables who was rostered on for that Saturday night but hadn’t been able to get up the mountain; he worked instead at Whittlesea.

They get an address and drive out to the lonely ridgetop road, but the house numbers are destroyed. Wood rings back to get a better description of the property and the vehicles. Finds the place; is troubled to see that all three cars are in the driveway, incinerated. He’s come to know what that means.

He takes a torch, walks around the house, beam sweeping. Nothing. There’s no structure left, just a pile of smouldering rubble and roofing iron, the odd lick of flame drifting up from some persistent material, the odd shadow running over scorched ground. He pulls some timbers aside, a sheet of iron, a length of twisted steel. Still nothing.

One last piece of iron.

And there they are, huddled together in what might have been the living room. Two adults, two tiny children cradled in their arms.

He trails back to the car, sits in the driver’s seat and covers his face with ash-covered fingers. Gives himself a moment. The image won’t leave him, though; hasn’t yet. Never will.

He and Mark ring the house with blue police tape, marking it for the victim identification officers who’ll be following.

Wood is an Aussie bloke; he tends to keep his deepest emotions close to his chest. Jo recounts the story of their coming home after the death of the baby, Jesse. Roger’s response, heartbroken as he was, was to throw himself into the farm work and spend long hours on the tractor or fixing fences.

But now the pain mounts up. There are so, so many deaths.

A few days later Wood pulls up outside the house of a good friend, a fellow parent at Strathewen school. He’s come to say good-bye. Garry Bartlett died that Saturday, along with his wife, Jacinta, and their youngest daughter, Erryn.

He sits in the car, staring at the devastation. He thinks about the times they had together; a school working bee just the weekend before. Garry was a landscape architect, a local legend for the amount of work he put into the environment and the community. They were beautiful people.

Wood finds himself slumped against the car window, weeping. Not just for this one lost family but for all of them, all the poor souls in the district who died on his watch.

‘We did our best,’ he tells himself. ‘We all did: me and Cam, the firies and DSE crews. It wasn’t enough.’

Soon afterwards he and his station colleagues get together, resolve to go to every one of the funerals. And, over the next few weeks, that’s exactly what they do.