To make it through the toughest night of their lives, Cate Tregellas and her family decided secrets had to be kept from each other.
I'm a mad keen gardener, and I've found you can grow just about anything in this corner of the country.
But as last year's spring wore on, I started to get a creeping feeling that the months ahead were going to be different.
I knew by the way my garden was growing that it was going to be a very hot, very dry summer.
From October, the soil was completely baked and dried out. There was no moisture anywhere.
We're right on the edge of Mallacoota, right next to hundreds of hectares of national park. And our house is a long, linear, north-facing house.
Between Christmas and New Year, it became clear to us that we'd likely be impacted by fire.
I thought, if a fire front came through, that house is going to be the first to go.
When it comes to our girls, we don't sugar-coat anything, so we sat down with them one night and told them what we thought might happen in the next week.
I drew up a list of jobs for everyone and put it on the fridge, and said: "If we have to evacuate, you go to the fridge and finish those jobs until I say it's time to go."
We hooked up our camper trailer and pulled that all apart and restocked — so that if our home was lost, we'd have somewhere to live, in the short term.
On Monday, the day before New Year's Eve, they held a meeting right in the middle of the oval in town. It was a really hot day and of course, there were lots of campers there.
By 11:30am people were packing up and going, because the police said shortly the roads were going to be closed. There was fire approaching us from Wingan Inlet, which is 40 kilometres away on the coast.
We knew from precedent there wasn't much time — probably less than 12 hours.
I went home after that and made lunch for everyone. They kept coming up and asking me questions, but I wanted to wait until we were all sitting down together.
I wanted to buy a bit of time for myself to think about the best way of telling them that yes, it was going to happen — the worst-case scenario, really, in lots of ways.
Part of me was really calm. And the other half of me was inside going, "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit."
About 4:30pm I got a phone call and it was the siren: "Leave now, you must evacuate."
I just stopped dead in the lounge room. I was literally on my way out. I had an armful of stuff to take, and I just remember thinking: "Holy shit, it's upon us."
We made the decision to leave the horses behind.
I opened the chook pen — they'd have to fend for themselves too.
I was quite prepared to leave the goldfish at home in their tank because I didn't think there was a good way of transporting them.
I had a stand-up argument with our youngest daughter. Everyone else was in the cars and she was saying we couldn't leave them.
In the end we had five guinea pigs, one rabbit, three dogs, two cats and the five goldfish we evacuated with.
It was insane.
I remember just touching the house for a second as I was leaving and thinking, "Oh, stay safe." And, "I hope I come back to you."
We drove for a few minutes and reached the evacuation point, down near the wharf in the centre of town.
We were there about 5:00pm, literally within minutes of getting that phone call. And it was quite busy already.
Even though it was still early, clouds of smoke were blocking the sun.
No-one was panicking, but it was that real sense of foreboding that the fire was headed our way and then it was a waiting game.
There's only one power line between here and Bairnsdale, 240 kilometres away, and that had been touched by the fires, so there was no power in town.
The only time people spoke loudly was if someone had heard some news from outside of town.
We felt quite trapped, on one hand, waiting in this terrible heavy silence, and then every so often someone would yell out, "the school's gone!" or something like that.
Within two hours of being evacuated down there, my husband came and grabbed me by the arm with this look on his face.
I knew what he was going to say before he even said it.
"The house is gone."
I thought, why don't I feel anything?
"We're not telling the girls," I said, and he replied: "No, we don't need to."
It was already traumatic enough for them to live through this. They didn't need to know their home was gone as well.
I ended up spending most of the night off and on in the car with my friend, who was staying with us for Christmas.
She had evacuated out of Swifts Creek the week before. As a severe asthmatic, she was panicking quite a lot and was really tearful.
We'd talk for a while and she would fall off to sleep sitting up in the car.
I was sitting up next to her with my legs through the passenger side window because it was so hot and uncomfortable.
The temperature got up to 50 degrees before the gauge stopped working.
I looked around at all the people who were really stressed and worried, then looked at our girls, sleeping on the swag, then looked in the direction of the sea, where you couldn't see anything, it was just black.
I was impatient — wanting to know the worst so I could get over it and get through it with everyone alive and intact.
I knew my town would never be the same again.
About six o'clock in the morning, all of a sudden, there was a flurry of people arriving — people had who stayed behind to defend their own homes in various parts of town.
Then we started hearing massive explosions, because most houses in town were on gas cylinders. It began with a sound like a huge gunshot going off. We started hearing one and then another, and then burning embers were raining down on us.
About four fire trucks basically ringed the evacuation area, and I thought, oh God, here we come.
It became eerily quiet, and when people talked, they talked in whispers. I remember the heaviness of the air.
We were almost poised to run, poised to literally dive off the wharf and into the water if we had to.
Then about lunchtime, just when we thought all the worst of it was over, Coulls Inlet caught alight. It raced up Mirrabooka Hill towards a whole lot of houses in the middle of town and it felt so close to us.
The way the wind was gusting, we felt like the fire was just going to come roaring down over the top of us.
By about 5:00pm, we had a sense that the worst was over.
I think the daylight helped a lot.
I ended up walking out of the centre of town, walking two kilometres up to our house on the main road into town.
On the way, it was just one shock after another: our friend's house has gone, so-and-so's house gone.
There was so much damage.
And when I walked up and saw our house still standing, I literally fell in a heap.
I had prepared myself for the house to be burned down.
The surprise was wonderful, and then I walked around and saw how close we had come.
Even though there was green lawn up to the back verandah, there had been two fires on the side of our door, that had gone up into the roof and were still smouldering.
I looked down and saw that the fires had taken hold in the roof — yet our house was still standing. How the hell did they stop? And all the while thinking: it should have burned. Why didn't it burn?
I found out later that two of our neighbours — the lady who used to live in this house, and the tiny little postmistress who stayed behind to look after their place and the horses — had seen smoke billowing out from the back verandah, and had gone over and fought the two fires with our garden hose.
The girls were rapt that all the chickens and horses had survived. I still don't know where they went, but they all survived, and they all came back.
It's funny, because in some ways that night felt like it lasted forever. We felt like we'd been away for months, or a week at least. But it was only 24 hours, literally.
We had dinner at about 10:00pm — cold baked beans because we had no power and no water. I remember saying: "Happy New Year's Eve. Let's hope next year will be better."
About a month later, the five of us had to leave town as we were all suffering from smoke-induced illnesses.
The only way to family in Melbourne was to go via Canberra, as the direct route on the Princes Highway was still not open.
We stayed overnight with a friend. Over dinner, I said something about the rumours — about people telling us our house had burned down when it hadn't.
And the girls said: "Yeah, we were so relieved to know that hadn't happened."
I just looked and said: "How did you know? Who told you?"
We discovered that during the night we were evacuated, down on the wharf, a school friend of theirs had said, "Oh, sorry about your house," and told them the house had burned.
I said: "How come you never said anything to Dad and me?"
And they kind of looked at each other stealthily and said: "We made a pact not to tell you and Dad."
We had vowed not to tell them and they had vowed not to tell us.
There is a part of me that really struggles with that — we've never been a family to keep things from one another.
But our oldest girl said: "We figured you and Dad did not have that kind of grief that night."
They said: "You were really holding it together for all of us."
Everyone else is calling this the Black Summer. Our family refers to it as our Lost Summer, because that is the single biggest thing — the loss.
Not just of carefree summer days having fun at the beach, not only because of the loss of our natural environment — you are confronted by that everywhere you look in Mallacoota — and not only the gaps, the absences in the streetscape where our friends' homes used to be.
It's the fundamental, visceral loss of security, of the deep peace you have when life is good and you love living where you live.
I have never felt like leaving town to live elsewhere — until this year.
We won't feel over it until we have a typical summer again.
Even if we have to wear face masks on the beach, that's nothing compared to what we went through. At least we can all breathe again.
This story comes from Days Like These, a podcast that introduces you to a regular human as they live through something wild. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.
Credits
- Author: Cate Tregellas
- Illustrator: Stacy Gougoulis
- Producers: Andrew Davies, Tim Leslie and Rosanna Ryan
- Developer: Colin Gourlay
- Podcast story reporter: Elizabeth Kulas
- Executive producers, Days Like These: Ian Walker and Rachel Fountain
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEyLTMwL2NhdGUtdHJlZ2VsbGFzLWZhbWlseS1zZWNyZXRzLW1hbGxhY29vdGEtYnVzaGZpcmVzLWJsYWNrLXN1bW1lci8xMzAwNjEzMNIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMzAwNjEzMA?oc=5
2020-12-29 19:16:00Z
CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEyLTMwL2NhdGUtdHJlZ2VsbGFzLWZhbWlseS1zZWNyZXRzLW1hbGxhY29vdGEtYnVzaGZpcmVzLWJsYWNrLXN1bW1lci8xMzAwNjEzMNIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMzAwNjEzMA
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