DARYL Hull lay in the mud of the little island in the middle of Marysville’s lake, staring at the ducks.
Over his head, he could see fire leaping through trees.
Little fingers of orange flame crept through the grass on the banks, too, as if the fire were a living thing although it also looked like an animation, he said.
It seemed so unreal that at one point he literally reached for a remote control.
“I just wanted to change the channel,” he told the Bushfires Royal Commission this week.
“As this thing kept getting bigger, I kept thinking, ‘I want to get away from this’.”
Hull, 58, did get away from it. But he also stayed close enough to film the fire that razed Marysville and killed 34 of its residents.
With startling presence of mind, he clung to his video camera throughout most of his ordeal. His compelling footage of the fire and its aftermath was this week shown to the commission.
He told his tale calmly, with a catch in his voice only twice: once when talking of his relief to see police lights after the fire had passed, and once when talking about the town’s devastation.
Hull’s family has been part of the town for three generations, ever since his grandfather built a guesthouse there in the 1920s. Hull used to work as a pianist in the local guesthouses but on Black Saturday was helping out as a kitchenhand at a cafe.
He did not leave the kitchen until 4.30pm, when he saw a pall of smoke over the town. At 5.15pm, on another break, he grabbed his cameras and began filming. He soon became alarmed and went to warn his employers. They all kept checking the sky, unsure whether they should be worried.
He said he heard a siren go off twice but then it was cut off.
“The fact of the siren stopping said to me, ‘Oh, false alarm, maybe there’s not a problem’,” he said.
But he knew to gather at the local oval in case of emergency. There, people were milling around in confusion.
“We were all sort of biting our nails at that point thinking, ‘What on earth do we do? Where do we go? What is happening? How bad is this?’,” he said.
Police announced they were evacuating people in a convoy. Hull would not go. He feared dying in a car at the side of the road.
“I’d said to various people, you know, if ever there was any trouble or a fire . . . that the lake would be the perfect place to get into. I’ve always been very fond of that little body of water,” Hull said.
“The ducks on the lake have always amused me enormously and they all gather in under that foliage on the lake at night. And I kind of thought, ‘Well, good enough for them, good enough for me’.”
He walked boldly into the water, only to find himself suddenly up to his neck.
“So I have got one digital camera underwater and automatically my right hand thrusting skywards to hold the video camera out of the water thinking, ‘What did I think I was doing?’,” he said.
Hull scrambled back to the edge and put the cameras under some ferns before swimming over to the far side of the island, where he submerged his body in the water and the mud.
He stayed, he thinks, for half an hour, before the island caught alight: “The smoke above me had descended and was sitting almost above my head . . . and it was . . . frothing and bubbling, it almost looked like tar, it was black and very, very dense and quite terrifying,” he said.
He got back into the lake and it gave him what he needed: shelter from a hail of embers.
“I put my hand out and there was the perfect branch in the shape of an umbrella, already wet, just at my arm’s length. I don’t know how that happened but I thanked whatever power had put it there,” Hull said.
“Over the lake it was very dense and very powerful and it had the sense of, as though it was drawing breath . . . and then . . . the entire sky seemed to catch fire and then it absolutely rained embers, just an absolute meteor shower of embers.”
Hull said at one point blue flames encircled the lake, and trees moved “as if they had their own current”.
He told the commission he heard two cars reach the water’s edge and the sounds of human voices, including a child.
But then there was an explosion, followed by silence.
“I don’t know what happened to those people,” he said.
An hour later, he retrieved his video and began filming. He walked down streets and filmed blazing landmarks: the kindergarten, a church where only its sign was left standing. The Age
“We were all sort of biting our nails at that point thinking, ‘What on earth do we do? Where do we go? What is happening? How bad is this?’ ”

First published in the Newcastle Herald.

FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION
KAREN KISSANE and DEWI COOKE

CFA workers at Kangaroo Ground feared at 3pm on Black Saturday that the Kilmore fire could spread into Kinglake, but were repeatedly forbidden to issue warnings, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
Several warnings were drafted over the next few hours but never released because the Kangaroo Ground workers did not have responsibility for the fire. The fire was formally under the control of an incident control centre at Kilmore, a CFA volunteer said. An urgent threat warning was issued only at 5.20pm when Kangaroo Ground was told that Kilmore’s communication system had broken down, Serafina Munns told the commission.
Mrs Munns, a CFA volunteer, was giving evidence on a day of reports about chaotic communications and multiple warnings drawn up by three CFA centres that did not make it to the CFA’s website in time to alert people to impending danger.
On February 7, she worked in the information unit of a centre in Kangaroo Ground under incident controller Jason Lawrence. Mrs Munns said a colleague named John Cowan, who understood mapping and the equations required to predict a fire’s rate of spread, predicted at 1.30pm that the Kilmore blaze might spread into Kangaroo Ground’s CFA region.
Sending out an awareness alert was discussed but Mr Lawrence said it was not appropriate, she said. Draft warnings that she produced at 2.30pm, 3pm and 4.15pm were not released, she said. “What we were told was that ‘no fire information releases were to be issued from this ICC whilst it was not our fire’.”
The alert message drafted at 3.02pm took into account the expected wind change and warned towns including Kinglake, Pheasant Creek, Strathewen, St Andrews and Arthurs Creek that fire could hit them.
Mrs Munns said: “The answer would have remained the same: ‘It’s not our fire.’ It was a pretty constant response that it wasn’t our area and it wasn’t appropriate to give out an awareness message … I wanted the information out there, given that we had it.”
The commission has already heard that the first time Kinglake was mentioned in an urgent threat message was at 5.55pm on the CFA website. One hundred and twenty people died in the Kinglake ranges.
Mr Lawrence has yet to give evidence. The lawyer representing the state of Victoria, Kerri Judd, SC, said it was CFA protocol that the incident control centre in charge of a fire should be the one to issue warnings about it.
This was to avoid errors and miscommunication, she said, and because the local control centre would have the best information on the fire.
But the commission heard that Kilmore’s fire chief issued a warning at 4.10pm that was inexplicably delayed. The message, which would have given Kinglake residents two hours’ warning, was “not as timely as it should have been”, said Gregory Murphy, volunteer captain of the Kilmore CFA brigade.
Mr Murphy was the first incident controller told to manage the Kilmore East fire on February 7. His team issued an urgent threat message at 4.10pm for eight areas, including Kinglake.
But he said it was not until the royal commission started this month that he realised the message had been delayed. “How that happened, why that happened, I am sorry, detail I am not sure of,” he told senior counsel assisting the commission, Jack Rush, QC.
The incident controller who relieved Mr Murphy at 4.30pm, Stuart Kreltszheim, said he did not know about Mr Murphy’s message, nor did he ask about any of the messages that had been sent through the day. He said he was dealing with a multitude of other problems.
Mrs Munns said an urgent threat warning drafted at 5.20pm that day was signed by Mr Lawrence after she told him that Kilmore had asked Kangaroo Ground to issue it because Kilmore’s computer and fax had broken down.
– A former top adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been appointed chief executive of the bushfire recovery taskforce, replacing acting chief Jeff Rosewarne.
The appointment of Ben Hubbard to the position, which will pay $159,000-$253,000 a year, was slammed by the State Opposition as Labor looking after its mates. But bushfire authority head Christine Nixon said Mr Hubbard came to the job with significant state and federal experience.
First published in The Age.

WATCHING the TV forecast of extreme fire danger the night before Black Saturday, Jillian Kane told her partner: “It’s a bit scary. Someone watching the news right now will be the news on Monday.”
She did not know that her brother would be one of those people. She did not think bushfire warnings applied to residents of the outer suburbs of Bendigo, where he lived.
Her brother, Mick Kane, had had two brain aneurisms in his youth and had developed schizophrenia, seizures and a weakened left leg, she told the commission yesterday.
He walked rarely and unsteadily, his leg stiffened by a brace.
That day, Jillian Kane and her partner were returning from a swim when they saw a large black cloud of smoke. They drove towards it, wondering.
They realised it was over her brother’s street. They were calm, assuming that if the fire was close, the houses would have been evacuated.
She was appalled to see her sister-in-law’s car still in the driveway as flames roared 15metres into the air from behind the roof of the carport. “A split second later I could see a dark figure on the ground, which I knew was my brother,” she said. “I couldn’t see his face, but I knew by the shape.”
He had fallen just near the passenger side of the car, and his wife of 24 years, Carol, was moving towards him.
Jillian Kane and her partner, Michael Ryan, leaped out of the car. Mr Ryan got Mr Kane to his feet and told Mrs Kane to get in the car and go.
But Mr Ryan was wearing only swimming shorts. “The fire changed direction and the flames seemed to turn straight back around and come towards us,” Ms Kane said.
“I just remember hearing him yell out in pain, ‘It’s too hot’, and he must have thrown his hands into the air and was unable to continue holding on to my brother.
“The flames overtook (my brother) and he cried out and my partner tried to go to the car and get a wet towel to go back and try and help, but he couldn’t. It was too late. The fire had turned and come straight back over the top of him.”

First published in The Age.

FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION – Flames 37 times too strong to fight

THE Black Saturday fires burned so fiercely they produced energy equivalent to 1500 of the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima, enough to power Victoria for a year, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday.
Fire behaviour expert Dr Kevin Tolhurst said the best fire-fighting equipment could be used in direct attacks only on fires that burned up to 4000 kilowatts a metre. He later told The Age that some fires that day burned at an intensity of 150,000 kilowatts.
Dr Tolhurst, senior lecturer in fire ecology and management at Melbourne University, also said that fires could burn in an area for much longer than what people are led to expect from current fire-safety information, which suggested a fire front would pass in about 10 minutes.
He said this time frame wastrue of fronts but not of “fire activity areas” dotted with spot fires, where the area could remain dangerous to life from radiant heat for an hour or more.
Analysing footage of the Murrindindi fire, he said: “There is a period here of basically half an hour where the radiation level would be very high, and an hour where the fire activity is quite pronounced … so it is … probably an hour where it would be dangerous.”
He said the average rate at which fires moved on Black Saturday was 12 kilometres an hour but because fire “pulsed” forward, it could travel for short bursts at up to 60 kilometres an hour.
Fireballs did exist, he told the commission: “What a lot of people have seen have been fair dinkum fire flares or fireballs.”
He said these were created because the fuel on the day was so dry and the temperatures were so high that burning plants gave off volatile gases quickly.
The gases moved through the air faster and then ignited into huge balls when they reached clearer air at the edge of the fire. “You only need to go down to Southbank to see the gas flares in front of the casino there. It is the same phenomenon,” he said.
The winds that were created by the fires were so fierce that tree trunks snapped, he said.
Dr Tolhurst spent much of Black Saturday working at the Integrated Emergency Control Centre (IECC), where agency chiefs ran the response to the fires.
He and his colleagues drew up several maps predicting that the fires would reach Marysville and Kinglake, which CFA chief Russell Rees has previously told the commission he did not see.
Marysville was razed and lost 38 people, and 120 died in the Kinglake ranges.
Dr Tolhurst said his team used to sit in a room directly off the control centre, but from January had been moved to a back room, where it was harder to monitor events.
“It meant that we weren’t getting any or very much casual information. It was only when either we ventured into the IECC or someone came into our room that we had a direct connection with what was happening.”
He said a fire prediction map could be drawn up within half an hour if all the information it relied on was already available, but it had taken up to four hours on the day as necessary facts were hunted down.
Electronics engineer Simon Langdon told the commission he had developed a system of remote-controlled cameras that were being trialled in four bushfire areas. He showed footage of the Murrindindi fire from a camera on a tower.
Mr Langdon said the system could zero in on a target such as a smoke plume and estimate its position by latitude and longitude – or street address – within a minute.
Mr Langdon said it was hoped the system could be linked into phone number databases so that warnings of fire could be sent to all telephones in an affected area.
First published in The Age.

FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION

BEFORE Black Saturday, the captain of the Kinglake CFA would have assessed Bald Spur Road as defensible against a bushfire, the Bushfires Royal Commission heard yesterday. The unprecedented severity of the fire that day had since changed his mind.
Paul Hendrie said, however, that in 30 years of volunteer fire-fighting he had never offered residents a fire-risk assessment of their homes or told them which strategy to adopt, because he was not qualified to do so.
He agreed it would be helpful if the CFA asked qualified people to offer such advice.
On Tuesday, Joan Davey told of losing her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren in Bald Spur Road, where 19 people are believed to have been killed.
She said her family had always planned to leave in the case of fire, but changed their minds after fireguard meetings, which gave them “a false confidence”. She said the CFA should have advised the family its home was indefensible.
Mr Hendrie said he had spoken at a fireguard meeting in Bald Spur Road last December. He said he routinely suggested residents consult a document called the Building and Wildlife Management Overlay, which helped residents identify their own fire risk.
He also said there would have been no point in sounding the CFA station’s siren because residents had not been told what to do if they heard it.
Meanwhile, Kinglake resident Shane Sparkes yesterday contacted The Age to say that what he had learned at the Bald Spur fireguard group had helped save the lives of himself, his wife and his two children.
While the rest of the house burned, they sheltered in a room where Mr Sparkes had backed the window with a cement sheet.
When the house was full of smoke, they fled outside. They knew to keep low under a wet woollen blanket and direct water from a hose on to themselves.
“The fire group … did instil confidence in us to survive a situation where we had no choice but to get through it, and if you have no confidence you can’t do it,” he said.

First published in The Age.

A LITTLE bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Joan Davey believes. She thinks information provided by the CFA to her son and his wife gave them false confidence that they could defend what turned out to be an indefensible home.
When Mrs Davey phoned her daughter-in-law Natasha in Kinglake on Black Saturday, “I could hear (granddaughter) Jorja singing the Wiggles song and Natasha said, ‘It is 50 degrees; Jorja doesn’t like the heat. We could get caught in a traffic jam. We could drive into a fire. We will stay here until we get information.”‘
Mrs Davey blames the community fireguard meetings the family had attended for the tragedy that followed.
“Prior to the activity with the CFA, our children were of a mind to leave, and we will lament forever that our children interacted with the CFA fireguard group.”
When Robert and Natasha Davey moved to Bald Spur Road in Kinglake eight years ago, Joan Davey was worried about fires, she told the Bushfires Royal Commission yesterday.
Her son reassured her that by the time any fire arrived, “‘We will be long gone’ … I took that to mean they didn’t intend to try and fight for the house, that their lives were important.”
In 2006, when the Daveys were all together on a trip to Perth and fires were burning in Kinglake, he told her that he did not want to return and fight them: the pets were in kennels, the house was insured, and they could do with new bathrooms.
But in recent years, the Daveys prepared to stay and defend their house. Wine merchant Robert, 36, bought tanks, pumps and hoses.
On Black Saturday, Natasha, 33, was inside the house watching the CFA website while daughters Jorja, 3, and Alexis, eight months, watched the Wiggles. Outside, he wet down the house and land, even though they believed the fire was a long way away.
Becoming increasingly anxious when she could not raise her son on the phone on the Saturday night, Mrs Davey kept calling the bushfire information line and the Red Cross line from 8.30pm until noon the next day. “Not one of our calls were answered,” she said.
“I actually got a voice, a computerised voice message that my call was important and that I should hang on, so I held that line – simply because it was something – for almost two hours and the call was never answered.”
Mrs Davey and her husband decided to drive to Kinglake to search for themselves. They were stopped at the Whittlesea roadblock. “We registered the children as missing and I wrote on notes, sticker notes … ‘Davey family, please contact us’ and ‘Rob, where are you?”‘
It was at the Whittlesea relief centre that she heard of the deaths of former TV newsman Brian Naylor and his wife at their home on Bald Spur Road.
“The gentleman beside me said, ‘Oh my God, if he’s gone, they will all be dead up there!’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said to me that … Mr Naylor’s property was eminently prepared … to fight anything and if he hadn’t been able to fight the fire with his equipment, he didn’t believe that anybody else would have been able to.”
It was not until 1.30am the following Monday that her fears were confirmed: all four members of her family were found dead in the bathroom.
Mrs Davey told the commission she did not know what was said at the CFA fireguard meetings, but Robert and Natasha seemed to have changed their minds after attending them.
She said they gained a false confidence “either in their own ability, in the ability of the CFA or the combination of both. If there had been a row of CFA trucks on Bald Spur Road, everybody (in them) would have died there as well. It was simply an indefensible street in a fire situation.”
She said she believed Bald Spur residents should have been warned of their heightened fire risk: “I think that if a CFA person went to that hill to convene meetings, they should have realised that Bald Spur Road was at the highest point of Kinglake. The street consisted of homes built of combustible material. Our (children’s) house was cedar. It was like having a house in a fireplace. Yet they were encouraged to establish fireguard equipment.
“The activity of that fire group (should have been) to establish evacuation or warning systems to get people out of that street.”
She said 15 other people had died in her son’s street.
A CFA volunteer firefighter who did not wish to be named told The Age they were instructed not to offer fire-safety assessments about people’s houses because they were not qualified to do so.
First published in The Age.

FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION
MASS evacuations during bushfires were probably impossible in Victoria because its roads would not cope, Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin told the Bushfires Royal Commission yesterday.
He also said Victoria might have to adopt the term “mega-fire” to describe blazes too fierce to be fought. “It will be the weather and the locale that actually puts those fires out; it won’t be the efforts of the firefighters. They are beyond combat,” he said.
Asked what it would take to evacuate a township of 1000 people, he said Victoria did not have the road network to be able to do it. “The Great Ocean Road, the Dandenong Tourist Road, the Kinglake-Whittlesea Road … they are not meant for huge numbers of traffic in that sort of situation.”
Mr Esplin said even in California, fire evacuations left its extensive freeway system “log-jammed with cars”.
Mandatory evacuation would have been particularly unmanageable before the Black Saturday fires in which 173 died, he said. “Given that the whole of the state was considered to be an extreme bushfire risk, fire could have started anywhere around the state. It would have been an enormous challenge to evacuate the whole of the state in the lead-up period.”
He said the US term “mega-fire” was helping people realise “that there is perhaps a scale of fire and an intensity of fire that is beginning to be experienced that may be beyond what has happened before”.
Mr Esplin said “tree-changers” now living in “dormitory suburbs” on the urban/rural fringe were city people with no traditional link to bushfire understanding, but climate change had left them at high risk on extreme-weather days. Climate change and drought also meant that extreme bushfires were occurring more often.
The inquiry continues.
First published in The Age.

Desperate emergency callers put through to Centrelink

THE morning after 34 people were killed in Marysville on Black Saturday, a report prepared by the staff of Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner declared that everyone in the town was safe.
“We understand everyone in Marysville is safe and are assembled at Gallipoli Park,” said the report, issued at 8am, and again at 5pm, on the Sunday. “Emergency response crews are working on getting emergency services into the town.”
It was one of several badly out-of-date situation reports produced at the Bushfires Royal Commission yesterday as more details emerged of chaotic communications, including an overloaded bushfire line putting calls through to Centrelink.
Counsel assisting the commission, Rachel Doyle, described the situation reports as “just embarrassingly out of date”.
Another report, issued at 5pm on Sunday, said: “The Taggerty area is now of concern”, even though the fire had burnt through Taggerty the day before.
Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin agreed that they were “unfortunate and wrong” but pointed out that the reports were designed only to brief him, and he had no operational role in deciding how to fight the fires.
On the Marysville report, Ms Doyle said: “That is true so far as it goes, Mr Esplin, in that the people in the park were safe, but that is severely incorrect, isn’t it?”
Mr Esplin replied: “‘It is on the basis of what we now know.”
He agreed he had been arguing for years that Victoria should get a telephone-based emergency warning system to reduce demand on triple-zero and other emergency telephone lines during disasters.
In his statement to the commission, Mr Esplin said that on the day, 9088 emergency calls and 970 SES calls were answered at three triple-zero communication centres: in Burwood, at Victoria Police headquarters and in Ballarat.
He said when the triple-zero call system becomes overloaded it forwards calls to other parties, known as second, third and fourth-preference responders.
If the Victorian bushfire information line receives too many calls, it diverts to Centrelink, and this happened on Black Saturday, he said. Centrelink was also dealing with Queensland flood inquiries that day, he said.
Mr Esplin told the commission that he was against the forced evacuation of indefensible homes in the path of bushfires because it could lead to a “cry wolf” situation.
Asked by commissioner Susan Pascoe why Victoria did not have a forced evacuation policy like California’s, he said people would “probably respond” the first time force was applied, “may or may not respond” the second time, but “the boy-cries-wolf type scenario” could be played out thereafter if no emergency eventuated.
He said it would be better for education to raise community awareness that some properties are not defensible so that individuals reached “that sensible conclusion” themselves.
He also said Californians were different to Australians. “California doesn’t have the amazing tradition of volunteerism that exists (here).”
He said California had considered trialling Victoria’s “stay or go” policy but following the February fires would probably await the commission’s findings.
Ms Doyle also produced documents showing that the Federal Government’s disaster plan was only invoked at 10.30pm on the Saturday. By 8am on Sunday, another memo said, Victoria’s only request for Commonwealth help was for 150 mattresses or portable beds for use in a relief centre.

First published in The Age.

FORCED evacuation of indefensible homes in the path of bushfires was not a good idea because it could lead to a “cry wolf” situation, Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin told the Bushfires Royal Commission yesterday.
His comments came as more details were revealed of chaotic communications on Black Saturday, with an overloaded bushfire line putting calls through to Centrelink and Mr Esplin’s staff writing status reports that lagged hours behind events.
Asked by commissioner Susan Pascoe why Victoria did not have a forced evacuation policy like California’s, he said people would “probably respond” the first time force was applied, “may or may not respond” the second time, but “the boy-cries-wolf type scenario” could be played out thereafter if no emergency eventuated.
He said it would be better for education to raise community awareness that some properties are not defensible so that individuals reached “that sensible conclusion” themselves.
He said California had considered trialling Victoria’s “stay or go” policy but following the February fires would probably await the commission’s findings.
Ms Doyle produced several “situation reports” prepared by Mr Esplin’s staff that lagged hours behind events, including:
■ A report at 5pm on Black Saturday that failed to mention the Murrindindi fire.
■ A report at 5pm on Sunday said: “The Taggerty area is now of concern”, but the fire had burnt through Taggerty the day before.
■ A report dated 8am Sunday said: “We understand everyone in Marysville is safe and are assembled at Gallipoli Park. Emergency response crews are working on getting emergency services into the town.”
Ms Doyle said, “That is true so far as it goes, Mr Esplin, in that the people in the park were safe, but that is severely incorrect, isn’t it?” (Thirty-four people died in Marysville and the town was razed.)
He replied: “‘It is on the basis of what we now know.”
Mr Esplin said he was not sure why there had been such confusion. The Murrindindi fire was under the control of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, he said.
But he pointed out that the situation reports were designed only to brief him, and he had no operational role in deciding how to fight the fires.
Mr Esplin agreed he had been arguing for years that Victoria should get a telephone-based emergency warning system to reduce demand on triple-zero and other emergency telephone lines during disasters.
Ms Doyle also produced documents showing that the Federal Government’s disaster plan was only invoked at 10.30pm on the Saturday. By 8am on Sunday, another memo said, Victoria’s only request for Commonwealth help was for 150 mattresses or portable beds for use in a relief centre.
In his statement to the commission, Mr Esplin said that on the day, 9088 emergency calls and 970 SES calls were answered at three triple-zero communication centres: in Burwood, at Victoria Police headquarters and in Ballarat.
He said when the triple-zero call system becomes overloaded it forwards calls to other parties, known as second, third and fourth-preference responders.
If the Victorian bushfire information line receives too many calls, it diverts to Centrelink, and this happened on Black Saturday, he said.
KEY POINTS
■Situation reports lagged badly behind actual events.
■Triple-zero calls patched through to other parties.
■Request for federal help came only on Sunday morning.
First published in The Age.

ENCOUNTER WITH ANNE LEADBEATER

In the aftermath of Black Saturday, one woman’s drive helped keep a community’s hope and spirit alive.

ANNE Leadbeater knew the hundreds of people standing in front of her, red eyed with smoke and silent with shock, were frightened and angry. She was, too. Like them, she wished it wasn’t happening. She wished it could all be undone. She wished there was time to stop and absorb it all, time to grieve.
But, as she bluntly told them, the physical needs of the living must take precedence. A small, dark-haired woman with a husky voice, she clutched a microphone and told Kinglake’s Black Saturday survivors that she understood, that everyone understood, and that they would not be abandoned. And she tried to inject them with a sense that they could work together to get through it.
“I have lived here for 21 years,” she said firmly, not seeking sympathy, but their acceptance of her credentials. “My family were sheltering in the house while my husband and I were trying to fight the fire. Every single” – she choked – “every single feeling you are having I am sharing. I want for you what you want. I’m not talking any more about all that because I’m a bit unhinged, like you are.
“If you get frustrated and angry, we are going to rise above it, as you have already risen above the most frightening experience of your lives. You got through here. I am so proud of you.
“I also wanted to give every single person in uniform on the mountain today,” she said, gesturing to the row of police, Country Fire Authority and State Emergency Service volunteers standing behind her, “a round of applause”. The newly energised crowd sent up a cheer.
“We have had nothing but support from every person that’s come up here, every person that’s heard about our plight in every state of Australia and the world … As long as we have strength of purpose and work together, we will be OK.”
There are people who flounder in a vacuum and people who fill it. Anne Leadbeater is the second kind. She has lived a quiet life in the small mountain town of Kinglake, raising her family and doing paid work for the local council helping build and maintain the links that hold a community together: child care for working families, drought support for struggling farmers. It prepared her a little for the drama of those weeks. She knew the local area. She cared about the people. And many of them knew her.
It was no sense of special ability that made her put up her hand to run the recovery effort after the fires, although she had helped run the town’s recovery effort after the 2006 fires, when some property was damaged but no lives were lost. It was simply that no one else was there. Kinglake has only a small outpost of the shire offices, a building just large enough for a reception desk, a library and a few offices. There was no set-up to manage what lay around them after February 7.
The fires left 747 houses in the Kinglake ranges, from Flowerdale to Toolangi, in blackened ruins. Twisted ghost cars littered the streets. A total of 42 bodies would later be found, the highest death toll of any area in the state that day. The road to the town was closed, strewn with smouldering trees and fallen power lines. No hero on a white charger was going to arrive to make it all better. And things needed to be done.
There was no power, no phones, no tap water (water pumps relied on power). The supermarket and pub were shut with fire damage. The bakery, which had opened its doors on the Sunday morning and fed families free, had run out of food. There was no fuel because the servo had gone up. And there were at least 400people left on the mountain who desperately needed all of those things.
“I thought we were going to spend three months in the 18th century,” Leadbeater says.
She became the woman of the moment. She first asked people what they needed and then, with the help of a tireless group of local volunteers, tried to deliver the solutions. Behind the scenes, she organised a committee of all the agencies working on the mountain – CFA, SES, police, counsellors, Centrelink, Department of Human Services, Red Cross, phone and electricity companies – so they could all share information and agree on the most urgent priorities.
She cajoled, rebuked, reassured, demanded, delegated, laughed, wept and hugged – there were lots of hugs. The humour was often black: “The standing joke was ‘Welcome to the asylum’, because we all had these red hospital bracelets (for identity). ‘Just slot the name and the facility into the bracelet after we all go off the rails!”‘
She raises a sceptical eyebrow at the suggestion that she “mothered” the town through those first ghastly weeks. “Maybe a ‘suck it up’ kind of mother,” she concedes reluctantly.
There were certainly some free and frank exchanges at town meetings in the volatile days that followed. To people who protested at having to put a sticker on their car so they would be recognised as locals, she snapped, “Don’t come bitch to me if someone stops you and asks you who you are!”
Most famously, to a crowd roaring its disapproval of a continuing roadblock that isolated the town, she retorted that Kinglake could not afford to have up to 1000 residents pour back yet: “We don’t have anywhere for them to sleep, we don’t have enough (supplies to) feed them and we don’t have enough people here to support their emotional needs. I will go down and lie on the road rather than have these people come up here and not be supported!”
She lost that battle. The road was opened. She had wanted the returnees to be gathered together at a local oval, gently told what to expect, and advised how to get help while they could all still take it in. But they were allowed to come alone.
She sighs. “We were all surprised to still be alive and feeling a bit bulletproof because of it, but those who were returning were going to have to absorb the full horror all at once. The mountain was all right when they left.
“That’s what happened. We had people walking around up here and they looked like they were walking through a nuclear explosion. You could pick them: ‘That man, that lady, that family are here for the first time today.”‘
For all her tough talk, Leadbeater’s grief broke through, too. Every now and then, halfway through a sentence at a town meeting, she would begin to cry. She would hand the mike over, step aside and gather her wits, and then return to business: bulletins about food, water, doctors, vets, fuel, donated clothes, government benefits, counselling, banking, insurance …
She laughs when asked about it. “I like to think I got really good at it, you know? ‘Here she goes again.’ ‘Just hold that thought for a moment while I sort myself out.’
“But there was no point pretending that there was any alternative, because that was how it was. It was a minute-by-minute thing. Once I was able to embrace public displays of grief and emotion, life got a lot easier. I decided that as long as I wasn’t wailing or rolling on the ground, I was going to go with what I was feeling.”
As for what made her break down, she says she only recognised it recently when a psychologist showed her photographs of traumatised people who had been through the London terror bombings. “That is the faces that were looking back at me: utter bewilderment and grief, and that thousand-yard stare. You could just see by the faces the pain that people were going through.”
Leadbeater was going through her own pain. Her parents had lost their dearly loved home in Strathewen, which had always been the hub of the family. Her sister and nephew had also lost their home and are living with Leadbeater while they sort out their future. She was sometimes seen to double over with grief as she heard news of yet another death.
And yet there were moments that made her laugh. One of her strokes of genius was to insist that the town be provided with a big tent for meetings. A tent barely large enough to store the food being used for emergency barbecues duly arrived. She rang back and said, “I need a circus tent. Think elephants and acrobats!”
But the huge white marquee that resulted was pitched in such a way that a local farmer’s fence was knocked down. His cows escaped. In the midst of all the drama and disaster, Leadbeater and others found themselves comically rounding rogue bovines off streets and back into paddocks.
The tent became the town’s centre, the place where people ate, wept, told their stories and sought counselling and practical advice. It was the logical place to direct the tax team that had arrived to help local business people. Leadbeater’s daughter, Kate, like her mother, was dealing with a dozen things at once. She told the tax person on the phone to find the tent and set up at a table and start talking to people. The person on the other end seemed a bit startled at the summary dismissal.
When Leadbeater arrived there herself, she understood why. “It was the deputy commissioner of taxation and he’d flown down from Canberra. It was the man himself and his entourage, and we’d told him to go find a seat and start talking to people! … We weren’t always as gracious as I would have liked to have been.”
The Bushfire Royal Commission starts its formal hearings on Monday. What would Leadbeater, who has seen so much, like to see come from it?
“I hope that what we have tried to practise, in terms of responsible agencies working together, will be strengthened. Perhaps agencies could work together collaboratively outside emergencies so that those processes and systems can be already in place. We also need structures that will empower local people on the ground, volunteers, to do what they did so brilliantly.”
LEADBEATER says we now know about the severity of the fires we might face in the future and must look at what messages are given about how best to respond to them. “I know people who died in homes that should have been defendable under all the usual rules, and people who didn’t do all the things you are supposed to do, who lived.
“They left home and sheltered in the open, or got into dams – the air quality close to the water with smoke is supposed to be bad, but people did it, and in this instance they survived.
“We need to put together all of those pieces and pull together a fuller understanding of what it is that has happened here.”
Leadbeater has long been a country girl. She grew up in nearby Strathewen, where she and her brothers and sister saddled up horses to go visit their teenage friends, and drove a vintage Beetle round paddocks years before they were licensed.
Recently she has had moments of feeling utterly bereft and has wondered why, given that her home and family are safe. “Then I realised I would look at a place and think, ‘I lived there and it’s burnt, and I grew up there and that’s burnt, and I was on the school council over there for years and that’s burnt.’ It feels like a great hand has come down and wiped out so much of my personal history, from when I first came to Kinglake to this point.”
So it becomes important to cherish the little things. Leadbeater was driving when she saw a small echidna marching across the road. The army major in the car with her got out to help “but as soon as she went over it tucked up. She went to pick it up” – Leadbeater laughs – “and, well, that’s not ever going to work. She ever so gently scooted it across the road with her army boot and got it off to the side, and once it felt the dirt again, off it went. I had a ladybird in my office the other day and I caught it and put it outside on a plant.
“There’s not a lot of wildlife left, so I think we’re conscious of trying to take care of what there is. It feels like we need to be really in the corner of anything that’s here and trying to make a go, and that’s the case for people and for animals.”
Karen Kissane is an Age senior writer.
ANNE LEADBEATER CV
BORN 1962
EDUCATION Went straight to work from year 11. Now completing a master of social science (policy and human service) at RMIT.
CAREER Has been a child-care centre
co-ordinator and a drought support worker; now community development officer with Murrindindi Shire Council.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Leading the recovery effort at Kinglake after Black Saturday; organising the Commonwealth Games baton relay through Murrindindi Shire.
FAMILY Married with two children.
HOBBIES Interminable home renovations, breeding Suffolk sheep, reading.

First published in The Age.