Six years on Karen Kissane, who wrote a book about the trial, reflects on the case that shocked our city.

Julie and Jamie Ramage were married and lived in Balwyn. He was handsome and she was pretty. Materially, they were worth $2.6 million. Her two children remember that one of her favourite songs was “Summertime”, in which “your daddy’s rich and your momma’s good looking”.
Jamie drove a pistachio-coloured Jaguar, Julie had a horse she rode at weekends, and the children went to expensive private schools. Their dinner parties were sprinkled with doctors and lawyers and businessmen. They seemed to have reached middle-class Melbourne’s nirvana. But something about the Ramages’ life together had gone wrong. In 2003, after 23 years of marriage, Julie left Jamie.
Six weeks later, she came back to the family home for a brief visit. It ended with Jamie punching Julie to the ground. When she was laid out on the family room floor, he knelt down and strangled the life out of her. Realising what he had done, he did not call an ambulance or even the police. He slung his wife’s body in the boot of that lovely, sleek Jaguar and drove for 90 minutes across town before burying her in a shallow bush grave.
When his son got home from school that afternoon, Jamie Ramage acted as if nothing had happened. It was only later that he phoned a lawyer friend and turned himself in to police.
I heard of it first from an editor at The Age who wanted me to cover the story as a reporter, as a tale of love gone wrong. What I learned sitting on the wooden benches of the Supreme Court during the subsequent murder trial was that there was much more to the story. Researching with lawyers, friends and family after the verdict, I learned that there was much more to it again.
This story was a babushka doll of truths buried inside each other. It takes us into so many secret places, behind the facade of a perfect life hiding abuse, affairs and lies. It also has at its heart a double injustice: the killing of the heroine and the failure of the legal system to name what had been done to her.
When I first spoke to publishers about turning these events into a book, I was startled to find out it would be classified as true crime. To me, it was a story about the dark side of relationships among “people like us”.
If I had been then what I later became – an experienced court reporter who understood legal rules, and in particular the law of provocation as it then was – I might never have written the book. But I was an ordinary person thrown into the legal arena for the first time. In my naivety, I thought trials were about seeking truth and justice. I did not understand they are about arguing using only the facts that the laws of evidence permit to be aired, a process that sometimes leads to truth and justice, and sometimes not.
My unease began during the pre-trial process. Jurors are meant to judge the facts, but it was here I learned that judges and lawyers decide which facts they will be allowed to know. Nearly all the evidence of Jamie’s controlling and occasionally violent treatment of Julie was excluded because it was too old, or because it was hearsay: that is, Julie had said it to someone else, and it could not go to the jury because Julie was no longer alive to testify to it herself.
The law also said that Jamie’s account of that final row between them (in which he alleged he snapped after she had told him she loved someone else and that sex with Jamie repulsed her) had to be accepted as true unless it could be disproved beyond reasonable doubt. How could his account be disproved? Jamie Ramage could not be cross-examined because he chose not to testify in court, and the only other witness to the encounter was dead.
It all crystallised for me when the defence lawyer argued that Julie might have been “scratchy” during that last deadly argument because she had her period and was therefore more likely to have provoked Jamie, who pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife. His lawyer argued that Julie had provoked him and caused him to lose his temper, so he should be convicted only of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The jury agreed. I realised this was much more than a story of love gone wrong; this was also about how the law dealt with men and women and relationships.
Writing the book, I tried to explore how love can turn to this. I wanted to look at how the law dealt with family killings; how four therapists had failed to sense the danger in Jamie in the weeks before the killing; and how violent relationships work. Why does she stay for so long, and why does he do it?
Jamie Ramage’s lawyer argued that Julie had provoked her husband in two ways. The first was having led him to believe, during the six weeks of separation, that it was possible she might return. She knew he was taking the separation hard and wanted to let him down gently, something the lawyer construed as “weeks of lies”. The second form of provocation was her alleged brutal frankness with him in that final row.
If a woman trying to leave a controlling man lets him down gently, she is lying to him. If she tells him blunt truths, she is provoking him in another way. How, then, can she keep herself safe, given that separation is statistically the time she is most likely to be seriously injured or killed by her partner?
This was no Underbelly, with psychopathic career crims operating in a subculture of moral vacuum. Jamie Ramage was a respectable businessman who wanted to belong to establishment Melbourne. He was not alone and unsupported in his troubles; many of those in his leafy-suburbs circle (two of them doctors) listened to him sympathetically for hours as he talked about his marital woes. One of the mysteries was how a killing could have sprung from such ground.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of homicide is privacy. I began my investigation with the police brief into Julie’s killing, which contained the sometimes intimately detailed statements of all the witnesses.
Few of the people I asked for interviews refused me. I spoke to friends, lawyers and therapists, and to her traumatised twin sister, Jane. For many of those who knew Julie well, and even for one friend who was closer to Jamie, there was an almost biblical need to bear witness about what had happened; out of loyalty, or out of a sense that the truth needed to be told.
Months later, I was talking to one of them about whether the book might hurt anyone connected with it. She looked at me and said, “Just keep reminding yourself that what happened here was wrong.”
The result was a portrait of a deeply troubled marriage in which there were many secrets. Every layer peeled back revealed yet another underneath and it turned out that Julie, too, was not as she had seemed.
The title of the book, Silent Death, was plucked by an editor from a line in the opening chapter. I wrote that no one in the Ramages’ street had heard a sound when Julie was killed, even though a neighbour’s windows were open: “Strangulation is like drowning: a silent death.”
The title resonated in other ways, too. It could be read as referring to the way Julie’s voice was silenced in court. It could also refer to the living death that is the abusive marriage in which a woman shields her partner with her silence. Julie herself had years earlier explained bruises on her face by telling friends she had walked into a cupboard door; in fact, Jamie had head-butted her in the face.
It was only much later that I realised that the phrase “silent death” resonated with me too, in a different way. When I was in primary school, my father was ill for several months. We were told he was getting better. It was a dreadful shock to be woken one morning and told he had gone to heaven. To me, it felt like his death had been shrouded in silence.
Perhaps that experience left me sensitised to the magnetism of a story like this one, drawn to uncover the truth about a family that had so many secrets around the death of a parent and a justice system that let too many of those secrets stay hidden.
Jamie Ramage did not appeal against his sentence (minimum eight years, and maximum 11 years). By coincidence, late last year I came into contact with an ex-prisoner who had done time with him at Loddon, a medium-security jail near Castlemaine.
He told me that Ramage had arrived with a batch of other wife-killers who came from the maximum-security Barwon Prison at the same time. “The first day he was there, I heard him say twice to people that he thought he had been hard done by in his sentencing, and it was too long a sentence for what he had done.”
Ramage did not endear himself to this man, who did not want his name used for publication. But the man acknowledged that Ramage had done a lot of good work helping the recreation officers at Loddon: “He’s been very good for helping get the art program up and running in a way that’s going to benefit the prisoners rather than simply the jail. James got money from a private foundation for this program and he did all the paperwork for that; submissions and writing reports. He does an awful lot of work for the jail where it interfaces with the outside world. There’s a food-fair day once a year, and ethnic communities set up food stalls on the recreation oval. James has put a lot of time into trying to improve it.”
But he remembered Ramage most as a sad figure: “A broken man; a whipped man.”
People often ask what effect the case has had. The problem had always been the law itself rather than any of the individuals applying it. Lawyers and judges are professionally obliged to work with the rules as they are.
Fortunately, the law of provocation was abolished in Victoria soon after this case. Proposed changes had been in the pipeline for some time, but the furore over the case might have helped energise the political will to push them through.
The case has made me realise that the law is not something that should be allowed to be “out there”, in a little bubble, remote from the rest of us. It’s meant to be an embodiment of what you and I think is fair. It’s important we scrutinise how it plays out because sometimes the fine principles that underlie it can fail to provide a just outcome.
Those interviews with the therapists have changed the way I parent my teenage children. I think there is a message here about teaching our sons and daughters how to negotiate an equal footing in relationships rather than to submit or to dominate.
We also need to convince our young people that they can bear being alone and can survive those times in adult life when there is no relationship to prop them up. This was something both Jamie and Julie Ramage deeply feared.
In the end, that fear of being alone destroyed both their lives.
Silent Death: The Killing of Julie Ramage has just been updated and re-released.
Suburban nightmares
The body-in-the-boot In February 2005, Maria Korp was strangled in her Mickleham garage by her husband’s lover, Tania Herman, who had lain in wait for her. After bundling 50-year-old Korp into the boot of her own car, Herman drove around the city before abandoning the vehicle near the Shrine of Remembrance. Found barely alive four days later, Korp remained in a coma for six months until her life support was switched off. Her husband, Joe Korp, was charged with conspiracy to murder but committed suicide on the day of his wife’s funeral. Tania Herman, who claimed Joe Korp had masterminded the plot to kill his wife, is serving a 12-year sentence for attempted murder.
The parent killer In a case that gripped Melbourne, Matthew Wales drugged and bludgeoned his mother, Margaret Wales-King, and stepfather, Paul King, to death in April 2002. Family members searched frantically for the Armadale grandparents before their bodies were found in a shallow grave in the Yarra Ranges National Park. Matthew Wales, then 34, the youngest of Margaret Wales’ five children, had a clear motive for murdering the millionaire socialites: money. He is now serving 30 years in jail after confessing to killing the pair with a lump of wood and wrapping their bodies in a child’s paddling pool. The case spawned a telemovie and book, which labelled the killings “The Society Murders”.
The driveway murder In November 1997, mother-of-three Jane Thurgood-Dove was gunned down in the driveway of her Niddrie home. A hooded gunman chased the 35-year-old around her car, repeatedly shooting her as her children, then aged 10, 5 and 3, watched from the car. Detectives, who ruled out her husband, Mark, as a suspect, at first suspected a serving police officer who was infatuated with Jane. They later concluded the gunman was a Rebels bikie gang member who had accepted a contract to kill a woman but shot the wrong person. The suspect died of natural causes and despite a $1-million reward, the case remains unsolved.First published in the Melbourne Magazine.

BUSHFIRE victims who win damages in court should have to pay back to the relief fund any grants they had received, the barrister leading a class action said yesterday.
“Anyone who gets full compensation in relation to their claim … should repay the money,” said Tim Tobin, SC.
He said that in 1980s court cases where power suppliers were successfully sued over bushfires, donated money had been returned. This was fairer and allowed more to go to people who had suffered but did not have grounds to sue, he said.
Mr Tobin estimated the damages bill for the Kinglake area could run to between $600 and $800 million, not including personal injury claims. He said Kinglake was one of six fires on Black Saturday believed to have started as a result of fallen power lines or other electrical problems.
Mr Tobin was speaking at a forum of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance.
He said there were questions about merged fires at Kinglake but witnesses had seen part of the fire begin at Kilmore East.
“We have people who saw the start of the fire. We can pinpoint it. One of the witnesses is cleaning leaves and his wife yells out, ‘The power’s gone off!’ and at the same moment he sees the fire start.”
Mr Tobin said it was uncertain if a wire fell and hit the ground before it broke, or whether it broke and then hit the ground, but it was believed to be a broken line because the power stopped the moment the fire began.
He said a fire at Pomborneit, near Colac, began with clashing power lines – “a totally avoidable error”. A fire in a Yarra Valley vineyard started with a transformer, and fires in the areas of Horsham and Coleraine started with fallen wires, he claimed.
Mr Tobin said other fires began as a result of lightning strikes caused by changes in the weather triggered by the fires.
An affidavit filed with the Supreme Court confirmed Leo Keane as lead plaintiff in a class action suing transmission company SP Ausnet over fires that allegedly started from faulty power lines.
The severity of fires in recent decades was linked partly to changed land practices by farmers, Mr Tobin said. Previously, large paddocks left fallow acted as natural fire breaks, but this was no longer the custom.
A second speaker told the forum that 30 per cent of bushfire victims making insurance claims have found they were under-insured.
Graham Cox, claims manager for LMI group, said the first four CFA volunteers assessed by special teams sent on to fire-grounds were found to have no insurance.
Under-insurance would make it even more difficult for home owners who would be forced to rebuild using metal frames rather than timber frames, increasing the cost of replacing their buildings, he warned.
Mr Cox said anecdotal evidence gathered by assessors suggested individuals had died after staying to defend their homes because they knew they had no insurance and could not replace them.
Other assessors had reported that some deaths were thought to involve people who had recently moved from the city and did not understand bushfires.
KEY POINTS
– Repayments would be a matter of fairness, says lawyer.
– He said fallen power lines caused six February 7 fires.
– Thirty per cent of claimants were under-insured.
First published in The Age.

FIRES ROYAL COMMISSION
MASS evacuations of people in bushfire-prone areas might have to be considered on future days of extreme danger to try to avoid another Black Saturday, the royal commission on the disaster has been told.
On its opening in Melbourne yesterday, the commission heard that people who stayed to defend their homes on February 7 were “entirely unaware” of the severity of what they faced.
“Fireballs seemingly of atomic force came before the fire,” said Jack Rush, QC, counsel assisting the commission, in opening remarks. “Such fires create their own weather and are beyond the most sophisticated attempts to control them.”
Australia’s “stay or go” policy, allowing people to make their own decisions on days of extreme danger, was unique and would be a key focus of the commission, Mr Rush signalled.
He compared the experience of Victoria with that of the United States, where evacuation is seen as the safest approach at times of high danger.
In the 2007 California fires, which destroyed 3069 houses, nearly 1 million residents were evacuated from 350,000 homes, and only 10 people died, he said. In Victoria on February 7, more than 2000 homes were destroyed and 173 people died.
The commission of inquiry into what Mr Rush called the nation’s “greatest peacetime disaster” would examine whether an evacuation policy would be suitable in some places on extreme days, he said.
“Some particular areas of this state, as a consequence of habitat and topography … are indefensible from a fire-fighting point of view,” he said.
Mr Rush said evidence would be presented demonstrating that on February 7 many people remained in their homes unaware of approaching fires until it was too late. He said the official “leaving early” advice from authorities suggested that residents make a decision on whether to stay or leave by 10am on an extreme fire danger day.
But by 10am and even midday on February 7, there was little fire activity in Victoria.
“There was no reported fire in Kilmore East, Horsham, Kinglake, Marysville, Strathewen, Callignee, Bendigo or Coleraine,” he said.
“Why would a resident of any of the fire-affected regions implement the ‘Go’ part of the policy if they were not aware of any fire threat?”
Mr Rush also said that while Victorians knew in advance that February 7 was a day of extreme risk, they did not understand there was a chance of “a fire that could not be fought”.
He said a rating of 12 to 25 on the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index was considered high and a rating over 50 extreme. “The index on 7 February reached previously unrecorded levels ranging from 120 to 180.”
The blazes probably reached an intensity of 100,000 kilowatts per square metre. “The maximum intensity for control of forest fires is about 4000 kilowatts per metre,” Mr Rush said.
He said the commission would hear evidence that communications failed to cope on February 7, with warnings falling behind the advancing fires and the way they developed after a wind change.
He said the commission would scrutinise the websites of fire-fighting organisations and assess “the ability to track fires at all”. Warnings needed to be accurate and timely, he said. “Underpinning such warnings is the ability for agencies to rapidly analyse on-the-ground intelligence, to monitor risks as they emerge and develop, predict future impacts and point to the best course of action.”
Another issue raised by Mr Rush yesterday was the decommissioning over time of emergency refuges set up after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires.
“Questions as to uniform standards, the legal liability of local councils who maintained them and the risk people may drive to refuges in dangerous circumstances have been raised as reasons for decommissioning,” he said.
Mr Rush said a new national building standard, adopted soon after February 7, failed to cover important questions for fire-prone areas. The commission would look at issues including building maintenance, exit before and after fires, bunkers, water and power.
He said some houses built to the highest standards had burned to the ground, so the inquiry had commissioned analysis on a street-by-street basis to help make findings about building codes.
Mr Rush also raised concerns surrounding fuel reduction, saying it was constrained by complex rules. “Many municipalities in high-risk bushfire areas have a land management overlay, an environmental significance overlay, a vegetation protection overlay, a wildfire management overlay,” he said. “On their face, the planning provisions appear complex and bureaucratic.”
Due to time constraints, the commission’s eight-week block of hearings beginning on May 11 will examine only warnings and the stay-or-go policy.
Commission chairman Bernard Teague said the inquiry could meet its deadlines only if it limited the issues it addressed and looked at the more critical issues first, with a focus on saving lives.
Mr Rush said remaining questions, including causes of the fires, would be addressed after the interim report was delivered in August. Discussion papers would be published on some topics.
The interim report might have suggestions about the stay-or-go policy but would not have a recommendation about whether the scheme should be replaced, Mr Rush said. The final report is due in July 2010.
The commission’s hearings will be streamed on the internet.
First published in The Age.

Bush communities call for designated evacuation points, Karen Kissane reports from Kinglake.
A KINGLAKE mother and her three children died on Black Saturday after reportedly being turned back at a CFA checkpoint as they tried to flee the bushfire.
Nine people including Tina Wilson, 36, and her children Krystal, 15, Nathan, 13 and Teagan, 6, died while sheltering in a neighbour’s home in Pine Ridge Road.
A second family, made up of a young couple and their child, are also believed to have died in this street after being turned back at a checkpoint.
Ms Wilson’s friend and neighbour Jacqueline Hainsworth said the deaths showed the need for bush communities to have a designated safe evacuation point in case of fire.
Ms Hainsworth said that about 4.30pm that day she was evacuating from Pine Ridge Road when she stopped in her car to talk to Ms Wilson, who was returning to the street. She said Ms Wilson said the CFA had blocked the road to Whittlesea and that she was told there was no way down the mountain.
The road would have been closed because a fire was coming up the hill from Whittlesea about that time. When the wind suddenly turned, the fire changed direction and consumed areas including Pine Ridge Road.
Locals estimate about 24people died there. The coroner has not released figures on deaths in individual streets.
Ms Hainsworth said another neighbour had told Ms Wilson to go to a local carrot farm that had a wide open space, but she refused. “Tina said, ‘No, they told us to go home’.”
Ms Wilson and her children sheltered in a neighbour’s home because his house was considered safer than hers, as it was double brick with a concrete slab on a cleared block.
But the man who owned the house was horrified that nine people mistakenly believed themselves to be safe there. The man, who is still traumatised and does not wish to be named, said: “I told them to get out and everyone said they were staying.”
He confirmed Ms Wilson said she had been turned back at a CFA checkpoint. He said he hosed his house down for as long as possible but left when the inside caught fire.
The others had “decided it was safe even though the house was on fire. None of them got out.”
He said a friend had seen another couple with a young child returning to the street after being turned back at a checkpoint. He believed they died, too.
He said the fire had travelled about 20 kilometres in three minutes and was so fierce that his metal shed exploded from the effect of radiant heat on fuel stored inside: “No one that stayed was going to get out,” he said.
“There was nowhere safe to send them if you were sending them back from the checkpoint. The fire was coming straight towards our street, which means it wasn’t a safe place to go.”
He said those at the checkpoint should not be blamed because it was standard bushfire policy for people to be advised to stay in a house until the fire front passed and then go out to extinguish embers. “But things were catching fire before the fire front had hit, from the heat,” he said. “Basically it was more a wildfire than a bushfire.”
He drove to Kinglake West where the local CFA told him to turn around and drive back to central Kinglake. He sheltered with several hundred others in the CFA station in the town centre as the fire front passed over.
Ms Hainsworth said that when she lived in Research in the 1970s, “everyone knew (that in case of fire) you would go to the school because it had all the ovals, which were kept fully mowed. But communities don’t do that any more.” The other neighbour agreed that an open space should be designated and publicised: “A farmer, one with a 40-acre or 100-acre farm, should allocate a paddock in the middle of it each summer and keep it cut; one that the community could use as a fire escape and one everyone knows about.
“People can survive a grass fire where they can’t survive a bushfire.”
Ms Hainsworth escaped because her husband rang a friend with a CFA scanner who told them the road from Kinglake to St Andrews was still clear at that stage. Her family took that route.
“I cried for weeks,” she said. “This is only just hitting home now. (What happened to the Wilsons) was so close to being us. We actually turned the car around to go home, but I said, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ Before the fire, that road was fully treed on both sides.” CFA director of community safety Lisa Sturzenegger said that on Black Saturday, CFA members in several places advised people to turn around if driving on would have put them in immediate danger.
“Whether that occurred in this case I couldn’t say,” she said.
Ms Sturzenegger said it was crucial that people in bushfire-prone areas had plans that included where to shelter if escape was impossible.
She said guidelines for setting up and maintaining mass fire refuges or evacuation points had been established in 2005, but it was up to councils to establish them.
First published in The Age.

THE FIRES

TRICIA Hill is living in borrowed caravans with her three children on her burnt-out block in Kinglake. She has no power or running water.
The mornings can be tricky, she grins. The first day, her daughter said she needed a toilet. “I said, ‘Go for a bushie.’ She said ‘Mum, there’s no bushes!”‘ They drove to the local CFA station, where Ms Hill is a member, to use its bathroom. That is part of their daily routine as life returns to the new “normal” after Black Saturday.
It sounds rugged, but she considers herself lucky: “There’s a waiting list for vans or any accommodation here, really. We did hear on the grapevine that they said they would give us some portable homes, but there’s no word on that.”
She does not want to move out of the area, even though her work as an events manager assistant takes her to town: “All I want is to go home and this is home. There’s nowhere else to live up here, and downtown doesn’t feel right.”
Her younger children – Linden, 13, and Sancha, 12 – are in the smaller caravan. Her son Jorden, 15, needs the greater length of the bed in the second caravan. Ms Hill sleeps in the third, and its annexe – put up with the help of volunteers during a rainstorm – is their living area.
Tied to a tent-peg is the frisky black puppy she was given to replace the family dog lost in the fire. Ms Hill has not lost her sense of humour; the new one is named Ember.
When it gets cold she lights a fire in the old metal keg that is one of the few things to have survived the flames. But the snowy Kinglake winters are bitter and she hopes to have her shed up within two months so the family can live there until their mudbrick home is rebuilt.
Meanwhile, she is trying to work her way through the bureaucratic maze of forms, information and misinformation involved in trying to re-build life for her family.
What she misses most about her old life, she says wistfully, is the couch – and the ability it gave her to just flop at the end of the day.
More than 1600 homes were lost in the blazes that ripped through the Kinglake ranges and neighbouring towns. While some families in places such as Flowerdale are in donated portable homes, others are renting in Melbourne or living on-site in tents, vans or even old portable classrooms.
Ms Hill has refused to let herself stop and think too much: “I have kept myself busy and focused. I study as well. I haven’t had time for emotional things. If I stop and break down, what’s going to happen? Nothing.”
Cooking is difficult, but Ms Hill has chosen not to take the family for free meals down the road at Kinglake West.
There, locals complained following the cessation of emergency army meals several weeks after the fires, and the free evening meals were restarted.
“I think it’s time for people to start standing on their own two feet,” she says firmly.
“Our businesses need to be supported by us spending money here. All the free meals mean that money is not being put back into the infrastructure of our town. They are going broke, basically, with all the free food.”
Trish McCrae feels the same way. She is touched and grateful for all the help she has been offered by friends and colleagues, particularly the friends who have turned their tin shed into a home for her.
She now has plastered walls, a kit kitchen, a plush lounge suite and a soon-to-be fully plumbed and tiled bathroom. Her friend told her: “If you’re going to be here for a long time, you’re going to be comfortable.”
Ms McCrae is a disability support worker and is humbled to find herself on the receiving end of giving.
“It distresses me when I see people who have lost their homes and had so much offered to them who feel bitter. How can you still carry anger after what’s been done for us? The anger is at the fire …
“We have got to do for ourselves now and not be victims.”
Both she and Ms Hill are worried that new building regulations will force them into modern estate-type housing rather than the character-filled kind of homes they lost.
Ms Hill wants to start a mud-brick rebellion if she finds she can’t rebuild the way she wants. “I’m a fighter,” she says.
The town itself is a fighter, says Ms McCrae, who was delighted when the local paper recently dug up an old photograph of the town sign as it was after bushfires in the 1970s. It read, “Kinglake: The town too tough to die.”

First published in The Age.

BUSHFIRES

ST ANDREWS

POWER and phone lines should be underground so that essential services don’t fail during bushfires, according to a woman who was stranded in her burnt-out street for 24 hours after Black Saturday.
Vicki Law, of St Andrews, told the Bushfire Royal Commission that rebuilding must include underground placement of wires in areas that do not have mobile reception.
“Nobody knew we were alive till Sunday afternoon,” she later told The Age.
The media are banned from the commission’s community consultations.
Mrs Law and her husband sheltered with a neighbour after losing their home, sheds, garage, hens and cats, despite being prepared with two water pumps and a pool.
As with other communities, the failure of communications on the day was a strong theme. Mrs Law said the CFA internet site was telling her the fire was still in Wandin at the same time as her husband “began screaming at me to get inside because it was coming down the hill”.
Resident Quentin Addison argued that more spotter planes should have been in the sky tracking the fires’ speed and direction. Air coverage might have provided more up-to-date information to ABC radio, on which many relied, he said.
Angela Lake and Bruce Rodgerson said there should be an advice service with experts available to visit and assess homes for fire safety. Mr Rodgerson said CFA workers talked in general principles but were not permitted to advise on individual homes for fear of litigation if a house was later lost: “There should be indemnity for suitably qualified people to give fire-ready advice.”
David Baker-Gabb said fire-readiness in the bush had deteriorated because the Department of Sustainability and Environment had been “Jeffed” and its staff almost halved under the Kennett government. “The DSE removed from the field people who are sitting in offices now, or in rocking-chairs somewhere,” he said.
Mr Baker-Gabb said there needed to be more fuel reduction and much better maintenance of bush tracks.
Businessman Steve Roberston said he felt at the end of his tether. He saved his home but lost his shed, which contained $120,000 worth of uninsured phones and computers for his data services company.
He said a string of bureaucratic issues since the fires was preventing him from getting back on his feet. He had spent days burying dead wildlife and stock for absent neighbours, the coroner’s order stopped him clearing the wreckage on his block for weeks, and he cannot start using what government relief money he is entitled to because he cannot replace stock without somewhere to store it.
He said Melbourne Water had refused to help clean out his soot-filled dam, and he had been told he must pay $500 each for permits to rebuild his burnt-out shed and water tanks in exactly the same place.
“It’s never-ending. It’s just strangling me,” he said.First published in The Age.

EXCLUSIVE

KINGLAKE

THE road where about 20 people died on Black Saturday, including Brian Naylor and his wife, had been labelled a bushfire deathtrap by residents for 26 years, but their concerns were ignored, locals said yesterday.
“The deaths, the fires, even the direction of the fires – they had all been prophesied,” said Chris Petreis of Coombs Road, Kinglake West. He said residents had been complaining since the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 that neglect by the council and other bodies had effectively turned the road into a seven-kilometre dead-end.
Mr Petreis said that on the day of the bushfires, flames came up the open northern end of Coombs Road, leaving residents like “rats in a tube”.
He said many residents would not even have tried to escape via the southern end of the road because 200metres of it was dangerously steep and so badly rutted with potholes it was considered by locals as a no-through road.
Mr Petreis said he had suggested to Whittlesea Council that he pay privately for grading and levelling of this part of Coombs Road, and of another exit track, Parkers Road, that he believed was poorly maintained. “I was told that if I touched the road I would be fined,” he said.
Fellow Coombs Road resident Alexandra Peters has a sheaf of documents given to her by the former owner of her property, a Mr W. Williams, and by Coombs Road residents Steve and Carol Wills, detailing alarm over the effective closure of that end of the road.
In 2003 the Willses wrote to the fire officer at Whittlesea Council warning: “The residents of southern Coombs Road have real concerns that should a bushfire strike this area there will be many families trapped on the top of the Coombs Road ridge, unable to escape to safety simply because the roads are in such poor repair.”
In another letter they said: “The residents of Coombs Road are concerned that should fire come from the north, we will be trapped on the hill with no safe means of escape. The poor state of these two roads will hamper access by fire crews.”
In 2000 Mr Williams had written to the council warning of the need to clear growth and of the poor condition of surfaces on southern Coombs Road and Gingles Road: “I request you to rectify all three hazards before the loss of life (not after). In this respect I have ensured the safe-keeping of this correspondence for use at any inquiry or the DPP” (the Director of Public Prosecutions).”
Twelve days later, he wrote to the council, “I am fascinated by the reply to my letter … and to hear that life and death are a matter of priority determined by a committee of the council, and the fact that Coombs Road, which has become all but impassable, is deemed adequate. I feel sure that it will not be so considered by a coronial inquiry or the DPP.”
Mr Williams had first started the letter campaign, in which he also appealed unsuccessfully to the Ombudsman, after the Ash Wednesday fires. He maintained that the southern end of Coombs Road was previously a through road that wound gently down the hill. He said parts of this old road were still visible on land that had since been fenced in by Melbourne Water.
After this, he wrote, Coombs Road was re-routed to go straight down a 700-metre section of steep slope. Mr Williams said that section of road was then damaged by army trucks in 2001 and not repaired.
But in 2004, the council wrote to Mr Williams insisting: “This section of road is a fire access track … The track was constructed purely for access by firefighting vehicles in the event of a fire in the area.”
Whittlesea Council was contacted late yesterday but was unable to gather the information needed for a detailed response. City of Whittlesea chief executive David Turnbull said the council was happy to consult residents and the CFA over fire-safety issues and would be happy to pass on concerns to any other relevant authorities.
Ms Peters and Mr Petreis said they had been told by the council that the track is to be permanently closed. Ms Peters said the council had first told her that section of track was privately owned and later told her it belonged to Melbourne Water. But VicRoads told her it was marked as a through road and was therefore the council’s responsibility, she said.
Mr Petreis said he had been furious to learn of the plan to entirely close that section off. He said that on the night of the fires he and Ms Peters escaped by risking their lives and their car down that dangerous stretch of road, because it led away from the firefront. All other roads led back into the fire. “It was the only way out,” he said.
He said the underside of his car was irreparably damaged. He saw cars abandoned at the southern end of the rough patch of road.
Mr Petreis said he would not continue to live in Coombs Road if the end of the road was permanently blocked because it would be too dangerous.
He said that he attended yesterday’s consultation by the Bushfires Royal Commission in Kinglake West but did not raise this issue because it did not fit the questions they were permitted to discuss. “In our case, nothing will work unless they give us another means of escape.”
Mr Petreis and Ms Peters were infuriated to see that a good-quality track was created on Melbourne Water land within days of the bushfires. It runs parallel to and just 10 metres from the unmaintained section of Coombs Road but is fenced off from public access.
“It’s amazing how one organisation can do it and another can’t,” Ms Peters said.First published in The Age.

KINGLAKE
STEVE Bell was an unhappy customer. The bushfire royal commission at Kinglake yesterday allowed local people to raise questions – not all of them well-informed – but gave no one a chance to answer them, he said.
Mr Bell was angered by the tight format of the royal commission’s community consultation, which he said gave him no chance to air his suggestions for improvements or to explain what had happened on the day. Media are banned from the consultations.
“One lady was saying, ‘Why was our tanker in St Andrews?”‘ he reported.
Mr Bell, a CFA lieutenant, had led that tanker crew. “We went down to stop the bastard before it got here, and if we had’ve stopped it, none of this would have happened,” he said. “The question was raised but not answered. Our local community is still not wise as to why our tanker was taken off the mountain.”
Mr Bell said he would have told the commissioners that every fire tanker should have a satellite telephone. Communications collapsed at times on Black Saturday because the CFA radio was overloaded and mobile phone towers went down.
He criticised people at the meeting who claimed they had not been warned of the fire that devastated the small mountain town.
“There was 24 hours of warning that the weather conditions would be the worst since Ash Wednesday,” he said. “How much more do you bloody need?”
The people asking those questions had never turned up to bushfire education sessions run by the CFA, he said. “None of these people were in Community Fireguard meetings. We had two years of trying to drum it into them but they weren’t interested. Nobody bloody wanted to know about it.”
His claim of community complacency was backed by a 25-year member of the nearby Toolangi fire brigade, Jack Walhout, who said people in his area also failed to attend bushfire preparation sessions, even though his brigade had been warning for years that the heavily forested region might one day face an unstoppable fire.
“At the last meeting, we would have been lucky to have half a dozen people,” Mr Walhout said. “You would drag people by the nose to those meetings.”
Many of the 150 local residents who attended the two commission consultations yesterday thought they had been useful. One suggestion had been fire bunkers in which people could shelter, local councillor Peter Beales said. The room was split on this idea, as some feared bunkers could turn into death traps.
It had also been suggested that the council provide a mulching service to help with clearing undergrowth. “But that would be very expensive for a council that’s even worse off now with rates. We have to revalue (burnt blocks) at only land value and refund money.”
The meeting noted that informal communications often worked better during the fire and its immediate aftermath, said Mr Beales. “If people listened to (ABC radio station) 774, it was saying the fire was in Strathewen. By the time it said that, the fire was already here, and the damage was done.”
On the other hand, texting teens transmitted information fast, and many people first learned that the Beales were OK through his daughter’s Facebook site, Mr Beales said.
“The kids got out information a lot quicker than the adults could.”
Four thousand messages and drawings from well-wishers were yesterday unfurled on 100metres of paper in the circus marquee where Kinglake’s community meetings are held.
The project is the brainchild of fashion designer Maryjean Hunter and graphic designer Shekhar Kemat, who belong to a meditation group.
Mr Kemat said the group had gathered messages from people in shopping and entertainment centres to allow ordinary Victorians to transform their sorrow into something positive.
First published in The Age.

ACCUSED terrorist leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika warned a journalist he would never forgive him if he “used anything against” him in his report, the Supreme Court heard yesterday.
Prosecutor Richard Maidment, SC, said Benbrika was covertly recorded saying that he had told then-ABC journalist Nick McKenzie: “This life doesn’t cost nothing for me. Watch yourself . . . I’ll come to you . . . I know where you are.”
In the 2005 ABC interview, Benbrika said some people believed Jews might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks in the United States and that Osama bin Laden was a great man “and he is my brother, as is every Muslim”, Mr Maidment said.
Benbrika refused to condemn the London tube bombings, saying he did not know who had done them or why, and he was “shifty” in ducking questions about whether he supported violent jihad, Mr Maidment said.
Benbrika repeatedly said Islam forbade killing innocents but evaded questions about whether he considered Australians innocent, Mr Maidment said.
Asked by McKenzie whether he considered any Australians not innocent, Benbrika paused before saying: “I would like to advise John Howard not to send troops to Iraq.” He then said some Australians had burned mosques.
Mr Maidment said Benbrika was later covertly recorded saying that lying was “an art” and “you need to train yourself, when you lie, to remember. This is, by itself, a knowledge.”
Mr Maidment said Benbrika’s insincerity with McKenzie (now an Age journalist) was evident when the interview was contrasted with covert recordings in which Benbrika said: “When September 11 occurred, didn’t we feel happy?”
In a covert recording a week after the London bombings, one of Benbrika’s followers, Ezzit Raad, allegedly said of the death toll: “It should have been more.”
Benbrika and 11 other Melbourne Muslim men are charged with having been members of a terrorist organisation pursuing violent jihad. Several face other terror charges. All the men have pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Benbrika described himself to the ABC as an Algerian-trained aircraft engineer who had been unable to find work in Australia since his arrival in 1989. He said he had studied religious texts, largely on his own, and taught Islam and Arabic, Mr Maidment said.
Benbrika had told his followers after the ABC interview that he had not needed to be clever as journalists were “stupid” because they did not understand Islamic law.
Benbrika tried to dissuade some of his colleagues from bashing a suspected informer because drawing police attention might interfere with the group’s real work, Mr Maidment said.
The trial continues before Justice Bernard Bongiorno.

First published in The Age.

AFTER THE FIRES – FIRIES’ LOSSES

Kinglake

SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Teagan clings to her new dolly, named Cindy II in memory of the first Cindy, who had come for Christmas. She stops dead in what used to be the front yard. “My bike,” she murmurs. She studies the twisted pile of metal and its one remaining pink handlebar.
“Where’s my stuff?” she asks at last.
“Your stuff is just over there, sweetie,” says her father, Steve Nash. She looks blankly at the blackened pile, raises a hand in a helpless gesture and shrugs. She has no words for this.
Her father takes Teagan and her brother Lachlan, 5, down into the pit that used to be their house. Behind them, the children’s playhouse and swings are still standing. “On that Saturday night when the house was still burning I came and took some clothes off the line,” he says. “They were untouched. We’ve still got some underwear and socks.” He grins. “If I’d known it was going to come through I would have done a bigger load of washing!”
Steve Nash is one of 10 Kinglake CFA volunteers who lost their homes while they were out fighting fires for other people. Now he is sifting through rubble and trying to persuade Teagan that her teacher will not be upset about the loss of the class budgies, with which Teagan had been entrusted.
Mr Nash’s colleague and neighbour in the same street, Tricia Hill, spent part of Saturday trying to look after a distressed colleague whose partner was desperate for advice on where to take their children for safety. “She was on the phone to her missus, who was driving through the fire with their two children, so I just kept coming back to the truck to support her.” The partner was told to go to the CFA station and after that the firefighter was able to concentrate on her work.
MsHill knew her own three children were off the mountain. She hopes she never has to choose between her CFA duty and them.
As it was, when her tanker passed by her house that night and she saw it was alight, “We didn’t have time to stop.”
The only things she has left are the fired ceramics that she had made. Fellow firefighter Ben Hutchinson drops to his knees in what used to be her living room and starts lifting shattered mud bricks. She hasbeen fretting for her dog and that’s where they think it might be.
Mr Hutchinson is camping out on friends’ floors. He thought the big clear space in front of his house would protect it. He was out of luck. Even his fire extinguisher exploded.
All of them talk about how lucky they are. They have seen what happened to others; Kinglake firefighters were the first to walk into many burnt-out homes whose owners hadn’t made it.
Country firefighters don’t usually worry about formal stuff, but last week the Kinglake brigade was measured for dress uniforms. There will be a lot of funerals to go to, and they want to have a brigade representative at every one.First published in The Age