Watch Out

That simple act will save our lives. I rush back around the side of the house, where plastic plant pots are in flames. I turn on a garden hose. Nothing comes out.

I look back along its length and see where the flames have melted it. I try to pick up one of the carefully positioned plastic buckets of water that I’ve left around the house. Its metal handle pulls away from the melted sides.

I rush back inside the house. The smoke is much thicker. I see flames behind the louvres of a door into a storage room, off the kitchen. I open the door and there is a fire burning fiercely.

I realise that the house is gone. We are now fighting for our lives. We retreat to the last room in the house, at the end of the building furthest from where the firestorm hit. We slam the door, shutting the room off from the rest of the house. The room is quickly filling with smoke. It’s black, toxic smoke, different from the superheated smoke outside.

We start coughing and gasping for air. Life is narrowing to a grim, inevitable choice. Die from the toxic smoke inside. Die from the firestorm outside. The room we are in has French doors opening on to the front veranda. Somewhere out of the chaos of thoughts surfaces recent media bushfire training I had done with the Country Fire Authority. When there’s nothing else, a car might save you.

I run the 30 or 40 steps to the car through the blast furnace. I wrench open the door to start the engine and turn on the air conditioning, as the CFA tells you, before going back for the others.

The key isn’t in the ignition. Where in hell did I put it? I rush back to the house. By now the black, toxic smoke is so thick I can barely see the others. Everyone is coughing, gasping, choking. My wife is calling for one of our two small dogs, the gentle, loyal Gizmo, who has fled in terror.

I grope in my wife’s handbag for her set of car keys. The smoke is so thick that I can’t see far enough to look into the bag. I find them by touch, thanks to a spider keychain our daughter gave her as a joke. Our lives are saved by a plastic spider. I tell my wife that time has run out. We have to get to the car. The choices have narrowed to just one option, one slim chance to live.

Clutching the second of our two small dogs, we run to the car. I feel the radiant heat burning the back of my hand. The CFA training comes back again: radiant heat kills. The three of us are inside the car. I turn the key. It starts. We turn on the air conditioning and I reverse a little further away from the burning building. The flames are wrapped around the full fuel tank of the other car, and I worry about it exploding.

We watch our home – our lives, everything we own – blazing metres away. The heat builds. We try to drive down our driveway, but fallen branches block the way. I reverse towards the house, but my wife warns me about sheets of red-hot roofing metal blowing towards us.

I drive back down, pushing the car through the branches. Further down the 400-metre drive the flames have passed. But at the bottom trees are burning.

We sit in the open, motor running and air conditioner turned on full. Behind us our home is aflame. We watch from our hilltop, trapped in the sanctuary of our car, as first the house of one neighbour, then another, then another goes up in flames. At one, the flames take grip at one end and work their way slowly along the roof. Another, at the bottom of our hill, more than a hundred years old and made of North American timber, explodes in a plume of dark smoke.

All the while the car is being buffeted and battered by gale-force winds and bombarded by a hail of blackened material. It sounds like rocks hitting the car.

The house of our nearest neighbour, David, who owns a vineyard, has so far escaped. But a portable office attached to one wall is billowing smoke.

I leave the safety of the car and cross the fence. Where is the CFA, he asks. With its help perhaps he can save his house. “What’s their number?” I tell him we had already rung 000 [the emergencies number] before our own house burnt. Too many fires. Too few tankers. I leave him to his torment. I walk back towards our own house in a forlorn hope that by some miracle our missing dog may have survived in some unburnt corner of the building.

Our home, everything we were, is a burning, twisted, blackened jumble. Our missing dog, Gizmo, Bobby our grumpy cockatoo, Zena the rescued galah that spoke Greek and imitated my whistle to call the dogs, our free-flying budgie nicknamed Lucky because he escaped a previous bushfire, are all gone.

I return to the car and spot the flashing lights of a CFA tanker through the blackened trees. We drive down the freeway, I clear more fallen branches and we reach the main road. I walk across to the tanker and tell them if they are quick they might help David to save his house. I still don’t know if they did. We stop at a police check-point down the hill. They ask us where we’ve come from and what’s happening up the road. I tell them there’s no longer anything up the road.

At the CFA station in St Andrews two figures sit hunched in chairs, covered by wet towels for their serious burns. More neighbours. We hear that an old friend, two properties from us, is missing. A nurse wraps wet towels around superficial burns on my wife’s leg and my hand.

We drive to my brother’s house, which fate had spared, on the other side of St Andrews.

The thought occurs to me: where do you start when you’ve lost everything, even a way to identify yourself? Then I realise, of course, that it doesn’t matter. We escaped with our lives. Just. So many others didn’t.

- Gary Hughes is a journalist for The Australian

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