Forged with Flames Read online

  FORGED WITH FLAMES

  ANN FOGARTY

  Ann Fogarty was born in Lancashire, England in 1950 and graduated as a nursery nurse in 1968. After marrying an Australian in 1970 she came to Australia under the “Ten Pound Pom” scheme, and settled in Berwick before moving to Upper Beaconsfield 3 years later. She worked in the kindergarten in Beaconsfield for 5 years. On 16th February in 1983, exactly 30 years ago, she was caught up in the Ash Wednesday bushfires that cut great swathes of devastation through Victoria and South Australia. She was hit by a massive fireball while protecting her two young daughters from the firestorm raging out of control through the bushland surrounding their house, sustaining serious burns to 85% of her body. She was the only survivor of the Ash Wednesday fires with this degree of trauma. Her daughters escaped without injury.

  She is now the proud mother of two adult daughters and four grandchildren, and lives on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.

  ANNE CRAWFORD

  Anne Crawford is a Victorian author and journalist. She worked as a feature writer on The Age and The Sunday Age for many years. Anne researched a documentary in South Africa about the historic post-apartheid elections in 1994, and acted as a volunteer in Nepal for three months documenting the work of the Fred Hollows Foundation in words and photos. She is a published and exhibited photographer. Anne has previously co-authored two books: Shadow of a Girl (Penguin 1995) and Doctor Hugh, My Life with Animals (Allen & Unwin 2012); and contributed to Through Other Eyes (Pan Macmillan 2002). She lives in Gippsland and is a volunteer firefighter with the Country Fire Authority of Victoria.

  FORGED WITH FLAMES

  Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford

  Published by Wild Dingo Press

  Melbourne Australia

  [email protected]

  www.wilddingopress.com.au

  First published by Wild Dingo Press 2013.

  Text copyright © Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

  Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Cover and internal design: Grant Slaney, MAPG

  Printed in Australia by Ligare

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publications Data

  Fogarty, Ann, 1950-

  Forged with flames / Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford.

  ISBN: 9780987178510 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9780987178565 (ebook: epub)

  ISBN: 9780987178558 (ebook: mobi)

  Fogarty, Ann, 1950-

  British—Australia—Biography.

  Ash Wednesday bushfires, 1983.

  Life-change events—Victoria.

  Women disaster victims—Victoria—Biography.

  Other Authors/Contributors:

  Crawford, Anne, 1960-

  304.894042

  Sources:

  John Milligan, J 1992, Ash Wednesday In Upper Beaconsfield,

  Victoria Country Fire Authority, Melbourne

  ‘Ash Wednesday’, The Age, 1983

  ‘Ash Wednesday’, The Herald and Weekly Times, 1983

  ‘The Firefighters of Bygully Barring’, Mt Martha Fire Brigade

  Australian Bureau of Meteorology; CFA;

  Upper Beaconsfield Association websites

  For Sarah and Rachel.

  My two wonderful reasons for fighting so hard.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  1. ASH WEDNESDAY

  2. NIGHT PANICS

  3. MY ENGLISH CHILDHOOD

  4. WINNING

  5. IN RETREAT

  6. SPRINGFIELD HOUSE

  7. A LONDON NANNY

  8. A FATEFUL ATTRACTION

  9. DREAMS COME TRUE

  10. HANGING BY A THREAD

  11. THE GIRL IN THE CORNER

  12. ON THE BRINK

  13. SARAH AND RACHEL

  14. TORTURE BY X-RAY

  15. RECOVERING MY FAITH

  16. FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT

  17. NO PILLOWS UNDER HEAD

  18. HALF AN EAR

  19. THE FLYING NUN

  20. THE UNEXPECTED VISITOR

  21. THAT’S NOT MY MUM

  22. OUT FOR LUNCH

  23. LOSS OF FACE

  24. AGAINST DOCTOR’S ORDERS

  25. THE ALFRED FAREWELL

  26. HAMPTON REHABILITATION HOSPITAL

  27. LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

  28. WE USED TO DO THIS, DIDN’T WE?

  29. BACK TO MY FAMILY

  30. I DO LOOK A BIT UNUSUAL

  31. THE POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

  32. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

  33. THE SCREAM

  34. ON THE BRINK, AGAIN

  35. FACING MY REALITY

  36. MELTDOWN

  37. THE BEST LESSON FOR SURVIVAL

  38. WHO AM I NOW?

  39. THE GIRL IN THE CORNER REVEALED

  40. BREAKTHROUGH

  41. RELEASE

  42. CHASED BY FEARS

  43. BLACK SATURDAY

  44. NIL DESPERANDUM NEVER DESPAIR

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD

  Ann Fogarty is a quite remarkable lady. I am very proud to have been asked by Ann to write a foreword to her account of her journey through suffering to ultimate triumph over adversity. Her story is a poignant one of her experiences of the devastating and life-threatening burns she sustained on Ash Wednesday in 1983, only to be followed some years later by breast cancer, necessitating a mastectomy. Both of these dreadful events have had a profound effect on her body image, yet she has handled her lot in life with incredible moral fortitude.

  We learn from Ann’s intimate story that, as a child, adolescent and adult, she had great determination. This has been her strength. Throughout the account of her story, she has had the courage to tell us about all the various doubts and uncertainties that have beset her in life. But, because of her determination, she has overcome these. She mentions some wonderful people who have helped her along the way. I feel that they have helped her because she is a lady whom one cannot help wanting to help.

  I commend this very special book to whomever dips into it. It is a good read that will give the reader faith in the worthiness of the human condition.

  John Masterton AM

  Former Head of Burns Unit

  Alfred Hospital

  Melbourne

  Australia

  PROLOGUE

  I sometimes feel as if my life, my past, is tucked away in boxes stored in a dark cupboard.

  In one corner, there is the box that was my childhood.

  There is the tinkling music box that was my marriage.

  Some of the boxes have been prised open. Others, in the deep recesses of memory, will remain closed forever.

  I lift the lid on one brightly wrapped box every now and then, to rising butterflies and the gurgling, infectious laughter of babies. My spirit soars.

  But one box sits ever waiting to spring open, an evil jack-in-the-box with a menacing mouth and flaming, flaming red hair.

  1

  ASH WEDNESDAY

  Ash Wednesday, the 16th February, 1983. A day on which a bushfire of deadly proportions would sweep across South Australia and Victoria, and change many lives forever. In the tiny Victorian town of Upper Beaconsfield, twenty-one people would lose their lives, one hundred and eighty-six houses would be lost, and many people would be injured. I would be one of these.

  The
fire front that would consume Upper Beaconsfield would form a blazing wall sixteen kilometres long and two kilometres wide. Flames would shoot over one hundred metres high, propelled by a wind strong enough to flatten radiata pine trees with trunks a metre in diameter. Fireballs, likened to those seen in nuclear explosions, would surge ahead of the main fire front, igniting everything in their path. One of those fireballs would hit me.

  On the morning of Ash Wednesday, a baking hot blast of air overwhelmed me as soon as I opened the back door. It was only seven o’clock in the morning and the north wind had long since sapped the newness out of the day. It was going to be a stinker. I blinked grit from one eye and looked out over the backyard. The lawn, dun and patchy, was all but lifeless after months of drought. The children’s swing twisted and turned from chain to chain in the wind. The gum trees at the bottom of our block lurched from the crowns down, and the bush beyond the rear boundary—hectares of uncleared land—seemed agitated, too.

  I had lived in Australia for enough summers to know that a hot north wind meant a gruelling day ahead. All the north winds in England, where I’d grown up, were the opposite—arctic, blowing off the steely grey waters of Scotland. Either way, a north wind is rarely playful. It blows with intent.

  A run of warm days had led up to the morning and I felt worn out after sleeping fitfully through the night. As limp as old celery. I groaned to myself as I anticipated another sweltering day to be endured until the cool change predicted for the evening. The cheerful clatter of our two young girls at breakfast snapped me out of it. Sarah, who was six, and Rachel, four years old, looked so gorgeous sitting at the kitchen table in their matching pyjamas with their short, straight blonde hair and dark almond eyes. Their mother’s opinion, of course, but I’m sure anyone else would have thought it, too. I looked at the dimples on Rachel’s hands as she spooned cereal into her mouth, and onto her chin, and smiled. I mustn’t let Sarah go to school without getting her fruit drink out of the freezer, I reminded myself as I packed their lunch boxes. Such were the moments that formed the contented rhythm of my life.

  Terry, my Australian husband of twelve years, came into the kitchen ready for work, as neat as ever in his shirt and tie, looking serious. Terry often looked serious. Sometimes he needed a good poke in the ribs. We kissed each other goodbye as we always did, although I didn’t call the girls out to the front veranda to wave him off, as was our tradition; it was too hot to be standing outside with the door open.

  Despite the heat, it felt like any other week day.

  That Wednesday, however, had all the earmarks of what I now recognise as the worst kind of bushfire day: a desiccating northerly wind, dangerously low humidity and, after ten months of drought, a vast carpet of tinder-dry fuel which lay waiting to ignite. The sky had glowed eerily orange the Tuesday before as tonnes of red topsoil blown from inland Victoria blotted out the sun. That had felt strange and foreboding, darkening the land like a biblical omen. It didn’t occur to me that if the wind could propel a wall of dust five hundred kilometres wide and one hundred deep, then it could drive fires over a huge swathe of the state.

  I didn’t know much about bushfires then or have any real sense of the devastation they could bring; bushfires weren’t part of my consciousness the way they are for those born in Australia. I’d grown up in a small English village where fires were confined to hearths in old stone houses or well-contained bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night. The idea that the bush could turn deadly never occurred to me. I’d come to love the muted beauty of the Australian bush with its silvery green eucalyptus drapes and, having been raised in Lancashire among rows of dark stone houses, the idea that you could be surrounded by space and by gum trees in your own backyard was enchanting.

  We lived on St Georges Road, a narrow stretch of tarmac that poked suburbia into the thickly forested hills. Dotted around us in what the locals called Upper Beac was an assortment of young families, retirees, people who worked locally and some who commuted, and the occasional oddball recluse; friendly people, all drawn together by a love of the bush. St Georges Road was a dead-end then and that, too, seemed to bind us into a community. you were never far from the next cup of tea in Upper Beaconsfield. Or nature. Rosellas flashed past our back window. Kookaburras perched, waiting to swoop on any tasty pickings in the grass clippings, perhaps an unfortunate frog, as Terry mowed the lawn. The occasional wallaby would bob through the foliage.

  I couldn’t read the bush or its creatures then nor did I understand that this was an ancient land that could turn wild. After all, I’d called our property Pendle Hill after a rainy summit in England! I didn’t notice leaves dropping from trees when they shouldn’t have been and lying coated in dust for rainless weeks. The dried-out debris of drought that crackled underfoot meant nothing to me.

  I knew there’d been bushfires before in Upper Beaconsfield because ‘Procie’, our grandfatherly neighbour from over the road, had mentioned them; but although I could see the tell-tale blackened trunks and burnt-out stumps, I didn’t fully realise that people lost their lives in them. I’d never heard of Black Friday, 1939, when seventy-one people died, nor had I ever seen footage of fires—we didn’t have a television for the early part of our married life. My father had preferred TV to conversation with his family, a habit I definitely didn’t want to repeat, so in the evenings Terry and I talked, read, played backgammon and listened to music, until eventually his parents gave us a set.

  Our old Wolseley felt like an oven as I strapped the girls in their seatbelts and wound down the windows ready for the run to school. Sarah and Rachel chatted animatedly in the back seat as we set off, oblivious to the draining heat. The primary school and kindergarten were adjacent to each other on the other side of what was then the Upper Beaconsfield village. It was little more than a cluster of timber shops with corrugated iron roofs and verandas that extended to the street in a way that reminded me of an outpost waiting for a horse. So much was different from England. The trip only took several minutes, but already I couldn’t wait to be back home with the airconditioning on full blast. I slowed as I passed the shops and looked out for any cars I might recognise. It was considered rude not to acknowledge people and their cars—locals expected you to recognise them. I passed the service station where a neighbour, Alan, worked filling tanks and fixing engines. Alan and his wife were good sorts; he was a cheery, muscled man with tightly curled hair, she a straight-speaking woman who didn’t take nonsense from anyone. Carol would often yell out to me across the vacant block that separated our houses to come over for a cuppa.

  I dropped off Sarah at school first and was coming out of the kindergarten after taking Rachel in when a friend, Liz, approached me and asked for a lift home. Liz, flushed in the face and looking bothered, explained that she was having her carpets cleaned that day and hadn’t been able to get her car out of the driveway because the cleaner’s van was blocking the way. She’d walked her children to school and kinder but although she lived only a short distance away thought it was too hot to walk back, so would I mind? We commented on how unusually and unpleasantly hot it was for that time of day, and wondered whether the Weather Bureau’s forecast of a ‘cool change’ tomorrow would eventuate. Little did we know as we said goodbye then that neither of us would have a house or any possessions by the end of the day.

  Sarah’s recollection.

  The day started like any other school day. I got up and ate some fruit and then a piece of toast with Vegemite for breakfast. I dressed in my school uniform and got my little brown case ready with my lunch and snacks in it. Mum tied my hair back in a ponytail. I had no reason to be concerned, no reason to think that the outcome of this day would alter so many people’s lives, including my own. I was six at the time.

  Back home I grimaced at the sight of the two huge baskets of ironing waiting for attention. Being English and a young wife I ironed everything. But today the ironing could wait until it was cooler. The airconditioning was on high but I was still sweating from dr
iving in a hot car. Would I ever get used to these Australian summers? The pink cotton skirt my mother had sent me from England was clinging to my legs and my blue T-shirt with the white collar and cuffs was sticky with sweat. The Shetland Sheepdogs, Tammy and Dusky, allowed inside today because of the heat, were sprawled out on the carpet, tongues lolling.

  I flicked off my thongs and sat down for a moment, turning my face towards the cool stream of air, coiling a roll of thick hair to get it off my neck. Anything close to the skin felt too hot. Three friends from my church were coming to lunch the following day and I wondered what to prepare for them. Obviously nothing cooked unless there was a big cool change… but would I have to go to the shops to buy some more cold meat? I couldn’t know that we would never share that meal; that two of them would not survive the night.

  After lunch, I hosed down the dogs and locked them in their run, then set off for an afternoon with a couple of friends nearby. Yvonne and her daughter, Shelley, and I would meet up every Wednesday afternoon for a social. Shelley was about my age with kids at the same school. As I was making my way across the lawn to the car a possum staggered uncertainly in front of me, zigzagging as if it were drunk. I did know that possums don’t usually show themselves in the middle of the day so that behaviour struck me as rather odd, if not disconcerting.

  Shelley didn’t have airconditioning so the three of us slumped in our chairs under the shade of some gum trees, sipping iced tea and wiping the sweat off our brows and cheeks, wilting. The heat was so intense that you could feel it as you breathed in. Any movement was too much but passing time talking somehow made it more bearable. By three o’clock, the mercury was hovering around its peak of forty-three degrees Celsius and it was time for me to pick up the girls.

  ‘I’m hot, Mummy,’ Rachel wailed, as she got in the car, in a way that suggested I could do something about it.

  ‘You can both play under the sprinkler when you get home,’ I promised.

  Once home, they quickly changed their minds and asked if they could play next door at their friend Fiona’s, as they often did. As soon as the car came to a halt in our driveway, they dashed out and headed for her place.