Kindness of strangers lifts spirits after devastation
After his dream home burnt to the ground in raging bushfires last weekend, Jeremy Sternson and his wife have told of the hope that the Aussie spirit and kindness of strangers has brought them.
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Every 30 minutes, Jeremy Sternson rang the phone at his Alpine dream home.
If he got the answering machine, he knew the house was still standing. By 4pm last Saturday, the line had gone dead.
“I spoke to my neighbour straight away and he said it was just a blazing inferno,” Dr Sternson told the Herald Sun.
The fire ripped through the 162ha property between Dinner Plain and Cobungra on January 4, 16 years to the day after the outdoorsy Melbourne dentist signed the contract to buy it. “It was meant to be an escape,” he said.
Fires had devastated the area the year before Dr Sternson and his wife, Melissa Dowling, bought the property, so when they built a new home in 2009, it was designed to be fire resistant. It was basically a modern, corrugated iron version of a heritage bush hut with strong steel beams.
The couple were warned a few cypress pine poles included in the design could be risky. But when the blaze hit on Saturday, the steel beams melted and the wooden poles stood strong, a quirk of fire that can’t be easily understood.
The horse stable was the only other structure that survived.
There were initially fears for its residents, horses Sox and Mary, but the pair were found alive in one of two small valleys.
“The whole property burnt to a crisp except their favourite valley and their stable,” Dr Sternson said on Facebook, after an earlier public plea to find the missing horses.
The original post has been shared more than 8000 times, leaving Dr Sternson floored at the kindness of strangers.
He estimates about 10 times an hour he receives a message from someone he doesn’t know, offering help.
“I have never heard of these people,” he said.
“It has been incredible — all the offers I have had for hay and clothing, I have been blown away. The spirit of people in Australia is overwhelming, how kind people can be to people they don’t even know.”
A bag of horse chaff, marked “we are with you, stay strong” by a Ballarat family, turned up at the property in the wake of the fires.
“It gave me a bit of hope,” he said.
Dr Sternson said he and his family had “really only lost material things”.
That includes family heirlooms from World War II and Christmas presents gifted to the kids – Matilda, 14, Rupert, 12, and Freddie, 11 – less than a fortnight earlier.
A nearby blaze could have again threatened the property yesterday, with authorities concerned it could also menace Omeo and streak through Swifts Creek and the Tambo Valley to connect to other fires in East Gippsland.
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But Dr Sternson wasn’t too worried.
“Once you’re burnt out, you can’t be burnt out again,” he said, vowing to rebuild.
Just like it did after the 2003 fires, the grass will grow back and the trees will recover.
“It will look beautiful again.”