By Lucy Cormack and Wolter Peeters
In a dimly lit motel room in western Sydney, Roy Annesley is on the phone to his bank.
He's sitting with his legs up on one of three beds in the room. He only sleeps in one, the others are strewn with the last of his possessions.
Roy Annesley in his western Sydney motel until he can return home to Yarranbella after suffering severe burns in a bushfire that destroyed his home.Credit: Wolters Peeters
Everything else was lost in November when a fireball ripped through his self-built shack on a remote property in Yarranbella on the NSW Mid North Coast.
With heavily bandaged legs and red, raw arms and hands that "just don't bend", Mr Annesley is calling the bank to pay out his credit card, asking if it might waive recent late payment fees because he has "had a bit going on".
It's Mr Annesley's way of saying he has spent the past 2½ months in Concord Hospital with 55 per cent burns to his body. For the first three weeks, he was in an induced coma.
The 52-year-old was trying to flee when he became trapped in the path of the bushfire that raged through the region on November 8.
"Bang - it got me:" The motorcycle Roy Annesley was riding in Taylors Arm near Macksville when he was overcome by flames. The photograph was taken by the Herald three days after the fire.Credit: Wolter Peeters
"I had gone home to get my stuff to evacuate and was still sitting on my motorbike in the driveway - then bang, it got me."
What followed was a survival mission of epic proportions in which Mr Annesley took refuge in a plastic water drum as gas bottles exploded and his home of 20 years incinerated before his eyes.
After the drum began to melt he walked 1.5 kilometres in search of help, already severely burnt from flames and landing in the boiling aluminium sludge of his melted roof gutters.
Mr Annesley reached a neighbour's evacuated home where some of the only water he could find to drink was inside the toilet cistern.
Like patchwork: Roy Annesley's life-saving grafts have left remnants of old tattoos from his shoulder and ribs on his hands and fingers.Credit: Wolter Peeters
He then tried to escape by driving his neighbour's car but, with roads blocked by fallen trees, he was forced to return and passed out. He was not found until the following day when he was taken in the back of a ute to a waiting ambulance, then a helicopter in nearby Macksville and flown to Sydney.
Since his discharge from hospital almost two weeks ago, Mr Annesley has been bound to the small confines of the motel room where he is staying alone. The cost of the room is being covered by the Department of Housing.
Cornflakes, instant noodles and microwave meals make up his diet and "a couple of takeaways now and then".
It will be his home for as long as he needs regular hospital visits for dressings to be changed on the skin grafts now covering his hands, arms, legs and feet.
The wreckage of Roy Annesley's Yarranbella shack.
Like patchwork, the life-saving grafts have left remnants of old tattoos from his shoulder and ribs on his hands and fingers.
"The worst part of it is trying to get everything working again properly. My hands don't work … my arms I can't straighten properly. Legs are the same.
"You don't realise everything you take for granted, how hard the simplest things can be," he said, before using his teeth to unscrew the cap of a carton of milk to make a cup of coffee.
On one of his first hospital trips from the motel he used his wheelchair to catch two trains and a bus to Concord alone. The hospital has since arranged taxi transport for him.
"You don’t realise everything you take for granted, how hard the simplest things can be," Roy Annesley says.Credit: Wolter Peeters
The human toll of this summer's catastrophic bushfire season has been writ large across the Australian landscape and Mr Annesley's motel room is no exception.
Uninsured, living alone and without savings, he admits he is doing it tough.
Roy Annesley spent three weeks in an induced coma in Concord Hospital.
"I had just got a $30,000 loan to fix my place up six months before all this. I bought a sewage tank, solar panels, a generator, all to finish my shack. I lost everything," he said.
On Friday, Bega MP and NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance made a public plea for cash donations and government payments to flow more quickly to devastated bushfire communities now facing a "humanitarian crisis".
The federal government has already announced payments of $1000 that will go to bushfire-affected adults who have lost a major asset on a property, plus $400 for any children under 16.
This week, Mr Annesley was visited by a representative of the Red Cross, with whom he filled out paperwork to apply for funding support.
He said it remained unclear how much he would receive as he does not hold title over the land, despite having held a caveat over half the property since 2003.
While he continues his treatment as an outpatient in Sydney, Mr Annesley said he hoped eventually to return to work at the Bowraville sawmill.
But first, he wished only "to go home".
"Home now is my bus. I bought a bus, a coaster, after my son started up a GoFundMe page. I put all that into the bus."
With a microwave, fridge, double bed and a hot water system Mr Annesley plans to take the motor home back to Yarranbella and rebuild his life.
"I want to get back to my place, start again. It's hard but no one else is going to do it for me, are they? You've really just got to deal with it yourself."