By Daniel Ziffer and Martin Boulton
ZEKE Wilson would have started high school next week.
The sport-loving 12-year-old from Stawell West Primary was in the last week of his summer break and preparing for the big move across town to the local secondary college when nature — and a disastrous turn of fate — intervened.
Not all the details are yet clear. What is known is that late on Sunday night, as a massive bushfire was rampaging through the Grampians, in Victoria's central west, Zeke and his 36-year-old father Malcolm were in their car on the Moyston-Pomonal road, perilously close to the fire front.
The blaze, whipped up by the northerlies that brought Victoria's extreme weekend heat, had already consumed tens of thousands of hectares, and the pair were rushing to defend the Wilson family property at Pomonal as it approached.
They were just two kilometres from their destination when smoke surrounded their Mitsubishi Magna. Blinded, Mr Wilson ran into a gum tree, disabling the car. Police believe the pair then lowered their car seats to try to shelter from the heat. But it was in vain.
Norma Wilson, 71, had been trying to phone her son and grandson while waiting anxiously for them to arrive at the house. Eventually she went out to look for them.
She found their burnt-out car at the side of the road. "From where I was, it was up against the tree," Mrs Wilson told Channel Nine yesterday. "I broke down and cried."
Family members described Malcolm and Zeke as almost inseparable.
Although divorced from Zeke's mother, the father managed to spend a lot of time with his son. They fished, rock-climbed and surfed together, and Malcolm had just bought Zeke a surfboard for Christmas.
"He loved his son. That's what he lived for. They did just about everything together," Malcolm's brother Norm said. "We'll battle on, try our hardest to remember him."
Norm Wilson said he and his mother had been waiting for his brother to arrive home on Sunday night.
"He should have been here before the front hit. He didn't make it. We were hoping he'd turned back," he said.
He told Channel Seven: "(He was) very heroic trying to get to us to help us."
Malcolm Wilson is understood to have worked at a restaurant in Grampians tourist town of Halls Gap. He had also worked at the Stawell abattoir, a major employer in the town, 10 years ago.
Zeke attended St Patrick's Primary School until grade 5, transferring to Stawell West for his final year of primary school.
Zeke played in the backline for the Stawell Bulldogs under-13 football team and was considered a tenacious star of the side, teammates said. Sam Clarke, 11, whose father Rod coaches the team, said of Zeke: "He was really fast … and good with the ball."
The Wilsons and those who knew them were not the only ones suffering yesterday in the aftermath of Victoria's disastrous weekend bushfires. At Campbell's Creek, near Castlemaine, the flag on the local fire station flew at half-mast and there was a steady stream of firefighters visiting to pay their respects to colleague and father-of-four Trevor Day.
Mr Day, 42, died when a Country Fire Authority truck rolled over during a mop-up operation after a fire in the Strathbogie Ranges, in the state's north-east. Three other firefighters were injured in the accident.
Mr Day had been a volunteer CFA member for more than 10 years and captain for the past four.
Nearby, in the Castlemaine home where Mr Day grew up, his parents were joined by other family members, all struggling to cope with his death.
"We're all very proud of him," his mother, Enid Day said. "Whenever he wasn't working he was helping out with the CFA (and) he wasn't working this week … he had a couple of weeks' holidays."
Mrs Day smiled briefly as she recalled how her son — the second youngest of her five children — met a local girl and ended up marrying her.
"They grew up here, got married and had a family," she said.
Yesterday Mr Day's wife Tracey and four children Tiffany, 15, Rebecca, 14, Stephanie, 12, and Lachlan, 9, were being offered support from the CFA. Mrs Day is a communications officer with the CFA and three of her children are junior members of the Campbell's Creek brigade.
Family friend Peter Thompson, a member of nearby Maldon CFA, said he had known Mr Day since their school days in Castlemaine and his friend "always knew what to do" when battling a bushfire.
Mr Thompson joined the stream of visitors to Campbell's Creek yesterday, all struggling to come to terms with the death of a trusted and respected colleague.
"Trevor was highly respected in this community," he said. "He had a good rapport with people, he was honest and he was fair dinkum. He loved his brigade. He treated it as part of his family."
Mr Thompson said local firefighters would do "everything they can" to support the Day family.
CFA chief executive Neil Bibby said Mr Day's family would be eligible for at least $450,000 compensation for dying in the line of duty.
Mr Day's death will also be subject to a coronial inquest and separate inquiries by WorkCover and the CFA.
Mr Bibby said he was horrified by the death. "The CFA family is a massive organisation and the CFA family gets together and looks after it's own," he said.
"Too often people don't understand when you are fighting fires there's a danger and this danger is covered by 9000 people also out fighting fires in Victoria right now," he said.
"The accident that killed Trevor Day was not directly fighting the fire but blacking out after the fire."
With GEOFF STRONG