The day the fire rained down

There are so many images from Black Saturday that stay with us, still embedded in the collective psyche a decade on.

Some photographs evoke the shocking magnitude of the firestorm that thousands of people faced on February 7, 2009.

Others demonstrate the incredible reserves of strength and the courage they drew on to survive it. Many pictures taken since have made heartbreakingly plain the enormous sorrow at the horrific toll – 180 lives lost – in the firestorm and on the days that followed.

And then there are the shots that evoke a spark of hope, of happiness even, amid the ashes. But it’s never that simple.

The reunion of Jennifer Wood with her partner Mark Kaempkes and infant son Jack, the day after the fire swept through their town of Narbethong, is among those unforgettable images.

Jennifer had left 15-month-old Jack, for the first time since he was born, to go with Mark’s sisters to the Mornington Peninsula for a long-planned night away.

She had spent all Saturday night and most of Sunday frantically waiting to hear whether Mark and Jack were alive. The last she had heard from them was when Mark called about 3pm on Saturday, saying there was a fire coming. ‘‘I couldn’t get him on the phone again after that,’’ Jennifer said.

An hour later one of Mark’s sisters got a call from a friend of a friend. ‘‘She said, ‘It’s hit Tarnpirr Road. Tell Jen to get out’. But of course I wasn’t there.’’

Jennifer Wood with her son Jack after they were reunited.Credit: Justin McManus

She called every number she could think of – including the Marysville police (unaware the station had burnt down) – desperately trying to find out if they had survived.

She dialled the Red Cross emergency line hundreds of times, finally getting through about 3am, only to find they had no information about her partner and child.

Jennifer and Mark’s sisters headed back to Narbethong the next morning to try to find him and Jack. They were stopped at a police roadblock on the Maroondah Highway where officers refused to let anyone through, even those who lived there.

As she stood there waiting for hours, some townspeople learnt they had lost relatives; others discovered their house and pets were gone.

Then a neighbour came out around the other side not guarded by police, and offered the two spare seats in his car to anyone who needed to get in to Narbethong. Jennifer put up her hand. Justin McManus, a photographer with The Age, took the other seat.

When they drove into her street, Jennifer was stunned. ‘‘It was horrific. Driving right through was really quite devastating in itself ... You were just trying to piece together what was there and what wasn’t.’’

The fire razed many of the homes in their street – Tarnpirr Road, which backs on to the bush – and claimed the life of one of their neighbours, as well as another three people in their town.

Jennifer and Mark embracing as they are reunited. Credit: Justin McManus

The trio's emotional reunion was captured by McManus on the afternoon of February 8.  The image of Mark and Jennifer embracing was a rare heartening moment amid the devastation. The photo taken by McManus as Jennifer and Mark kissed, with blackened trees their backdrop, showed the raw emotion and joy of that moment. That series won him a World Press Photo award.

When Jennifer returned, their house, amazingly, was still standing. Mark had raced back and forth trying to save it while Jack was inside in his singlet and nappy, sitting on a couch, screaming. At one point Jack, who was barely toddling, got out as Mark was frantically trying to dismantle a burning wood pile on the neighbour’s side of their fence. Mark saw him and took him back into the house.

Mark and his brother, Ronny, who lives next door, were helping each other save their homes. Born and bred in the area, they had detailed fire plans and were well-equipped with fire pumps and masks to help them breathe.

‘‘[They] had proper masks and Mark had that on, so he must have looked quite scary to Jack,’’ Jennifer said. ‘‘And the house was full of smoke, and the noise. Everyone talks about the noise.

‘‘Ronny, Mark’s brother, he still says – and they laugh about it now – that Ron said, ‘‘It’s OK, it’s OK, the choppers are coming. Mark said, ‘That’s not [the sound of choppers], it’s the fire’.’’

When the fire front hit, even Mark felt for a moment that they might not survive. He didn’t have time to get back inside the house with Jack; he sheltered in their shed as it passed over. It burnt the pergola off the front of the house and almost everything in the yard, and scorched the verandah posts and the shed, but Mark and Jack and their home were intact.

Last week we met Jennifer at Narbethong Hall, a modern box of a building with a stunning timber interior that she was instrumental in helping to rebuild. She received a Medal of the Order of Australia for her community work following the fires. On the day we visit, Jennifer had just shown Victorian Governor Linda Dessau around the hall after she and her husband stopped to leave flowers at the town’s Black Saturday memorial.

Jennifer Wood welcomes her partner Mark home on the same spot they shared a kiss 10 years ago.Credit: Justin McManus

Mark was at work in Healesville. Jack, now 11, was at school with his eight-year-old brother, Connor. Jennifer warned us that Mark might not get back in time to meet us.

But moments after we pulled into the couple’s driveway to get a shot of Jennifer outside their home, still standing, he arrived in his truck.

Carrying his Esky and wearing a fluorescent work shirt, he strode down the gravel path, wrapped his arms around Jennifer and swooped in for a big kiss. Justin’s camera whirred. Jennifer blushed. That moment, recaptured, was a beautiful thing.

While we see hope and happiness in that original photograph, of a family safely reunited, all she can think of is the look on Jack’s face on that day – of what he experienced. As a counsellor and social worker, she knows more than most about trauma and its effects.

And she still feels guilty about leaving him for that one night. That’s all she can think of when she sees those photos of a decade ago. I assure her there’s no reason she should, but she shrugs.

‘‘I always feel guilty about Jack, really,’’ she says. ‘‘Well, yeah. We’re lucky. I know other people who lost children.’’

Rob Hallett in front of his stone shed in Narbethong which housed his antique motorcycle collection and gun collection.Credit: Justin McManus

'This was like a cyclone on fire'

A thousand-yard stare, like the look on little Jack’s face, was at the same time etched on the visage of Rob Hallett, just a few houses away on Tarnpirr Road. On February 7, 2009, he too was fighting for his home, and his life, for 14 hours straight. This photo, taken by Justin McManus on the Sunday, is published here for the first time.

It’s a stinking hot day in late January when we drop in to see him. He leads us into his shed — as he calls his house — and serves us the coldest beer we’ve ever tasted.

Above the door frame sits a misshapen piece of melted metal. ("Offering dedicated to the gods of fire" is written on it in Texta.) It’s a relic of the home he salvaged from the ashes, keeping the burnt stonework and reinforcing it with concrete rather than knocking it all down as he was told he should.

Rob Hallett and his dog Ted in the ruins of the shed.Credit: Justin McManus

Rob, now 66, was working as a farmhand and foreman a decade ago, and his first thought upon hearing that the fires were heading his way was to check on his workplace. Then he came home and fought to save his own home, his beloved BSA motorcycles, and his little dog Ted.

He had lived through Cyclone Tracy in 1974 while working in Darwin. Black Saturday, he says, was a cyclone all its own. ‘‘This was worse. This was like a cyclone on fire.’’

With its own in-built thunder and lightning, it was cracking and smashing as it hit with a roar that sounded like a jet plane landing backwards in his yard.

‘‘It just came that way, that way, back this way,’’ he says, pointing in all directions. ‘‘The main fire front came a million miles an hour, 40 foot high. The marks are still up on the trees. It’s black up there, 50 feet still. There’s a lovely day in hell.’’

Rob Hallett 10 years on. He has rebuilt his home using the burnt stonework.Credit: Justin McManus

As the fire hit his home, he sheltered inside, but the flames soon found their way in. ‘‘By then, my generator had stopped, I had no power, no water. Tried to get my bikes out and couldn’t. And I had to run because this blew up, it did a flashover, where the flames roll across the ceiling and at you a million miles an hour. And I had to run.

‘‘I stood there in front of the brick wall with a hose like this,’’ he says, holding it above him like a drooping umbrella. ‘‘The rock wall saved me.’’

He spent the next 12 hours using a mop and a bucket full of water trying to put out what he could. ‘‘So four in the afternoon til four in the morning. That’s what I did. I never felt so dead and buggered in all my life. I thought I was gonna die. But I had my little dog, he was with me all the time.’’

Rob looks at Justin’s portrait of him, taken the next day, and marvels at how he looks — his eyes red raw, his body covered head to toe in soot and ash. He spies his dog Ted in the corner of another shot. He hasn’t seen that photo before, and it hits a sore spot.

He found Ted, who had been with him for four years before the fires hit, dead in his driveway a few weeks earlier, bitten he suspects by a snake. Rob says he cried for two days after losing his him. I notice as we leave that he still has Ted’s little tins of dog food sitting on the bench in his shed.

Kinglake residents Lois and Luke van den Berk in Mill Park after the fires.Credit: Paul Rovere

'I was sure I was on fire'

Lois and Luke van den Berk had only been a couple for a few weeks when the fires hit. They had been friends for more than a decade, but their relationship was still in its infancy. Despite the hot weather, on the Saturday he was cooking a roast at his home in Kinglake. He and Lois planned to tell his three children that they were now a couple.

The single dad was a live-in caretaker at a Macedonian Church on the edge of National Park Road, right at the edge of the bush. That afternoon his kids had hosted 15 of their friends for a swim in their dam.

Around 4pm, after all their mates had left, the fire hit. Luke, Lois and his three children — Brodee, Aaron and Khyle, then aged 16, 14 and 12 — sheltered inside.

‘‘The embers came down the chimney and lit the fire,’’ Luke said. The ember attack outside ‘‘was like the fireballs they used to fire in catapults’’.

‘‘It was like, pop, and instantly there’d be this three-metre ring of fire, and they just kept coming. Whoah.’’

They had to flee their house as, room by room, fire took over. They covered themselves in wet towels and ran down the road.

‘‘We got out the front and the roof collapsed, so we only just got out in time,’’ Luke said. ‘‘My god. Trees on the road, lamp posts fallen over, the white lines were even on fire. You couldn’t stop, you had to keep moving, ‘cos of the radiant heat.’’

‘‘It was so hot walking down the street,’’ Lois said. ‘‘I had a pair of jeans on, and I kept looking down at my legs because I was sure I was on fire, it was that intense, the heat.’’

Barely able to see in the smoke and darkness, they trudged 1.7 kilometres, trying to stop at neighbours’ homes, but they too were burning.

The fourth house they reached was the home of a CFA member, Helen. They sheltered there, where Luke’s daughter Brodee was having an asthma attack, and had burns on her feet due to the radiant heat.

The first time The Age encountered Lois and Luke was on February 10, 2009. They were sheltering at a motel in Mill Park, leaning against the scorched panels of Lois’ work car, the rubber of the door trims melted. Three days later, on Valentine’s Day 2009, Luke asked Lois to marry him. They’ve been inseparable ever since.

A fortnight ago we sat with the couple in their Flowerdale home, also right on the edge of the bush. It took eight years to receive their payout from the class action against SP Ausnet over the fault that sparked the deadliest fires on Black Saturday, and they used it as a deposit.

Lois and Luke van den Berk at their new home in Flowerdale.Credit: Justin McManus

There was never any question of the couple leaving the area. Luke’s children, however, who lost several school friends in the fire, could not bear to stay. They later moved to Melbourne’s western suburbs with their mum.

Lois is poised, unflappable, and a straight shooter. For Luke, however, the emotions sit barely beneath the surface. He is composed until, recounting a meeting soon after the fires with then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a relief centre, he is overcome.

‘‘He held my hand,’’ he said. ‘‘I had tears. He said, ‘You know, we’ll help you people, I’m sorry you had to go through this’. He was really nice. I’ll never forget that.’’

That’s one thing the van den Berks, and every survivor we have spoken to in recent weeks, echoed and was careful to articulate: their extreme gratitude for the generosity of the community after the fires, the way the whole country, it seemed, came to their aid.

Bron, Lola and Dom Sparkes sheltering between the tanks after the worst of the fire had passed.Credit: Shane sparkes

'There’s a moment of truth'

They are moments that are imprinted on Bron and Shane Sparkes for life.
The inside of their Kinglake home was ablaze. Shane, carrying their two-year-old son, Dom, had just punched out the cement sheeting shielding the house, stepped through the window and out into a firestorm.

‘‘There’s a moment of truth like, how much is this gonna hurt, where you’ve got to jump out into the next step,’’ Shane said.  ‘‘That’s probably the most difficult thing ... It’s a phenomenally hard thing to do. Everything was cherry red: a carpet of embers, every tree was red and on fire.’’

Holding their four-year-old daughter, Lola, Bron faced certain death if she stayed where she was, and if she followed Shane and Dom out the window she faced, well, likely death.

She froze.

‘‘I had sort of gotten to the point where I accepted that we weren’t going to survive … My body, my brain, just froze and stopped trying to find ways out, I guess. It accepted that I wasn’t going to survive, and I accepted as a mother that my children weren’t going to survive, which is probably the most traumatic part of the experience.’’

Shane headed for the water tanks; they each contained several thousands of gallons of water carefully rationed during the drought.

When he realised Bron and Lola hadn’t followed him, he sat Dom in the muddy puddle between the tanks and raced back to the house.

‘‘He said, ‘Where the f---  are you?’ ’’ said Bron. ‘‘And just his words kind of woke me up.’’

Bron put a wet blanket over Lola’s head to help her breath, then got a lungful of smoke herself. She ducked under the blanket herself, passed Lola over to Shane, jumped out the window and ran for the tanks.

Shane and Bron Sparkes, with Lola and Dom, lived in a caravan on their property after the Black Saturday fires.Credit: Justin McManus

What happened next saw their images spread around the world. Shane, a cinematographer, had left their van parked ready to go, on council land next door that he had cleared. Amazingly it was untouched by the fire, with its parking lights on and keys in the ignition.

He grabbed a camera from the car and shot vision as they sheltered between the tanks after the worst had passed, Bron holding the blanket over her and the kids, a hose running overhead to shield them from the radiant heat.

‘‘You incorporate the experience into every cell of your mind and body,’’ Bron says. ‘‘It’s a part of you and it will always be part of you.’’

It was love at first sight for Bron when she met Shane 20 years ago, on a ‘‘cold, rainy, miserable night’’ at the front door of his home in Pheasant Creek. Soon enough she was living there too. In 2005 they moved to nearby Kinglake.

After Black Saturday, they rebuilt on their Kinglake block and lived in the house for several years. In early 2014 they moved to Canberra, after Bron took up a promotion in the public service.

The Sparkes family in Canberra with their dog Bella. Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong

Lola is now 14 and Dom is 12. He’s just started high school and they’re both keen sportspeople. I speak to the family by the phone about their experience on and since Black Saturday.

This is the first time the children have heard their parents recount their experience in full.

Lola remembers ‘‘little things, like seeing fire outside a little window, or seeing our car, it going from black to grey back to black which was weird ... It doesn’t seem scary, it just seems, like, really unreal, because I don’t remember it, so I don’t remember that that happened to me.’’

I ask about the concept of moving on. For Bron, that is not straightforward.

‘‘I would articulate it in a way that’s less about moving on and more about adapting to that experience and figuring out how to live while carrying that experience with you.

‘‘You incorporate the experience into every cell of your mind and body. It’s really how you work with that as you progress through life. Because it’s a part of you and it will always be part of you. And you can’t move on from that.’’

The past decade had been ‘‘full of extreme highs and extreme lows’’, she said. ‘‘If I kind of look at this was 10 years ago that it happened, in a heartbeat I can be I in the house or next to the water tank.’’

She posed for a series of photographs several weeks after the fires.

‘‘I’m not wearing anything, just a red scarf that looks like flame. I guess that picture represents what I’ve learnt ... I didn’t have any of the material things that were used to represent who we are, and it gave me a very strong sense of the fact that I am who I am and nothing can take that away. It shows I guess how adaptable we all are. When you need to draw on a huge amount of strength, you’re able to.’’