Loss too hard to understand, focus on the small stuff

Numbed survivors at Winmalee are picking through their past.

Evangeline Love

HUNCHED over, with her dog at her feet and a couple of friends to comfort her, Jane Boys, 47, sat in Springwood Sports Club on Thursday night trying to comprehend life without possessions.

The club had become an evacuation centre accommodating 100 people: cat owners in one section, dog owners in another.

A nurse at Springwood Hospital, in the Blue Mountains, Boys had had the day off and, with the wind and the heat, was monitoring the television and the "fire brigade website, which just kept shutting down" -- there was nothing to indicate a firestorm was approaching Emma Parade, Winmalee.

"I had no warning -- there was just an explosion in my backyard and then smoke and flames," she said. Boys looked out her window to see houses down the street in flames. "There were no police, or firemen or anything." Just her neighbours, rushing up the street yelling: "Just get out! Just get out!"

They were prepared, with community fire trailers permanently stationed at either end of the street, containing pumps, masks, rakes and goggles. Someone ran down the street putting stand-by pipes into the mains, to make it easier for firefighters to connect. None of it would save their houses.

Boys ran back into her home and collected her dog, cat, iPad, some documents and her handbag -- the sum total of all she now owns -- and as she was leaving the back of the house was on fire.

She told me she has two teenaged kids, who were away at the time, and is thankful that nobody was hurt. What now? "You've got to do the essential things, like go out and buy clothing, you have got to think practically, then try and get your insurances happening and somewhere to live, you know."

By morning, across the mountains, numbness had turned to grief. I found 18-year-old Samantha Boys, Jane's daughter, standing alone outside the house she had lived in since she was five, staring into the smoking embers, quietly sobbing.

"I was hoping I might salvage something, some jewellery maybe, but there's nothing," she said.

Samantha was dressed in new clothes after a late-night visit to a 24-hour K-Mart in Penrith -- the first step to rebuilding her life. A first-year nursing student, she lost a year of study notes, including an assignment due in a few days.

Salvaging something, anything, from their old lives seemed to be the focus as people sifted through their dwellings. Anja Minney, 45, emerged from the wreckage of her house on Hawkesbury Road clutching a little, charred, wooden jewellery box that her father had made her. "Look!" she exclaimed. "That chain I bought in Germany is OK."

Others marvelled that their Hills Hoists had survived, including the pegs, but that they now had no washing. Anja's husband, Pat, was pretty pleased that his fishing boat was intact.

He was at home when the fire swept through on Thursday and tried to save their house. The wind was so strong it blew the crown out of a large liquidambar tree in his front yard, blocking his exit. "I thought, 'I gotta make a decision about what I am going to do', so I threw the dog and the rabbit in the truck and gunned it over the tree."

Back in Emma Parade, the Bartush family was amazed that their cat had survived. Molly had been locked in the house and had to wait until a back brick blew out before she could escape to a neighbour, singed and in pain, but alive.

In this time of utter devastation, people focused on the small things, the enormity of their loss seemingly too hard to comprehend. It brought to the surface their better selves, and most emphasised that they'd survived, their kids had survived, their neighbours had survived. Ultimately, houses and cars were "just stuff". They insisted I thank the firemen and volunteers for their selflessness for them.

There was humour too. Around the corner in Sunny Ridge Road, Nakia Belmer and his mate stood outside his mum's burnt-out house listing all the expensive paintings, art and mountain bikes that had been lost in the blaze, becoming more ridiculous as time went on. "Was that one outside the dunny a Rembrandt or a Picasso?"

Paul Hollier, 57, stood outside the mangled mess of his house in Emma Parade, while inside we could hear the sound of running water, the only service still working. He was trained as the head of the local community fire group and was well prepared -- he had pumps and water in wheelie bins to put out the spotting, but it was all to no avail. Hollier is experienced in the way of fires and says the direction it came from was highly unusual. "You'd have to think it was deliberately lit, which is pretty bloody disappointing."