Bushfires: How I was saved from inferno by fireys, a friend and my Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow
Were it not for a fortunate combination of events, Venessa Downing would likely be another bushfire corpse.
Were it not for the bravery of local firefighters, the cool actions of a loyal friend and a 1971 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with good seals, Venessa Downing would likely be another bushfire corpse.
She is grateful to that trio for collectively rescuing her as flames engulfed her rural property at Quaama in far south NSW, and to medical staff in nearby Bega and Sydney’s Concord Hospital.
It was to Concord that Ms Downing was airlifted and placed in an induced coma in intensive care on life support for some days.
Ms Downing, who this week returned to view her destroyed house, charred chooks, razed bushland and mostly burnt-out vintage cars, including a just-restored 1974 Holden HQ, is further thankful that all she suffered were some burns, severe smoke inhalation and fuzzy vision from slightly scalded eyes, all of which should heal over time.
“I’m not supposed to be back here inhaling smoke, but I wanted to see everything,” she told The Weekend Australian amid a thick haze as she sifted through the detritus looking for dead pets and finding keys, including those to the Silver Shadow.
Ms Downing can’t express enough thanks to the people who know her and those who don’t in the small Quaama community who have provided food, clothing, and everyday living odds and ends, along with the fellow automotive enthusiast friends who have taken her and her friend, Grant Brown, into their home.
Like many who have lost their homes to bushfires, Ms Downing is struggling financially — but what trumps all of that is that she has lived to tell her extraordinary tale.
When she got up about dawn on New Year’s Eve and started her usual morning routine, she could see a fire in the distance and made sure she had a getaway vehicle ready to go. “I let the chooks out, and I could see this glow of red, but not fire trucks.”
Then it all happened super fast.
“An ember jumped over the paddock about 200m away, and another came up,” Ms Downing said. “It came up so quick.
“I locked all the house up to stop all the smoke coming in. It came up from the back, straight up the grass, within 10 minutes. Then the windows started smashing. It pushed through the house, and I realised the ceiling was on fire.”
Ms Downing knew it was time to get out fast with her pets. The cats wanted to make their own decisions and jumped out the windows; the dogs were too terrified to move. “I went out the front door and inhaled the smoke, trying to get the dogs out,” she said. “The car I was going to escape in, the 4WD Subaru, had the back of it on fire.”
That’s when Ms Downing, who works at a local crash repair and mechanics shop and whose hobby is restoring vintage cars, took to the Silver Shadow, which was blocked in but still intact under the green carport. “I just sat in the Rolls because that was the only car I thought was safe — it is an old solid car, and had all new seals.”
She rang her cousin Charles Parsons and said: “I don’t think I’m going to make it, it’s all around.”
During that phase, she said, “all the chickens were flying at me, and they were lying down, they couldn’t breathe”.
After 15 minutes, “it was getting really hot” and hard to breathe — when The Weekend Australian saw the Silver Shadow, parts of it, including the turn signal lenses, had melted.
“I rang Grant next and told him where I was,” Ms Downing said.
Mr Brown, who sometimes lives at Ms Downing’s property but was on the NSW central coast that day, liaised with the local Rural Fire Service to give them a GPS fix on her location by identifying the green carport on Google.
When she heard sirens, Ms Downing stepped out of the Rolls-Royce and found a local RFS volunteer — who, by chance, she knew — Nathan Barnden, there to take her to safety. They drove a small truck through patches of flame to the evacuation centre at the Quaama Hall where she was so black with soot that none of her neighbours recognised her.
Like so many others who have lost their homes in Quaama, Ms Downing is simply happy to be alive. “I wouldn’t have made it, I was running out of oxygen,” she said. “I am hoping to rebuild. I still have my cows, they all survived, and they are like my pets.”
She is, however, concerned about the road ahead. The $1000 she got in immediate emergency relief through Centrelink has been eaten up by buying a generator.
Because she did not have time to collect documents before fleeing, it’s taking time to get more funds. Red Cross officials, from whom she could potentially get $5000, need more identification than she has, and her replacement driver’s licence has yet to arrive.
As yet, there has been no concrete offer of medium-term independent accommodation from any authority, although she says her insurance company has moved fast and been very helpful.
Asked what would make the most difference, Ms Downing said: “Just having somewhere to live. It makes it hard when you have had such a stressful ordeal.”
Somewhere to live is exactly what Paul Gallagher needed after the cottage in which he was living on a friend’s property neighbouring Ms Downing’s went up.
Mr Gallagher, who works in maintenance and client support at the small disability home Nardy House in Quaama, helped out in the evacuation of the residents, who were taken by convoy, escorted by a fire truck to safety as the fire approached, while other firefighters saved the facility.
After a fortnight travelling with and supporting the residents at aged-care facilities in Eden on the NSW far south coast and in Canberra before the Nardy House residents and staff returned to Quaama this week, Mr Gallagher is homeless.
“I asked my two daughters to post on Facebook that I needed a cheap caravan,” Mr Gallagher said. “Somebody contacted my youngest daughter, and said: ‘I’ve got one, you can have it for free.’ ”
Mr Gallagher has it camped at Nardy House until he can move it on to the shattered block where the cottage sat, which will be when power has been restored.
The area around Quaama is crawling with soldiers, along with electricity and telephone technicians working like industrious ants to repair damage, but those on the ground say it will be a long, difficult path to recovery.
The Weekend Australian found local Telstra workers Michelle Miller and Lawrie O’Callaghan using a mechanical digger and hand shovel to repair cable joins that burnt out, digging them up and replacing them one by one, starting at the Quaama exchange.
They had 20km of burnt cable joins to go. “It’s going to take a long time to fix them, months,” Mr O’Callaghan said.
A contingent of soldiers was hard at work cutting down and disposing of dead trees on the Quaama property of Dee and Ian Greig, as their two highland cattle watched on. The bushfire destroyed the Greigs’ house and singed their olive grove, from which they produce a small commercial line of oil.
Ms Downing and the Greigs are among those who have made use of the boundless generosity of volunteers who run an operation out of the Quaama Hall where locals bring donations of everything under the sun to be availed of by those who have lost homes.
“My husband has been coming back every day to the hall, and he has been here and gathering advice,” Ms Greig said.
“We have been taking things like food and water and clothes. I find it difficult going into a store.”
Apart from every imaginable provision, the hall hosts notices with details of how to claim assistance, and offers from locals of free accommodation, or free veterinary and medical services.
The circumstances of those who have lost their homes varies, and consequently so too do their intentions. Ms Greig said their situation was influenced by a serious farm injury her husband had suffered in August.
“We have decided not to stay on the land, but to rebuild our lives in Bermagui,” she said, referring to the NSW south coast town. “We have a lot of time to reflect.”
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