Black Saturday: Following Bonnie into the fire

Save for his faithful companion Bonnie, John Laffan would have perished in the Black Saturday bushfires.

The remains of a house burn near Kinglake West after the Black Saturday bushfire.

Save for his faithful companion Bonnie, John Laffan was alone on the property, which was about 5km from the town of Kinglake in Victoria’s Great Dividing Range and surrounded by dense bush.

With his phones out of use, he had no connection to the outside world. His nearest neighbours were almost a kilometre away. He went back outside into the eerie, dark afternoon and turned on the radio in the ute. It was Saturday February 7, 2009 — a day now known as Black Saturday.

“There was a bit of crackling, then finally I heard something about a bushfire coming. They said there was a remote possibility that Kinglake might come under ‘ember attack’,” he recalls.

“I didn’t know that half of Kinglake had already been destroyed by four o’clock.”

What John did know was that staying put would be suicidal. There was only one realistic chance of survival. He had to make a break for it. “I grabbed Bonnie and a biscuit tin full of family photos and got in the car. I had a terrible, terrible time trying to get the car going. The fire was just sucking the oxygen away from everything. I saw trees go up, sheds go up. Half the roof had come off the house. The windows had blown in.”

He could see flames now, advancing up the hill towards his home like some demonic army. There was a gully at the end of the street; it was a sea of fire. Panic rose like bile in John’s throat. If he was going to make it to Kinglake, he would have to drive into that gully.

When he finally got the car going, he drove in the opposite direction, towards a dead end where there was a dam. “I thought there’d be safety in numbers.”

But safety remained frighteningly out of reach. In the almost impenetrable smoke haze, John’s ute smashed into a tree. He abandoned the car and frantically searched for salvation in the burning bush. As he worked to dig a hole at the side of the road, his mobile phone began vibrating in his back pocket.

“I pulled it out of my pocket and put it to my ear and heard a voice I didn’t recognise say, ‘John, start praying’.”

But John didn’t pray. He couldn’t. He is a devout Christian, but in that moment he couldn’t see how God could help him. “At that point,” he says, “it came down to human will to survive.”

Incredible Dog Journeys by Laura Greaves.

That’s when Bonnie began repeatedly disappearing into the smoke and flame, then returning to hover anxiously just beyond John’s grasp. “She was stopping and looking back at me, but as soon as I got anywhere near her she’d turn and run back into the bush,” he says. Suddenly, John understood Bonnie was entreating him to follow her. But where to? Following her could be disastrous for both of them.

“I thought Bonnie was trying to take me back to the house. Even though I was only a few hundred metres away from home, I had no sense of direction. Everything was on fire.”

But Bonnie had never let him down before. In fact, she had proven her devotion time and time again. John knew without doubt that Bonnie trusted him; now she was asking him to trust her.

John plunged into the bush behind Bonnie. The smoke was so thick he worried he’d lost her, but after what seemed like an eternity, he spotted the little white dog. Bonnie was sitting patiently, almost expectantly, beside a hole. As soon as she saw John approaching she dived inside it. Without a second thought, John did the same.

“We were in this depression that was below ground level and below heat level. There was a bit of air in there, so we could breathe. It was just enough for protection.”

John and his dog sheltered in that hole for four hours as the bushfire rumbled directly over their safe haven. It sounded like an earthquake, and “felt like a bulldozer driving over the top of us”.

When they finally emerged, the landscape had been obliterated. John had sustained minor burns, and Bonnie’s chest and paws were painfully singed. She was limping and shaking. But they were alive.

This is an edited extract from Incredible Dog Journeys by Laura Greaves (Penguin).