CHAPTER THREE

FIRE-READY

Steels Creek has often seen and felt fire, although catastrophic bushfire has been rare in living memory. In the summer of 2008–09, the greater threat was, once again, not careless barbecues or faulty wiring but the increasing likelihood of bushfire. And the reason for that was the continuing drought. Victoria, although celebrated in tourist brochures and on numberplates as ‘The Garden State’, is subject to periodic bouts of intense heat when huge areas of bush and farmland burn. The state’s history is punctuated by evocative names: Red Tuesday, Ash Wednesday — and now Black Saturday. Although the 2009 fires did not see the largest extent of blackened forests (that distinction belongs to 1851), it did cause the greatest loss of human life.

In winter, fire is seen sometimes as a cheerful, welcoming blaze; in summer, we more often see it as an enemy. We give it human qualities — it ‘seeks out’ and ‘attacks’; it is ‘vicious’ or ‘relentless’. But it is nothing more than an elemental reaction: what you get when fuel and spark meet under the right conditions. For as long as humans have lived on this continent, because of the facts of its climate and vegetation, fire has been a part of Australian life. Over vast stretches of time, according to the rhythms of temperature changes in distant oceans, fire has burned in the bush. Seed pods open in response to flame, and germinate in ash — whole species, such as the mighty mountain ash of Victoria, depend upon periodic burning to propagate. With the arrival of Aboriginal settlers more than fifty thousand years ago, fire became a tool to be used in the conscious human shaping of the Australian landscape. As Bill Gammage shows in The Biggest Estate on Earth, Indigenous people across the continent burned country systematically to create the conditions that would yield more, better, or different foods.

The Europeans, who started arriving in 1788, also burned land, to clear it for stock or crops. Conflagrations — called ‘bush fires’ from the earliest years — became a part of the Australian colonial experience. The most notorious of colonial fires, Black Thursday, 6 February 1851, affected about a quarter of the colony of Victoria (including much of the land that would again burn on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009). In that catastrophic blaze, in which a vast fire front extended from Mount Gambier to Gippsland, only twelve lives were lost (though perhaps a million sheep died), a reflection of the relatively low population of European settlers.

Periodically, huge destructive fires have blasted Victoria’s bush: in 1898 (Red Tuesday), 1939 (Black Friday), 1944, 1962, 1969, 1983 (Ash Wednesday), 1998, and 2003. In 2006–07, fire agencies reported more than a thousand fires burning across the state in the fire season between mid-December and mid-March. The deepening drought made the country even more susceptible to the scourge of fire — a threat to be guarded against, watched for, fought, and feared.

In the twentieth century, while fire remained a vast and largely uncontrolled force in the west and north of the continent, in the more populated south-east it became a force to be suppressed. The 1939 and 1944 fires, in particular, accelerated the increasing attempts to fight fire, resulting in the formation of the Country Fire Authority (CFA). Composed mainly of community-based volunteers and dedicated to suppressing fire wherever it appears, the CFA has become a major force in Australia’s relationship with bushfire. (Other states also developed voluntary firefighting services, but Victoria’s, with over twelve hundred brigades, is the largest.) Black Saturday 2009 was to see both its finest hour — in the mobilisation of thousands of volunteers — and its nadir — in systemic failures to track the course of the fires and to warn those threatened by them.

The human desire to fight fire sits uneasily alongside the idea that the Australian bush needs fire. With the development of a national consciousness in the late nineteenth century, Australians began to place a greater value upon their unique fauna and flora — New South Wales created the first national park in 1879. This quickening relationship with the bush — exemplified in art by the Heidelberg School — also led to the creation of guesthouses in places like Steels Creek, where Melburnians could find beauty and tranquillity. Burning, once the principal technique for clearing and farming, became in the new century a thing to be detested and feared.

For more than a hundred years, farmers, bushmen, pastoralists, scientists, and foresters conducted a long-running debate over whether or not to burn the bush. By the late twentieth century, ecologists and conservationists had joined in. Stephen Pyne, a fire historian, identified the crucial questions. Should fire be encouraged or allowed in Australia’s bush? Should fire be fought everywhere or managed in many places? Should fires be lit to reduce the severity of bushfires? From about 1945, Australian foresters — heeding the lessons of the big wartime fires — accepted that the bush needed to burn.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, then, the bush had become a battleground between those who believed that burning off (or ‘hazard-reduction burning’) was necessary, and those who regarded even preventative burning as a sacrilege. National parks were managed for conservation and recreation, and subjected to intermittent, closely controlled burning — although, in the eyes of less idealistic commentators, not enough of it. As cities expanded into the surrounding bush, their forests were managed conservatively. Councils in outer-suburban Melbourne restricted or prohibited the removal of trees, and encouraged the planting of ‘native’ vegetation. Forestry experts recommending that bush be burned to reduce fuel loads were regarded as marginal at best and vandals at worst. The result was that fire, routinely suppressed, fed on the accumulated fuel formerly dispersed by grazing, felling, and burning — bursting out in irregular but huge outbreaks rather than small regular ones. The Black Saturday fire, then, was not exactly unforeseen, not exactly a surprise. It was a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, of ‘where’ rather than ‘whether’.

Indeed, in one sense, Black Saturday in Steels Creek had been foreseen years before, by Stephen Pyne. The expansion of cities and prolonged drought produced fuel for the fire; as Pyne put it in 2006, ‘once-cleared landscapes returned to scrub, while newcomers, often retirees or recreationists, stuffed the landscape with wooden structures that appeared to fire as no different from logging slash’. It is an unkind portrayal, but it sums up as well as any twenty-seven-word quotation what happened, fire-wise, in Steels Creek over the thirty-odd years from about 1970. Pyne had also predicted the climatic circumstances that would produce a blaze of the magnitude of Black Saturday’s. Writing in his 1991 fire history of Australia, Burning Bush, Pyne described the pattern of long-term climate and short-term weather that was to occur on 7 February 2009. During a prolonged drought, the country — and the accumulated fuel of years — dries. Storms in the north generate whorls of wind that draw hot air from the interior, forcing them south with strong northerly winds. If this coincides with a high-pressure cell over the Tasman Sea, the desiccating winds increase temperatures and dryness. As the high over the Tasman shifts, a strong southerly front bursts northwards, bringing relief from the heat, but also changing the direction of any burning fires. This combination of seasonal weather, Pyne wrote, ‘transforms the southeastern quadrant of the island continent into a veritable fire flume’. A flume is a narrow channel through which a force, such as water or air — or fire — is forced.

Extraordinarily for a community living in a heavily bushed area immediately adjacent to a national park, little sign exists that the people of Steels Creek took part or sides in this debate. Some certainly held firm views on the subject. (It became one of the subjects upon which neighbours could fall out. Dave Allan told the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission that Leigh Ahern declined to become fireguard coordinator because Leigh ‘felt he would have difficulty representing the views of all residents’.) What did the people of Steels Creek feel about the hazard-reduction burning in the national park and its surrounds? Most seemed to agree that strategic burning to protect lives and property was acceptable and even necessary, especially if it occurred in autumn, when burning harmed animals least.

Although Steels Creek is relatively well-watered — its average yearly rainfall has been around eight hundred millimetres over the past century or so — the country of south-eastern Australia is subject to periodic and catastrophic drought. Often lasting four or five years, droughts have afflicted the land in most of the decades since records began: in the late eighteen-sixties and the mid-eighteen-nineties; just before the Great War; in the mid-nineteen-twenties; just before World War II, and during it; in the mid-fifties, the mid-sixties, and the eighties (twice); and in the decade before the 2009 fires. Not surprisingly, drought and fire come together. As geographer Alwyn Williams noted in 1996, drought ‘corresponds also with the worst bushfires on record’.

For a fire to start and burn, the accompanying weather is crucial. In the summer of 2008–09, a prolonged drought gripped south-eastern Australia. In the previous decade, temperatures had been, on average, higher than ever, with maximums exceeding those set over a one-hundred-and-fifty-year period. Rainfall had been up to 30 per cent below the average established over the preceding fifty years. Biologist Malcolm Calder — sensitive to changes in vegetation to which many remain unaware — noticed that even native trees, such as eucalypts and acacias, were dying, losing the struggle against the continuing drought. With water restrictions in place, all Steels Creek gardeners began watering by hand. Many residents became concerned at the likelihood of fire, conscious of the bush’s potential to turn from benign beauty to lethal inferno.

Through the summer of 2007–08, gardeners around the valley found that they were losing the battle to keep their plants alive. Winter rain helped to bring parched gardens back, but the summer of 2008–09 proved to be even more severe. Even the Calders — creators of a garden proudly exhibited through the Open Garden Scheme — became discouraged. Malcolm watered selected plants, while Jane became resigned, accepting that ‘if plants died, then they died’. Successive issues of The Jolly Thing charted the drought’s tightening hold on the valley into 2009. It published regular reports based on rainfall readings from four people around the valley: Malcolm Calder on Blackwood Hill; Greg Leonard at ‘Western Slope’, on Yarra Ridge; Andrew Chapman at ‘Kilravock’, on the creek at the head of the valley floor; and David Allan at ‘Newera’, on Brennan Avenue. Their local records documented what every landholder and gardener in the valley knew.

Those who lived closest to the bush were the most sensitive to the changes that the drought had brought to Steels Creek. Hannah Sky lived next to Kinglake National Park. Twenty-five years before, Hannah had hoped to buy a house that she had seen in her dreams — a wooden one with fruit trees, by a creek. In the window of a real estate agent in Yarra Glen, she saw a photograph of a weatherboard cottage; she immediately bought it, and, despite the hardship of keeping up the mortgage payments as a single mother, kept it. Later, she realised that, as a bike-riding child, she must have seen it on one of her many expeditions around the district — and had it lodged in her mind. Hannah loved what she called ‘a very bonny little house’. With just three rooms, it had been built by Millie Fullerton around 1920, and had had only one other owner. Hannah added a kitchen, and a yurt out the back.

The house stood on the steep bank of Jehosaphat Creek, beside an old manna gum. Before the drought, the creek had flowed, booming down the gully and filling the house with the sound of rushing water. In summer, Hannah and her son, Wirrun, would sit in the creek, playing in its cool pools. Through the seasons, the gully was full of wildlife. Animals would perch on the steep bank opposite, safe from humans, but close and visible. Hannah grew familiar with ring- and brush-tailed possums, bush rats and mice, tiger snakes (‘I preferred the mice, really …’), and the birds that filled the surrounding bush with song. Hannah noticed that, while the gully of Jehosaphat Creek had always provided enough for the many animals — and the few humans — who shared it, in recent years the animals had begun eating her fruit when it was still green. ‘Wobbles’, a wallaby Hannah had encouraged, began eating the O’Neills’ roses and pot plants. A week or so before Black Saturday, a large tree that was close to her house fell over — a casualty of the drought.

The Jolly Thing reported that the year before the fire had been the driest on record for the district. Barry Sheffield had kept rainfall figures for just off Steels Creek Road since 1997, and had collated rain records from the Yarra Glen post office dating back to 1890. He found that the most recent eight years included five of the lowest annual totals. In 2008, the total rainfall was four hundred and seventy-eight millimetres, about three hundred millimetres lower than the long-term average. Steve Carroll described the lawn at ‘Rose Glen’ as ‘like walking on cornflakes’; Rob Fallon recalled that he had mowed his lawn only four times in as many years.

Many of Steels Creek’s older residents knew how fire could ravage the surrounding ranges. Joan Radford remembered many fires over the fifty years she had lived in the valley, and her house, built around 1918, had been lucky enough to survive big fires. As a girl, Hannah Sky had seen the remains of houses burned out in 1939. Riding about the district with her brothers and friends, she had come across clearings in the bush, marked as the sites of houses by a scattering of blackened kettles or other rusted metal artefacts. One of her earliest memories was of her mother pointing to a line of flames atop the hills around Kinglake, saying, ‘That’s where your dad is’ — fighting a fire with a bushfire brigade. Jim Milne knew what bushfires could do: aged almost eighty at the time of Black Saturday, he had lived through the 1939 bushfires in Gippsland. He had happened to be walking in the bush as smoke from the 1939 fires drifted over his holiday place. Jim described the sensation of walking in the smoky bush as ‘like being blindfolded’; he felt his way back to the farmhouse he was staying in. So Jim had a measure to later assess the magnitude of the 2009 fire — and he thought it exceeded 1939.

Steels Creek people knew that they lived with fire. It shaped the way that many situated and built their houses. Big fires influenced responses for years after. When John Crossley built his house on Brennan Avenue in 1973, he found signs of the 1939 fires in the bush around him. ‘So’, he later wrote, ‘the threat of a bush fire was something that was to be thought about right from the beginning’. When the Filsells renovated their house near the school in the late eighties, Ivan Filsell found evidence of the 1962 fire in the walls. The McLoughlins’ house on Scott Road was built around a steel-framed roof and outer beams; they had noticed evidence of big fires on their block in the past — stumps showing evidence of charring — and, ‘absolutely’ aware of fire, had asked their architect to design accordingly. Ray and Bronwyn Dahlstrom lived in a house that was cut into the hillside of Yarra Ridge, in a deliberate attempt to protect the house from bushfire.

The ‘old’ Steels Creek had supported an informal, volunteer firefighting group, but, with many fit younger men working in rural jobs, it had enjoyed a resource denied the Steels Creek of modern times. Instead, the residents relied on the CFA, especially the two brigades at neighbouring Yarra Glen and Dixons Creek. Few institutions in rural Victoria enjoy greater respect than the CFA, the more so because it is staffed at the local level almost entirely by volunteers. Hardly anyone in Steels Creek expected the CFA to attend more than isolated fires, though the valley entered the 2008–09 fire season well equipped to meet local threats. Some acknowledged that the very thoroughness with which the CFA and other firefighting forces fought and doused fire might have contributed to the chance of a disastrous conflagration. Jane Calder mused that ‘the Kinglake fires of two-to-three years ago did us a disservice because we would see a line of flame on our side of the Kinglake ranges … thinking … they came to nothing’.

Most people prepared for the possibility — even the inevitability — of fire; and they did so not just as individuals and families, but also as a community. This is clear in the formation of the several telephone trees around the valley. The way those networks operated reveals a great deal about the relationship between fire and community in the valley and, indeed, in early twenty-first-century Australia. Technological change has altered the ways in which people learn of and respond to fires. Throughout the story of Black Saturday are accounts of people making and maintaining contact by telephone (mobile and landline), by text message, and by email; and finding out information by consulting websites, listening to the radio, and even tuning in to CFA radio traffic using scanners. People still described walking — or more often driving — over to see neighbours, or meeting them on the roads; but, overwhelmingly, contact was (paradoxically, perhaps) both immediate and distant.

The people of Steels Creek made many of their decisions and choices with an underlying awareness of fire. When, in 2004, Rob Fallon found a council contractor cutting trees along Old Kinglake Road (some far taller than saplings should have been), he did not write to the council to object. Instead, he talked to the contractor, pointed out that he was cutting down trees that he should have been leaving, and brokered an agreement to leave the trimming to local residents. Rob pointed out that leaving the verge without shade would only encourage the growth of burgan (a variety of tea-tree), which would present a potentially greater bushfire threat than eucalypts (firefighters nicknamed the oily burgan the ‘petrol bush’). The arrangement between residents and contractors remained in force, an example of the local desire to take responsibility for actions affecting them, and especially those concerning fire. The representative action, however, was the decision to form or join a community fireguard group.

Under the heading ‘Bushfire Survival — are WE ready?’, the CFA began to promote the formation of fireguard groups in the valley towards the end of 2005. By 2006, five fireguard networks existed: among fourteen properties around Brennan Avenue and Old Kinglake Road, twenty-eight properties north of Old Kinglake Road, twelve properties around Hunts Lane, and two with a dozen households each around Greenwood Lane and Hargreaves Road (both of those groups coordinated by Lindy Montell). Even so, in December 2007 The Jolly Thing reported that fewer than one-third of the valley’s properties were formally associated with a fireguard group, although it seems that there was a higher proportion in the more vulnerable areas on the hills — and many, anticipating that formal trees might become clogged, reached informal agreements with neighbours to warn each other if possible.

Fire tested the efficiency of the fireguard groups on 22 January 2006, when a blaze began on Old Slide Road, among the steep and heavily wooded slopes of the national park. The Steels Creek Tennis Club was hosting a tournament that afternoon, and tennis players became distracted as aircraft dropped tonnes of water onto the fire. Although it consumed only a hectare of bush, the fire required four CFA appliances and a big D8 dozer to bring it — swiftly and efficiently — under control, with many more support vehicles clustering around the courts. Peta Whitford, of the Valley Road fireguard group, recorded that its twenty-two households had been contacted in just under four minutes. This was encouraging. The isolated fire had demonstrated that telephone trees could speedily reach large numbers of residents. What this dry run did not demonstrate was what might happen if there was confusion or ignorance among the authorities responsible for warning them.

The protective net of the fireguard system was threadbare. Essentially a ‘top-down’ approach, it did not reach up into the organisation responsible for warning of or fighting fires. If one fire affected a distinct area, activating the tree was straightforward. But if the nature, scale, direction, or extent of the fire was unclear, and if no one knew whether or not a threat existed, the fireguard group would be rendered useless, or at least greatly impaired. On Black Saturday, when a huge fire burned towards Steels Creek, the CFA did not issue clear warnings; the fireguard trees, therefore, could not function as they should. In the event, the people of Steels Creek — like almost everyone else in the area that burned on Black Saturday — would face the fire largely on their own.

How prepared were the people of Steels Creek? On Yarra Ridge, the Giffards had spent huge amounts on the materials for their house, in order to ensure it had a higher fire-safety rating. Almost everyone adopted precautions such as cutting and clearing vegetation around the house; installing a large water tank; buying a fire hose and pump (usually petrol- or diesel-powered); and having ready buckets, mops, overalls, and protective clothing. On her biodynamic farm on the flat near the creek, Judy Anderson invested in less expensive precautions: keeping baths and buckets filled. Though operating on slight margins, she bought a new fire pump only days before the fire. ‘The Goddess had spoken to me’, she explained.

On the crest of Yarra Ridge, John and Margaret Houston were well prepared. When they had discussed building on this knoll in the early eighties, they imagined a timber house. The 1983 Ash Wednesday fires caused them to alter their design, and, on CFA advice, they erected a house constructed without flammable materials. By 2009, they had added a rooftop sprinkler system and in-ground sprinklers able to wet a radius of fifty metres around the house.

Joanne and Brian Spears lived in a large house, ‘Holly Lane Mews’, on Willow Bend Drive, with stables and sheds, and a wing housing bed-and-breakfast guests. Brian, a quiet, considered man in his mid-seventies, still practised as an architect. Jo, an exuberant personality, was well known around the Yarra Valley, having formerly been a shire councillor. Jo and Brian later confessed that they had different attitudes toward preparing for fire. While he had once volunteered for the CFA in Buxton, Brian’s plan extended to the slogan ‘don’t panic’. (‘Actually,’ he mused, ‘on the day, I think that did help’; Jo added, ‘I panicked.’) They ruefully admitted that they had allowed dead vegetation to build up on roofs and in gutters — ‘totally unprepared’.

The Centre for Human Transformation’s custodians, for all their apparent otherworldliness, understood the danger they faced from the bush around them. They had ‘spent a fortune over the years being fire-ready’. The main house — Rachana and Daricha’s home, but also their office and library — was built to be fireproof, its sod roof keeping them cool on the hottest afternoon. Daricha, Rachana said, was ‘really diligent about … keeping the grass cut’ and he had attended meetings at the Yarra Glen CFA. They had had close calls with fires in the Kinglake National Park in recent years and felt that they were prepared for the fires they expected to face. In the days before Black Saturday, Rachana felt ‘totally at peace’. If fire came again to the hills, they would be ready; for all their New-Age practices, they had the right gear, and they knew how to use it.

On Scott Road, the house of Margaret and Richard McLoughlin sat on a knoll with expansive views in three directions: south, towards Yarra Glen; east, towards the Yarra Valley; and north, up the valley of Steels Creek. The house was on a reasonably open block, separated by grass paddocks from the bush of Yarra Ridge. Stylish and functional, the building had been designed by an architect only six years earlier. Apart from its steel-framed roof, the eaves were designed without nooks, which might catch burning embers. The McLoughlins had a fire plan — though, in the event, they had too little time to implement parts of it, such as filling baths. They had decided not to leave, but had hoses, mops, and buckets ready: ‘it’s defendable’, they felt.

CFA vehicles could often be seen around the valley. In the two months after a fire on Old Slide Road in January 2006, smouldering timber flared up four times — a reminder of how fires do not end with the passing of the fire front and the dousing of the flames. In January 2009, a grassfire on Pinnacle Lane attracted CFA units in what a witness called ‘a spectacularly short response time’. Five or six CFA units converged on the fire and extinguished it before it got very far. (This is what the CFA did best — responding promptly to isolated emergencies, a visible demonstration of the service’s expertise and value. It was to prove less able to respond, at least initially, to a large-scale, catastrophic fire.) The CFA’s other vital role, in educating and informing residents about the risk of fire and how to deal with it, continued with the 2008–09 fire season. In the last issue of The Jolly Thing before Black Saturday, a member of the Dixons Creek brigade asked householders questions that they needed to be able to answer firmly: ‘Are your fire plans in place … have you practised? Is your property fire-ready? … Have you made appropriate plans for pets and livestock?’ He closed, ‘Have a great summer!’

John O’Neill, his wife, Adrienne, and their teenaged children lived on Old Kinglake Road, next door to Hannah Sky. Occupying about twenty-eight hectares in the valley of Jehosaphat Creek, with a clearing around their house, they practically backed onto the national park. The O’Neills’ century-old weatherboard dwelling had survived bushfire before: in 1939, 1969, and 1983. John, a lively Irishman who had moved from Tarrawarra five years before, had become involved in local groups such as Landcare and Healthy Waterways. The O’Neills — active members of a fireguard group — had decided to stay and defend their property. They had a fire plan for the house, and they had a dam, a ninety-thousand-litre swimming pool, and no fewer than five twenty-two-thousand-litre concrete water tanks.

Those living, like the O’Neills, in the most exposed places — the wooded gully of Jehosaphat Creek and the bush-clad slopes of Brennan Avenue — naturally made the most thorough preparations. Guy Williams lived in one of the most vulnerable spots, high on Yarra Ridge. ‘I knew I had found land in a fire-prone area’, he reflected, ‘and wanted to do everything I could to protect myself if ever I faced a bushfire.’ In 1993, while visiting a trade show, he found a stall promoting ‘autoclaved aerated concrete’, a building material that eliminated the need for a wooden frame or external — and flammable — timberwork. The fireproof blocks were astonishingly light, and easily cut or even sanded. It took Guy three years, working mostly alone, to build his house. With its metal roof, concrete walls, and sprinkler system, it seemed to have the best possible chance of withstanding a fire.

The first week of February had seen fires break out in various parts of Victoria, and the combination of heat and wind made for dire predictions. The CFA issued a ‘Community Information Alert’, warning that ‘Tomorrow Saturday 7th January, 2009 [sic — February] has been declared by the CFA as a Day of Total Fire Ban for the Whole State of Victoria.’ It advised people in ‘high risk area[s]’ to ‘implement their bushfire survival plans’. In accordance with the authority’s policy, it advised people to either ‘actively defend their homes’ or ‘be prepared to leave their homes early in the morning, well before a fire ignites’. The Bureau of Meteorology’s forecasts on Friday 6 February were extreme enough for Victoria’s premier, John Brumby, to issue a more concise warning. With the state ‘tinder-dry’, he urged Victorians to ‘exercise real common sense’ on Saturday. ‘If you don’t need to go out, don’t go out’, he warned. ‘If you don’t need to travel, don’t travel … If you can stay at home, stay at home.’ He asked people to check on friends, neighbours, and especially elderly relatives. ‘It’s going to be a terrible day’, he said.

The effectiveness of Steels Creek as a community is perhaps illuminated by the way neighbours around Valley Road expressed concern for Phyllis Hinch, an elderly woman living alone. While shire and CFA officials felt unable to urge her to leave due to concern for privacy, Peta Whitford enlisted the help of Les King of the Yarra Glen CFA. He asked Phyllis two simple questions — ‘Can you start the fire pump?’ and ‘Can you get up on the roof?’ — that persuaded her to see the sense of evacuating. All day Saturday, and increasingly through the afternoon, people phoned friends or neighbours. They asked if anyone had heard anything and asked about unoccupied houses — checking, warning, and speculating. These contacts were a tangible expression of the ideal of community.

Allan Giffard had travelled to Sydney on business on Friday. Returning by plane that afternoon, he had thought, ‘I really should go and buy a new pump’ — to feed the hoses the Giffards would run from their pool. (‘Your wife had been nagging you to get better equipment for about two days’, Stephanie said. ‘Well, for two years probably’, Allan replied.) It was a hot afternoon, and Allan was keen to get home to see his family. A detour to the shops in Lilydale would add forty minutes onto his trip, but Allan decided that he would stop by and at least get a quote on a new pump. At the shop, the salesman said, ‘I tell you what, how about if I set it all up and you buy it now. It’s a good price.’ At that point, Allan’s mobile phone rang, and as he answered it, he said, ‘Yeah, okay. Do it. Set it all up.’ This was, Stephanie said, uncharacteristic. It was ‘very unlike Allan. He usually gets two or three quotes’. But Allan’s unusual impulsiveness was to have profound consequences the following day: Black Saturday.