The patient had been in a coma for twelve days. Strange dreams were all he could remember. He dreamt he was in a red room, then a green room, and when, finally, he woke, the walls were orange. There was flame even in the paint colour and he knew without being told that his wife was dead. He checked his hands and was surprised to find that his fingers – put back together now, bandaged – had been saved.

His children sat next to his bed, while a young police officer had positioned his chair further away, towards the back of the hospital room. All of them were waiting to hear what had happened.

Detective Senior Constable Paul Bertoncello had visited before. The first time, Rodney Leatham had been wearing an oxygen mask and couldn’t speak. He had burns to 40 per cent of his body and was covered in layers of dressings. The detective had cautiously touched a bandaged hand. He’d been a police officer for nearly ten years, but no grave situation ever felt like preparation for the next. Rodney was crying, nodding, communicating with his eyes. He was two weeks behind everybody else: already, even by the tiniest increments, people were adapting to the reality of the fire, but he was still right at the beginning.

‘I know it’s hard,’ the detective found himself saying, ‘but I’ll need to come back and talk a bit.’

Again and again, he bypassed the foyer’s balloons and flowers, and took the elevator to the burns unit. On the ward there were nineteen people who’d survived the fires. They had submerged themselves in any liquid they could find, in dams or livestock troughs, which saved their lives but left many of their burns infected.

When Rodney could speak, Bertoncello told him that while he’d probably never have to stand up in court, the police would need a statement. Rodney agreed to give one, but only at the same time he told his kids.

‘Are you sure you want me there for that?’ Bertoncello asked. He felt less an intruder than a torturer.

‘I’m only saying it once,’ Rodney replied.

On the day of the statement, grief was in the air like a chemical element; it was difficult to breathe or swallow. Rodney’s children sat beside him, and Bertoncello turned on his tape recorder and tried to disappear into the wall.

He already knew the shape of the story:

Leatham, a carpenter, is working on his house in Morwell when he sees smoke rising, an unlikely skyscraper, over Churchill, ten kilometres away. He worries it is heading towards the tiny hill community of Callignee (pop. 367), where his daughter lives on a bush block with her partner and small children. Rodney and his wife, Annette, drive over to assist in case there are spot fires. Annette is a frail woman with an autoimmune disease. She stays inside helping her daughter, while outside her husband and son-in-law connect a generator Rodney has brought, should they lose power. Then the two men fill buckets and containers with water.

Throughout the afternoon, the family listen to the radio and check the websites of the Country Fire Authority and the Department of Sustainability and Environment. There are now blazes all around the state, although no specific warnings are issued for their area. Outside it is growing dark. Smoke blocks the sun and the sky glows red. They lose power: the lights and radio go off, the phone and internet stop working. Rodney and his son-in-law believe that if the wind changes, the long thin fire will turn like a snake and bypass their property. They’ve prepared for fire to come their way while believing it won’t. But in many minds, staying to defend your house is the Australian test of grit: it’s proof that you deserve to be living in the bush in the first place. Holding their nerve, they decide to make dinner.

In the background they can hear the blaze, constant like an ocean. Surrounded by steep gullies, they can’t see flames. They can’t tell where this fire is, until suddenly it feels very close. The family debate whether to stay or go, stay or go, and then it is clear they have only moments to leave.

Leatham’s daughter and son-in-law drive away first in separate cars. But a beast has found them: at the end of the driveway, a spot fire ignites in the next paddock. Then, all at once, burning debris – not just airborne embers but flaming branches – falls everywhere, along with fat drops of black rain. This fire is now creating its own weather system. His daughter is driving underneath a pyrocumulus, a massive grey fire cloud that’s formed over the smoke plume. Hot air has risen in a convection column, and as the cloud grows heavy it rains – pointless, ironic drops.

Black splodges of liquid soot fall over the windscreen, the wipers now cutting up the view of fire everywhere. Native animals come down the road, fleeing a burning fauna reserve. In the first car, Leatham’s son-in-law hits a kangaroo, then his daughter hits it too. In the chaos, she realises her parents aren’t behind her and flashes her headlights. Her partner thinks she is telling him to drive faster. At the top of a hill she stops, debating whether to return to her parents, or go on towards her children. She steers away from the fire . . .

Now, in this room full of medical equipment, Rodney is telling them what happened at the house. He jumps from past to present tense, as if he’s still living each moment. His children ask no questions. They cry as he describes going to disconnect his generator, he and their mother getting into the ute, finding they’re surrounded by flames – Bertoncello’s tape recorder stops working and he starts transcribing Leatham’s words into his notebook as fast as he can:

This is where everything turned into milliseconds. Everything is slow. Less than half a minute, a quarter of a minute and red-hot bullets are falling, cinders landing everywhere. I backed away from the house to get around a retaining wall, and there was a massive grass fire in front of me . . . The heat and wind were astronomical. I backed down to the grass and had to drive through another fast, furious grass fire. Red fire bullets were everywhere, hitting the car, falling all around.

I was trying to locate the driveway, to get back onto it. I could hardly see out of the windscreen, soot, ash and shit were all over the ute. I had to stop. I had to slow to a stop. I think the ute stalled, I don’t know. It is all in milliseconds.

In a millisecond, I decided I’d back into the dam: that might be okay . . . The fire . . . the fire was coming over the hill. In the next millisecond, no sooner had the ute stopped, Annette tells me, ‘Let’s run to the house.’ She opens the door. There’s no time to say yes or no. It’s just what we’re doing.

She turned out of the car, out of the passenger door and fell over. I heard her cry out. I got out, ran around the car and she was virtually on fire. I tried to drag her. She was in flames. I was putting my hands in flames, but I couldn’t hold on. It was so hot. I couldn’t do anything. I looked around. Shrubs were like glow bombs on fire. I wanted to help her . . . there was nothing I could do.

I knew I had to move, to run to the house. The flames were head height from the ground. I don’t know how I got there . . . I sat in a child’s plastic sandpit shell filled with water, and cursed everything under the sun.

Bertoncello wrote this down through tears. He’d seen the aerial photographs of the crime scene. The house had somehow remained untouched. It stood there ringed with burnt earth, the ute sunk in post-nuclear ash. Nearby was the dam, from the sky a pockmark, to which Rodney had run from the plastic sandpit and submerged himself. Lying low, in a grief-filled hallucination, he’d seen the eucalypts:

glowing like Christmas trees, like somebody had put a massive amount of fairy lights over trees 30 metres tall.

I don’t know what happened to the ute. I don’t know if it stalled or not. All I could do was have plans . . . plan A to plan Z, and if one fails you go to the next one. Plan A – gone. Plan B – gone. Plan C – get Annette . . . She was on fire. I was on fire. Next plan . . . all of this in milliseconds.

Later, much later, the detective will handle the statements of over six hundred witnesses and slowly piece together their stories. Just after 1.30 pm on that Saturday, a group of volunteer firefighters were standing outside the Churchill fire station, smoking and yarning in the searing dry heat. In a place where there wasn’t a lot to do, the building was as much a social club as a fire station, and some members had been waiting all morning, conscious they could be needed.

Everyone had heard the endless dire weather predictions (‘Don’t go out . . . don’t travel . . . stay at home,’ the premier, John Brumby, had warned.) Then, through the shimmering streets, a woman drove up in a white SUV, kids strapped in the back, and pointed to a column of black smoke rising in the hills behind them.

Just moments before, the crew had been looking at that same innocuous spot, bitching about the thought-cancelling temperature as sweat gathered under their heavy uniforms. They might have been standing in a dream – barely peopled, with those making cameo appearances moving slowly in the oven-like air – and here was the moment it turned to a nightmare, with the smoke rising ever darker, higher. This was the fire everyone had half expected. The fire they’d felt coming towards them all day.

The volunteers hurried onto the only available engine – a pumper, designed for urban firefighting – and roared towards the billowing smoke. It was the colour of a car tyre burning – the plume normally seen on a blaze that had been raging for hours, not a couple of minutes. As they reached the intersection of Glendonald Road and Jellef’s Outlet, they realised there were two separate fires in the eucalypt plantation. Newborn furies, mewling and thrashing through the trees on either side of the outlet. Those on the pumper immediately had their suspicions about how these giant twins had come to life. The fire was slightly less advanced on the right-hand side, but on the left it was crowning, surging through the canopies of thirty-metre-high gum trees, propelled by the parched timber and limitless supply of eucalypt oil.

‘The flames were lying down,’ a crew member later told police, ‘because the wind was howling through’ – horizontal yellow and red flames, so fierce they looked to be rolling up the hillside. In these low mountain ranges, for every ten degrees that the slope increased, the fire doubled its speed, preheating the fuels above, causing the flames to lick faster at leaves and branches.

Even within the truck, the volunteers could feel the radiant heat coming off the blaze. None of them had ever seen a wildfire build so quickly. It was already impossible to make out the depth to which it had blasted into the plantation. They were skirting the fire’s flank and they knew it was too big for any single engine to fight.

Instead they drove along the winding, semi-rural Glendonald Road, in an area known as Hazelwood North, sounding the sirens and air horns to warn people to evacuate.

The Country Fire Authority captain radioed in, asking what the situation was. A volunteer lieutenant, watching the fire approaching in the engine’s side mirror, told him, ‘You know that four-letter word we can’t use over the radio?’

It was ‘SHIT’, an acronym for ‘Send Help! It’s Terrible’. The lieutenant called for aircraft support and twenty fire engines. Soon a CFA helicopter started dropping water from the sky.

The fire rushed south-east and its speed created a narrow fire front, but over the afternoon the flanks grew to a length of fifteen kilometres. Firefighters concentrated on these walls of flames, water-bombing them, bulldozing in firebreaks, siphoning dam water and hosing it onto the blazes left after the free-burning front had moved through.

At around 6 pm that Saturday, the wind changed direction. This, Detective Bertoncello was to learn, was the pattern with all the most devastating Australian fires: the exsiccating north-westerly collided with a south-westerly buster gusting up to seventy kilometres an hour. The cold front fed the fire a new store of oxygen as it struck the blaze on its eastern side, turning this flank into a vast front, accelerating in tandem with the mountainous terrain. Sending burning firebrands kilometres ahead, the fire front charged north-east towards the tiny townships of Koornalla, Callignee, Callignee North and Callignee South.

The Heartbreak Hills, locals once called this steep, poor country. The south-eastern corner of the Strzeleckis was opened up to European settlement at the end of the nineteenth century. Within years of a great forest coming down, many settlers had retreated from wet and sunless winters, rabbits, weeds, and pitiful roads far from any markets. Around these collapsed communities a version of the bush grew back, and now the fire, enlivened by shearing, twisting, whirling winds, swept deep into the hills towards these reduced places. Later, Detective Bertoncello would meet tree-changers who’d lived here, but more often people who had been skint for generations, and for whom, as they struggled to feed their children, an insurance policy was no priority.

Earlier, at 1.45 pm, the CFA’s regional incident control centre had issued an urgent warning about an impending wind change, but there were disastrous problems with communication. Fifty tankers were using just one fire ground channel and one command channel. These channels had jammed from being inundated with calls, or there was static from the smoke. Radios and mobile phones had poor coverage in the hill country, delaying for hours messages sent by the paging system or SMS. Vital information did not pass up or down the chain of command. Those at the top didn’t know where fire engines had been deployed. Most brigades also had no idea about the timing or consequences of the wind change, and the public warnings issued to many of the communities directly in the fire’s path were inadequate. People had to rely on television or radio bulletins that were hours old, not realising that an inferno was tearing their way.

This is how those in the Churchill fire’s path described it to the Arson Squad detectives: ‘We all heard a noise start, and it was getting louder. It was like a jet engine. I’d never heard a noise like it, and then the penny dropped – it was the fire coming’; ‘We couldn’t see it but we could hear a sound like continuous thunder’; ‘a God-awful roar, deafening’; ‘like a 747 plane sitting on a tarmac revving its engines’; ‘like seven jumbos landing on the roof’; ‘like seventeen freight trains’; ‘this massive constant roar’; ‘the noise still haunts me. It got louder and louder and it became ear-splitting.’

‘It was like someone flicked a switch.’ Within moments, ‘the wind changed direction and it was just wild roaring’; ‘it was a hurricane coming through. Trees were losing branches, and they were crashing to the ground.’ Flocks of birds tore out, and wallabies and kangaroos fled the fire’s path. ‘As the front approached, everything started to shake . . . I was picked up off my feet and went about a metre and a half in the air.’

Soon ‘you couldn’t open your eyes properly, because of the smoke and ash’; ‘It got dark so fucking quickly it wasn’t funny’; ‘daylight, dark . . . boom’; ‘darker than night’; ‘at one point, I was only about fifty metres from the house, putting out a spot fire, and I could not see where the house was’; ‘the sky was black’; ‘and then, as the main fire front neared, it started getting lighter again, the colours started changing and it went from dusky yellow to a reddish colour’; ‘when the fire front actually arrived it was almost like a sunrise. The whole western sky, as far as one could see, was aflame.’

‘We were in an elevated area and could see over the tree tops, the flames just coming’; ‘moving very fast like someone had poured petrol on the ground’; ‘Within twenty or thirty seconds everything was just exploding all around us’; ‘It felt like it was raining fire’; ‘red snow’; ‘fine embers were blown by the wind everywhere like snowflakes’; ‘little sparks falling on my skin’.

‘The wind was moving in all possible directions and the embers started coming from everywhere . . . in all sizes and sometimes they were lumps of wood flying through the air: branches, leaves and smaller loose items’; ‘I was being pelted with burning gum nuts’; ‘It was basically hailing fire.’

‘The embers became like showers of flaming arrows the size of tennis balls hurtling everywhere and bursting into flames . . .’; ‘There were embers the size of dinner plates coming down’; ‘embers the size of pillows’; ‘as they were landing they were exploding up about seven feet in the air in flames’.

One man saw his beehives combust from the sheer heat. ‘Trees ignited from the ground up in one blast, like they were self-exploding.’ Burning birds fell from trees, igniting the ground where they landed. ‘Everything was on fire, plants, fence posts, tree stumps, wood chip mulch, the inflatable pool. I put water on it, but it melted slowly to nothing.’ The aluminium tray of a ute ‘ran in rivulets on the ground’.

‘It was so hot in the fire that the plastic breather in the middle of my face mask melted and the liquid plastic burnt my lips. I grabbed my sunglasses, and they actually squashed and melted in my hands.’ That night, this man slept upright to avoid the painful weight of his eyelids.

Inside houses, people took shelter while ‘[t]he heat coming through the front windows was amazing’; ‘I felt like I was inside a Coonara [a wood heater] looking out from within the fire’; ‘all I could see was red with little black sticks flying through the air’; ‘everything was blood red and you couldn’t get a depth perception of how far this blood red fell’; ‘It was like the air was red. There was no air in the air’; ‘It was like sucking on a hairdryer if you tried to take a breath’; ‘you could feel your skin melting from the heat of it’. From their houses, people watched fireballs coming towards them. One man went out into the inferno with a gun and shot his horses.

Another man admitted: ‘When I saw the fire, I was initially mesmerised by the sight of it. Our house had floor to ceiling windows and I had a full view of the flames, which, at a guess, would have been at least thirty metres high, moving horizontally, smacking into the side of the house and wrapping around it. It was as though the house had been picked up and thrown into a sea of fire . . . I noticed at about that time that our water pump had failed and it was then I realised we were in “Scenario Z” – or in other words, that we should not have been there.’

Windows started to crack, then curtains were ablaze; skylights melted and began to drip; fire came under doors, or through the subfloor or the ceiling. The bins and buckets and plastic containers that people had filled with water seemed absurd. One man went outside to check if it was safe and came back with his boots on fire. Someone else ran from the flames and realised his jeans had ignited. People stayed alive by breathing through wet fabric, or lying in dams or creek beds. A man waited in a fish pond with a tea towel over his head.

Another man and his son survived in a dam by ‘grabbing lily pads and putting them all around our faces and over our heads, armfuls of lily pads, even the green slime helped’: any hair or skin uncovered was singed. Kangaroos joined them in the water as the main front passed. ‘At one stage,’ this same man said, ‘I looked up and I could see a blanket of flame that went from one tree line to the next. It was like someone was waving an orange blanket over our heads . . . you could almost touch it.’

A brigade of firefighters caught in the eye of the firestorm scrambled into their truck and held a fire-retardant covering over themselves while two of them set their hoses to ‘fog spray’, creating a secondary layer of mist. One man holding a hose tried to breathe through his wet gloves. When he dared glimpse outside, ‘it was like looking into a furnace’, a hell, ‘hell would be better actually’. They heard the low-water alarm.

‘Mayday. Mayday. Mayday!’ the man in the driver’s seat called on the radio. ‘Full entrapment and under fierce attack.’

‘Understood,’ a voice came back. ‘There is nothing we can do for you.’

‘We understand.’

Someone asked, ‘Anyone go to church?’

‘Not fucken likely.’

They drove to the door of the house they’d just been defending and ran inside to collapse on the floor, weeping. None of them could understand how this place was still standing. But the fire – fickle, picky – left them to live.

The din of flame-engulfed buildings was a noise one woman later heard repeatedly in nightmares: ‘it sounded like they were screaming. It was so loud.’

Another group of firefighters broke into a house with an indoor pool and survived in the water with the pool’s rubber heating hoses alight and burning next to them, the house’s fire alarm blaring like a sick joke.

Two brothers, Colin Gibson, forty-nine, and David, eighteen months younger, had both been volunteers in country fire brigades. They’d met that afternoon at their elderly parents’ log cabin on Glendonald Road, a kilometre up the street from where the fire had been lit, to prepare its defence. They blocked off the house’s downpipes, filled the gutters with water, hosed down the walls, and left water-filled garbage bins and wet cushions on the verandah. Their family called continually to monitor the situation.

And then the phone calls went unanswered. In the middle of the night, David’s daughter avoided the police barricade by driving through the plantation’s service tracks. She veered up her grandparents’ driveway and assumed, in the dark, she’d taken a wrong turn. The house was missing, turned to rubble.

As the fire raced towards his farm in the steep hills of Jeeralang North, 77-year-old Erich Martin filled a wheelbarrow with precious possessions, which he was soon pushing outside as he and his wife, Trudi, eighty, fled their burning house. Then Erich noticed flames licking at the wheelbarrow. He moved it to their orchard, which was already blackened, and came back to find his wife on the ground, stretched out, he later told the police, as if ‘lying on the beach’. She looked so peaceful that at first he thought she was resting. She’d had a heart attack and died.

Eight kilometres east of the fire’s beginning, in Koornalla, Alan and Miros Jacobs, fifty-two and fifty, had spent the afternoon preparing to defend their house from fire. Alongside them was Luke, their 22-year-old son, who phoned a friend to ask for extra help. The friend, who was at an eighteenth birthday party recruited a group of others, the call to arms punctuating this endless summer day. Between bouts of fire preparation, the young friends cooled off in a swimming pool. Out of it, the air was scorching.

The Jacobs owned an equipment supplies business, and there was a forklift in the driveway. One friend lifted another up to see if he could spot flames, but there was just smoke, great clouds of it. When embers started drifting in, most of the helpers decided to leave. Then it was just the Jacobs and 21-year-old Nathan Charles, a part-time scaffolder, who felt it was right to stay. They fought the fire that soon arrived for as long as possible before seeking shelter in a homemade bunker under their house.

Around 6.30 pm, Charles phoned his father, a truck driver just returning to the Valley from an interstate job, who thought Charles sounded like he was saying goodbye. The call dropped out. The father dialled 000, waited on hold for an eternity, then drove to the Hazelwood North fire station and begged the CFA members on duty to help his son. They told him to ring a central number. He felt he would collapse and die himself right there. He rang his partner and said, ‘I think I’m about to bury my son.’

A text message soon arrived:

Dad im dead I love u

Further east, on Old Callignee Road, were another father and son. Alfred and Scott Frendo, fifty-eight and twenty-seven years old, gave up on the family home they had been trying to defend and fled in their cars. Their two vehicles were later found sitting on burnt steel rims, moored in ash, one and a half kilometres from their house, which remained undamaged.

The car of Martin Schultz, thirty-three, was found the following week by a Callignee farmer who was dragging his dead cattle along the scorched ground to a burial pit. The farmer had lost his house, animals, sheds, fences, pasture. All he’d saved were three drawers of photographs. He saw the steel frame of the car sticking out of a creek bed. Molten silver metal had flowed from the vehicle’s chassis and solidified on the ground. Schultz, who worked in a local brick factory, had been fleeing with his own photos, those of his son as a baby. He called his father-in-law, who was minding the boy, to say his car was on fire. Then the call dropped out.

In Callignee, fifteen kilometres from the inferno’s beginning, a man and a woman, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend survived the fire front by lying on the floor of their shaking house with wet towels over their faces. Between the waves of flames, the man had gone outside to extinguish spot fires around the house. During one of these sessions, a figure came towards him.

Thinking it was his neighbour, he called, ‘Good on you! You made it through.’

It was the neighbour’s father-in-law. ‘I’ve lost my wife and I’m burnt!’

The first man rushed and grabbed him, helping him onto the verandah. In the dark, the daughter could just make out the visitor’s smouldering clothes and she smelled burnt flesh. He told them his trousers were on fire. In fact he was wet from sheltering in the dam, but they took them off him anyway. He couldn’t feel his blistering legs.

The family put wet towels on a deckchair and helped him sit down. They filled up a wheelbarrow with water and put his feet in it, wrapped in more towels. The daughter dipped sponges into the wheelbarrow and wrung the liquid over his whole body.

‘My wife,’ he kept crying, ‘my wife!’

He told them he’d grasped her hand but wasn’t strong enough to hold on. It felt as though he were standing inside a volcano. The flames scorching him, his skin dripping from his body, he had to let her go.

Both the man’s hands were now badly burnt. One little finger had turned to jelly; it was translucent when he held it to the light. Carefully, the daughter took off his wedding band before the ring finger swelled further.

He told them how long he had been married and said, ‘Why couldn’t it have been me? I just want to hold her one more time.’

The ambulance wouldn’t come. It was too dangerous. Burning trees lay across the roads, houses were still alight.

The man began hallucinating. Every time he was given a drink of water he would tell his hosts to give his wife a drink as well. Soon he thought this family were members of his own. He glanced at nearby flare-ups, telling the flames to fuck off and leave them alone. The fire he was seeing was a creature, a demon. It was alive.

He began to scream with pain.

Three hours after his arrival, two CFA volunteers broke with orders and drove the hazardous roads that wound to the house. Outside it was pitch-black, but trees and sheds were still burning and in the firelight they made out an ash-covered car – keys in the ignition for the planned escape – connected to a horse float, the horses now dead in the stables.

They walked through a burnt garden, and on the verandah, under a melted laser light, a man sat shaking, draped in wet towels from head to toe. Using a fire blanket, they lifted and carried him to the back seat of their ute. They drove him away along roads walled by flames, passing the shells of burnt-out vehicles. A skeleton in one sat upright in the driver’s seat.

An ambulance was waiting for them at the Traralgon South fire station. The paramedics asked the man about his pain level and he answered, ‘A hundred out of ten.’ Later, he believed that he’d actually felt nothing, that the physical pain didn’t matter. They gave him morphine and the next thing he knew he’d woken a fortnight later in an orange hospital room.

By this point, the Arson Squad had arrested someone for lighting the fire but the news was difficult for Rodney Leatham to take in. He was still coming to after days and nights of strange dreams. He’d emerged from his coma knowing which part of these dreams was real. ‘The easiest thing in the world would have been to cuddle my wife . . .’ Detective Bertoncello heard him telling their children. ‘But no – I had to be stronger and I was.’