Road to nowhere

We've been given the chance to visit Kinglake. Rather than blog, here's the dispatch I have just sent over for From Our Own Correspondent.

It is easy to imagine how the road to Kinglake used to be a route of happy escape. As you climb the tree-lined mountain, you can see Australia's second city, Melbourne, an hour to the south, with its thrusting skyscrapers and outward-creeping suburbs.

No wonder this, the prettiest of towns, was such a popular destination for Melbournian weekenders, and people looking to get away from the pressures of the city.

But last Saturday, this road became the scene of a flight of terror, as residents tried to get away - as the trees which make it look so beautiful suddenly made it so deadly.

A wildfire was advancing up the valley with the roar of a jet engine and the swiftness of a runaway train. Mountain-people who'd had years to think of their fire plans had just minutes to put them into action.

Normally in bushfires, most people decide to stay and defend their properties because they're not normally destroyed by the wall of flames but are endangered instead by the shower of red-hot embers.

Armed with a hose, and perched on the roof, you can often save your home.

But last weekend was anything but normal. A once-in-a-century drought combined with a once-in-a-century heatwave to produce the most deadly wildfires that modern Australia has ever seen.

We see the flames every southern summer, but typically measure them in the acres of forest land they have destroyed rather than by the lives they have claimed.

So now the road to Kinglake is lined with blackened forestland, and burned out family cars.

One of the awful aspects of the Victorian wildfires is the number of people killed as they tried to flee the flames - their vehicles overtaken by the fast-moving fire fronts. Close to the town is the wreckage of two cars that crashed into each other. Think of the panic which must have gripped the drivers.

Across the garden state of Victoria, the initial death toll was 14. Fourteen - a figure I remember thinking must be wrong. Surely I was hearing of heat- rather than fire-related deaths, of elderly people who'd succumbed to the overwhelming temperatures - another sad but not entirely unexpected feature of sweltering summer days.

Now, as I write, we are measuring this tragedy in hundreds of lost lives. It is Australia's worst peace-time disaster.

But this isn't just a natural disaster. It is true that most of the fires were the product of the fury of nature. But at least one of the six major blazes last weekend was started deliberately by a firebug - that deceptively friendly Australian aphorism for an arsonist.

Mass murder is how the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described this crime, speaking with a furious anger which caught the mood of his nation.

In that awful moment of realisation, with his house about to be engulfed by flames, John Pyle grabbed the photographs from the wall.

The school photos of the four children he and his wife had raised in their house of 30 years, a dream home set atop the rolling hills. Then he dashed out of the door, leapt in his car and raced down the valley.

On Monday, we found him sifting through the cindery remains, in clothes borrowed from his elderly father. In his mind, he carried a mental picture of his home and he gave me a tour of it.

The master bedroom was here, he said pointing at the wreckage, the lounge room over there. But save for the twisted metal of what used to be a bath tub and kitchen sink, his home was unrecognisable.

His wife's jewellery had melted in the heat, so, too, the coins from all over the world he had collected as a child. All the trappings of a long and abundant life had been destroyed in a matter of seconds.

John, you could instantly tell, is normally a gentle man, but he summoned the tough resilience which is part of the Australian character. Come back in a year, he said, and I will show you a rebuilt house.

The love of home, and the love of the land and - further down the road - the love of country.

In his driveway, on a flagpole that towered over a burned-out car, one of John's neighbours had hoisted the Australia colours, billowing now in the very winds which had fanned those life-devouring flames.

This has been a very Australian disaster, for the country's south-east corner is thought to be the most fire-prone landscape on the planet.

Such is its beauty, and so many are its charms, that residents would not contemplate living anywhere else. But they will continue to do so noting the cautionary advice of government scientists: that the extreme conditions which contributed to the disaster appear set to become a more regular part of their lives.

This has long been the world's driest continent, and the drier it gets the more dangerous it will become. The road from Kinglake, you fear, might be treacherous again.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?