Forged with Flames
FORGED WITH FLAMES
ANN FOGARTY
Ann Fogarty was born in Lancashire, England in 1950 and graduated as a nursery nurse in 1968. After marrying an Australian in 1970 she came to Australia under the “Ten Pound Pom” scheme, and settled in Berwick before moving to Upper Beaconsfield 3 years later. She worked in the kindergarten in Beaconsfield for 5 years. On 16th February in 1983, exactly 30 years ago, she was caught up in the Ash Wednesday bushfires that cut great swathes of devastation through Victoria and South Australia. She was hit by a massive fireball while protecting her two young daughters from the firestorm raging out of control through the bushland surrounding their house, sustaining serious burns to 85% of her body. She was the only survivor of the Ash Wednesday fires with this degree of trauma. Her daughters escaped without injury.
She is now the proud mother of two adult daughters and four grandchildren, and lives on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.
ANNE CRAWFORD
Anne Crawford is a Victorian author and journalist. She worked as a feature writer on
The Age
and
The Sunday Age
for many years. Anne researched a documentary in South Africa about the historic post-apartheid elections in 1994, and acted as a volunteer in Nepal for three months documenting the work of the Fred Hollows Foundation in words and photos. She is a published and exhibited photographer. Anne has previously co-authored two books:
Shadow of a Girl
(Penguin 1995) and
Doctor Hugh, My Life with Animals
(Allen & Unwin 2012); and contributed to
Through Other Eyes
(Pan Macmillan 2002). She lives in Gippsland and is a volunteer firefighter with the Country Fire Authority of Victoria.
FORGED WITH FLAMES
Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford
Published by Wild Dingo Press
Melbourne Australia
First published by Wild Dingo Press 2013.
Text copyright © Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Cover and internal design: Grant Slaney, MAPG
Printed in Australia by Ligare
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publications Data
Fogarty, Ann, 1950-
Forged with flames / Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford.
ISBN: 9780987178510 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9780987178565 (ebook: epub)
ISBN: 9780987178558 (ebook: mobi)
Fogarty, Ann, 1950-
BritishâAustraliaâBiography.
Ash Wednesday bushfires, 1983.
Life-change eventsâVictoria.
Women disaster victimsâVictoriaâBiography.
Other Authors/Contributors:
Crawford, Anne, 1960-
304.894042
Sources:
John Milligan, J 1992,
Ash Wednesday In Upper Beaconsfield
,
Victoria Country Fire Authority, Melbourne
âAsh Wednesday',
The Age
, 1983
âAsh Wednesday',
The Herald and Weekly Times
, 1983
âThe Firefighters of Bygully Barring', Mt Martha Fire Brigade
Australian Bureau of Meteorology; CFA;
Upper Beaconsfield Association websites
For Sarah and Rachel.
My two wonderful reasons for fighting so hard.
CONTENTS
26. HAMPTON REHABILITATION HOSPITAL
28. WE USED TO DO THIS, DIDN'T WE?
31. THE POWER OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
37. THE BEST LESSON FOR SURVIVAL
39. THE GIRL IN THE CORNER REVEALED
44. NIL DESPERANDUM NEVER DESPAIR
FOREWORD
A
nn Fogarty is a quite remarkable lady. I am very proud to have been asked by Ann to write a foreword to her account of her journey through suffering to ultimate triumph over adversity. Her story is a poignant one of her experiences of the devastating and life-threatening burns she sustained on Ash Wednesday in 1983, only to be followed some years later by breast cancer, necessitating a mastectomy. Both of these dreadful events have had a profound effect on her body image, yet she has handled her lot in life with incredible moral fortitude.
We learn from Ann's intimate story that, as a child, adolescent and adult, she had great determination. This has been her strength. Throughout the account of her story, she has had the courage to tell us about all the various doubts and uncertainties that have beset her in life. But, because of her determination, she has overcome these. She mentions some wonderful people who have helped her along the way. I feel that they have helped her because she is a lady whom one cannot help wanting to help.
I commend this very special book to whomever dips into it. It is a good read that will give the reader faith in the worthiness of the human condition.
John Masterton AM
Former Head of Burns Unit
Alfred Hospital
Melbourne
Australia
PROLOGUE
I
sometimes feel as if my life, my past, is tucked away in boxes stored in a dark cupboard.
In one corner, there is the box that was my childhood.
There is the tinkling music box that was my marriage.
Some of the boxes have been prised open. Others, in the deep recesses of memory, will remain closed forever.
I lift the lid on one brightly wrapped box every now and then, to rising butterflies and the gurgling, infectious laughter of babies. My spirit soars.
But one box sits ever waiting to spring open, an evil jack-in-the-box with a menacing mouth and flaming, flaming red hair.
1
ASH WEDNESDAY
A
sh Wednesday, the 16th February, 1983. A day on which a bushfire of deadly proportions would sweep across South Australia and Victoria, and change many lives forever. In the tiny Victorian town of Upper Beaconsfield, twenty-one people would lose their lives, one hundred and eighty-six houses would be lost, and many people would be injured. I would be one of these.
The fire front that would consume Upper Beaconsfield would form a blazing wall sixteen kilometres long and two kilometres wide. Flames would shoot over one hundred metres high, propelled by a wind strong enough to flatten radiata pine trees with trunks a metre in diameter. Fireballs, likened to those seen in nuclear explosions, would surge ahead of the main fire front, igniting everything in their path. One of those fireballs would hit me.
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, a baking hot blast of air overwhelmed me as soon as I opened the back door. It was only seven o'clock in the morning and the north wind had long since
sapped the newness out of the day. It was going to be a stinker. I blinked grit from one eye and looked out over the backyard. The lawn, dun and patchy, was all but lifeless after months of drought. The children's swing twisted and turned from chain to chain in the wind. The gum trees at the bottom of our block lurched from the crowns down, and the bush beyond the rear boundaryâhectares of uncleared landâseemed agitated, too.
I had lived in Australia for enough summers to know that a hot north wind meant a gruelling day ahead. All the north winds in England, where I'd grown up, were the oppositeâarctic, blowing off the steely grey waters of Scotland. Either way, a north wind is rarely playful. It blows with intent.
A run of warm days had led up to the morning and I felt worn out after sleeping fitfully through the night. As limp as old celery. I groaned to myself as I anticipated another sweltering day to be endured until the cool change predicted for the evening. The cheerful clatter of our two young girls at breakfast snapped me out of it. Sarah, who was six, and Rachel, four years old, looked so gorgeous sitting at the kitchen table in their matching pyjamas with their short, straight blonde hair and dark almond eyes. Their mother's opinion, of course, but I'm sure anyone else would have thought it, too. I looked at the dimples on Rachel's hands as she spooned cereal into her mouth, and onto her chin, and smiled. I mustn't let Sarah go to school without getting her fruit drink out of the freezer, I reminded myself as I packed their lunch boxes. Such were the moments that formed the contented rhythm of my life.
Terry, my Australian husband of twelve years, came into the kitchen ready for work, as neat as ever in his shirt and tie, looking serious. Terry often looked serious. Sometimes he
needed a good poke in the ribs. We kissed each other goodbye as we always did, although I didn't call the girls out to the front veranda to wave him off, as was our tradition; it was too hot to be standing outside with the door open.
Despite the heat, it felt like any other week day.
That Wednesday, however, had all the earmarks of what I now recognise as the worst kind of bushfire day: a desiccating northerly wind, dangerously low humidity and, after ten months of drought, a vast carpet of tinder-dry fuel which lay waiting to ignite. The sky had glowed eerily orange the Tuesday before as tonnes of red topsoil blown from inland Victoria blotted out the sun. That had felt strange and foreboding, darkening the land like a biblical omen. It didn't occur to me that if the wind could propel a wall of dust five hundred kilometres wide and one hundred deep, then it could drive fires over a huge swathe of the state.
I didn't know much about bushfires then or have any real sense of the devastation they could bring; bushfires weren't part of my consciousness the way they are for those born in Australia. I'd grown up in a small English village where fires were confined to hearths in old stone houses or well-contained bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night. The idea that the bush could turn deadly never occurred to me. I'd come to love the muted beauty of the Australian bush with its silvery green eucalyptus drapes and, having been raised in Lancashire among rows of dark stone houses, the idea that you could be surrounded by space and by gum trees in your own backyard was enchanting.
We lived on St Georges Road, a narrow stretch of tarmac that poked suburbia into the thickly forested hills. Dotted around
us in what the locals called Upper Beac was an assortment of young families, retirees, people who worked locally and some who commuted, and the occasional oddball recluse; friendly people, all drawn together by a love of the bush. St Georges Road was a dead-end then and that, too, seemed to bind us into a community. you were never far from the next cup of tea in Upper Beaconsfield. Or nature. Rosellas flashed past our back window. Kookaburras perched, waiting to swoop on any tasty pickings in the grass clippings, perhaps an unfortunate frog, as Terry mowed the lawn. The occasional wallaby would bob through the foliage.