Christine Ryan escaped the Ash Wednesday inferno that engulfed Macedon and Riddells Creek in February 1983 with her daughter, then husband and a few lucky pets. Her beloved horses and her home were not so fortunate. Forty years on, Christine writes about the trauma that still haunts many who survived that horrific natural distaster.
I don’t know how to say this or to describe how I feel but I will do the best I can. You see I lost myself 40 years ago and that happy young girl never came back. I have searched for her, I have pretended and I often get a glimpse of her, but Ash Wednesday, February 16 1983, took her away. Trauma is real, PTSD is real and should be taken very seriously. People just do not get over things. It is not like feeling anxious, you can’t just pick yourself up.
I remember some of the events of that day; the heat of the train engines roaring on the railway line as they overheated and I remember being told there was a fire out Trentham way but that we were safe.
By the time I realised that we weren’t it was nearly too late.
I found out that the latest roaring was the actual fire itself. I ran next door to tell my friends Issie and Stan and my then husband Ian raced over to his mate Mark’s to tell them to get out.
The fire trucks had been sent to other areas so they weren’t there to help us, give us information or tell us to get out. The power was off so the sirens wouldn’t even work. Stan worked for the forestry commission but he hadn’t been told. Issie told me off because the clothes I was wearing could melt so I changed. Then we saw a big light coming over us. Issie said ’Thank God it’s a helicopter we are safe’ but it was a fire ball that went straight over us and landed in Mt Macedon.
Our horses were over at Mark’s place but we felt they were better off in the paddock because we had just been through a horrendous drought. We were allowed to use 60 litres of water per day per person that’s how bad it was so no grass. Horses would be safer there, wrong again but really if we had let them out people could have been killed on the road trying to avoid them so really no choice.
I got my daughter Cassie out, thank God. She was obviously my number one priority. Without her I would not have survived. I must admit I stupidly put her in a friend’s car because I assumed that as a male he was better able to cope, that she would be safer with him because that was what we were brought up to believe. His wife came with me. I was actually coping better than him I believe.
As I drove down Mt Macedon Road there was what appeared to be a 40 foot wall of flame heading towards us. We just got out in time. I had to drive nearly right into it to turn left to get out, and I do remember shutting my eyes because a car was heading straight towards us and I knew if I went off the road to avoid him we would be dead so I just hoped that he would be able to avoid me.
The roaring hadn’t stopped. Even now these memories are pretty intense and my brain bounces from one drama to another. I went to Riddells Creek to a friend’s place and Ian joined me there. He had stayed behind to help our neighbour and then left on his motorbike, how silly was that? Julie and I took the cars and went to her in-laws’ house in Sunbury. I believe we were one of the last cars out of Macedon and then again out of Riddell.
I was told the next day that Riddell had burnt down and that my husband and his mate who stayed behind were most likely dead. Thankfully emergency services got it wrong as the fire was heading straight for Riddell the wind changed direction. I was told that if not for a previous fire on Mt Macedon the fire could have easily kept going to the NSW border and beyond and there would have been no stopping it.
I didn’t sleep. I ended up just sitting in my car listening to the radio. Ian and Kerard went up to the house to check and then to Mark’s looking for the horses and obviously hoping to find houses in tact but what they found was just total devastation and dead animals. I got out with my daughter Cassie’s cat, my old dog and 2 budgies. I had a very small amount of our clothing and Cassie’s teddy bear that her godfather Peter gave her.
Going to Macedon and seeing the devastation was horrific. A chimney and rubble. A town decimated and don’t forget there were no mobile phones so I didn’t even know if my brother Stephen was alive. We found each other on day two when we were both at the shire offices registering as alive and unemployed as his nursery had burnt down. I will never forget how it felt to give him that hug and be hugged.
I feel a total affinity with refugees and I would assume you are starting to see why. I did not get caught up in a war, but I did go through intense trauma, again not comparable to theirs but at the end of the day most people get to go home. That is normally where they feel safe, theoretically where they are loved and cared for, their safe haven. When that is taken away, again I can’t describe it.
How do you parent a 4 year old who has been through this? I tried but I don’t think I was very successful. She would probably agree.
The following days were so hard, but I remember going through the phone book looking for relatives of Issie’s to find her and Mum telling me she was on the phone.We just cried and cried.
I cried a lot last week because it comes back to me a lot. People wanting to see what happened, tourists asking survivors questions like ’where is the car the guy died in?’, which houses etc.
There were also looters. One lot tried to steal a kid’s bike, it was all he had left. They were caught and I believe punished accordingly.
One man got to his burnt out home after putting his wife into psychiatric care. His kids I think were left with grandparents and he gets to his burnt out place to find a man with a metal detector going through the rubble. The guy said it was ok because the stumps were smouldering so he put them out.
I found a man driving into Mark’s, luckily I didn’t go in because if I had seen my horses I know I would not have coped. His excuse was that he was taking his kids up to see what had happened, they were in car seats. I told him to go in the paddock and let them play with my dead mare. It went downhill from there.
I didn’t and don’t expect people to understand as they didn’t go through it, but don’t compare what my child is going through to yours because he or she saw ash land in your back yard in Sunbury. Don’t yell at me for your power bills going up because SEC was found responsible and don’t send up shirts for men to wear when you have taken all the buttons off. Don’t as a doctor tell me to go home and get my dog put down because it would be less traumatic for my daughter than if she just passed from old age. And just don’t put a picture of my dead mare on the front page of a national newspaper and then just brush it off as ’oh well that’s the sort of stuff that sells papers’.
That picture was then used on PR posters for the CFA which traumatised me so badly when I was in hospital, very sick and saw it on a wall in a hallway right outside the ladies toilets.
There were so many wonderful people doing so much to help us and I do so appreciate everything they did. They kept us functioning when we couldn’t do it for ourselves. We made such strong friendships and we forged on together. But now when I see a national disaster I think of all the people who suffered and many who died of cancer after Ash Wednesday – fires and fumes do that. I think of all the mental health issues these people will have, refugees come from horrific lives and we expect them to just fit in and do it our way, but without the mental health help that they need. We need to ask people what we can do to help instead of giving them that damaged shirt.
