The ferocious Black Tuesday bushfire of January 11 left in its wake a trail of destruction rarely seen by the Lower Eyre Peninsula community. Some believe it to have been the most powerful ever to burn in South Australia.

By the time it finally died, so too had four children and five adults.

Killed were: Judy Griffith, 59, and her grandchildren, Star and Jack Borlase; Jodie Russell-Kay, 33, and her children, Zoe and Graham; father of three, Neil Richardson, 54; volunteer CFS fire-fighter, Trent Murnane, 30; and Port Lincoln High School teacher, Helen Castle.

More than 100 people were left injured; and the estimated cost of the property damage has ranged from $50 million to, now, as much as $200 million.

Lost, according to the most recent reports, were 83,000ha of farmland, forest and scrub, 92 homes, 130 vehicles, almost 50,000 head of livestock, and 1,500km of fencing.

The fire – accidentally ignited by a car exhaust, reports suggest – started in Wangary on the western side of the peninsula on Monday afternoon, January 10. CFS crews responded, and soon had the blaze contained.

Overnight, however, it broke out of its containment lines and, with the aid of high wind speeds, began burning furiously east toward Wanilla.

By the early afternoon of Black Tuesday, the fire had raged right across to the peninsula’s eastern side, and taken human life, homes and/or livestock in Wanilla, North Shields, Poonindie, White Flat and Louth Bay.

When it was over, media reports rightly told the stories of farmers, and other community members, devastated by the inferno and, in some cases, left with nothing. The press also covered the invaluable work of fire-fighters and paramedics.

And in the weeks that followed came stories not only of community volunteers, but also farmers who, from properties hundreds of kilometres away, had pitched in to help their “neighbours”.

But surprisingly little emerged about the police contribution; and, certainly, no one told anything of officers’ personal losses, and subsequent devastation. The press coverage, essentially, kept a civilian focus.

That left the public to see the police as it usually does in such crises: defenders and protectors with no personal stake in whatever life-threatening mission they might undertake.

So the Police Journal dug a little deeper and found that cops had lost loved ones, homes, livestock and precious personal items, just as the rest of the community had.

As the worst disaster of his life loomed on Black Tuesday morning, Ian Ryan began the day on his farm property near Wanilla without a care. He had just begun a four-day break from work, and seemed set to enjoy some treasured family time.

His daughter and son-in-law, Kylee and Michael Walsh – both Whyalla police officers – had come for a few days’ visit with their two children. Other friends were to join them that evening for a barbecue, and to chat about a holiday they had all planned to take together this month.

And Ryan also had the luxury of a mind untroubled by any thought of his 80-acre farm failing to prosper. He had just received $2,000 in cash for his “best hay crop ever”, and had full bails of wool ready to take to the market. This last year had been the best of his four-plus on the property.

Now, delighted to be ahead financially, he thought the future looked “absolutely rosy”.

“I couldn’t have been happier,” he says. “I was thinking: ‘There’s nothing much I need to do this year. I’m going to sit back, relax, look forward to the houseboat trip, and this year is going to be terrific’.”

Sadly, the raging Eyre Peninsula bushfire would, in an afternoon, wipe out virtually everything standing on Ryan’s property: his four-bedroom home, granny flat, workshop, shearing shed, tractor, stocks of hay, tools and “huge” chook run. It would leave him and his family with nothing but their car and the clothes on their backs.

Ryan had known of the supposedly contained fire that had ignited the previous day at Wangary, but held no concerns about it. So, by 10am on Black Tuesday, he and his wife, Christine, drove into Port Lincoln to buy a new back door knob.

As they stopped at the Cummins turn-off on their way, Ryan could see a fire in the distance. Still unconcerned, however, he and Christine continued on into Port Lincoln.

At home, they had left their three foster sons, the Walsh four, and Ryan’s father-in-law, Jack Knight, who lived in the granny flat.

As they shopped for the door knob, Ryan received a “frantic” phone call from Kylee. “The fire’s coming, the fire’s coming!” she shouted. “We’ve got to get out!”

Ryan immediately headed back home, but thought of his property as heavily grazed and therefore not a great fire risk. He still harboured fears, however, for his 90 sheep, horses and vast range of pets.

By the time he got back to the Cummins turn-off, Ryan realized he was too late; that the fire had already cut a swathe of destruction through his area. He could not get through thick smoke and flames to his own property and, so, just 21/2kms from it, stopped in at a friend’s home.

Christine drove back to Port Lincoln, as had the rest of the family after passing her and Ryan on the Flinders Highway.

Meanwhile, Ryan got an instant impression of the depth of the tragedy when he looked at his mate’s family. “You could see the expressions on their faces were of just pure horror,” he says.

“I gave him a hand in case the fire went through his place. Fortunately, the wind changed and it was saved. It (the fire) headed in a different direction.”

Then, in his mate’s car, Ryan headed for his own place. After he passed through a roadblock and broke through the smoke, he could see a nearby home “absolutely surrounded by gum trees” and not even scorched.

He had seen the emotional young woman owner of the home at the roadblock, and so returned momentarily to let her know it had survived.

Back on his desperate bid to make it to his own home, Ryan began to think he would find everything intact. He considered he had done all he could to clear enough ground as a precaution against the peril of bushfire.

“Then, of course, as I drove closer, I saw there was just a heap of rubble,” he laments. “I realized everything had gone. There was nothing left.

“I was devastated, but I had to get on with it. I thought of my animals. Were my animals all right?”

Among the many pets to which Ryan was devoted were birds, ponies, kangaroos, wombats, ferrets, turtles and even turkeys. As he ventured onto his property, the first creature he saw was one of his horses – burnt to death.

To his great relief, he found two of his ponies still alive but with much of their skin burnt away. Ryan, with the help of some of his family, got them urgently to a Port Lincoln vet, who thought he might yet have to destroy them. But, astoundingly, both survived.

With his ponies in care, Ryan charged back to his property, where he could see his sheep – somehow alive and wandering in his top paddock. Thinking “they must be all right”, he immediately cleaned out their ash-filled trough, which he refilled with water.

Finally, he approached the sheep in the hope that he could bring them down from the paddock for a life-saving drink. “When I got close,” he says, “I realized they were far too far gone.

“I don’t know how they were still alive. It was really quite shocking: they were burnt that severely. Their faces were swollen and they must have been in absolute agony.

“I saw a couple of our other pets dead, too. We had a couple of pet kangaroos that we raised from little joeys.”

Ryan had lost his guns in the fire, and so borrowed some, as well as ammunition, from a friend. Deeply pained, he spent the afternoon shooting his surviving but fire-tortured sheep.

“I felt so much for the animals,” he says. “It had to be done. They were just in too much pain. I was so glad when I’d shot the last one, and thought: ‘Well, at least their suffering’s over’.”

Of Ryan’s beloved pet wombats, only one survived the inferno which, in its fury, penetrated the helpless animals’ burrows. Ryan heard the survivor “scratching and coughing” and began a frenzied dig to retrieve her.

Eventually, he could see the animal but only from behind. Ryan, at first glance, thought she “seemed okay”.

“I couldn’t see any singe marks, and thought: ‘Thank goodness for that’,” he says. “When I finally managed to get her out, she turned around and it was quite shocking. She was very burnt.

“There was no hair on the front of her, and her eyes were just melted and closed together. I had to put her down. That cut me up.”

Later, as night began to fall, Ryan went to search for one of his two Murray Grey cows among still burning trees. He never found the animal, and had to make his way back to clear ground through an obstacle course of fiery trees that were now plunging to earth.

But, to the relief of the Ryans, their husband and father had at least not been at home when the deathly fire raged through their property. They knew well how he would have reacted.

“I would have had to get my animals to a safer place,” he says. “They (my family) said they were afraid that, if I was there, they might have found me dead.”

Of the loss of his home, Ryan took a somewhat philosophical view. It had gone, and he accepted that “there was nothing much I could do about that”. He saw the response to his animals as his first priority throughout Black Tuesday and the next day.

But Ryan was intensely saddened, rather than bravely philosophical, over the loss of precious items inside his home. Gone were photos and videos of his children growing into young adults.

Also lost were photos of his grandmother and family, and tools and boomerangs that had belonged to his late father. “My father never had much,” he says, “but what he had was given to me.

“Every day, you go through (what you had) and think: ‘Oh, my God, that’s gone, too’.”

Ryan even lost the $2,000 cash he had received for his hay. The money, along with his wallet, burned in a bedside cabinet.

Naturally, Ryan has laboured, but never buckled, under a great mental strain since Black Tuesday. He has shed more tears than he “can poke a stick at”, and felt the entire range of human emotions.

And with no home of his own, he and his family have moved into his father-in-law’s Port Lincoln house, where they live in somewhat cramped conditions.

In all he had experienced in his 50 years, nothing had prepared him for Black Tuesday, or its emotionally-taxing fallout. Lost amid a mixture of thoughts and dreams in the first nights after the disaster, he barely slept.

Even eating became near impossible, as his stomach churned and brought him close to vomiting.

“But Ian was just marvellous under the pressure,” says Police Association president, Peter Alexander, who toured Ryan’s property with him just days after Black Tuesday.

“He must have been hurting so much, but he was so positive in terms of how it could have been worse. He kept referring to the loss of life, and the fact that his family was safe.”

Still, as a long-time proponent of counselling, Ryan decided to take his own advice. He talked to a counsellor and says the experience helped.

“Sleep is still a bit of an issue, because your mind won’t let you (sleep),” he says. “You’re still going over things – over and over again like a darn recording. It’s not quite as bad as it was, but it’s still there.

“You also think: ‘Well, how close was it? How in the hell could I have ever gotten through this if I’d not only lost everything I had, but also my family?’ I don’t know how anybody could have coped with that.

“You try not to think about it, but then you find yourself absolutely deep back into it again. I had to occupy myself to keep my sanity. When you’re working, trying to do something else, that gives you a bit of relief.”

But, for Ryan, relief also came in other forms, which left him overwhelmed. On a Sunday morning, soon after the fire, 20-odd of his workmates turned up at his property armed with chainsaws to begin a working bee. They set about chopping up burnt trees and generally cleaning up rubble, and worked through to 7pm.

They also took up a collection at their station to buy Ryan a chainsaw and generator. And from the Police Association came a cheque for $1,500, which helped buy him a tractor and post-hole digger.

“The damage and loss for Ian and his family was just extraordinary, so the Police Association was very keen to assist him,” says Peter Alexander. “Also, I was very impressed by the commitment of other Port Lincoln police officers to assist him.

“When I went out to the property, I saw off-duty police officers there providing help, which gives you a certain pride in the job. There was a great sense of camaraderie.”

All the generosity left Ryan to wonder how he would ever repay his benefactors.

“What do you do for people like that?” he asks. “My colleagues were absolutely phenomenal. They moved mountains. I’m just so grateful for what they’ve done. It was just too big a task for one person to try to clean up.”

Ryan also marvelled at the community and broader public support: truckloads of donated clothing, cookware, stoves, electrical items and toys, which filled a Port Lincoln warehouse. To people left with nothing, as were the Ryans, these were invaluable donations.

Support for Ryan even came from police as far away as Mt Isa, Queensland. Officers he did not know sent him a cheque for $450 from their sports fund. “These people had just got together and decided to do something,” says Ryan, “and that just blew me out.”

The Western Australia Police Union became the most recent contributor with a cheque for $1,000.

Now, determined to start over rather than pack up and leave his desolate property, Ryan and his family have to face the long process of rebuilding.

His insurance on his house, shearing shed, main workshop, tractor, fencing and tools will help cover the losses he estimates to be worth more than $300,000. He concedes, however, that he was “well under-insured”, particularly for his extensive range of tools.

And the cover on his fencing, he believes, would only be enough “if we did it ourselves”.

“We weren’t insured for all our hay, the wool, the sheep and the stock,” he says. “You can only insure for so much...”

Meanwhile, Ryan hopes that, with Black Tuesday, the worst tragedy of his life has come and gone; that circumstances never again play so disastrously against him, as he continues to live in bushfire-prone country.

“To go through this again...” he ponders. “Am I that strong? I don’t know.”

Kylee and Michael Walsh and their fear-frozen children tried to escape the raging Black Tuesday bushfire by car. But, the moment they turned onto the Tod Highway from the soon-to-be-wiped-out Ryan property, a red glowing fireball flashed over their Toyota Camry.

To country-raised Walsh, this fire was like no other she had ever seen before. It appeared just as an intense glow, with no visible flames. Even now, Walsh finds it near impossible to describe.

It seemed to her as if this glowing destroyer was leaping from burning forest trees across the road, over the car, and toward trees at the front of her father’s place.

As her husband, Michael, “just drove”, Walsh – sitting atop two suitcases on the front seat of the car – turned to see her children looking like statues in the back.

“This was nothing at all like a normal fire,” she says. “I imagine a fire to be flames coming off the ground and the firemen standing there hosing them. This was over the top of the car.”

But, as fast as that car would take them, Walsh and her family charged through the fireball, black smoke and flying ash toward the Flinders Highway.

Only 500 metres into their desperate highway escape, the four suddenly found themselves in totally clear surroundings. Walsh could now see her grandfather, Jack Knight – who had evacuated just 30 seconds earlier – parked on the side of the road.

Shaken, the Walshes pulled up to speak with him. He said he had seen flames leap across the road, before the beam of their car headlights emerged from the fog-like smoke.

Walsh and her family had survived the closest call of their lives. And the frightening episode had come in such stark contrast to the way in which Walsh and her husband’s day began – with a quiet morning walk through Wanilla Forest.

It was from this forest that, just a few hours later, the glowing fireball would emerge, and threaten to consume them. But, on their walk, they sensed nothing of the approaching fire.

Walsh was first to return to the home of her parents, Ian and Christine Ryan, with whom she and Michael had planned to enjoy a few days’ visit. Michael, before his return, took a slightly longer walk.

By mid-morning, the house was full, except for Ryan and his wife, who had driven into Port Lincoln. In their absence, a neighbour called in to ask if anyone knew anything of a fire in the area, as smoke had started to fill the skies to the west.

Michael and Knight took a drive to look for any signs of impending danger, while Walsh went indoors with the children.

The men soon returned with news that a fire was indeed burning around 15km away, near the Coffin Bay turn-off. But neither of them rated it as a concern.

Soon, another caller was at the front door. This time it was a stranger – with an urgent warning. “The fire’s coming,” he said. “It has just jumped into the forest. Go now. Save your family.”

Walsh overheard the man’s remarks, which left her feeling unnerved. “When I heard them,” she says, “I thought: ‘Right, we’re just going’. I wasn’t even going to consider staying.

“I shouted to the kids: ‘Get the cat!’ because we had our animals there. Michael started saying: ‘Pack! Pack the stuff!’ And I said: ‘No, I’m not packing. Let’s just go’.”

Walsh ran out to Knight’s granny flat, where she told her grandfather of the stranger’s warning.

Knight would also speak with Port Lincoln police officers, Stuart McLean and Nellie Hirschausen. They, too, called in – after the stranger – to make sure the Ryan household knew of the fast approaching fire.

Back in the house, Michael quickly grabbed two suitcases, which he threw onto the front seat of the Camry. Walsh snatched the keys to one of her parents’ cars, a Hyundai Excel, in the hope that she might save it.

She again ran outside, where Michael and their six- and five-year-old children, Luke and Darci, were now in the Camry and ready to leave. Also ready to leave, with Knight in his Commodore, were the three Ryan foster sons.

Walsh got into the Hyundai, just as Michael called out: “Where’s the dog?” The family dog, a miniature fox terrier called Benny, was one of the animals the Walshes had brought with them on their visit.

So, with their son, both Walsh parents charged back to the house to search for the imperilled creature. At the back door, they discovered that the power had gone out, but still screamed for Benny to come to them.

For just a moment, he appeared in a hallway, but then suddenly ran away. Walsh decided she had to go, and so left him as she dashed back to her parents’ car.

And, if the family’s drama had not already played out with Hollywood movie-like tension, it would now – the Hyundai would not start.

Just then, Michael again yelled: “Where’s the dog?” but also urged his wife to hurry. Walsh told him to start the Camry, while she tried one last time to find the dog. Michael insisted that she leave him and get in the car. Walsh, however, kept running toward the back door, thinking: “If the dog’s not there, I’m just going to have to go.”

She made it to the door, beyond which she would not have to search: standing on the other side of it was Benny. Walsh immediately picked him up and turned to run back to the Camry.

Even before she took a step, however, she started to gag on the smoke now beginning to engulf the property. She could also see “embers and thick bits of ash everywhere”.

Nonetheless, she got back to the car and clambered into the front passenger seat, on top of the suitcases, after she had thrown Benny in the back.

But, now, in more Hollywood-like drama, the Walshes’ car would not start! With no one inclined just then to abandon it and run, Michael tried repeatedly to start the engine. His efforts, however, proved fruitless.

The family would later discover that a Toyota safety feature had kept the Camry from starting.

“We found out from the Toyota dealer that it’s got this very fine sensor,” says Walsh. “If there’s smoke or dust in the air, it (the sensor) won’t allow the car to start. That is so it (smoke or dust) doesn’t get in the motor.”

Knowing nothing of the mechanism thwarting his attempts to start the car, Michael persisted. He tried over and over again until, by some miracle, the engine started.

Now, the family headed for the highway, amid flying ash and choking black smoke along the Ryan property’s 100m driveway. In the distance across the road, in the forest, Walsh could see that deadly glow.

“I knew it wasn’t at the actual road yet,” she says. “You could see it wasn’t far back (however). When we first saw it, I’d say it was 100m or so away.”

If the Walshes were to make their courageous charge toward the safety of clear ground, it had to be now. It would be a monumental risk to all four of their lives, but circumstances had left them no alternative. The fireball would burn through that 100m distance, and be upon them, in seconds.

“I just screamed at Michael: ‘Go, go, go!’ ” says Walsh.

“We didn’t realize how quickly it was coming. The glow was probably coming just as fast towards us as we were towards it. We just happened to meet at the road.

“If we had gone down there 10 or 15 seconds later, it would have been on Mum and Dad’s property, and we would have had a lot more to drive through. I think we just got there at the right time.”

So, through merciful warnings and good timing, the Walshes managed not to become four more Black Tuesday statistics. As they stood with Knight and looked back at the glowing fire they had driven through, its enormity struck them.

“You could actually see how big it was,” says Walsh. “You could see really high black smoke, and just the red glow. You couldn’t even see the property.”

The Walsh family headed off with Knight along the Flinders Highway to his place in Port Lincoln. On the way, they met the homeward-bound Ryans, to whom Walsh had made an urgent phone call about the fire.

After a few moments’ conversation, chiefly about the welfare of the animals, each group continued on its way. Walsh got to Knight’s place, where she waited for news from her parents. Her mother finally called to say: “Everything has gone.”

Walsh went back to the ravaged property with Michael early in the evening. “The worst thing was when you turned onto the road and could see there was just nothing there,” she says. “It was just like sand dunes, and hard to picture that that was the place.

“I didn’t want to see any of the animals dead or in pain. I couldn’t bear to look at any of that, so (after just 10 minutes) I went back into town.”

Michael stayed back to help his father-in-law with the grim task of shooting the horrifically burnt sheep.

The next day, Walsh had to explain to her children – who lost their bikes, walkman and other items – how the fire had destroyed their grandparents’ property and animals. They wanted to see how the place looked, so Walsh took them back there just two days after Black Tuesday.

“As soon as we turned onto the road,” she says, “my daughter saw the burnt trees, and started screaming: ‘I don’t want to come here’. She cried the whole time, saying: ‘I want to go home’. Even a week-and-a-half later, she didn’t want to go out there.”

Naturally, Walsh struggled to sleep on the night that followed the day’s devastation. She thought of a chilling range of scenarios that did not happen but might have.

“You’re lying down,” she says, “thinking: ‘What if that person (the stranger) hadn’t come and told us to go? We would have been stuck there. What if it had happened when we were (walking) in the forest? We would never have been able to outrun it’. That night, all the ‘what-ifs’ started to race through my mind.

“Michael did actually ask me: ‘If the dog wasn’t at the back door, would you have gone in even though I was calling you?’ I said: ‘I don’t know’.

“I probably would have gone in but, if I’d done that, they (Michael and the children) would have had to wait that extra 15 seconds that we had to get out. I don’t even want to think about it. That’s the scariest thing: ‘What if this happened?’”

As she reflects on the harrowing experience now, Walsh accepts that she and her husband and children might indeed have lost their lives. She insists that, without warning from the stranger and two police officers, “we wouldn’t have had time to get out”.

“Even if we’d known the fire was getting out of control a bit, we probably would have gone earlier,” she says. “We just didn’t have any (early) warning.”

With her four-year-old daughter Alice in her arms, Susan Van Den Broek had to flee into the ocean to escape the Black Tuesday bushfire. She waded out to waist-deep water, in which she and Alice sat holding a woollen rug over their heads to protect them from searing heat.

Susan heard others – “screaming and in absolute panic” – rush down to the water from the Port Lincoln Caravan Park, through which she had just driven to get access to the beach.

“You couldn’t see them,” she says, “because visibility was, maybe, a metre. But you could hear the roar of the fire. It was like a jumbo jet hovering above your head as it came down through the park.

“It came first from over our left and, then, a little bit later, it came from the other side; and that was when a bit of the park was completely demolished from lots of explosions. (Gas) bottles and tyres were exploding, and that was pretty frightening.

“Your nose is running because of the dust and ash, and your eyes are going. It was very uncomfortable physically.

“It felt like we were down there for a long time, but it was only 15 minutes, half an hour.”

Greg Van Den Broek had to remain separated from his wife and daughter, as they made their escape and endured the discomfort of their ocean refuge. He and a colleague had left for Cummins on an enquiry in the morning. In his absence, the fire had begun to burn ferociously toward his hometown of North Shields.

So, when he and Detective George Fenwick tried to get to his (Van Den Broek’s) home and, ultimately, back to Port Lincoln, the blaze stopped them out near the local airport.

Earlier, when Van Den Broek left Port Lincoln for Cummins, he had believed, based on police radio traffic, that the fire was contained. By the time he and Fenwick had reached Cummins, however, news over the airwaves was that the fire had broken out of its containment and reached Wanilla.

Concerned but still composed, Van Den Broek, at around noon, rang Susan, who had taken Alice, and their six-year-old son, Charlie, to a children’s party in Port Lincoln. He warned her that the fire was heading toward their home, and said she should return there to pack some belongings.

Susan had, on her way to the party, already noticed the Port Lincoln sky to be an ominous-looking brown. After her husband’s phone call, she left Charlie at the party and headed straight back home with Alice. On the way, day seemed to turn into night, as the sky continued to darken.

Susan arrived back at the family’s near 100-year-old granite stone home to find it without power. Although not then concerned, she acted quickly to pack some clothes, bedding and medication.

Meanwhile, Van Den Broek learned from another radio transmission that the fire had reached Chapman Rd – a locale just 3km over a hill behind his home. He had not truly believed the fire would reach North Shields when he suggested his wife go home, but now thought: “Shit, it really is going to get there!”

He rang Susan again to urge her to leave. She remembers him saying: “You’ve got 10 minutes – it’s at Chapman Rd!”

Susan grabbed Alice, jumped in her car and drove to her mother’s place on the property next door. There, she told her mother she was “going to get out”.

“Then,” says Susan, “we looked up, and it (the fire) was at the top of the hills, so we took off to go to the jetty.

“Because flames were leaping across the road in front of us, we couldn’t get to the jetty, so we had to go into the caravan park (directly across the road).”

Even in such obvious danger, Susan remained calm enough to photograph the fire. “I stopped next to a building where it was fairly clear, turned around, and took it through the back of the car – and there’s this big sheet of orange (fire) coming,” she recalls.

“We drove straight ahead, towards the beach, and were the first ones down there. My auntie was with me, and we ran down into the water.”

And, crouched in the sea protecting herself and Alice with the rug, Susan somehow managed to take another phone call from Van Den Broek. She told him that, despite the intense heat, dust, wind and noise, she was safe in the water with Alice.

To her great relief, the fire soon passed. The moment it had, she felt “dead keen” to get back to her home. But, before she could find out if the fire had left her home standing, she would have to see whether it had destroyed her car.

Fortunately, after she made her way back from the water to the caravan park, Susan found the car still in intact. She drove straight home with Alice to “see if we’ve still got a house”.

At the same time, the might of the fire continued to force Van Den Broek and Fenwick north, away from North Shields. So, in their own perilous situation, they decided to take on a role that would save others: to block southbound Lincoln Highway traffic and direct it away from the advancing fire.

Susan, meanwhile, had arrived home. “As I was driving up,” she says, “the trees along the driveway were still alight, and all the fence posts were still alight.

“There were still lots of flames and a big heap of hay rolls still really going. Different trees in the yard were still very much alight.”

The family home had come under threat from fires to a rear pergola, front and side verandah posts, and iron roofing.

But, in extraordinary acts of selflessness, three good Samaritans had – in the Van Den Broeks’ absence – saved the dwelling.

“A guy we know, Muir McFarlane, went through a roadblock with fire-fighting equipment, came up our driveway, and started putting out spot fires,” says Van Den Broek. “That saved the house; there’s no doubt about that.”

Two others, former CFS volunteer, Jeff Rayson, and his teenaged helper, joined McFarlane in the fire-fighting effort. They had already extinguished a shed fire on the next-door property of Susan’s parents.

Susan was able to give Van Den Broek the good news of the house when he called her again at around 1pm. Before then, he felt certain his home had been lost.

“I was hearing on the radio of houses going, cars pranging and people being found burnt,” he says. “I thought: ‘My house has gone, for sure. I’m going to have to build a new house’.”

Says Susan of her first moments inside: “I couldn’t see down the end of the passage because it was just so filled with smoke, and the noise of the smoke alarm going off was very eerie.

“Alice was shaking in shock, saying: ‘I’m cold, Mummy, I’m cold’. I popped her in the hot shower to get her clean. I thought: ‘I’ve got to get her out of these wet clothes and get her warm. I did that and changed my clothes.”

Susan took Alice next door to stay with her mother, before she began the task of fighting spot fires the Black Tuesday blaze had left all over the Van Den Broek’s 11-acre property.

She continued to battle those fires throughout the evening; and, as phone communication had failed, she would not speak with Van Den Broek again, until he got home late that night.

Soon after 8pm, police began to remove some roadblocks. Sadly, Susan saw the freshly opened highways as an invitation to some slow-driving voyeurs.

“That appalled me,” she says. “I remember standing there getting angry, thinking: ‘Get off the road’.

“There were fire trucks and ambulances still tearing up and down the highway, trying to get water to where they needed it, and get people to hospital.”

Van Den Broek’s vital roadblock work had, by the end of the night, taken him to Tumby Bay. But, after he finally scored a relief at around 11pm, he headed straight home.

He had expected that emotion might just overtake him when he got to see his wife, but their reunion played out calmly.

“When I came home, the house was lit up like a Christmas tree,” he says, “all the lights were on. Sue was running around putting out spot fires.

“I could see the house was all right, and that was all I was ever concerned about, because I knew Sue and the kids were all right. But I hadn’t known the condition of the house.”

Susan, now with her husband’s help, continued to douse spot fires around the property until 3am, and half-hourly through the rest of the morning. Van Den Broek considered that “everything was fine”, despite all the obvious fire damage.

“I wasn’t too concerned at all,” he says. “I still reckon the damage was minor. It could have been really bad.”

But others might have considered the damage as somewhat more than “minor”. Lost were 30 stud rams, a shed, hay rolls, trees and fencing. Substantially damaged were two rainwater tanks, the pergola, roofing, water pipes and children’s play equipment. The Van Den Broek losses came to around $40,000 worth.

For the trauma they endured, the family, luckily, did not pay a high emotional price.

Says Van Den Broek: “I felt a lot of guilt from our place not burning down. I knew it (the guilt) was misplaced, but I felt it when I heard about other places burning down. I felt guilt because we were one of the lucky ones.

“And, for probably a week, I was pretty hard on myself about sending Sue back home. I wouldn’t send her back to the house again. It’s just crazy to come back and risk a life to save property.”

When her husband Paul rushed to her aid in a hot Yeelanna phone box on Black Tuesday, Janelle Carman had already collapsed and could not even speak. Only a moment before, the worst news of her life had come down the phone line from her mother, Diane.

Her only niece and nephew, little Star and Jack Borlase, aged just three and two, were dead.

The ferocious Lower Eyre Peninsula fire had consumed them, and their 59-year-old maternal grandmother, Judy Griffith. She had tried to drive them away from the fire-threatened Borlase family farm at Wanilla to safer ground.

That failed bid for safety had left Carman’s brother and sister-in-law, Darren and Natalie Borlase, to suffer the agonizing loss of their only children.

“As soon as I got that news,” says Carman, “I can’t even put into words what I felt. It was just incredible.

“Paul had been sitting in the car with the air conditioner going and the engine running, and something must have caught his eye. He looked at me and flew out of the car.

“He said: ‘What’s going on, what’s going on?!’ I couldn’t talk to him, and I had dropped the phone. He said: ‘What’s happened? Has the house gone?’ I couldn’t tell him.

“Eventually, after a couple of minutes, I got it out. He was wonderful. He said: ‘Come on, we’ve got to go. Just get in the car (and) we’ll go’.”

The Carmans got straight back on the road and headed for the 1,400-acre Borlase property, where the fire had already destroyed Darren and Natalie’s home. And, only on that solemn journey would Carman, the doting aunt, have time to grieve over the children she had loved so intensely.

Never again would she delight in playing with them, as she had on her four or five visits home each year. The kite-flying the three had enjoyed together, as well as fun with the children’s paint sets, would be no more. And never again would Carman see Star and Jack “climbing all over Paul” who, to their great joy, used to lift them up to the ceiling.

Both the children had participated in Carman’s life, too. They had watched her graduate from Fort Largs in 2003, and played their parts in her wedding party when she married in early October last year – the last time she ever saw them. Her last contact with them was over the phone on Christmas Day, just two-and-a-half weeks before Black Tuesday.

Carman, who told Star she would see her in a few weeks with some Christmas presents, has a happy, vivid memory of her conversation with the outgoing youngster. All Star wanted to know was whether her aunt would be bringing her police car with her.

When she said she could not bring it, Star put the phone down and walked away. “She didn’t want to talk to me because I wasn’t bringing a police car for her,” says Carman, with a chuckle.

The Christmas presents, with she had hoped to make the children’s eyes sparkle, now lie, still wrapped, in a cupboard in the Carman home.

Carman’s first knowledge of the fire threat to her family had come late in the morning, as she worked a day shift at Port Augusta. Her mother, “quite hysterical”, rang her just before midday. “You’ve got to come now!” she cried. “The fire’s coming for our house!”

The news instantly distressed Carman who, only four months earlier, had suffered the loss of her father. She knew that, if the fire destroyed the family home, his ashes and possessions would be lost, too.

Carman broke away early from work, and set out on the drive to Wanilla with her husband. He was not about to let his wife head into a bushfire alone.

By around 4pm, they had made it to Tumby Bay but, for the blocked roads, could go no further. So, they turned back, headed toward Lipson and “sort of weaved our way through the hills”.

At several stops along the way, Carman continued to call her mother for updates on the fire, and its ever-increasing danger to her family. At her Yeelanna stop came the shattering news of the three deaths.

But Carman bravely pushed on with her husband, and the pair eventually got through to Edilillie. There, CFS officers would not allow them through – until Carman explained the tragic deaths, and her desperation to reach her family.

The officers urged the pair to be careful. “We got maybe three or four kilometres down the road,” says Carman, “and the fire was all over the road, so we had to put good sense ahead of the ultimate goal.

“We turned around and went back to Cummins and had to go all the way over to and down the western side of the coast.”

But that long way around finally brought the pair near to Wanilla, where Carman saw the devastating force with which the fire had burned through the countryside.

“We approached Wanilla Forest,” she says, “and it was still on fire. Everything was black, and it was just absorbing. What you were looking at was just incredible – the ferociousness of what had occurred in the hours leading up to when we got there.”

Beyond the burning forest, the Carmans soon drove into the Borlase property, where they met and spoke momentarily with Darren and Natalie. The grief-stricken parents, who had only the clothes on their bodies left, then went to hospital.

Carman saw the car in which the bodies of Star and Jack lay dead with their grandmother. Nearby was another car in which Darren’s father-in-law, Wayne Griffith, had tried to flee, along with his wife and grandchildren. He survived, but with extensive burns.

Carman went to look at the cars, around which the police had by then established a crime scene. She stopped at the horrific site for only moments.

Now, the time Carman had afforded herself to grieve over the children on the journey to Wanilla was over. “Once I’d got to the farm,” she says, “I had to be strong for my mum and my brother. I had to sort of take the lead.

“It was a case of: ‘All right, we’ve got to deal with the situation at hand’.

“We didn’t have time at that instant to really let sink in what had occurred. We (Paul and my uncle and me) had to shoot stock and put out spot fires. The stock was really severely burnt. We had to put them out of their misery.”

Carman and the others laboured through until 11:30pm, when all were left with soot-covered bodies and blistered feet. And, for the Carmans, the soul-deadening work continued through to the end of the next day, when they left to return to Port Augusta.

But, back at work, on Thursday morning, January 13, “things really hit home” for Carman. Away from the scene of the deaths and destruction, she became “quite stunned” by all that had happened. Her superiors arranged to bring her annual leave forward, and she returned to the family farm that afternoon.

So, by Friday, she had resumed her clean-up role around the property. “It was just a matter of pulling trees down that had been burnt and were close to falling over, killing or moving stock, tidying things up, and organizing insurance assessors,” she explains.

“From (Black) Tuesday until about Friday morning, we probably had about two meals and four hours’ sleep. We were up late trying to deal with the incident, and then you’re up early.

“If you lie in bed and don’t do anything, your thoughts go into overdrive; you think too much and get upset.”

By the next Monday, January 17, Darren and Natalie had returned from Adelaide, where they had spent the week by the side of a hospitalized Wayne Griffith. The Carmans helped them sift through the ash and rubble left from their burnt-out home.

They found some broken toys and other items that had belonged to Star and Jack. “You would remember moments through the toys, and say: ‘Oh, I remember playing with the kids with this’,” says Carman.

“It wasn’t a sad moment. Going through where their bedrooms were, and trying to find jewellery and that sort of thing, was a reflective moment.”

Carman, concerned not to crowd her grieving brother and sister-in-law, spent just a few hours with them on that Monday afternoon. She could offer only a sister’s embrace as consolation.

“We’re a family of not a big amount of words,” she says, “and a hug says 1,000 words. So there were a lot of hugs and a few tears, as we reflected on things and looked at photographs.”

At that time, however, mental rather than photographic images had become a powerful source of horror to Carman. In her mind, for 10-odd days after Black Tuesday, she could see Star and Jack in the car, aghast at the approaching fire and clawing at the windows.

The images sometimes left her crying herself to sleep. And they never even began to fade until she spent time speaking with Darren and Natalie, and the children’s grandfather, Wayne.

Sadly, more pain was to come with a combined funeral for Star and Jack, and their grandmother, Judy. The family had put the farewell off for a month, until Wayne had recovered enough to attend it.

Carman had farewelled her father only five months earlier, but found the children’s Port Lincoln church service tougher to endure. Gazing at the tiny white coffins, she lamented the sad waste of Star and Jack’s lives.

And, while she strongly supported the month-long delay of the funeral, Carman found it “very difficult to wait for that little bit of closure”.

Her regret now is that she remains away from her family. “I’ve come back here and have work to come to for a bit of normality,” she says. “My family’s back there, and when they wake up in the mornings (the aftermath) is still there for them.

“You look at photographs of when it was all green and the all the trees and crops were upstanding. Now it’s just a dirt ball. There are no trees; all the topsoil is blowing away because there’s been no rain. Everything’s black and dirty.

“You look at it and say: ‘Where do you start? Where do you pick up from here?’ It’s pretty tough.

“I feel a little bit useless, because I’m not really there to support them (the family) emotionally and physically.

“If, in six months, my brother rang and said: ‘I really need you emotionally’, I’d put in a transfer and we’d head to Port Lincoln.”

Meanwhile, Carman uses simple busyness to keep her mind free of painful thoughts and images. But she still wonders why Star and Jack had to die. “What have we done to the world for all this to happen?” she asks rhetorically. “Who is in control? What else can happen?”

Around her home, Carman has many photos of her beloved Star and Jack. When she talks about the children, she naturally feels sad. But that, she insists, does not lead to total despair.

“As much as you get sad,” she says, “you remember all the good and funny things – and all the memories.”

The Black Tuesday story continues in the next issue, as other officers tell of the dangerous tasks they had to undertake in the field.