Even seasoned West Coast crime-scene examiner, Marty Gornall, could scarcely believe what he saw when he arrived at his first job on Black Tuesday afternoon. On Settlers Rd near Wanilla, the dead bodies of volunteer CFS fire-fighter, Trent Murnane, 30, and Cockaleechie farmer, Neil Richardson, 54, were still on fire.

Half-metre-high flames were leaping out of one side of Richardson’s body, as it lay face-up with its skin peeled away and arms stretched out skyward.

Just 20 metres away, the body of Murnane lay burning in the back of his utility, from where he had tried to fight the raging inferno with a water pump. Port Lincoln constable, Kelly Lavington, who joined Gornall at the scene, would later say Murnane’s body looked like a burnt tree trunk that was “all ridged and charcoaled”.

The officers moved quickly to douse the burning bodies with a police car fire extinguisher, which proved “absolutely useless”. And, with the GRN not working for them, they could not call for a fire truck to attend and help.

The pair simply waited, for “what seemed an eternity”, in the hope that a fire truck might approach. Finally, one did, but it roared right past them. Gornall, a 48-year-old husband and father of three, clambered into his police car and chased it down.

The truck returned to the gruesome scene, and the officers got the equipment they so desperately needed. “They (the fire-fighters in the truck) handed me the hose,” says Gornall. “So, just a bit of drizzle, and we were able to put the bodies out.”

Gornall’s first knowledge of the fire had come on the previous Monday evening, as he flew back into Port Lincoln from a ballistics course. He had seen a pall of smoke over the town, but knew nothing of its origins until he spoke to Port Lincoln OC, Senior Sergeant Hank Swalue, the next morning.

Swalue told him of the scrub fire that had broken out, but been contained, at Wangary, on the western side of the Eyre Peninsula. He also told Gornall to drive out there to “find the seat (of the fire) and what had happened”.

As the then unsuspecting crime-scene man neared Wangary, he could see huge plumes of smoke rising into the air. After he arrived in the town, he called in to the local sports centre, in which he saw much “running around” among CFS personnel.

He sought information from the forward commander, who responded: “I think we’ve lost it.” Then, only moments later, he exclaimed: “We’ve totally lost it!”

The fire, which the CFS had brought under control the previous day, had, overnight, broken out of its containment lines. With the aid of strong winds, it was now burning furiously east toward Wanilla.

Gornall relayed the news of the now out-of-control fire back to Port Lincoln police station by radio and, then, set about warning residents of the crisis. Driving from one to another, he urged them to make a choice: either flee or stay, but be ready.

At 1:10pm, Gornall got word by radio of the Settlers Rd deaths, the first two of nine on Black Tuesday. Lavington, too, received word, before the two officers headed toward the scene.

But simply driving there would be a dangerous, confronting task. Flames at one point shot out across the road and forced the pair to retreat by half a kilometre.

“The flames were shocking, and it was blowing an absolute gale,” says Gornall. “I had sunglasses on and I was still getting crap in my eyes. It was just blinding.”

Gornall and 36-year-old Lavington eventually got to the death site, where they faced and overcame the difficulty of dousing the burning bodies. With that achieved, Gornall began his crime-scene examination.

But as he made his observations, drew plans and took photos, he heard that the fire had begun to sweep through and devastate North Shields, where he owned a tenanted home.

“That was quite chilling,” he says. “You’re doing the crime scene listening and knowing that North Shields was going up in flames.”

Although he knew, and feared, that he might lose his house, Gornall somehow remained focussed on his work. And, even before he had finished, word of another ghastly multiple fatality – at which he would have to ply his craft – came to him by radio.

Little Star and Jack Borlase, aged just three and two, and their grandmother, Judy Griffith, 59, had died trying to escape the fire by car on Borlase Rd, Wanilla.

So, on the fire-ravaged landscape, much more horror awaited Gornall. But, before he headed off to the site of his next grisly examination, he at least found out what had happened to his North Shields house.

“I called up on air,” he explains, “and said: ‘Could someone put me out of my misery? How’s my house?’

“It was singed all down one side and had a couple of windows blown in. We lost our garden, a shed and a rainwater tank. The house next door was razed, totally flattened. We were really lucky.”

Gornall moved on to the site of the children and grandmother’s deaths, leaving his colleague, Lavington, to guard the Murnane-Richardson scene. She would remain there for a total of 11 hours, until investigators relieved her at 12:30 the next morning.

For Lavington, the day had begun with a morning view of the “eerie” smoke-filled sky over Port Lincoln. And, as she sat through a mid-morning hairdresser’s appointment, another sign of the looming disaster emerged.

The hairdresser’s husband had called his wife with great concern that their property might be vulnerable. That call prompted Lavington – not due to start work until 3pm – to see if her station knew of any change in the status of the previous day’s fire.

But, just after 10am, when she rang work, no one there had yet received advice that the fire had broken out of its containment. Two hours later, however, Lavington emerged from her hair appointment into a day that looked like night.

“It was worse,” she says. “Lincoln was just covered in grey ash and smoke. It was very eerie. It just felt like it was going to be a bad day.”

At midday, she called into Port Lincoln police station, where Swalue told her of the out-of-control fire and asked if she had her uniform with her. As she did not, she charged home to get it, returned to the station and started work immediately.

Later, at the horrific scene where she would spend so long as a guard, she made some observations beyond just the clinical ones people expect of police officers. The outstretched arms of Richardson, for example, had struck her as looking as if the father of three had, in his last moments, “reached out to God”.

And, in something of an observation of the human condition, she noticed how quickly she and Gornall had adapted to such a hideous scene of death. “When Marty was still there,” she says, “we were walking up and down doing our investigations.

“We were saying: ‘Isn’t it amazing how adaptable we are?’ because we’d been there only about 10 minutes and it was just like it was every-day (work). Whether that’s because we’re coppers, or because the human body just adapts so quickly…”

Before Gornall left, he and Lavington had covered Murnane and Richardson with body bags. But the bag covering Richardson rarely stayed in place, with the dead man’s outstretched arms and continuing strong winds. Time after time, Lavington had to re-cover him.

“I’m out there with smoke and wind,” she says, “and this body bag kept blowing away. I just kept thinking this was really awful. I was coping all right with it, but when it got dark I put the car dome lights on. Because I was there on my own, I must admit it was a bit freaky.”

Meanwhile, at 4:30pm on Borlase Rd, Gornall found the skeletal remains of Star and Jack and their grandmother, Judy, in the car in which they had perished. As he went about his second demanding examination, the children’s parents, Darren and Natalie Borlase, arrived.

Gornall stepped toward them and tried to dissuade Natalie from approaching the car. “I said: ‘Please, you don’t want to go there’, and I tried to explain why,” he says. “She amazed me, because she was extremely resilient.

“She said: ‘I’m the mother of those babies in the car and I’ve already been there. I need to go again’. Of course, you can’t stop her, and her husband was there, too.

“He didn’t look, and I don’t blame him. If they were my kids in the car, I wouldn’t want to look either. She (Natalie) was a very strong lady.”

Gornall went back to his examination but, before he had finished, a call came for him to attend yet another scene of human incineration. And, at this one, he would find more child victims.

Zoe Russell-Kay, 11, her brother, Graham, 13, and their mother, Jody, 33, had had died trying to escape the fire at Poonindie. The car in which they were travelling ran off the road amid thick smoke before it smashed into a gum tree.

“I was just thinking: ‘It’s surreal’,” says Gornall. “You just don’t believe that this could possibly happen in little old Port Lincoln. You just don’t expect it in this area.”

Gornall arrived at the Poonindie death scene at 6:30pm, when he began his third gruelling examination in four-and-a-half hours. But investigators, whom he calls “the cavalry”, soon arrived from Adelaide and Whyalla and relieved him.

Lavington, whose relief was then not due for hours, continued her guard duty at Borlase Rd. Smoke and dust, through which she could hardly see, hung in the air around her, as flying ash came to stick to her skin. She would take days to get it out of her ears.

A newcomer to Port Lincoln, she had harboured some fear of the fire turning on her as she guarded the scene. But Gornall and CFS officers, present when she arrived in the afternoon, had reassured her.

“I’d never been in that situation,” she says. “But all the trees around us were totally burned out, and once the CFS were adamant I was safe, I just got rid of those fears and got on with the job.

“The ironic thing was that I did bushfire training when I was at (my previous post) Port Adelaide, and I just remembered thinking: ‘I’m never going to need this’.”

But a small yet “scary” fire did ignite in a nearby paddock at about 11pm. When it started to get bigger and glow brighter, a CFS crew turned up to extinguish it.

As the evening had worn on, Lavington had come to see the best of a community under siege. Passing locals, many of whom had lost all they had owned, stopped in their cars simply to ask if she was all right.

One man, who had indeed “lost everything”, stopped to ask Lavington if she needed food or water. “I said: ‘No, don’t worry about me’,” she remembers. “Then, half an hour later, he came back with food, a Baker’s Delight bun, and water for me.

“And at about 10 o’clock, a lady came through, gave me some water and said: ‘I’ll come back later’. I said: ‘Look, don’t worry about it. I’m fine’. At midnight, she came back with food and water, and coffee and chocolates from her daughters.

“And she sat with me for half an hour until the investigators arrived.”

All night, locals had continued to come and go along Settlers Rd, which Lavington found impractical to block. Many asked her who the two dead men were. Although near certain of their identities, she rightly told no one.

Some fleeing residents asked her about the progress of the fire, and if they could take certain routes safely. Lavington could only give them the information she had heard on her radio.

Late in the evening, Gornall ventured back out into the field to run the investigators through the death scenes. He stayed on the job until 2am the next day.

But he would be back at the scenes again only hours later. His task then was to help recover the corpses and take part in a DVI (disaster victim identification), as had SA police officers in the Bali bombings investigation.

“I was allocated Jody Russell-Kay’s body for the DVI exercise,” says Gornall. “She was a big girl, but the meaty skeleton I pulled out of the car was that of a petite little girl. That was all that was left of her.

“The forearms were missing, and beyond the knees were gone. They were just bones at the bottom of the calves. They had sort of sunken into the seat, too. Trying to pull them out of the springs was a difficult exercise for me.

“I’ve dealt with burns victims in the past, but never tried to pull them out of a car.”

Gornall insists that his work, amid the gut-wrenching scenes of death on Black Tuesday, left him without any emotional damage. His vast, character-hardening experience, in equally horrific settings, enabled him to take that terrible day’s work in his stride.

But he also attributes his mental and emotional strength to “the typical copper culture”, in which police simply do not allow their work, no matter how repugnant, to affect them.

He concedes, however, that post-Black Tuesday newspaper pictures he saw of Star and Jack Borlase, as happy children, stirred his emotions.

“That made my eyes misty,” he says.

“I looked at that and (thought of) what I saw in the back of the car.

“You think: ‘Oh, God…’ It brings it home to you that they’re real people, (because) I guess you just treat them as non-entities; just a job to do, and you do it.”

Whenever a Black Tuesday emotion does surface, Gornall talks to his wife, Joanne, whom he calls “brilliant” for her support. “She lets me talk to her (about that day) and that’s good,” he says, “because you can offload a lot of what you’re thinking and feeling.”

Lavington, in her days after the fire, managed only a few hours of restless sleep each night. She continued to feel as if her body had remained charged with adrenaline.

By the next week she was “back to normal”, but could still see pictures of the dead in her mind. She suspects those images of Black Tuesday will remain with her for a long time, if not permanently.

On the next Sunday after the disaster, Lavington read an article about Trent Murnane. She felt confronted by it, and suddenly thought of the dead man as “a real person”.

Later that day with her cousin, who had lost 80 goats and alpacas to the fire, Lavington went to church – a place she rarely attended. In the church newsletter, she read some lines that encouraged parishioners to pray for Murnane’s family.

“It mentioned Trent by name, and that was it,” she says, “I just lost it. I was absolutely sobbing for about 10 minutes. And my cousin had lost her goats and alpacas, so that set her off as well.

“We were sitting there just holding each other and crying. But that was good because, after that, I felt a lot better.”

Only a week before the fire, Lavington had thought about seeking a transfer back to Adelaide at the end of the year. But her experience of the good will of the locals who had cared for her on Black Tuesday night made her rethink her options.

“That (fire),” she says, “made me think: ‘Wow, this is a really good community’.”