It’s been 40 years since the Ash Wednesday bushfires swept across South Australia and Victoria, killing 75 people and livestock in the thousands. The fires destroyed homes, businesses and farms. But amongst the death and destruction there were also remarkable stories of survival, as RICK BAYNE found out.
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Robert Neal doesn’t know how many kilometres his 1979 canary yellow Toyota HiLux ute has done because it resets to zero after every 99,999.
But he does know that the few kilometres he drove it from the Hopkins River at Framlingham on February 16, 1983 saved his life.
The car is no longer registered but still starts every time Robert fires it up for a job around his farm at Ballangeich.
Although he has more modern vehicles at his disposal, he’s going to keep this lucky charm for as long as it runs.
Robert was one of hundreds of south-west Victorian dairy farmers impacted by the Ash Wednesday bushfires.
He was one of the lucky ones. He emerged unscathed and his family farm and the property he was sharefarming at the time missed the worst of the blaze.
However, he came face-to-face with the devastating fire and only survived thanks to a few split-second decisions.
Today, Robert and his wife Sharyn live on the Ballangeich farm started by his parents. Their son Paul now runs the business in a sharefarming agreement
Robert and Sharyn married in 1980 and went sharefarming with the Jellie brothers near the East Framlingham Golf Course.
They were there when the fire started, about 5km from their current farm on the Hopkins Highway.
Robert saw the smoke and got on his motorbike and rode over to see what was going on. A local CFA volunteer, he jumped on a private truck with a pump on it.
“We tried to catch it,” he said.
“We were fighting on the right-hand side and it went past us on the left-hand side. It was gone. You couldn’t achieve anything with one truck.”
He has many clear recollections of the day.
“I remember little whirly-winds of fire. I think it was cow manure getting picked up and tossed hundreds of metres down the paddock. As soon as it hit, the ground was on fire and everything was burning.
“It kept doing that — kept getting ahead of itself.”
The private tanker ran out of water so Robert got back on his bike and returned to the sharefarm to put the cows in the dairy.
“I thought if it came our way, the cows had no hope out in the paddock,” he said.
Sharyn, who was seven months pregnant, took their son Matthew, 2, and went to her parents at Mortlake, packing the cat, Robert’s Beatles records and video recorder.
“We’d only bought the VHS recorder and it was probably the most expensive thing we had in the house,” Robert said.
The fire went across the corner of the family farm and while it hadn’t spread too wide, the local volunteers could see it was getting away.
Robert decided to go to the Hopkins River to help with a quick-fill pump near the East Framlingham bridge.
In a life-saving decision, he took the ute and left his bike at home.
“There were milk tankers coming down to the river taking off water for trucks and there were fire trucks coming left, right and centre to get water.
“I can still see the flames across the top of the bank and then the wind changed and it went silent for a little while and then all of a sudden there was an almighty roar.
“There were six or eight of us down by the river and we knew we were in strife because of the change of wind.”
Some of the volunteers jumped into the river, but Robert couldn’t swim. Instead, he followed a milk tanker driver who ran for his truck.
“I ran for my ute. By the time I got to it, the grass was on fire all around it,” he said.
“I can remember shutting the door and thinking I need to get out of here quickly.
“I thought should I go back and get back in the river but the tanker was going up the hill so I followed him. We went around to a dairy on Ellerslie Rd. There were flames around me as I’m driving.
“I was lucky I took the ute — I don’t know whether I would have been calm enough to kick-start a motorbike with flames all around me.”
The tanker driver went the right way and the fire was blown further south.
Those who jumped into the river escaped unharmed, except for sore eyes.
“It went straight across the top of the river; there were parts around where the pump was sitting that didn’t even get burnt,” Robert said.
The fire stopped about 150 metres from the boundary of the sharefarm.
Robert spent the next few days pumping water.
“We were putting out spot fires for the next fortnight.
“I can remember standing over the East Framlingham bridge one night and there were little red glows as far as you could see. The stumps and trees smouldered for days.”
His cows were safe in the dairy. The power was off for about a week but the farm owners brought in a stationary motor so the cows could be milked.
“We couldn’t cool the milk but the factories were good and collected it whether it was hot or cold,” Robert said.
About a week after Ash Wednesday, Robert drove to Naringal and Nullawarre where he got to understand the full scope of the fire.
“I never saw a paper for the week and didn’t realise the scale of it. When you’re fighting fires there are a lot of rumours.
“Sharyn’s parents were hosting an exchange student from Finland. Her parents called because they’d heard that from Melbourne to Adelaide was on fire.“
Robert said there was no stopping the inferno.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if we had a thousand fire trucks. You couldn’t have done any more. It was just going that quick.”
The scare never dented his love of farming.
“I never considered getting off the land, but it made me wary about having holidays around February-March. I wasn’t game to leave the property.”
The worst thing was seeing the dead stock, but Robert also remembers the community spirit.
“Any disaster brings good out of people.”
They shifted as planned to Scotts Creek a few months after the fire, before returning to Ballangeich in 1992, initially as sharefarmers but later purchasing the property with help from Robert’s parents.
The farm has since expanded to more than 323ha and they milk about 375 Jersey cows.
“We cut all our own silage and hay and don’t buy much stuff, just some grain so we’re pretty self-sufficient,” Robert said.
Paul took over management in April when Robert, 64, “retired”, although he still helps out with relief milking and silage and feeding work around the farm.
Robert is also curator of the Purnim cricket oval, where a new turf wicket was installed last year.
“We’ve done well out of milking cows for a living and I still enjoy dairy farming and I like the cows,” he said.
“I couldn’t think of anything worse than waking up in the morning and not knowing what I’m going to do for the day.”
DNA writer