Finding Hope In The Ashes

A decade ago, author Ella Holcombe lost her parents and childhood home in the Black Saturday bushfires. Despite the unimaginable tragedy, Susan Horsburgh finds it has inspired healing and hope.

For Ella Holcombe, much of Black Saturday remains a blur, but she can’t forget her mother’s final, terrified words before hanging up on their last phone call: “We’re in really big trouble”. Ella, 26 at the time, was living in a Melbourne share house with her 23-year-old twin brothers, Patrick and Eugene, while her parents were at the family’s mountaintop home in Kinglake, an hour-and-a-half’s drive north-east of Melbourne.

Living next to Kinglake National Park, Ella’s mum and dad had fended off bushfires before – every summer they sent the family photo albums to their daughter in the city for safekeeping – but that Saturday in February 2009 the winds were fierce and the temperatures in the mid-40s. By the afternoon, the siblings knew it was serious.

When they lost phone contact with their parents, they headed for their childhood home, but were stopped short by police roadblocks in Whittlesea. There they joined a panicked, ever-growing crowd of loved ones looking for answers. “We could see the whole top of the mountain on fire,” recalls Ella. “Everyone was trying to talk to the police and SES guys. No one knew anything.”

They went home to Brunswick that night and worked the phones for two days, flipping between optimism and despair. At one point, a friend whose father had seen the family block told Ella the house was gone, but she refused to believe it. Finally, 48 hours after they saw the flames, police came to their door. “They didn’t need to say anything,” says Ella.

Ella and her brothers had lost their mother and father, their much-loved family dog and the timber and mudbrick home their parents had built two decades earlier – the backdrop for all their childhood memories: chasing skinks, poking ant nests, lying under the stars together on the trampoline.