The Day Our World Caught Fire

The Black Saturday bushfires tore through Victoria in 2009, taking 173 lives and devastating whole communities. Ten years later, Megan Norris speaks with some of the survivors who lost homes, properties, loved ones, and whose lives will never be the same.

Standing in the backyard of her sweeping 20-hectare mountain property, in Kinglake, Victoria, Jemima Richards stares over the treestops towards Melbourne’s skyline. From this spectacular spot, an hour from the city, the smell of eucalyptus rises from forests where bellbirds sing again and where affordable house prices have brought a steady influx of new families into this pretty bush community.

On the surface Kinglake is like any other close-knit rural township where neighbours run into each other at the local shops or at the footie, their daily lives intertwining in the way they always do in small country towns.

Despite its apparent normality, however, Kinglake remains a town in recovery, the charred stumps of burned-out gums peering starkly from leafy bush tracks, a haunting reminder of the fateful day that life changed forever. It is what Jemima describes as the ‘new normal’, the sort of normal that follows any catastrophe where an invisible line is etched in trauma, forever defining the old life from the new, the ‘before’ from the ‘after’.

For Kinglake, that defining line was drawn in hot embers on Saturday, February 7, 2009, when the hottest day Victoria had ever known sparked the deadliest, most intense firestorm in Australia’s post-European history.

Today, 10 years after the inferno that claimed 173 lives and destroyed more than 2000 homes, The Weekly examines the dark legacy of the Black Saturday fires which, for some, has burned scars so deep they will never heal.