Flame tree

The temperature in Victoria last Saturday reached 47.3°Celsius, the most scorching on record.

I spoke to my grandmother that day, she said it felt like the hottest place on earth. The countryside has been in extreme drought for many years. She held the phone up to the window and asked, “Can you hear that terrible wind?”

That evening there were sudden raging bushfires, the landscape smote.

My grandmother’s house, owned and lived in by our family for three generations, is gone.

The flames leapt and swallowed 140 years of our family’s domestic detritus, treasures lovingly kept and collated, every item an anchor that held down memories, my entire paternal family history.

Irreplaceable family photos, old super-8 video, my grandmother’s wedding dress, my great-grandmother’s piano, vintage Wedgewood dinner sets, war medals, decks of cards, portraits, sheet music, painstakingly compiled family trees, school reports, silverware, jewellery, satin ball gowns, bicycle frames, the old stables. It’s all grey, black, stinking ash.

Nana keeps wistfully mentioning the marble fireplaces.

Bizarrely, the bunya pine is still standing – she says she would have been quite happy for that to burn down, it dropped too many prickles.

Yet we are truly some of the lucky ones: many people have lost everything. Family, friends, neighbours, pets, houses, livestock, livelihoods - entire country towns have been razed. The scale of the destruction is apocalyptic.

Nonetheless, we lost my father several years ago, and to lose the remaining artefacts of his life in a bushfire seems nastily capricious of fate. It’s as if the last skerricks of him have been erased.

My brother had been to the house the day before the blaze, and taken two dictionaries from dad’s belongings, one for each of us, and some of his cycling medals.

He is helping sift through the embers and rubble this week. The ground in some places is still so hot the rubber soles of his Dunlop Volleys were melting. Nothing has been salvaged, the flames made a ghost of everything.

Victorian Bushfire Appeal:

400,000 hectares were burnt.

Donate to the Australian Red Cross,

check out Handmade Help or OzBushfireAppeal on Etsy.