On the outskirts of Yarck, a small farming town in central Victoria, the ground is still smouldering. Gumtrees are flickering with flames as white ash whips through the air.
Across the region houses are reduced to warped steel, with brick chimneys often the only thing left standing.
At his property, Dave Rigby is pointing just metres from his back fence. The ground is black. But the grass he is standing on is green, the garden almost immaculate, and his house – it’s still standing.
“I was actually preparing to leave at 10am yesterday,” Rigby says on Sunday. “I went down the street to talk to my neighbours, they had just gone to leave, but by that time, you just couldn’t get out. All the roads were cut.”
So Rigby set to work. He was prepared with bore water and a generator. He rigged up sprinklers across his property. He hosed down his house and, with about five other neighbours, they did their best to protect the small street. Many of the homes were saved.
“I was stressed,” he says. “The wind was just howling through here. You couldn’t see because of the smoke. The trees were just bent over.”
Yarck’s Country Fire Authority members had been an hour north, in Longwood, where the bushfire started. They’d been forced back, and back, until they were defending their own homes.
Rigby points to the nearby hills, noting neighbours’ houses that were razed. The dairy farm on the ridge, the woman who had a small shack at the end of the road and his back neighbour. They lost everything.
“We were pinched in the middle of it,” he says. “You could just see flames from the ridge line, all through down here. It was calm, calm, calm, and then just hectic.”
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As bushfires continued to burn across Victoria, residents who evacuated want to return home. But authorities first need to make sure it’s safe.
No one yet knows the extent of the damage. But at least 300 structures have been destroyed, including 80 homes, with 350,000 hectares burnt. One person died – their body was found about 100 metres from a vehicle off Yarck Road at Gobur.
On social media, anxious residents ask if their homes are safe, if someone could check whether their cows have water, or if there’s spare feed?
On the other side of the Yarck ridge, Kathy Munslow returns to the animal shelter she runs to find many of them injured. All are hungry. Some are missing.
“The animals are standing in smouldering paddocks and the fence is still burning,” Munslow says of Gunyah Animal Healing Sanctuary.
“The only thing standing here is my house, which the CFA saved because the fire came within three inches on all sides. Everything else is gone. I’m just here on my own, feeling really scared.”
Like many in the area, Munslow is desperately trying to find food for her surviving animals. She had just spent $3,000 on hay – now a pile of ash.
Spending “$3,000 on hay doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a struggling charity, that’s a year’s worth that’s all burned down. I only got it a week or two ago.”
The fire burned the generator, so she has no power. The taps have stopped running. There’s no phone reception.
Down the road, the only thing open in Yarck is the pub. Chris Charman is keeping it running while his friend, the proprietor, tries to save his own property.
On Saturday morning it took Charman four hours to get 15km up the road, to find his house had burned down. But he brushed that aside, more concerned about his mates who had lost livestock and their livelihoods.
“So many houses, and so many farms are gone,” Charman says. “No one actually knows how bad it is. So many livestock are dead.”
On surrounding farms, piles of hay are still burning in paddocks. Dead animals litter the roads – koalas, cows, some carcasses so charred they’re unrecognisable.
At a community meeting in Seymour on Saturday night the deputy incident controller, Greg Murphy, told residents that emergency services were working to get people back to their properties “at the earliest possible, but safe, opportunity”.
Some areas are still on fire. As Murphy spoke, the Longwood blaze had spread across 136,000 hectares. Power lines are down, trees have fallen across roads, and there is thick smoke in places. A wind change could mean a new area is under threat.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he says. The next steps are clear: control the fire, make the roads safe and provide the relief that’s desperately sought.
“It’s not a long process but it is a thorough process,” he says. “And we will do it safely. Unfortunately, I did hear a comment this morning that if you take too long, we’re just going to go around it. Please consider that behaviour.”
Gun shops have started donating ammunition to exhausted farmers. In Mansfield, in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, Shane Curley had already given out hundreds of rounds of ammunition by Sunday morning.
“I had a couple of farmers in yesterday,” he says.
“They had 500 to 600 sheep, so I just gave them a bunch of ammo. There will be thousands of cattle and sheep that are burnt that …” He trails off, before adding: “This will be very hard.”
After the 2019-20 fires, Curley says the gun shop stayed closed for more than three months while he went around helping farmers put down livestock. As he talks, tears appear.
With his wife, Mandy, they will go and cook for farmers or help euthanise animals, as they did last time.
“Yeah, it’s not going to be good,” he says. “I will probably need more donations but I don’t mind handing out ammo if I can just do something to help.”
The state Nationals MP Annabelle Cleeland and her husband have a farm outside Euroa, in Victoria’s north-east. Her family evacuated and haven’t been able to get back to check on their stock. She fears they could have lost 1,000 sheep.
“We don’t know yet but we need to get in there because we’re looking after animals,” Cleeland says.
“That is our job as farmers. There is this deep innate sense of protection to get back there to make sure they’ve got food and water, because we will not let them starve like that, that’s just torturous.”
Her electorate sits at the top of the fire map and she says they are moving from the initial fight phase to the recovery phase. With a group of locals, she is running a drive to get animal feed to those who need it.
“Everyone here has been impacted by this tragedy,” she says. “No one will be unscathed.”
