KEY POINTS:
James Coote is a changed man. With his mates in Victoria's Country Fire Authority, the former Aucklander fought the big fire on Saturday and survived.
The next day he was out again, this time to one of the most devastated areas, dampening down hotspots and praying the flames would not come again.
Four days later, as Australia and the world are listening in horror to the mounting death toll, Coote hears news which makes him question his role as a volunteer firefighter. One of his mates has been killed in a house fire, a tragic way to die after the horrors they have endured.
This is Coote's first bushfire season as a member of the volunteer force. His CFA mates at the Upper Ferntree Gully told him this was his baptism of fire.
Now, on the day his friend and fellow firefighter has lost his life, Coote sits, bone-tired and choking back tears and he asks the same question of himself that most of Australia does of the CFA: Why do I do it?
This morning, at least, there are no answers that make sense. Coote, 31, is one of the thousands of volunteer firefighters struggling to keep Australia's biggest natural disaster from becoming even worse.
He lives on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne with partner Carmen May, 34, from Te Awamutu, and joined the local brigade shortly after moving to the community a year ago.
Coote works for a kitchen installation company in customer relations, but every Sunday and Wednesday night he trains with the CFA. Volunteering requires time, dedication and a home address within four minutes of the fire station.
Since finishing his initial three-month training, Coote has attended car accidents, house fires and a host of other callouts but nothing that would prepare him for what was to come.
Three weeks ago, after 27 days without callouts, the bushfires began. They were nothing like last weekend, which everyone knew was going to be different. "When we were looking down the barrel of that 46-degree day, we knew it was going to be on. If it was going to happen, that was the day."
It began as a couple of small "spot" fires on grass and in scrub. Coote was on the first truck to arrive. By the time their boots were on the ground the fire had raced past the truck. Their priorities switched from beating back a spot fire to saving the truck, themselves and most of the hillside behind them.
Holding a hose in the face of an inferno fed by the wind is testament to optimism. "It's very insignificant. It's not doing anything." To make a difference, the firefighter needs to be face to face with the flames. "You have to get right up to it."
It's terrifying, he says, but at no time did he think of dropping the hose and running for it.
"Running for it - all it was going to do was chase you and get you. I didn't feel the heat of the day. I did feel the heat of the fire. You couldn't breathe for the smoke, couldn't see for the smoke stinging your eyeballs."
Then on Sunday, Coote was with the brigade north of Healesville, in an area still off limits. The crews sprayed water across white ash areas to turn them black and kill off cinders. The scene was, by now, familiar - burned-out homes and incinerated remnants of life - but no less shocking.
"You wonder how people survived that. No wonder it looks like a war zone. Never in my life had I seen anything like that. You sometimes go to a burned-out house but to see house after house ... that many people in a short space of time."
His team learned about the death of their mate over the radio. It shook them all, and left Coote wondering why he volunteered to be part of this close-knit team.
"For all this stuff that has happened in the last few weeks I thought I don't want this extra shit in my life'. I have no idea why I do it. Maybe that's something I have to look at.
"You'd have to be some sort of sicko to wake up at 3am to look forward to going to a house fire, car accident. Three in the morning, your pager goes and you jump up and race down to the station.
"We don't go around thinking we're supermen. We join to fight fires, not to make friends. That just happens along the way, with people that you never really think that you would.
"I find it easier talking to [the brigade] about it than I do with my wife. They understand - everyone understands straight away."
The death toll stands at 181 but it is expected to go much higher. The scale of this disaster is difficult to understand. In size, it covers hundreds of kilometres, many thousands of hectares.
It reaches beyond the communities affected. People stop at newspapers, look at the faces of the dead. They become immobile, transfixed, as tears edge at their eyes.
Closer, though, there are a multitude who help. Firefighters, chaplains, police, community groups, sports teams - such an eclectic grouping of people desperate to help that in Whittlesea, south of Kinglake and Marydale, the worst affected areas, even the Church of Scientology has set up a table and is offering counselling.
There was no fighting this blaze. Surviving it, yes, but only for a few of those who stayed. There was never anything else like it, outside war-time. To call it a bushfire disguises its ferocity, even here in a country where they have "fire season", those few months when you expect the hills to burn.
In Australia, it is the natural order of things. The bush must burn to bring the regrowth. But this was no bushfire. It was a firestorm. The temperature was 47 degrees and humidity almost zero. The clouds hung low and close, bottling in the heat. There was the drought, which left as little moisture in the ground as there was in the air. And the winds gusted higher and harder, and fanned the flames.
It was different from any other year and any other tragedy. Police officers say privately they expect the death toll to reach 400 and perhaps even 500. But they can't find the bodies. The heat was such that people were turned to dust. Some people will never be laid to rest.
It reached 900 degrees in places. The heat readings in some areas were five times higher than firefighters are allowed to approach. On the road in Kinglake there are solid puddles of hard metal. These are tyre rims, says one officer, weighing it in her hand then chucking it back to the road. They melted to liquid.
And there was the wind - it blew over 100km/h before the firestorm struck. That's what sent the blaze racing forward. The fire would run with the wind, and the wind would pick up and throw embers forward, as far as 20km. In New Zealand, we wouldn't call these embers. We would call it firewood - big chunks of burning wood flying through the air to start another fire 15 minutes' drive down the road.
And they fed on each other, Fire and wind, wind and fire. In places, they believe, the fire was demanding so much oxygen to feed its hunger it sucked in winds at 400km/h. One officer says there were trees that two people could not put their arms around, trees of a size he has seen emerge untouched after being struck by a 70 tonne semi-trailer at motorway speed. These trees survived that - but were snapped off, 5m up, where the wind changed direction to feed the fire. It's a wonder anyone lived.
The fire has a bitter humour of its own. Everywhere this week is evidence of fate and fire combining. Houses spared when there is no reason for their existence, people who survived when there was no reason they were spared.
In Kinglake, which suffered one of the worst death tolls, the survivors include Ken and Joy Griffith, aged 76 and 73. Houses on either side of theirs are ruined, as is their garden on which they lavished so much care.
But their home is intact, although the spouting around the edges has melted. "The ember attack was the longest I had ever seen, about 20 minutes," says Ken, who served as a volunteer firefighter for 51 years. "Lumps of wood flying through the air."
The couple moved around the house, damping down the roof with water driven by a petrol-powered pump, hurling buckets on to small fires that sprung up. About 5pm, the fire forecast its ferocity with a roaring noise as it raced up the hill to Kinglake. Next door, they watched the neighbour's lawn flare up and feed the flames - the same lawn he refused to cut because of the endangered flowers he had found growing among the grass. It is now a blackened carpet.
The intensity of the heat still surprises Ken. Decades ago, he fought a fire in which the fire truck combusted from radiant heat - "this was hotter. The flames came across like a flame thrower and it was the heat that sets the fire.
"It's like a war zone and the only difference is ... I don't know if there is a difference."
Kiwi helicopter pilot Dennis Corrin, who is contracted to the Victoria Government, watched the fire from the air. In eight years of heli-firefighting across the world, he has never seen its like. "It was the most spectacular I've seen. The heat and the wind ... we were controlling it until about midday and it gradually took over and became completely uncontrollable. It just erupted, over and over. It was like a dam bursting, the way the fire came down the hill."
At the time it hit, Anthony Brady, 33, and partner Mel Harris, 34, were at opposite sides of the hill, and Harris' 6-year-old daughter Keeley was with friends. Brady, at the bottom, was texting and calling his partner without getting through, even as she was deciding whether to stay or go. Harris, like many, says there was no warning, and that led to her delaying.
It was only when the sky fell black and she heard the fire that it seemed madness to stay. The noise was incredible, she says: "It's very angry, this fire." She raced inside as it began "hailing embers", chunks of burning wood landing on and around the house. Harris scooped up the ashes of her husband, who died just over a year ago, and locked the windows in her daughter's room. As she did, she saw the shrubs outside on fire. She remembers shouting to her neighbour: "We're going to die. We're going to get burned."
In the car, she turned one way to find the road covered in flame. Turning the other, it was little better. "I took my hands off the steering wheel, covered my face, put my feet on the accelerator and just screamed and drove."
She escaped. If her daughter had been with her, she says both would have died. "She would have slowed me down. I would have had to explain. I would have had to put her in the car. Five seconds later, there is no way I would have made it out."
On some streets of Kinglake, there is nothing left. No houses, no people, nothing. Cars are pushed to the side of the road where they collided, drivers blinded by smoke trying to find a way out on crowded roads filled with other panicking drivers. In the town you hear the survivors: "Was that Barbara's car? Is she all right?" Everywhere is the smell of smoke. It gets in your hair, your clothes and stays. Marydale is worse, and other towns fared as badly. The dead are waiting to be found, what little of them remains.
The homeless number in the thousands. To see tent cities crop in a place that many Kiwis think of as their second home is incredibly sad. At Yea, north of Kinglake and Flowerdale, where one house in five survived, tents spread out across the football oval. The grandstand and changing rooms have been converted into an emergency aid shelter, filled with volunteers and government agencies, counsellors who try to help the dispossessed make some sense of their lives.
Among them, in tent C5, is Kiwi Emma Chamberline, 60, from Te Kuiti, with husband Grant, 59, and daughter Cerone, 22. The Flowerdale family were separated when the fires came. Cerone was working in Whittlesea, across what would become the fire divide and her parents were at home.
For them, there was no question about staying and fighting. The CFA instruction to residents in areas likely to be hit by fire is to decide early whether to flee or fight - and the fight is one to the death. "We took the animals down to the creek to cool them off. All I could see was this black smoke and this big wall of fire."
Grant and Emma Chamberline knew they weren't going to stay. They went in separate vehicles, piling cat, dog and goat into the car with Emma, fleeing before the fire. The local CFA brigade had gone, called out earlier to fight fires in other towns before anyone knew how widespread this would become.
Smoke was thick and embers - those large chunks of flaming wood - were falling around. The smoke was so thick they put their lights on to see, and passing the Flowerdale Hotel, headed for Junction Hill, part of the exodus north. "As soon as we started climbing Junction Hill, the car gave out. It was too hot for it," says Emma Chamberline. With fire behind them and embers falling around, "we had to pull up on the side of the road, bail out and put everything in the other car".
Transfer completed, they worked their way over the hill and down into Yea.
In Whittlesea, Cerone was helping evacuate residents from the retirement home where she works. There were 90 people, a huge task that stopped her calling her parents until it was done. When she tried, the call would not go through. As Grant and Emma Chamberline sought refuge in one town then another, she fretted that they had not escaped. Her parents spent the night trying to sleep on a football field, with no blankets, while Cerone stayed with her brothers, Eden and Jackson, trying to contact them. It was two days before they connected.
Emma Chamberline went back on Wednesday. The house is one of the few standing in Flowerdale but is ruined. "I was numb," she said, looking at the house. "We just stood out the front, broke down and cried. We had to do that. It was shock, devastation. I couldn't believe it. We must have stood there for 10 or 15 minutes."
The family has been offered a house by the state, about 90 minutes north. What next, they have no idea. "I don't know if I'll ever go back," says Grant Chamberline.
The sun is rising red through the smoke as Pat Handley drives the winding road south to Flowerdale. From the crest of Junction Hill, 10km north of the township, the dry green of the Aussie bush gives way to charcoal. The undergrowth is gone, replaced by a white ash which runs from blackened tree to blackened tree. "This," he says with a wry smile, "is our beautiful green valley."
As you descend into the valley, the fire's ferocity is plain. Burned-out shells of cars line the roadside, one belonging to the Chamberline family. The remains of houses can be seen through the trees, although there is such little left they look like twisted piles of corrugated iron.
Handley walks the edges of the home, tracing the path to the front door, pointing to where he moved roses from a few weeks before, where the conservatory had been and saying how cool it was to shelter there from the heat of the summer. He points to the barbecue, with a full gas bottle, just a few feet from the front door. It survived untouched when only a few steps away the heat was so intense it reduced everything to white ash. Again, the random nature of the fires.
The Mini in the shed - a restoration job, he says, that is now beyond restoring. "Look," he says, pointing to the melted wheels. "Alloy melts at 600 degrees," he was told. That's how hot it was.
Handley, whose family once lived in New Zealand, was prepared - no doubt about it. There are houses, pumps, buckets and big rubbish bins filled with water. He was intent on staying but "left before I saw the flames", about 5pm. "I chickened out, got too scared".
He headed for the pub and decided that was far enough. There was a group of about 20 people and they decided to stay. The decision was made: "We'll fight." He sighs and rubs his eyes. "And we fought all night."
There, on this stretch of road, was the battle of Flowerdale. This is where they stood, back to back with fire all around and fought to save the pub, and sometimes, their lives. The firestorm came through the valley about 9pm, over the hill from Kinglake, and ravaged the valley. On the stretch of road at the pub, there is no close bush and it's as safe a place as any, considering the heat from a fire can kill at 100m.
They stood and fought as fire roared in from one direction and then another, and just when it seemed like it might stop, tried creeping in from behind. The wind was "swirling" and in the glow above them they could see flocks of birds all night, trying to escape the blaze.
No one slept that night. They kept on fighting, saving the pub and each other. Chucks of burning wood were thrown in by the wind, landing all around and starting new fires. Occasionally, explosions could be heard above the roar of the fire.
Then, when the sun rose, they stopped. Smoke rose from all around, and here and there flames crackled in trees. Handley and a mate grabbed a 4WD and a chainsaw, and set off to inspect the damage.
It normally takes five minutes to drive from the pub to Handley's home but that morning it took almost two hours. The road was covered in trees and forcing a way through was hard.
In Ferndale, only one house in every five is estimated to have survived, and the final death toll has yet to be counted. As Handley recounts the trip, the sights that greeted him that morning are still there to see. House after house in ruins. In one area, a small subdivision of about 30 cabins and caravans has been flattened. "We were just numb," he says.
As they moved slowly forward, his hopes for his own home rose and fell with every corner. He saw houses that survived, and compared their placement to his own house, justifying its existence.
When they arrived they found Handley's home, remarkably, was still standing. Then, as Handley as his mate watched, they saw flames licking around the corners of an eave. Twelve hours after the worst had passed, fate had waited for Handley to arrive.
"I saw my house, and she went up before my own eyes. This is my house," he says, a few days later, walking around it. "This is what I watched go up in smoke. As I turned the corner, there were only a few flames coming out of the corner. Then it went boom'. As we watched it, my mate put his arms around me and he cried. And he didn't even know his own house was gone."
They moved on along the road, leaving the burning house behind them. Handley, retracing his steps, has a lot of difficulty with this next stretch of road. He says he will never be able to travel it again without thinking of the mother and child he found dead, sheltering behind a fence at the side of the road.
The fence, like everything here, is burned black. Behind it was a woman kneeling in a fetal position and behind her, lying face up, a toddler about 2 years old. "It's a sight I'll never forget." Handley stares at the spot, then sobs. "It was horrific, absolutely horrific."
