By Casey Neill
“Just like Hiroshima.”
That’s how Ray Donkin described the plume of smoke he saw billowing over the hills behind his Buxton home on Black Saturday.
Radiating sincerity, he said the spotted the approaching blaze about 3pm on 7 February and images of the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan during World War II immediately sprung to mind.
About 40 people were at the property, using his dam to cool down since the town had no public swimming pool.
“I thought to myself, ‘good god almighty. It’s huge’,” Ray said.
“It was a bloody huge ball of smoke. I could see the turbulence inside the ball.
“The embers were coming over and they were breaking out in the hills.”
By 6pm Ray’s home was gone.
“It was an inevitability that I knew was going to happen,” he said of the ferocious bushfire.
“I do a lot of horse riding. I take people out into the bush.
“I used to say to these people, because I’ve lived in the area all my life, ‘have a look at this undergrowth, this fuel on the floor of the forest. If some nutter drops a bloody match in here it will be a holocaust’.
“The aboriginals used to burn it, so that deleted the undergrowth to an extent.”
The fire took out Ray’s fences and sent his stock scattering onto the highway.
The clean-up and rebuild on his own property and others across the district wasn’t easy, but he was full of praise for the state government of the day, led by Premier John Brumby.
“They did a fantastic job. The way they organised for a whole area to be cleaned up after the fires…” he said.
“The way they did that it was really great, the speed of it.
“The people of Australia – and probably overseas, of course – the donations that rolled in…that was a tremendous effort.”
But Ray did think some major aspects of the incident could have been handled better.
He questioned why television broadcasts weren’t interrupted with emergency messages for communities under threat.
“That to me is the simplest, quickest way to get through to people,” he said.
“Being a hot day, people are watching telly.
“The greatest failing of that day, I believe, was lack of communication.
“People actually died because of that.
“Everyone I spoke to, they didn’t get enough warning.”
He recalled one mate who opened his back door to step outside for a cigarette and found the bushfire “on his doorstep”.
Ray said some Buxton locals who stayed behind in the housing estate opposite the trout farm were bucketing water from the river onto the flames.
He said there was no fire truck left to defend the town itself because they’d been called away to the front.
“They could have left at least one truck here,” he said.
His other bone of contention was about a convoy from the Marysville football ground to Alexandra.
He questioned whether the evacuation should have taken place.
“One woman in the convoy said the smoke was that thick you couldn’t see,” he said.
“The fire was running along the nature strip beside them.
“If one tree had fallen across that road there would have been a human disaster. What would they have done? Jumped out and run?
“But I guess it’s all in the past now. You have to move on.”
Ray just hopes that lessons have been learnt.
