The day Elaine left, and lived

ElAINE Postlethwaite’s escape from Marysville is well documented – her story has attracted widespread media interest – and with good reason.
From her sister’s home in Boronia she told of how grateful she was to be alive, of reading in The Age that she was missing, and of the angst in making her decision to go.
Len, for whatever reason, refused to leave.
Like so many others, Elaine says there was very little warning.
She had noticed smoke at one stage and was told that it was smoke from the Kilmore fires.
The big red sections she could see in that smoke were explained as the sun being high in the sky.
Moments later however, her daughter was ringing to say people were evacuating and that she and Len should go.
“I started to try to get my husband in the car, but he just wouldn’t go,” she said.
She had put her handbag in the ute, and the dog in the back, but having never learned to drive, she had to make the hardest decision of her life.
“I saw the fire approaching and could see the smoke and hear the crackling of the flames. Our house was the first port of call at the base of the hill and I thought ‘what can I do, a little old lady and a faulty hose’.”
She had no choice.
“That was when, after half an hour of trying to persuade Len, I started walking.”
Elaine said the smoke was so thick she didn’t know where she was going. “Luckily a neighbour drove past and picked me up,” she said.
So much of what she loves has gone, Elaine says she is still trying to make sense of it all – what has happened, what will happen, where she now fits into it all.
Elaine fell in love with Marysville when she moved there in 1958 to teach at the local primary school.
Len had lived there since 1930. It was where they met and where they lived for 50 years.
“I have always been involved with the school and the kids,” she said, reflecting that every time she heard the fire siren her first thought had always been ‘I hope it’s not the school’.
“I was always scared it would be the school … now, this time, it was the school.”
The loss of lives is too much to contemplate.
“I keep hearing of how many people have died; one family of children have lost both parents … it’s just too hard to believe,” she said.
Her daughter went on one of the buses which took Marysville residents back into the town last week for the first time. Although they have spoken of the devastation, she says she doesn’t think she can fully realise the situation until she sees it for herself.
It’s hard to imagine for anyone, but especially for Elaine, that in the treed landscape of Marysville if you stood at her house on the outskirts of town you can now almost see Steavensons Falls.
“Marysville was famous for its natural beauty, going back over the decades the very early tourists, including many famous people went there and would comment on trees, ferns, rivers and mountains,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen with all that now.”
She misses her lovely dog and cats, is sad that her three beautiful hats are gone, and that the rainbow serpent, which had its last outing in the Australia Day procession in January, will no longer provide a colourful focus for Marysville’s celebrations.
She doubts, with no house, no transport and no church, that she will go back to Marysville and is considering the offer of a unit in Ringwood.
However, despite her new status as “a refugee”, and at 72 years old, Elaine is determined to make the most of the years that lie ahead.