Dorrigo Evans rescues his family from the Tasmanian bushfire

Dorrigo Evans rescues his family from the Tasmanian bushfire in a desperate journey through smoke, flame and blocked roads. He breaks through a police roadblock to reach Fern Tree, finds Ella Evans and their children after they have taken shelter from the fire, and drives them through a burning tree and the fire front itself. The rescue saves the family, but leaves Dorrigo badly burned and briefly exposes an intimacy that the marriage has long concealed.

The fire reaches Fern Tree

The danger comes into view while Dorrigo is in Hobart, Tasmania, for a College of Surgeons luncheon held in his honour. After sherry and cigars, news arrives that the fire situation has worsened and that towns to the south, including Fern Tree, are threatened by a firestorm. Dorrigo tries to reach Ella’s sister by telephone, but the connection is down, as are almost all the lines to homes on the mountain. Ella and the children are there; he has no way to learn whether they are safe.

Dorrigo asks Freddy Seymour, the surgeon who has welcomed him, for the keys to his old green 1948 Ford Mercury. Freddy agrees with affection, accepting that the car may not come back as it was. The trip from the city should take twenty minutes, but the weather has become hostile: the wind is ferocious, heat presses through the air, and ash swirls around the car. The mountain disappears behind smoke so thick that Dorrigo must use his headlights and can see only a few yards ahead. Cars coming the other way bear signs of the fire—scorched bodies, blistered paint and, in one case, no windscreen.

Breaking through the roadblock

A police roadblock stops Dorrigo before he can continue toward Fern Tree. The young policeman tells him the area ahead is a death zone and warns that embers are starting fires far in front of the main fire. They fall onto the car’s bonnet as he speaks. The policeman has been at the roadblock for two hours and has not seen anyone resembling Ella or the children; they may have escaped earlier. Dorrigo nevertheless decides that, with his family up the mountain, turning back would be the greater recklessness.

When the policeman refuses to move, Dorrigo drops the Ford Mercury into gear and smashes through the roadblock. He begins apologizing to Freddy for the damage. The choice commits him to a route with no reliable signs and almost no visibility. Flames soon surround the car, though he cannot tell whether they mark the main fire front. He has never visited Ella’s sister’s home, and the address is of little use when street signs have vanished from view. He searches driveways and road verges at walking pace, sounding the horn and listening through a partly opened window. The road is strewn with burning branches and abandoned cars; he sees no one and fears that everyone has either fled or died.

Finding Ella and the children

Ella, meanwhile, has found Jess, Mary and little Stewie playing beneath the small amount of water still coming from the backyard sprinkler. She tells them they will walk to Hobart. As they make their way through the fire, Ella carries Stewie, while Mary clings to her dress and Jess holds her other hand. Burning trees and houses surround them; a tree falls across the road, and they skirt it, a burning car wreck and a fallen telegraph pole tangled with electric cables. Mary’s feet blister, and the heat grows worse ahead of them. Ella turns the children back, a change so stark that they know something has happened: she never swears, but now tells them there is no time to waste.

They reach a small fibro shed beside a house with an old apple tree and a dead lawn. Ella chooses the shed as shelter, though she fears it may be where they die. The family huddles together as the heat intensifies and a tongue of flame reaches under the door. After the noise subsides, they look out to find the house gone while the apple tree remains, singed but standing; the forest across the road is still burning. Then they hear a car horn weakening as a vehicle drives away. Ella and the children run out, yelling after it. The car has passed them, but it stops.

The vehicle is Freddy’s green Ford Mercury, recognizable by its white-walled tyres. Its driver is Dorrigo, who has come to find them. He takes Stewie onto his hip and draws Ella and the girls close, holding Ella’s head and face against him. The embrace lasts only a moment before they flee to the car, but the children have seen their father show their mother more affection than they had witnessed in a lifetime. The rescue is not only a reunion: for an instant, under immediate threat, the distance in the marriage gives way to physical closeness.

Through the fire front

The reunion does not put the family beyond danger. Driving away, they see a huge wall of fire ahead, rising above the road and joining smaller fires into what Ella identifies as the fire front. Dorrigo reverses violently and races back the way they came, past burning wrecks and fallen wires. The fire catches them, enclosing the car between walls of flame. He alternates between speeding along clear stretches and slowing to steer around falling limbs and debris. A blue fireball rolls across the road; he swerves around it as burning sticks and branches strike the car.

A burning tree falls across the road ahead, and Dorrigo brings the Ford Mercury to a halt only yards away. The fire front has closed the route behind them, leaving the fallen tree ahead as the other barrier. The children crouch together in the back seat. Dorrigo backs toward the flames, gathers speed and smashes through a garden fence toward the burning crown of the fallen tree. He aims for the point where, he calculates, the branches will be smallest, though the flames are largest. The car strikes the bonfire; heat fills the cabin, the rear window shatters, and the vehicle nearly stops when something catches beneath its chassis. It emerges on the other side and breaks through another paling fence. The windscreen bursts into fragments, and Dorrigo tells Ella to kick out what remains.

With the windscreen gone, Dorrigo steers one-handed while using the other to remove burning sticks from the back seat and throw them out. His left hand is badly burned; the fingers swell into large blisters, and he will later need skin grafts. The Ford Mercury, its green paint blackened and blistering, makes it back down the mountain on three tyres and a disintegrating wheel rim. Through the smoke, the family finally reaches the police roadblock.

Rescue and its aftermath

Ella recognizes the cost of the borrowed car and remarks that Freddy may not invite Dorrigo to lunch again. Beneath the joke is the physical evidence of what the rescue has demanded: a damaged car, a perilous escape, and burns to the hands Dorrigo has tried to protect as a surgeon. The children sit silent, sooty and overwhelmed by the ordeal they have just shared.

Ella’s response to the escape is more unsettling than simple gratitude. Watching Dorrigo drive, she realizes how little she knows about him and understands their marriage to have been over before it began, beyond either of their power to change. The rescue does not resolve that estrangement. Instead, the danger produces one exposed gesture of affection within a life of shared work, illness, tragedy and jokes, but also of separate inward worlds. The family survives the fire together; what the scene reveals about the marriage is at once tender and unresolved.