1967 Tasmanian bushfires

The 1967 Tasmanian bushfires put Dorrigo Evans’s family at Fern Tree in danger and turn his journey to see them into a rescue. Dorrigo drives from Hobart through the fire to find Ella and their three children, then takes them back through the burning landscape when the route out is blocked. The family survives together, but the rescue also exposes the strain of their marriage: Ella recognizes that she knows little about Dorrigo, while the children witness an intensity of affection between their parents that has been unfamiliar to them.

The fire reaches Fern Tree

Dorrigo arrives in Hobart by plane after flying from Melbourne. Violent winds and smoke complicate the descent, and the passengers disembark into conditions already marked by ash and heat. He is in Tasmania for a College of Surgeons luncheon in his honour; afterward, he plans to go to Fern Tree, where Ella and the children are staying at her sister’s home. Ella tells him by telephone that her sister is away with the car and that she and the children are staying put. At that point the village is not yet described as threatened.

The danger escalates while Dorrigo is at the luncheon. News arrives that the fire situation has worsened and that Fern Tree and other towns to the south are now threatened by a firestorm. Dorrigo tries to call Ella’s sister’s number from the hotel, but the connection is down, as are almost all the lines to homes on the mountain. With no way to confirm that his family has left, he asks Freddy Seymour, the surgeon hosting him, to lend him his car. Seymour agrees, accepting that the old green 1948 Ford Mercury may not be returned in its original condition.

Dorrigo drives into the danger zone

The drive from Hobart to Fern Tree would ordinarily take about twenty minutes. By the time Dorrigo sets out, strong winds and heat have made the route hazardous, and smoke limits visibility. Cars are coming in the opposite direction as people try to escape toward the city. At a police roadblock, an officer tells Dorrigo that the road ahead is a death zone and orders him to turn back. The officer has been stationed there for two hours but has not seen anyone matching Ella and the children. He suggests they may have left earlier.

Dorrigo weighs that possibility against what he knows. There may have been an hour and a half since his call, but Ella had no car, and the town had not been threatened when they spoke. He hopes the family got away, yet decides he must act on the assumption that they did not. The officer explains that the fire is coming from the Huon and from the east, with reports of embers starting fires far ahead of the main front. Dorrigo refuses to turn back. When the officer will not move aside, he drives through the roadblock and continues toward Fern Tree.

The road offers no clear route to the family. Dorrigo has never visited the sister’s home, though he has its address, and he cannot make out the street signs. Smoke obscures the landscape, while fallen branches, abandoned vehicles, and fire make the road difficult to follow. The same road had been familiar to him nearly twenty years earlier, when he had travelled it in a Cascade brewery truck; now he searches along it for his family, sounding the horn and looking for anyone in driveways, at road edges, or in shelters. He can find no one. He keeps listening as he drives, unsure whether a faint sound is a call or merely part of the noise around him.

The family reunites

Meanwhile, Ella and the children have remained at her sister’s home. After a nearby house catches fire, Ella gathers Jess, Mary, and Stewie, who have been playing by the backyard sprinkler, and sets out with them on foot toward Hobart. She does not know how far the city is. As the fire worsens, she carries Stewie while the girls hold on to her and to each other. A burning tree falls across their route, and they detour around it, passing a burning car and a fallen telegraph pole. With the fire advancing ahead of them and Mary’s feet blistering, Ella changes direction and tells the children they must go back.

Dorrigo has continued searching when he hears a sound he cannot immediately identify. He stops the Ford Mercury and gets out. Ella and the children have returned to find the house gone, while the apple tree beside its remains is still standing. They hear a car horn grow weaker as the vehicle moves away. Ella gathers Stewie and runs with the girls, calling after the car, but it has already passed them. Then it stops. The driver gets out: it is Dorrigo, who has come to find them.

The reunion is brief before they must leave. Dorrigo lifts Stewie and draws Ella and the girls close, holding his wife and children together before they all return to the car. The children will remember the green Ford Mercury with its white-walled tyres. They also witness an expression of tenderness between their parents that is more affection than they have seen Dorrigo show Ella in their lifetime. The urgency of the meeting does not resolve the marriage, but makes its emotional deprivation newly visible.

Escape through the fire

The family’s return route is blocked: a burning tree lies ahead, and the fire front has cut off the way behind them. Dorrigo considers their limited options and chooses to drive through the flames near the house, where he judges the branches to be smaller. He reverses to gain distance, breaks through a garden fence, and accelerates toward the fire with the family inside. During the passage, a rear window breaks and the windscreen is shattered. Once they emerge, Dorrigo steers with one hand and uses the other to remove burning sticks from the car.

The Ford Mercury is badly damaged as it carries them down the mountain, and Dorrigo’s left hand is severely burned; he later requires skin grafts. The family reaches the police roadblock, where the journey out of Fern Tree can continue. Ella’s response to Dorrigo’s rescue is not simple reconciliation. Watching him, she thinks of him as a mystery and recognizes that she knows nothing about him; she sees their marriage as having been over before it began, beyond either of their power to change. Yet the children have seen their parents act together under extreme pressure, and the family has endured the escape as a unit.

Significance

The bushfire makes the distance between Dorrigo and his family physically dangerous: telephone lines fail, roads close, and neither hope nor uncertainty can establish whether Ella and the children are safe. Dorrigo’s decision to continue past the roadblock, and later to drive through the fire, turns his concern into action. The rescue does not erase the estrangement Ella names. Instead, the contrast between his decisive care in the crisis and their ordinary emotional distance gives the reunion its force. The event holds both facts together: a family survives because its members find one another, while the danger briefly reveals a closeness that their shared life has rarely made visible.