Fern Tree is a village in mountain forest just outside Hobart, Tasmania, and the place where Ella’s sister lives. During the 1967 Tasmanian bushfires, the village becomes both the destination of Dorrigo Evans’s journey to his family and a fire-threatened settlement he drives into when he fears they have not escaped. The novel sets its picturesque forest setting against a rapidly advancing fire: familiar roads and homes become difficult to see, communication fails, and the question of whether a family can reach safety governs the scene.

Setting and family connection

Fern Tree is introduced as a village near Hobart, set among picturesque mountain forest. Ella’s sister lives there, and Dorrigo plans to go on to the village and his family after attending a luncheon in Hobart held in his honour by the College of Surgeons. He has never visited his sister-in-law’s home, although he has an address. The location is therefore personally urgent but not fully familiar to him: he must search for a household he has not seen before in terrain he cannot readily navigate.

The family’s presence in Fern Tree gives the village its immediate domestic meaning. When Dorrigo telephones Ella from the airport, she explains that her sister is away with her car until mid-afternoon. She describes the shade beneath the vast eucalypts as pleasantly cool and says she cannot think of a better place to be. That calm description establishes Fern Tree as a place of shelter before the fire reaches it. The trees that make the village’s shade inviting also form part of the wooded setting through which the danger will advance.

The fire reaches the village

Dorrigo first learns at the luncheon that the fire situation has worsened and that towns immediately south, including Fern Tree, are threatened by a firestorm. He tries to call Ella’s sister’s home from a hotel telephone, but the connection is down; the operator reports that almost all the lines to homes on the mountain are also out. The loss of communication leaves him unable to confirm whether Ella and the children are still there, or whether they have found a way out.

A roadblock then makes the village’s isolation physical. A policeman tells Dorrigo to turn back, describing the area ahead as a death zone. He has been stationed there for two hours and has not seen anyone matching Ella and the children. Their absence offers a possibility that they left earlier, but it does not establish that they escaped. Dorrigo calculates that roughly an hour and a half has passed since his telephone call and doubts Ella would have left while the town still seemed safe, especially because she had no car available. With no reliable message and no sighting to resolve the uncertainty, he decides to act on the possibility that his family remains in Fern Tree.

Dorrigo’s search through the forest

Dorrigo asks the policeman to move and drives through the roadblock in Freddy Seymour’s 1948 Ford Mercury, apologising to its owner as he goes. Within half a mile, flames surround the car. He does not know whether he has reached the main fire front, and the address he carries is of little practical use: there are no visible street signs, and he has never been to the house. The road is barely distinguishable among burning branches, abandoned cars, falling embers, and thick smoke.

The journey also returns him to a road he travelled nearly twenty years earlier in a Cascade brewery truck. The contrast is stark: where he once drove through a snowstorm trying to understand love, he now moves at little more than walking pace, searching for his family in smoke. He scans driveways, road verges, and shelters, and repeatedly sounds the horn. There is no one in sight. As the sky disappears behind blue-black clouds lit red by the fire, he fears that everyone has fled or died, yet continues listening at the partly open window for any human sound that might guide him.

Ella and the children

The village’s danger is also shown from within the family’s immediate surroundings. After the house five along from Ella’s sister’s home explodes into flame, Ella finds Jess, Mary, and little Stewie playing beneath the backyard sprinkler, from which only a little water is still oozing. She tells the children they will walk to Hobart. When Jess asks how far away it is, Ella cannot say; she guesses seven or ten miles and feels frightened.

This scene gives Fern Tree’s threatened setting a second perspective. Dorrigo approaches without knowing whether his family is still there, while Ella and the children face the fire with no certainty about the distance to safety. The failed telephone lines, the absent car, and the children’s dwindling sprinkler water all make the danger concrete without resolving it. Fern Tree thus becomes the point where Dorrigo’s search and Ella’s attempt to leave intersect: a forest village described first as cool and sheltered is transformed into a place from which a family must try to escape.