Kinglake-350

Kinglake-350 to VKC. Urgent, do you read me?
The fire’s here now. God help us.

Kinglake-350 is a masterpiece of writing about family, community, country life and what happens when a day of ultimate terror arrives. Adrian Hyland takes a dramatic and compelling sequence of events on that day and weaves them into a picture of universal significance and deep fascination.

On 7 February 2009 Roger Wood was the police officer in charge of Kinglake, at the epicentre of the worst bushfire disaster in Australia’s history, Black Saturday. As the firestorm engulfed the community, he risked his life, again and again, to try and save people.

With the fire raging all around, he phoned home to warn his wife what was coming. She screamed that the fire had already hit their property. Then the line went dead.

Black Saturday was a many-headed monster in whose wake stories of grief, heroism and desolation erupted all over the state of Victoria. This is a book about the monster—and the heroism of those who confronted it.

Extract

‘Should I be worried?’ she asks him.

Strewth, he thinks. She lives in one of the most fire-prone communities in the world, one that’s been hit by numerous fires in its 130 year history. Today is the worst forecast ever, she doesn’t know what a fire plan is and she’s asking if she should be worried?

Standard police procedure in these situations is to do nothing other than to recommend that members of the public ‘activate their fire plans’. Anything else, any specific suggestion, could go pear-shaped and leave the force open to litigation. You suggest to a person that they stay—you could be held responsible if they die. You suggest they go, they get caught out on the road—same thing. But he looks at her standing there, thinks about the weather, the slope, the parched bush. Thinks about his own family down in St Andrews.

‘If I were you, ma’am, I’d take the kids and get off the mountain. Early. Go down the city somewhere, visit a friend. Lot of safer places than Kinglake on a day like this.’

The woman looks a little taken aback. ‘You really think it’s that bad?’ ‘What I’d do if I were in your shoes.’

She nods thoughtfully, picks up a barefoot boy who’s playing with a rack of pamphlets. ‘Okay, that’s what I’ll do then.’

He never sees her again, but when he casts his mind back over the conversation, days later, he prays that she took his advice. He doesn’t recognize her among the lists of dead, so he figures she must have.

Read the Herald Sun article: “Intimate Look at Black Saturday”.

Watch Adrian Hyland talking about Kinglake-350 on the First Tuesday Book Club website.

Listen to a moving interview with Adrian and Roger on ABC Radio’s Life Matters.

Praise for Kinglake-350:

‘What sets Kinglake-350 apart is its strong, agile storytelling – particularly Hyland’s skill for weaving together small, telling details with big-picture concerns like climate change, weather pattern complexity, the failings of fire management policy and Australia’s historical relationship with fire…’Read the full interview.

Meg Mundell, Readings

‘Every Australian, both rural and urban, should read this book. Adrian Hyland pulls no punches in describing the harrowing consequences of living on the planet’s driest and most fire-prone continent, and his account of the disastrous Black Saturday fires is a story of courage, dread and fallibility that will never leave you.’

Cate Kennedy

‘I’ve been waiting for a writer to look Black Saturday in the eye ever since the flames died down and, finally, Adrian Hyland’s done it. In this compelling and moving book, Hyland has captured the character of a town caught, quite literally, in a fireball.’

Anna Krien

‘Kinglake-350 is about more than Black Saturday. It’s about families and communities, the vital nature of ecology and geology; it’s about the genesis of life itself. And while there are too many deaths in this saddest of tales, for the lucky ones the outcome was redemption.’

Lincoln Hall

‘This is a masterpiece of storytelling about the most terrifying natural disaster in Australia’s recorded history. Even those for whom Black Saturday 2009 has already become another distant tragedy in a landscape of disasters will find this heart-wrenchingly compelling. Of its type, I have read none better. If the Victoria Cross represents our peak measure of valour, then the central characters in this special book emerge as Victoria Cross heroes in the heart of a bush community.’

Kerry O’Brien

‘I was compelled by Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake-350, which traces the movements of key members of Kinglake’s community on February 7, 2009, the day a firestorm engulfed the town. Why do some people, indeed some systems, rise to a crisis and others collapse in on themselves? These are complex questions.’

Sophie Cunningham, Weekend Australian