Sunday 23 March 1997

After the fire the hurt still smoulders

By LARRY SCHWARTZ of the Sunday Age

AT the height of the bushfires that engulfed Seabreeze Avenue, Ferny Creek, earlier this year, a firefighter became aware that someone was looming at his shoulder in the smoke.

``Better get out of here, mate,'' he warned. No response. When the smoke cleared he found he'd been talking to a marble statue of a Roman hunter in a fig leaf, with a dog at one side and, at the other, the head of a boar on a stone.

Dating from 1885, the statue remained intact until council workers recently arrived on the scene.

Across the way, a retired telegrapher, Frank Deely, was chopping wood last week from 10 trees felled on his block.

He sees some irony in the fact that it was only in the aftermath of the 21 January fires in the Dandenong Ranges - in which 41 houses were destroyed and three people died - that the statue was damaged.

``They were clearing the rubbish and they broke the head off the dog, the ears off the (hunter's) head,'' says Mr Deely, whose house survived relatively unscathed.

Two months after the fires, Seabreeze Avenue's residents are still reeling at the consequences.

``I think the secondary destruction coming through is almost worse,'' says the writer Judy Mraz, who moved here from Belgrave four years ago.

Among her regrets: the death of neighbors, extensive tree felling, loss of privacy and unwanted sightseers.

Judy and Grant Mraz, a medical scientist, have two daughters: Natasha, 1, and three-year-old Alexandra, who misses her best friend, Bonnie, whose family's house was burnt down.

Fresh flowers were entwined last week in the wire fencing that now seals off the entrance to the home at number 29, where 26-year-old Graham Lindroth and his wife, Jennifer, 24, died with their 50-year-old neighbor, Genevieve Erin.

Some residents say the deaths have made Seabreeze Avenue a focal point of subsequent attention.

They say the tragedy has brought out the best in some people. There have been neighborhood barbecues and support and an increased sense of community. Judy Mraz has come to know neighbors she might have just waved to before.

Then there were the many volunteers co-ordinated by a local community recovery committee and the Yarra Ranges shire council. ``We had a team of 12 people on Sunday we don't know, who turned up on our doorstep to help us clear the wood, cut and stack,'' she says. ``People who rang up and said: `Do you need a massage?' `Do you want the children looked after?'''

Outside, chainsaws buzz, heavy vehicles clatter about. There is no sign yet of construction on the sites of six houses in this street destroyed by fire. A timber cottage next to the Mraz house at number 33 was home to neighbors Cheryl Martin, her husband, Doug McKay, and their five-year-old daughter, Bonnie.

The family has since lived with relatives and friends in Kilsyth and Belgrave. They are now back in Ferny Creek, determined to remain in the area. However, they will not rebuild on their block because of fond memories of neighbor Genevieve Erin, who lived at number 31.

In a way, Ms Martin pities those who have remained. ``We frequently go back to the block,'' she says ``For us it's like a healing process. We see the new shoots growing. You talk to the neighbors.

``But we can still pull away from it ... Others still living there are having to cope with it every day. So there's a different hardship for the people that are still there.''

The tragedy has made Seabreeze Avenue a reluctant tourist destination of sorts. ``You can see they're going out to tea at a local restaurant, but before they go out to eat they come and look at us,'' says Jill Dusting, a resident of 22 years. ``I can't see why they have to have a meal out of us.''

There was little damage to the home she shares with her husband, Gary, and their 16-year-old son, Glenn.

She was heartened to discover that a tree peony grown from a seedling from a plant that had once belonged to her grandmother had survived. ``Then the tree men landed a tree on it,'' she says.

Jill Dusting wishes the events of one day in January could somehow be erased. ``I'd wind back the clock to the 20th,'' she says. ``Everything's changed now and it'll never, never be the same.'