Saturday 01 February 1997

After the fire

Last week John Dunham and Beh Kim An were victims of the Mount Dandenong fires. They lost their house, their garden, and one of the country's most important private collections of Indian art. They speak to RACHEL BUCHANAN about their tragedy. Pictures by CATHRYN TREMAIN.

AT 8am on Tuesday last week, the day of the big fires, Beh Kim An, his partner John Dunham and their two slippery-grey Chinese Crested dogs, Ling Ling and Po Po, left their home among the eucalyptus at the top of Scenic Crescent, Kalorama, and set off for work in Melbourne at Madame Fang, one of the three restaurants they run.

The north wind was blowing and it was very hot. These factors, and a feeling for prophecy, caused Beh, a head chef, to make this comment to his staff: ``If there is a fire today, I will not be surprised. And if there is a fire, our house will be burnt, the first one.''

The power of words. The power of the wind. At 6pm that night, the fire that had burnt over the western side of the Dandenongs that morning blew up over Montrose Reserve and engulfed the home of Beh Kim An and John Dunham. The fire destroyed one of Australia's best private collections of Indian art and literature, and Dunham's family history and memoirs dating to the 17th century. It also destroyed Beh's recipes, 25 years of notes on the exquisitely simple food that has made Shakahari, Isthmus Of Kra and Madame Fang so successful.

Their house was burnt. It was the first and, due to a change in wind and water bombs from helicopters, the only house in Scenic Crescent to be destroyed.

The couple saw the remains of their home on Wednesday morning. As Beh tells it, those first moments were like watching a black-and-white movie. It was eerie. The burnt eucalyptus gave off a powerful, refreshing smell. Their garden of bacon and egg plants, many species of kangaroo paw, orchids, native mint and wild cherry, was gone.

Beh looked at this and thought that what you spend years creating can just go. In seconds. ``It makes you realise we have just this moment, just live in this moment very, very precisely. Don't miss it,'' he said, three days after the fire.

THE TWO men arrived in Kalorama 25 years ago. Dunham, a lecturer in Indian history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and Beh, a chemistry student at RMIT, were looking for a refuge, somewhere private and quiet.

They found Phoenix Cottage, on Scenic Crescent. For sale: $19,000, including a swimming pool. The cottage and the street were well named. In 1935, and again in 1962, the houses on the site had been burnt to nothing in bush fires. Phoenix Cottage, the third house on the land, was named after the mythical bird, which burns to ashes every 500 years and rises from the fire again.

And the street name? It is an understatement - Scenic Crescent has to be seen to be believed. The dirt track twists up off Mount Dandenong Tourist Road in among the gum trees, and the homes have views of Mount Evelyn Forest, Mount Macedon, the Yarra Valley, Port Phillip Bay. A 180-degree vista on a clear day. In the mist, as it was earlier this week when the smell of burning still lingered, the bush seemed to embrace the houses left standing and the one that was not.

Back in 1971, Beh and Dunham were serious, in a '70s sort of way, about living in harmony with the environment. They accepted that in the Dandenongs fire, too, was part of that environment. It was something that happened every 30 years, something that was good for the bush. The pair only grew indigenous plants in their garden, they refused to chop down trees, even when they grew so tall that the views were obscured.

Alistair Knox, an architect who built mud-brick houses in Eltham, designed an extension for Phoenix Cottage. He used yellowbox timber from the old ballroom at the Exhibition Building and built a veranda with beams that sloped up on either side like a Buddhist temple. The house was so captivating that it was featured in the Australian House and Garden magazine.

``When we moved there, it was 10 years since the last fire,'' Beh said. ``Fire was very much a part of everyone else's experience, but it was not part of ours.''

Their neighbor is James Govett, aged 85. Last Tuesday morning, he stood at the front of his asbestos, tin and wood house with a hose in his hand, listening to the fire roar over the western ridge. The police came and saw Govett with the hose. ``They said, `That's no good. Get out'.'' He got out.

This was the third bushfire on Scenic Crescent since Govett paid Ë15 pounds for his block of land in 1928 when he was an 18-year-old bank clerk. The first fire happened before Govett built on the land. The second was in 1962.

By this time, Govett had quit banking and had studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London to fulfil his ambition of becoming a painter. He was working as a portrait painter and had finally built his house on Scenic Crescent. A week after it was finished the fire came and destroyed everything. Govett hadn't even been insured.

He looked at the mess and decided to start again. What else could he do? His cousin, a lawyer, lent him Ë500 to rebuild. ``Well it was my property, the only one I had, and I liked it up here,'' Govett said this week, looking out from the balcony where he feeds king parrots every morning and night. The burnt trees and black grass stop only two metres from his house, which contains hundreds of oil paintings of subjects ranging from a young Graham Kennedy to a Spanish ballet dancer dressed as Pan.

From the balcony, the unburnt lawn is like a charmed circle. Only a week before the fire Govett had helped another neighbor to dig a narrow fire-break track and to burn off some of the undergrowth. Maybe this, and the asbestos, saved his paintings and his home.

Reg and Irene Easton, who live further down Scenic Crescent, lost their cottage in the 1962 fires. Smouldering leaves floated over their heads two days before fire reached their home. This time, there was not even any smoke. The police just came and told them get out as quickly as they could. ``We walked out as we were,'' Reg Easton, aged 86, said.

``It is only a miracle that we are here now,'' Irene Easton said. ``If we lost it (their home) again, we couldn't start again. Not at our age. I think God was on the side for the people around here.''

When they first moved in, Beh and Dunham had taken part in fire drills and assemblies and talked to people in their street about the last bushfire. Beh remembered one woman who said she could not live through another fire.

``Oh yes, I remembered what she said: `Everything I have is gone, I have nothing to cling on to', but the thing that moved me is (what) she said: `I wouldn't live anywhere else. I like this place so much I will start to rebuild.''' Beh said.

TWENTY-five years is a long time to live in one place, and Beh and Dunham liked to hunt, to horde and to collect. Dunham started collecting books as a schoolboy. Two rooms were filled with his collection, which included an 18th-century translation of a book written by a Muslim advocate who lived in Mombasa, two volumes of a rare British edition of gold-embossed college books for Maharajas, and Sanskrit manuscripts inscribed on the original palm leaves.

Dunham had traced his family's history to 1650. ``I had gone to England, I had gone to the graveyards, I had the memoirs of my great-grandfather who had lived in India. All of this was in a trunk brought out by my father when my family came here from England,'' he said.

Beh had collected notes and completed chapters ready to go to the publisher of his book on contemporary Asian cuisine and how Mediterranean cooking has influenced Asian food in Melbourne.

Dunham and Beh have travelled and collected art and ceramics in South-East Asia, Morocco, Japan, the United States. Every summer between 1978 and 1988, they took a group of Melbourne University students on study trips to India.

``We really scavanged all over India,'' Dunham said. ``We were really collecting seriously - bronzes, paintings. We probably had the best private collection of Indian art in Australia, and some of our best pieces we found in Victoria,'' he said.

One such find was a Tibetan tanka, bought at a Lilydale auction of the house of a former government official in China. The rare and valuable scroll painting, framed in silk and brocade, was used for meditation and prayer. The pair had planned to donate this painting and the rest of their Indian art collection to the National Gallery of Victoria.

``I think with these things, the feeling that we have about them, is the feeling of guilt. We couldn't even look after these little things,'' Dunham said. ``The reason I brought them back was to protect them, they might not last in India. These arches (he gestures to the carved 18th-century haveli arches in Madame Fang), that was the reason we got these, the CBDs of Indian cities are being bulldozed for high-rise apartments and no one wants these.''

Even the Country Fire Authority cannot estimate how long it would have taken for the men's home and all its precious contents to burn. Within half an hour of sparks catching the edge of a veranda or an exposed beam, the whole house may well have been burning. Once the fire started to consume the oxygen, it may well have flashed along the ceiling in a second, reaching into a new room. At its peak, the temperatures inside the house would have been immense. Solid brass urns melted into puddles and brass does not melt at temperatures less than 700 degrees.

That Wednesday morning after the fire, Beh and Dunham could only imagine how the wind had pushed the fire through the undergrowth to their home and how it had fanned the flames through the house. All that they could see was a Hills Hoist on its side, sheets of charred corrugated iron, a Yukon pot-belly stove, the fireplace standing on its own, the frame of the balcony, the burnt-out gargage.

Fragments of other things remained too: a lens from a pair of glasses, part of the brilliant red cover of the Maharaja book; half a pair of striped wool trousers; a travel brochure; the metal casing of a briefcase; a mangled 35mm camera; coffee mugs made by Dunham's sister, who is a potter.

Beh saw this devastation but he had a strong feeling that not everything could be totally destroyed. He started to search.

He found a Tibetan tara, a buddha associated with good health, long life and good conditions. The buddha was made from gilded gold and copper and its face was coated in melted glass from a window. When Beh touched the buddha, the glass fell, it peeled off like it was skin, and everything underneath was intact. A miracle!

Two other buddhas were also intact, including one made from iron in the 16th century.

But it was the final discovery that comforted Beh most. In the place where the bedroom used to be, he found his mother's Buddhist pendant, made of copper and gold with a very fragile silver chain. He touched his neck with light fingers to demonstrate how fine the chain was. ``It is my only memento of my mother,'' he said, and, for the first time in our interview, began to cry. Beh is from Penang and his parents died more than 20 years ago, when he was a student in Melbourne.

``There are the few things (that remain). I am so happy. In one life a miracle, it is like a second Tattslotto, something like this,'' he said of the discovery of his mother's pendant.

``It makes you realise that whatever money you have, the things you never realised before, how important some things are, beyond money. I have always said some things are beyond money but now I actually feel it.''

Both men said what had happened to them was nothing compared with the loss of lives in the fires. They said they were glad to have experienced the humanity and kindness of neighbors, friends, firefighters, and the Shire of Yarra Ranges staff.

They said, in the most genuine manner, that what had happened to them, the loss of the memories and the history, was a misfortune, not a tragedy. In our interviews, they never once said: Why us? Why our place? What did we do to deserve this?

Even with this acceptance, the misfortune of a hot wind that pushed the fire up the hill to their home that Tuesday has changed their lives. And it will keep changing them.

Now that they have nearly nothing, Beh says he feels, in some perverse way, a sense of freedom. He can start all over again. He can simplify things. He can be very careful about what he acquires.

They will build again, but this time the house will be very plain, just a few rooms, built partly under the ground, a bit like a bunker. Dennis Carter, whose apprenticeship was served under Alistair Knox, the architect who made their old house, will design the place.

And when the house is built, they can wait for the green shoots to start sprouting from the black trees. They can watch the trees grow strong again and embrace their home and the other homes on Scenic Crescent. Both of them love this regeneration, to see how resilient the bush is, and how resilient we are, after a disaster.