By Casey Neill
Lesley Porter fought back the flames that threatened her Chum Creek property on Black Saturday, saving her home and her treasured animals.
“I sometimes question whether I’d have the guts to do it again, to stay and defend,” she said.
“I always said that I’d never leave the animals and I was true to my own word.
“I did find the strength to stay and fight it.
“There was a sense of pride that I walked my talk.
“Sometimes you get to situations and you don’t.
“I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’d do it again.”
Lesley appeared on the front page of our first edition of the Mail after the fires, on 10 February 2009.
Reporter Jade Lawton, now Jade Glen, was one of our team members out on the ground in the aftermath.
She was met with a shocked and bewildered Lesley, who’d been up all night putting out spot fires at The Good Life Farm, and asked if she could photograph her.
Lesley agreed. The striking image summed up how so many people in fire-devastated areas felt once the flames had passed.
“It was a bit of a day,” she said.
In fact, much of the state and beyond was struggling to grasp that tragedy that had unfolded.
Reflecting on her experience on Black Saturday and the following decade, Lesley told the Mail that she’d felt anxious in the days leading up to 7 February 2009.
“Chum Creek had been dry for the last three years in February,” she said.
“It was just – you knew something was on the cards.”
A young girl who’d been taking part in Lesley’s mentoring program at the farm called her from Healesville, screaming ‘get out, get out, there’s a fire’.
“I said ‘no, it’s fine here’,” Lesley said.
Her horses were drinking at a lake a couple of kilometres towards Healesville.
“One was third generation – I had her mum and her grandma – and the other was my daughter’s mare in foal,” she said.
She reached them, “I turned around and there were 100-foot flames at the top of the hill.”
Her instinct was to run, but the horses kept her feet planted.
“I turned around, unlocked the gate and dragged the horses home, my hand out the car window,” she said.
“As I was dragging them home, every man and his dog in Chum Creek was leaving.
The horses were fighting against the lead rope, but Lesley got them back home and into a paddock.
Her daughter’s friend Monique had arrived and started up the property’s water pump and sprinklers on the roof.
Together they fought back the flames from opposite ends of the house.
“It came to the front door and the back door,” Lesley said.
They moved the horses around as paddocks caught fire. The dogs took shelter under the house.
The shed caught on fire. They threw buckets of water at spot fires that sparked in the guttering.
Many of her fences burnt down. The house two doors up burnt to the ground.
“Another friend about 12 midnight broke through the blockade,” Lesley said.
“He came and we basically stayed up all night putting out any spot fires.
“In the middle of the night we were sitting on the back verandah and we could see this glow over the mountain and it would flare up and flare down.
“We just sat there and thought ‘oh my God’.
“You just pray for people, and the animals too.
“We didn’t have the intensity like that did at Kinglake or like they did in Marysville.
“It was as scary as all…
“The funniest thing I remember is being exhausted in the morning and thinking ‘now I’ve got to feed the animals’.
“And then I thought ‘how lucky am I to feed the animals?’.”
Lesley received donations to help her with the task.
“The week after Black Saturday a long-lost relative turned up, and a friend from Queensland came down and they put up the front fence in a day,” she said.
“It was about 10 of them.”
On 26 January this year, almost 10 years after the fire, Yarra Ranges Council named Lesley the shire’s Citizen of the Year for her work on the farm.
It celebrates difference, builds resilience and connects teens with their communities.
Back in 2009, kids from the then-Upper Yarra Community House (UYCH) had been working at the farm the day before the fire.
They returned a month later to help Lesley with the clean-up and rebuild, and continued their support for months to come.
“I had to stop the program for June/July and had the rest of the year off,” she said.
“It triggered a lot of stuff from my past.
“Sometimes you’ve just got to take some time to heal.”
She sought help from a psychotherapist and did some equine therapy in Monbulk.
“I had a lot of survival guilt,” she said.
“I survived a car accident when I was little when all my family died.
“Things happen and you can’t stop living because things happen.”
“If I were to never get in a car again, how much would that have impacted my life?
“There has to be time for healing, but there has to be time to step out of your comfort zone and face your fears again, otherwise it just disables you to do anything.
“It paralyses you and you don’t live your life to the full – and that’s not what life’s about.
“The following summer was the hardest.
“Every time it was hot you had flashbacks and got a bit panicked on hot days.”
Lesley wanted to “spread joy among the sea of black and burnt earth” so with plenty of help, she created a giant pink pig to sit at the top of her driveway.
“For me, I think the most positive thing that came out of it was the sense of community,” she said.
He’s recently had a facelift and is now black with brightly-coloured writing, welcoming visitors and passers-by to The Good Life Farm.
“Resilience is living through hard times,” she said.
