Brumby gets the message

By Kath Gannaway
CHUM Creek teenager Kelly Winter is just one of many young people who had their first terrifying exposure to bushfire on Black Saturday.
It’s an experience she and three other Healesville High School students who shared their stories with Victorian Premier John Brumby on Thursday say they will never forget.
The visit to the Healesville Memorial Hall Bushfire Co-ordination Centre and the Relief Centre at the high school by Mr Brumby and Seymour MP Ben Hardman coincided with a visit by AFL footballers.
Mr Brumby kicked the footy around with students and the Richmond and North Melbourne players in what teachers said was a much-appreciated and needed morale booster, before talking with Kelly and friends Tyler, Jarrah and Emily.
“It’s frightening, feeling completely powerless,” Kelly told the Premier. “You don’t know where your friends are and whether they’re going to be all right.”
But her most impassioned message to Mr Brumby was to highlight the role her father, Melbourne Water employee Garry Winter, and others like him, had continued to play as the worst week in their young lives drew on.
Kelly, 17, told a terrifying story of when her family, like so many others, found the fire upon them too late to leave their home and of their concern for her 17-year-old brother Tim who was out fighting the fires with the DSE.
Speaking resolutely to the Premier, Kelly said: “My dad went up there (the water catchment area) Monday or Tuesday and he is still working up there trying to fix our water and is working at home trying to make sure our house and family are OK. He’s not sleeping and working so hard and it’s only our family who can see how hard he is working.”
Kelly said she was reassured by Mr Brumby’s response.
“A lot of people have been giving everything this week … firefighters and many others … and it’s really hard, but it’s really important, too,” he said.
“Tell him we appreciate what he does.”
“We will get past all this,” he added.
Kelly told The Mail that while she knew so many people had been through much worse than she and her family she wanted people to know of the hard work being done by people such as her father.
“The Premier can’t do anything about it, but I want him and the public to know there are people up there who are working all day and all night trying to save this town, and he has his own family, yet he is still out there, and with so many others, trying to protect this town.”
Healesville High School principal George Perini said students were bearing up well but that some had been through situations that had affected them significantly.
Jarrah told The Mail of driving towards Healesville and being confronted with a huge wall of fire across the road.
“Mum reversed back to go to Toolangi but another fire wall sprung up. We were trying to stop the cars coming up, we went up someone’s driveway but there was another fire coming down. We had no choice but to go home,” she said.
Her ordeal continued as the family fought to save their house.
“I just think of the people at Marysville and all it had to take was a wind change and we could have … ” She stopped there.
Tyler, 14, says he looked back as their family was evacuating down Maroondah Highway, fire on both sides, and looking back at Healesville enveloped in a pall of black smoke.
Emily and her sister evacuated to the RACV Club but she says her father stayed. “The house is OK at the moment,” she said, still fearful of what the next days and possibly weeks might bring.
Kelly summed up on Thursday what many of the district’s young people would have been feeling.
“I just want to get through this weekend and go back to normal sleep, relaxing with friends, no helicopters flying over,” she said.
“Everyone is living on fear … living on the edge.”
On Friday, she would have awoken, as did everyone in Healesville, to another fire threat alert.