Alpine Bushfires
John McEvoy · 38 min
A humble farmer-teacher who kept meticulous records of every name and act of courage during Black Saturday reveals how an entire community held itself together — and how a draft horse protected a flock of sheep from the inferno.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
John McEvoy is a farmer and teacher in Glen Creek, a small valley in Victoria's alpine region. On Black Saturday, February 7, 2009, his property escaped the worst of the fires, but his community did not. When the fire jumped the Yakandanda-Dederang Road and headed toward Big Bend, it took Mark Vanderven and Ross Wilkinson on an excavator, working with red-hot rocks underfoot, to cut it off. When the narrow valley near Barwidgee ran out of oxygen, a neighbour's house exploded. John watched the strike team leader call retreat just in time to save the crew.
Instead of returning to his teaching job, John took six weeks of long service leave to coordinate the response. He borrowed his wife's mobile phone (he did not own one yet) and spent those weeks in his ute, managing hay trucks arriving from across Victoria and New South Wales, delivering fencing supplies, distributing emergency goods from the hall, and directing three lumberjacks from Port Macquarie who volunteered for three weeks to clear dangerous trees along forest lines. He kept two books of names and farms and jobs, because he wanted to remember the people who showed up: the Rotary and Lions teams, the farmers' groups, the strangers who heard the need and came to help.
Years later, John still carries one story that stays with him. An elderly man living deep in the bush, unable to leave because his wife had just had a hip replacement, survived the fire with his flock of sheep and a draft horse. When the fire came, the horse rounded up the sheep, stood in front of them in a corner of the property, and protected them through it all. Everything around them burned to cinders. All of them lived. That moment, John says, was one of his happiest in all that work helping people. Recovery, he learned, takes far longer than anyone expects. People who were impacted still need to talk about it, because talking is part of how they heal.
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