Thanks to everybody who emailed or phoned after the Childers fire. While I
was obviously not directly involved, the shock of having come so close to
such a tragedy is only now beginning to subside. A couple of the best
friends I have made since coming to Australia were killed, I found out on
Monday. Having worked and lived with them for two months, it is very
difficult to come to terms with, as you can imagine. The strange thing is,
and I'm not just saying this in hindsight, they were two of the nicest
people you could ever hope to meet, who could entertain you and not harm
anybody.
What seems to make the disaster all the worse for me is that Childers and
the hostel is such an innocuous place. Nothing ever happened there. And to
think that the place where we lived out our trivial lives for two months
could become such a death-trap, making news around the world, makes
everything seem all the more surreal. Watching people we knew interviewed
on television, seeing the bedroom where I slept so many times, now just a
pile of ash and mangled metal in a photograph in a British newspaper is not
something I ever thought I would experience. How many times did I sit on
the, now infamous, verandah overlooking the main street, sipping a cup of
tea after a hard day's work without a care in the world with the two people
who were killed just a couple of weeks later?
I still don't think I was lucky to have left before it happened because I
still can't believe that it did happen. To have seen and spoken to the
murderer every day I was there seems to make matters all the more
uncomprehendable. On our last night, as he did on the night of the fire, he
drank and chatted with us. Little did we know then that he'd already been
imprisioned for attempted murder and was probably already planning to do the
same again.
On the farm where I worked, just a family-run business, where we picked
tomatoes and I frequently crashed the car taking the fruit back to be sorted
(!), four of the my eight co-workers there perished. I still cannot find
the words to explain what happened.
I was always going to remember my stay in Childers as the highlight -
despite the hard work - of my trip to Australia, and I still will, but now
the memory will always be overshadowed by the tragedy which followed. By
the recurrent image of where my escape route could have been. By the face
of Rob, my co-worker, who killed my friends. By the sound of the fire alarm
during the middle of the night a week before I left that no-one did anything
about. By the faces of Gary, Mike and Joly who died.
My holiday will continue despite the tears. We're now in Darwin where it's
very hot. We're going to meet some of our friends this week who survived
the fire. Life goes on, already the news has been knocked off the
headlines. I'll still have fun. But I just can't get out of my mind the
picture of the hostel as I knew it and not being able to believe that that
little place, or the people in it, no longer exist.
Stay in touch,
Ian
South-East Asia
Sydney
Brisbane
Childers
Darwin
Melbourne
New Zealand
Hawaii
Vancouver