Elingamite’s Barney Lenehan was fast asleep on the couch when the fifth phone call from his persistent brother woke him and alerted him to the fire headed straight for his house on Saturday.
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Mr Lenehan, 56, headed down the road to see what was happening, and when a neighbour told him the fire was moving quickly he returned home to get his dog and wallet.
By the time he’d reached the Cobden-Warrnambool Road and travelled about half a kilometre along it he was confronted with a huge fire front.
“It was 50 yards in the paddock as I went past so it was pretty close,” he said.
“I think if I had’ve not answered the phone, or five minutes slower, it might have been different.
“He’d rung me five times.
“I was just so fortunate I answered the phone because I had a crook knee and I took a couple of Panadeine Forte, they zonk you out.
“I was asleep on the couch totally oblivious to what was going on until I answered the phone.”
Mr Lenehan found out about 6am Sunday that all his worldly possessions had been lost when the fire razed the property he had been renting since August.
Virtually all that’s left is a singed cow ornament that is still sitting on one of the two fireplaces that remain standing at the house.
“Everything in the house perished. I lost my tractor and my motorbike,” he said.
Surprisingly though, the 15 calves that he’d been rearing survived the blaze inside the shed.
“I didn’t expect to see them the next morning,” he said.
“They were bellowing for a feed when I got out there yesterday which tells me that they generally weren’t affected by it.”
Cattle that he had on a block of land he’d been leasing across the road since January also survived, but the land itself didn’t. His livestock have been moved to the properties of three friends.
He said five of the 12 houses in the streets around him were lost in the blaze and about 1000 acres burnt.
“It’s a pretty tough time,” he said.
“The Cobden community has been just wonderful. Everyone gets together and just looks out for each other which is really important. Especially now that the reality, it’s raw, but it’s just kicking in.
“They’re there for you, even if you don’t know them.
“It’s overwhleming the support they’ve given.”
He said so many people had rung to see if he was OK and offered places to stay.
Mr Lenehan’s grandparents lost everything in the Ash Wednesday bushfires which tore through their Garvoc property in 1983.
“I lost a school mate in Ash Wednesday. Went to the wrong place at the wrong time and just perished,” he said.
