Tara-Lee Salau barely got to use the brand new kitchen that was installed just days before Saturday’s inferno razed the four-bedroom house they had been renovating.
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Ms Salau and partner Adam Rowe had spent the day in Melbourne ordering new flooring for the North Elingamite house that they’d moved into in November, and were already in bed when his phone started to beep. “I just happened to come out and have a look at the sky and it was orange,” Ms Salau said.
“My partner just freaked out. He just said ‘We’ve got to go. Just get what you want and we’re going’.”
They got just a few hundred meters down the road when they decided to turn around and get the caravan so they’d have somewhere to stay the night. “We just put it on the back of the car and took off,” she said.
She said the couple’s six-year-old son Oliver was traumatised, telling his dad in the car that night to “get out of here”. Within about the next hour their property was gone.
Their two other children, Zachary, 8, and Harrison, 2, were in Camperdown having a sleepover at their grandmother’s.
“We were going to go to Camperdown but heard about the fires around the lake. Then we were going to Scotts Creek to park the van at my in-laws and then there were fire alerts in Scotts Creek and Brucknell.
They got temporarily stranded in Brucknell, unable to turn the caravan around, after a “massive” gum tree landed on a car full of people. They eventually made it to Warrnambool where Ms Salau kept an eye on the emergency app which at one stage she noticed had 61 incidents – that included fires, trees and powerlines down.
“It was just traumatising. Really good friends of ours were stuck in their car in Garvoc,” Ms Salau said. “So I’m stressing about my house and then I found out that they were stuck in their car surrounded by fire in all directions.
“They’re OK. I rang SES and they patched me through to 000 and they got a rescue team out to them.
“You think: ‘I’ve lost a house but when there’s lives at risk I’d rather have my friends safe and my family safe’.”
The couple’s new kitchen with white cupboards, island bench, mocha-coloured benchtops and stainless steel appliances was only installed last Monday. “It was just beautiful,” she said.
They’d just painted, had new carpet laid and air-conditioner put in. “Four ceiling fans went in last week,” she said. “Because this is our second renovation I finally did have a nice house full of furniture. It’s taken me about 20 years. We’d just bought two brand new TVs.”
The couple has found a house in Camperdown to live but they need furniture to fill it such as a fridge, washing machine and kitchen appliances.
They have been overwhelmed by community support with people donating goods including a Thermomix – the person who donated it knew how much she loved it.
“I always said as a joke that if ever our house burnt down this would be the first thing I took,” she said. “I left it there. I wasn’t that devastated because I could replace it.”
It’s things like photos, school concert DVDs, the kids’ health records that perished that can’t be replaced. “We’ve lost everything,” she said.
Support has flooded in for the family. Mr Rowe said he wanted to thank Trevor Cook from Derrinallum who was the first to donate a trailer load of hay for free.
He said that if anyone needed some hay they could grab some from his property, but because his tractor and front-end loader had perished in the blaze a neighbour had offered to help anyone who needed assistance loading the bales.
Despite losing the house and machinery, Tara-Lee Salau said she thought most of their beef cattle survived.
“We’ve had people deliver water and hay bales for them to eat and grain,” she said. “I think we’ve even got other cows in with them at the moment.”
Ms Salau said she wanted to thank everyone from Colac, Cobden Warrnambool, Camperdown, Terang who had pitched in to help out.
“We’ve had the schools helping us out with uniforms to get the kids back to school. They’ve offered counselling,” she said. “They’ve just been so good.”