The smells, sounds, and sights of Ash Wednesday are as vivid today as they were 35 years ago for the former police officer, but he says the memories are not as painful as they once were.

It’s now, more than three decades on, that Mr Wilson is being recognised for his bravery in the firestorm that destroyed families and towns and scarred south-west Victorians for life. At a ceremony next month, surrounded by the family he was so desperate to get home to that awful day, Mr Wilson will receive the Victoria Police Medal for Courage. 

February 16, 1983 dawned hot, like the many days before it, and the wind was fierce. Back then, Mr Wilson was sergeant in charge at Port Campbell and rostered on the afternoon shift.

“I was just in the front yard with my three kids mucking around, the next thing the phone rings in the police station,” Mr Wilson remembers.

He was called out to relieve another officer manning an intersection near Brucknell and tell locals still in the area that it was time to evacuate. On the way, Mr Wilson had to stop into Timboon Motors – gauges on the police car’s instrument panel were melting in the day’s heat. 

When Mr Wilson got to his post the other officer had already left. The fire was right in front of him.

“(When I radioed in) they thought I was hallucinating because they thought the fire was about 10 kilometres to the north of me,” he recalls. “I don’t know how far the jumps were but it was spotting well in front of the fire.

“I stood there for a minute pondering what I was going to do and I turned around and I saw two people coming out of the smoke.” 

One was farm machinery salesman Kevin Grigg and the other was 10-year-old Gareth Anderson.

Both were suffering horrific burns.

Urgently calling for an ambulance, Mr Wilson waited for what felt like an eternity before he was told that the help had to turn back.

“I was on my own, basically,” he says.

“Out of the blue a car came down the road from behind me and the bloke got out.” 

Mr Wilson told him he had to get to a hospital.

“He walked over to the car and said ‘Mark, is that you?’, he thought it was his nephew. This little kid heard the voice and said ‘no Dad, it’s me, dad, dad, dad’. It was his father, Max Anderson.

“His little kid Gareth was the kid in the back seat. He started to pull him out of the car, ‘I said, matey, just leave him, I’ll get him to the hospital’.”

It suddenly hit Max that Gareth should have been with his mother, Nellie. “He got overwhelmed and jumped in his car and drove off into the smoke,” he says.

Now almost surrounded by fire, Mr Wilson turned the car around and headed up a road that was already burnt.

“The bitumen had melted and I could feel the car sliding around a bit, the smoke was really bad I could only see about 20 feet in front of the car,” he remembers.

“The bloke beside me was yelling ‘keep going, keep going’ I had my foot almost flat to the floor... I don’t normally drive like that but I was just in a panic.

“I drove in and out of fallen trees, sliding around, every time there was a flare-up beside the car little Gareth would yell out in pain because the radiant heat was coming in.”

Mr Wilson turned the car into Moreys Road, by then the wind had changed and the car was enveloped in smoke.

“I couldn’t see outside my windscreen at all. I had to stop. I didn’t know if I was in a paddock or if I was off the side of the road or where I was.

“No sooner had I stopped when another car went wham into the back of the police car and pushed the boot right up underneath the back window.

“Because I couldn’t put a seatbelt on Kevin Grigg in the front seat (because of burns), he’s hit the dashboard and broken his nose, there’s blood squirting everywhere in the car by now.”

On opening the car door, Mr Wilson found a puddle of water left behind by a tractor towing a water tanker.

“There was a beer can, of all things, that I picked up and was pouring water over the top of the car because the embers were now coming onto the car.”

Now stranded, Mr Wilson desperately radioed for help. The Timboon police officer, who had been in court, heard the calls.

“He finally cruised along beside me and said ‘Don, I believe you’re having a bit of trouble’.”

The relief is still palpable and emotion raw as Mr Wilson recalls the moment that it appeared his ordeal was over.

Gareth and Mr Grigg were loaded into the other car, but with two other officers already on board, Mr Wilson had to wait on the roadside until the car returned.

When the officers came back they told him young Gareth didn’t make it. The reality of that is still hard to bear.

“When I talk about it like this, I think of Gareth,” Mr Wilson says. “I had a 10-year-old boy too at home. It could have been my kid.

“People have no idea. The intense heat. The fire was quite a way from me in some places, but the heat was still unbearable. The sound and the noise was just absolutely horrific as it roared through.” 

At the time, though, Mr Wilson’s thoughts returned to Gareth’s mum, who Mr Grigg said had fled the car they were sheltering in.

“They suffered this fuel vapourisation, which means that she sort of stopped the car because she couldn’t see and once the motor slows down to an idle or stops you can’t start it again.

“We found the car that they had got out of. The driver’s door was open and one of the other doors was open. They had all laid down and tried to cover themselves up. Nellie panicked, got out of the car and ran.”

There was no counselling for the horror Mr Wilson faced.

“That was part of the job and we were expected to do it,” he says.

“It took me two-and-a-half hours in a court (at the inquest) to read out three pages, I just couldn’t get it out.”

Mr Wilson, who is now the administration manager at the Warrnambool Police Station, tried to track down Max Anderson for a long time. Mr Anderson eventually approached him about five years ago, now ready to hear about his son’s last day. 

“I’ve got a good rapport with him now,” Mr Wilson says. He has also met up with Melbourne-based Mr Grigg and has been approached by many other strangers he helped that day.  

The veteran officer, who three years after Ash Wednesday survived the Russell Street bombing, said it was just sheer luck that saved him in 1983.

“I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, I didn’t know about fuel vapourisation, I just had my foot flat to the floor and I reckon that’s the only thing that saved us. That was no skill, it was just panic,” he says.

“I had no intentions of being a hero. It was all about getting out of it and going home that night.”