You are here, you are safe, you are present, you are safe.
You are here, you are safe, you are present, you are safe.
You are here…
This is Melanie Harris-Brady’s mantra. These days, it’s more like a reflex. The words cycle through her head whenever she smells smoke or feels the baking heat of a particularly scorching summer day. But they used to be more of a crutch, a way of convincing herself that she did in fact survive the inferno that engulfed her community 10 years ago.
The mother of two was one of those lucky to escape the town of Kinglake when Black Saturday bushfires roared across the ranges on February 7, 2009. There were 120 people killed in that area alone, and a further 60 perished in blazes across the state.
Her home was razed. The home her daughter, Keeley, had grown up in; the home that held the memories of her husband Adam, who’d died of Cystic Fibrosis just 18 months earlier. His clothes had still been hanging in the wardrobe, his shaver sitting in the bathroom. Melanie made it out with Adam’s ashes and a jewellery box. The rest was reduced to cinders.
“This was the house that I felt warm, safe and nurtured in,” she writes in her book, Ten Years On. “It was our home, our sanctuary, ours.”
Melanie often thinks of the home, of its irreplaceable treasures, thoughts that bring with them flashes of that day. But anniversaries have always been particularly difficult. "Horrible", in fact.
"You wake up and you're like, 'Today should be any other day.' And that's what you tell yourself. 'Today should be like any other day. Just because it's the seventh of February doesn't mean it's going to happen again,'" she told Mamamia.