The sound was sort of like a tidal wave coming to town.
It was sort of like a 'whhhhhh'.
She's definitely coming, and by the sounds of things,
she's a little bit cranky.
It was like a big, angry, hungry monster
just rolled over the hill into Mogo.
I was absolutely petrified, and I could not,
I could not stop apologising to my son
because I'd wanted to stay.
And I felt bad that I'd put us into the situation.
I was putting out as much as I could that way,
and my son was out the back, doing the semi-circle
of the back of the house and the front of my house.
This area caught on.
There was a pile of stuff here, just burnt through that.
My sister's caravan caught fire,
there were flames coming across here.
Poor cockatoo must have just run out of puff.
He wasn't burnt or anything,
didn't seem to have any injuries, but obviously
he just couldn't fly anymore.
Probably asphyxiated, the poor fella.
The embers were just flying past everywhere,
I don't know how I've still got hair.
'Cause they were just going everywhere.
But once the fireballs started, I said to my son,
'We can't keep doing this, we have to go, we have to go'.
We had the cars all lined up, ready to evacuate,
and a big fireball just came out of nowhere.
It was like, 'Yep, this is it'.
I just talked to the fellas up there,
I just kept telling them that they need to keep us safe.
We tried to get out through Tomakin Road,
but the flames down there were just crazy,
and then we drove out on the way to Bimbimbie,
but they were 20 to 50-foot flames
coming across the road.
What could we do, we felt like we were stuck.
There was nothing else to do, except go and try and
defend the rest of whatever we had left at our houses.
By the time we got back, the hose at the back
had already melted.
The neighbour across the street, his house just melted
right before our eyes.
I'd hosed down my friend's house up the road,
earlier in the day I went up and I hosed her hose down
three times.
One minute it was there, and the next minute
it was just a hot ball of flames.
16 years since my dad passed, and our house is what's left of his legacy,
and his little shed.
This is his work bench, all my dad's tools
and our camping and fishing gear was burnt
Definitely the scariest thing I've ever experienced in my life,
but I'm just glad that I saved my mum's house.
I think on top of everything else,
if that would have gone, she'd be a hot mess.
The residential area here is primarily Indigenous people.
We've had about 12 to 15 houses burnt down,
That's about 40 people, 45, 50 people that are now displaced.
50 per cent of the houses that are here still have
generations living in the one house.
It's not just, 'I've bought my house and I live in it'.
It's, 'I've bought my house, my children live in it,
and my grandchildren live in it'.
We had a rent-to-buy cheme through the Land Council
so a lot of our parents were fortunate enough
to be able to buy their houses.
And a lot of them now are elderly people.
A lot of people are probably underinsured.
They've been here for 40 years, 40-plus years,
Mogo is the only place that they've known to be home,
and this is where they want to be.
A lot of history has gone with the Land Council,
All our work stuff's gone, all our data collection.
Artefacts that had been collected by the Land Council
over the years ... it's now all dust.
Being so connected to the land through my work,
and through my ancestry, it's been really hard because
we're grieving for the families that have lost
their houses, and things that you owned personally
that's gone in the fire, but me personally,
I'm grieving for the plants,
I'm grieving for the animals that have been lost too.
This isn't my town, this isn't my landscape that's left.
I haven't heard one kookaburra yet.
The kookaburras are my totem,
and they keep my family safe.
Right now it's an eerie silence, and it's not a nice feeling.
I did a lot of talking to the ancestors, and
I believe they kept us safe, they just tested us.
Now I do, at the time I was like,
'Gee whiz, we need your help'.
As we were going through the fire,
and having to deal with everything.
Never needed them so much in all my life.