Grandmother Adams’ Bushfire Story
Editor’s note: Roger Underwood is a renowned Australian forester with fifty years experience in bushfire management and bushfire science. He has worked as a firefighter, a district and regional manager, a research manager and senior government administrator. He is Chairman of The Bushfire Front, an independent professional group promoting best practice in bushfire management.
We have posted many essays by Mr. Underwood [here, here]. This one reveals a case of divine intervention, or a miracle, or something similar. You are cordially invited to append (as comments) your own tales of inexplicable salvation.
By Roger Underwood
Patsy Adam-Smith is one of my favourite Australian writers. She has a simple, clean style and she wrote about places and people that I love: the bush, the sea, timberworkers and railwaymen. I also like the way she wrote about her family with such pride and affection, and the stories of her grandmothers who were pioneer settlers in Victoria, one Granny Smith and the other Grandmother Adams.
Her relationship with Grandmother Adams was not a particularly happy one, although they had one thing in common. “We admired the pioneering spirit,” Adam-Smith writes in her first book (Hear the Train Blow, in which she records her childhood, growing up in a railway family during the 1930s). “She would tell me stories by the hour of the pioneering days, and I would listen for as long as she would talk. She and my Grandfather had pioneered the hills of Gippsland.”
They lived in a slab hut with an earth floor, her husband taking work where he could find it to buy their stock, and the mother and children milking the cows while he was away shearing, fencing or sleeper cutting. Adam-Smith goes on: “Grandmother Adams had been burnt out twice in the Gippsland hills. Once she narrowly escaped with her life. My grandfather was away.”
I sent your aunt Anastasia to neighbours to tell them we needed help; the fire was surrounding us [Grandmother Adams recalls]. Not long after she left the wind changed. I looked at the track she had taken and now flames criss-crossed it, and as I watched a blazing tree fell right across it. She was a wonderful horsewoman, you know, and I knew she would get to the neighbours, but I thought she would never get back. The bigger children helped me pull my sewing machine outside and I covered it with wet bags and I gathered up what we could carry. As we left the house I looked across to the only gap that was clear of flames and there was your aunt, sailing over a fallen log, her horse bringing her home at a gallop.
“How did you find that gap?” I asked her.
“I followed the two men,” she said.
“What men? There are no men here,”
“Oh yes, they jumped the log ahead of me. When the wind changed I didn’t know which way to go and these men rode out ahead and beckoned me to follow them.”
At this stage in her story, Adam-Smith writes, her grandmother always blessed herself, before going on…..
There had been no men. It was God Himself that led the girl home.
But men did come through the gap after her. Grandmother Adams and her children were rescued.
There are several things I like about this story, not the least being the importance placed on saving the sewing machine. This is a telling reminder of the importance of these machines (their first, and only ‘labour-saving device’) in the lives of many bush wives and mothers, and also of their value as a hard-won investment. My wife’s maternal grandmother (also a Granny Smith), a pioneer group settler in the karri country, acquired a ‘Singer’ sewing machine during the 1920s, and it was her pride and joy. The machine was inherited from her own Grandma Smith, and was by then already probably 30 years old. It was worked by a foot treadle, connected to the works by rubber driving bands. We have it today. We keep it clean and oiled, and it still works. Both my wife and her mother learned to sew on it.
I also like the spiritual side of the story, and I am happy to accept Grandmother Adams’ explanation of divine intervention. I can recall two mysterious experiences myself at bushfires many years ago, times when I was exhausted or under extreme stress. And I have heard stories from others about the apparent intervention of a mystical power that saved the day. My old forestry mate Brian Cowcher once told me how, when working in the jarrah forest one day, he had stepped off a large log and just before his foot touched the ground, he saw that he was about to land on a tiger snake, which had its head up and was looking at him. Brian said he never knew how it happened, but somehow he found himself again back on the log and standing upright, even though, he said, “he had passed 45 degrees” on the way down.
I have always liked the thought of God intervening to save Brian, who was a mentor, a good bloke, and to whose wonderful bush yarns I loved to listen, for as long as he would talk.
December 2009
When I was a lad, I sometimes fished along the lower Metolius River. below the fly-only sections, trying to catch Dolly Varden with big grasshoppers impaled on a hook. I used split shot and a bobber, casting into whirling pools around drift and log jams.
I was always sort of snake wary, and one day working my way down the river trail, I jumped up on a wind thrown yellowbelly pine, and was on my way to ground on the other side when I heard what I just knew was a snattlerake buzzing. I never hit the ground on the other side, but somehow reversed course in mid leap, and went running back up the riverside trail full bore. But this snake would not be outrun, according to the sounds it was making, its buzzing overwhelming the acoustics of that snare drum which was my heart in overdrive. And then it slowly dawned on me that I was hearing the split shot rattling around in the tin that they came in, right there in my fishing vest. Over my heart.
I never went further down stream that day. And my hummingbird heart did slow down after a short while. My ability to gain traction from thin air for a turn-around escape served me well in my logging days.
Today, I would tell the snake to go ahead and bite me, and then it had better be ready itself to be turned into reptilian pudding. I am not going to move that far nor that fast anymore. Hell, I can’t.
I was a rookie forester, green as the trees. We all went to fire school, which was a one-day affair, but otherwise firefighting was not something we did, generally. But a big fire blew up at the south end of the County, and we were called in to assist. I was assigned an 8-man crew and we were pushed off the road to build a fire trail with shovels, pulaskis, and a chain saw.
As crew boss, I hoped to at least get a radio to converse with the sector boss, but they didn’t have one for our crew. The trail we were supposed to build went down the hill into deep brush. A quarter mile in we couldn’t see the fire, had no communications, no safety zones, and no escape route except back up the trail. In other words, total violation of the cardinal rules of firefighting.
I was green and willing, but I was not a total idiot (then or now). Once we got deep into the brush, I had a premonition. Something was not right. In fact, everything was wrong, but I didn’t know it at the time. I told everyone to stop. The crew was huffing and puffing with the exertion, but they stopped chopping and looked at me in stunned silence. Just then a flaming ember the size of a small tree sailed overhead, not unlike a mortar round.
I said, “Screw this. Let’s get out of here.”
One of the crew, a forestry tech even greener than me, was bursting with adrenaline. He argued with me, citing higher authorities. “This is where they sent us, and we should keep on building trail.”
Suddenly the premonition turned into a full vision — of a pack of kids roasted in a fire, with me as the prime rib.
“We’re leaving. You can stay if you want to,” I said. “The rest of you, grab the tools and book it back up the trail.”
The crew members shrugged and did as I had ordered them, but without undue haste. I repeated my command, “I said book it. Double time.”
We took off running. The sawyer dropped his chainsaw, which I grabbed. The recalcitrant followed us, grudgingly. About 100 feet from the road I stopped and looked back. The forestry tech was right on my heels. “Look at that,” I said.
Behind us the entire trail we had just built was one big wall of flame. “Holy shit,” he said. It looked like the gateway to Hell.
When we got back to the road, there was no one there, but the fire was heading off in another direction. We walked quietly down the road until we spied the sector boss. He said, “Where the hell have you been?”
I just shook my head. No words formed. Near death experience can have that effect.
The forestry tech came up to me a few minutes later and thanked me for saving his life. I nodded to him, but I was mainly occupied thanking God for saving my own foolish skin, as well as his.