Stalked by death in day of hell
NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance faced death three times in one harrowing day during the recent bushfire crisis, writes Gemma Jones and Heidi Tiltins
NONE of us knows exactly when we will die, and most people are blissfully ignorant about how they will shuffle off this mortal coil.
A bit over two months ago, Andrew Constance thought he had found the answers to both.
New Year’s Eve morning, 2019, and in an inferno.
The repercussions of the shock are still revealing themselves to Constance. Daily life is hard.
The funerals are over, the blackened grass has turned neon green after a deluge finally extinguished the fires, which had taunted the south coast of New South Wales for months, and visitors are starting to trickle back, but seared in Constance’s memory is the day he nearly died.
Not just once, but he recounts three times he thought his number was up.
The first, as he stepped outside his Malua Bay home into a hellfire. The beige weatherboard country-style house sits on the side of a ridge overlooking a grass paddock.
When a blast of superheated air followed by towering flames galloped through on New Year’s Eve morning, the NSW Transport Minister was in the firing line.
For hours he had emptied 5000L of water on the house walls and grass surrounds thinking he could stay and defend. The ground around the perimeter became “like walking into a sponge”.
He told new podcast Mates Under Fire – which documents the fight for survival in and around Malua Bay on New Year’s Eve – the growing inferno first showed itself via a crackle in the distance, “like twigs burning”. By the time the wall of flames arrived, it was roaring like a jet engine.
Constance is tormented by the loneliness. It was midmorning, he had been up battling fires at his home, and also that of his parents-in-law almost 30km away at Nelligen, since 3.30am. The phone towers were gone so there was no way to ring his wife Jen and children who were sheltering on the waterfront at Batehaven just to the north.
In typical circumstances, it would be a quick 15-minute drive to reunite. Instead, they were totally isolated.
His world appeared to be ending and Jen was having a hard time, too, not least because Sky News was reporting her husband was missing. Without phones, no one could prove otherwise.
Jen was safe but she was surrounded by choking smoke.
Constance was unaware of rumours of his potential demise – he was still locked in a life-and-death battle at home.
“When Jen left, we didn’t even say goodbye,” Constance said flatly. “I had been up to that point so worried sick, I wanted everyone gone.”
But then they were gone and the loneliness is what has left him “cut up the most”.
“I felt incredibly lonely,” he said. “The wind hit and it was like a heatwave that had just beamed up the valley. I reckon the temperature went up 20C at that point.
“I had driven up the street, just for my own mind, thinking, ‘Yeah, I’ll go’, and then I drove back down to the house to give it one last go. At that point I made my mind up.
“The heatwave just kept getting … I honestly thought I was going to melt.”
There marks the first time he thought death was coming, and then a brief moment of phone reception brought some grim news.
“I went back inside and thought maybe I could stay here and be OK, then I walked back out again and I thought, ‘Nah, that’s it; I am going’.
“Tore up the lane and very sadly as I was driving out, had a phone call from Gladys.
“She told me Robert and Patrick Salway had passed away that morning, and then I knew things were really bad. The Salway family had been a very big and highly regarded family from Cobargo, and I then said to Gladys, ‘Hey, I’ve got to go because I am trying to get away from a fire’.”
Weeks later, Constance would drive the route, all the while recounting the point on the road he thought he might die. The roads are narrow, the trees so close to the sides you could almost touch them out the window. When he says he was worried for his life, it is understandable – they are exactly the sorts of roads where fire claimed some of the seven lives lost on the south coast that awful morning.
He reached the Malua Bay surf club to find in excess of 1000 people “scared for their lives”. “We could start to hear the explosions. You feel sort of helpless at that point. You could just get a sense everyone was sitting there going, ‘Why, why is this happening?’. It was just very hard; we had people choking on the smoke; everyone was just terrified.
He contemplated his fate for a third time. The southerly drove the flames back at the throng on the beach before the threat finally lifted.
Constance made his way back home. The idyllic valley he loved was now a smokefilled, blackened moonscape, his neighbours’ homes burning all around him. In Malua Bay, 90 homes were razed.
“I could see my place was still standing. I thought, ‘Holy hell, how did that happen?’.
“The only problem was the whole of the garden right up to the veranda was alight, a lot of flames. The back gate was alight and yeah, she was on fire. Anyway, I just tore around, got the pump started and then for the next seven to eight hours, kept putting fires out.”
There are more than 900 families now homeless in Constance’s state electorate of Bega.
It’s too soon to know what Constance’s future holds. Late trains and light-rail hiccups in Sydney seem a trifling problem now, given the scale of the losses and heartache in his electorate. He bats away speculation about his future, whether he may one day run for federal parliament.
People in Bega are only connecting sensible dots of where he may be of most help to them, but for now he is totally focused on the recovery.
And, as he openly admits in a bid to encourage others to also seek help, time on the trauma counsellor’s couch beckons.