‘A lot of people moved on but I couldn’t live anywhere else’

Helen Kenney wasn’t supposed to be in St Andrews on Black Saturday. Her daughter Kate was getting married two weeks later and she’d flown from Sydney that morning so mother and daughter could spend the day at a nearby winery, finalising the details of the wedding menu.

“I picked her up from the airport early in the morning and by the time we got home to St Andrews I decided I wasn’t going anywhere,” says Helen, 63, who fought the fires for three days and nights as her world burned.

“We didn’t know the scale of the fires then, but as the afternoon came we began to get cars and traffic jams at the front of the station – people had their horse floats loaded up and were trying to get away. We had to clear the road to get people out.”

By late afternoon, she realised St Andrews was in strife, and at 10.30pm the then-fire captain joined a convoy of trucks trying to reach people in distress, after spending the hours before coordinating firefighting efforts around the district.

“It was very eerie. The heat had dropped, there were a lot of trees on fire and trees across roads. I could see the flashing lights of other crews in the distance,” she remembers.

“We couldn’t get to some places because people had perished trying to escape the fire and police had closed off parts of the road. We were putting out spot fires, checking on homes, clearing driveways and water tanks and evacuating people. I did that for three days straight.”

Helen’s family also rallied to help. While her husband Robert kept things running at home, some of her children stepped up, attending call-outs to fires, feeding the crew, and dropping off food and water to residents whose homes had survived.

Helen says the scars of that day remain. Her family has battled nightmares and PTSD and in November, Helen suffered a minor stroke that she believes is related to the stress of the fires. The flames came within 300m of her own home but leaving never crossed her mind. “I couldn’t live anywhere else,” she says.