Fire is a strange craftsman. It can bevel branches, blunting the wood on the origin side and tapering the back as it advances; it can ‘crocodile’ a tree’s bough, leaving charcoal scales on the point of impact. White ash is the hallmark of complete combustion, and objects directly hit may appear lighter; a fence the men came upon had more of this pale soot on one side, and they moved further that way. Rocks and larger tree limbs often shield finer fuels, such as twigs: where the latter were unburnt, the men knew to move in the opposite direction. They looked for how deeply the timber was charred, and also at the angle of char, another sign of which way the fire had travelled—the scorch pattern on a tree trunk facing the fire’s origin was low, whereas there was a steep angle to the burn mark on the sides and back of the trunk as the flames leapt forward.
Now the investigators started walking sideways across the path of the head fire until they found indications of the fire’s flank. On the periphery of the blaze, trees were not as badly burnt: fuels that the fire’s centre would have destroyed were sometimes barely touched. The men crossed back again and found the fire’s other flank. Zigzagging back and forth, narrowing in slowly, they followed a natural V-shape to its point and came to what is known as the area of confidence. Here, paradoxically, the signs were more bewildering. The leaves did not all angle in the same direction: in its coiling infancy, the fire hadn’t yet established its course. The damage was closer to the ground. Objects had burned in jagged ways. Somewhere very near here the fire had begun.
Beyond this area were clear signs of the backing fire, or heel fire, where the fledgling flames had reared back, trying to spread until corralled by the wind. Signs of burning were less powerful: fine fuels still remained, and the angle of char was even and level. The investigators started putting flags up to mark the outline of where it seemed the fire had been lit.
Some 26,000 hectares of plantation, state forest and private property had been burnt and yet, after an hour studying and photographing the evidence, the men could tighten their flags into an area of eight square metres, four metres inside the plantation. There was no sign of an incendiary device—sometimes investigators would find the remnants of DIY contraptions made with mosquito coils or party sparklers attached to weights—but in the explosive conditions of the day before, all the arsonist would have needed was a lighter. One flick of the finger and the spark wheel releases terror.
Then again. The second fire had started only a short walk from the first.
A local police officer had found Ross Pridgeon earlier in the day and told him the initial crew attending the blaze had seen two parallel fires burning. Pridgeon led Henry and the other investigators to an area on the western side of Jellef’s Outlet, also a few metres in from Glendonald Road. Here too they identified the head fire then crisscrossed the flanks, marking the periphery, working backwards to the area of origin.
This second fire appeared to have started just behind a sign reading prohibition against dumping, regarded locally as an invitation to unload rubbish. There were three bicycles, or the twisted remains of their frames, alongside the burnt debris of old tyres and other car junk, televisions, mattresses, couches, a pram, children’s toys—the domestic excess of people unwilling or unable to pay fees at a tip.
None of it was the kind of rubbish that could self-ignite. The investigators looked for signs of glass bottles, which, like a magnifying glass in the hot sun, might kindle dry grass—there were none. There were no junk food containers, or porn, or aerosol cans left by kids chroming—sometimes after getting high they messed around with matches in the woods. There had been no lightning strikes, no heavy machinery nearby; no powerlines were down, and no one would have camped here.
Could an ember from the first fire have created the second? Xydias believed that such ‘spotting’ was virtually impossible within the first fifteen or twenty minutes of ignition. An ember would have had to travel backwards into blasting wind, then sideways, to light up the other area. The evidence suggested that two high-intensity head fires had moved rapidly south-east, fan-forced by the hot, strong north-westerly. They’d been separately lit, in conditions ideal for a monster blaze.
Twelve years of drought had turned the logs in the plantation’s undergrowth, the leaf litter, even the organic matter in the soil, into fuel. The arsonist had had no need to set kindling amongst the blue gums. Each tree had made its own pyre. Every summer they dropped their bark and branches and leaves, and each year without fire the piles grew higher, and they released toxins to ward off new growth that would compromise their fuel beds. No plant on the planet craves fire like the eucalypt: to live it needs to burn. ‘Gasoline trees’, the Americans call the globulus. Flames release gases that act like propellant, sending fireballs rolling across treetops. The shedding ribbon bark unfurls streamers of fire that travel kilometres on the wind.
Indigenous Australians managed this pyrophile ecology to their own advantage. Among European settlers it created a sub-community of destructive firesetters. For generations this had been a kind of open secret. In many country towns there was someone who seemed to go on a spree each summer, just as the north winds blew in from the Central Desert. Only relatively recently had the Latrobe Valley been declared a ‘hot zone’, due to the high rate of deliberately lit fires. Here, it was as if this preference for flames was as much in the DNA of certain locals as it was in the plants.
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The Arson Squad had set up an office in the Morwell police station. This new grey modernist building, larger than might be expected for the region’s population, was just off the main street. The chimney towers of Hazelwood were visible from the windows, as they were from nearly everywhere in the coal town. In the old days, the power station’s bell rang at 7.30 am, then at 4.30 pm, and the men trudged to and from work. Most of those jobs were gone now. These days the station sat in the midst of a flaring crisis at the best of times, and, after the fire, it was surrounded by an alien landscape. Even when the brand-new toilets were flushed, the water was black. Local officers who were drilled in the day-in, day-out crimes of family violence and abuse now met with the newly homeless and the relatives of the missing, anguish not yet settled on their faces.
It’s basic policing theory that if you follow a chain and it yields no answers you return to the start. Four days after the fire had begun, on Wednesday 11 February, Detective Adam Henry decided to revisit the area of the blaze’s origin, half hoping some pointer might be lying there unnoticed. The day before, he had taken a police helicopter over the Valley and seen where the fire had travelled. It was a form of vertigo having the ground come up to meet him, for the day before that, on the Monday, along with the forensic team, he’d visited the places people died. He saw close up the torturous things the fire had done. Now he wanted to look again around the plantation.
Paul Bertoncello accompanied him, and in the unmarked Land Cruiser they drove back towards Churchill, passing a blur of gas turbines, coal-handling buildings, electricity wires and towers. Closer to the township, a sign pointed to the campus of Monash University; there were a few shops and a supermarket. Not a lot to see, only the uniform houses, coated grey from ash and the lingering smoke.
At the plantation they met Ross Pridgeon, the DSE fire investigator. Henry led them behind the crime scene tape, amongst the scorched eucalypts. The chimney reek was inescapable. The men walked around in the blackness, taking in the two marked areas of ignition. The bright little flags like bunting, pinned in the soot.
It was the first time Bertoncello had left the Morwell station, other than to sleep, in nearly seventy-two hours. While Henry had driven straight to this area last Sunday, Bertoncello had been directed to get an incident room ready for the operation at the station. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the devastation. Soon it would be known as Black Saturday: four hundred separate fires had burned in Victoria, giving off the equivalent of 80,000 kilowatts of heat, or 500 atomic bombs. Bertoncello quickly began to learn every acronym of emergency management terminology. Contacting the local ICC (Incident Control Centre), he met the EMT (Emergency Management Team) and a dozen other sets of initials, and tried to work out who was doing what so that the Arson Squad could concentrate solely on the criminal investigation.
Now he walked among the charred trees, looking at the burnt ground, trying to think, just think. There was only one road in and one road out. The first and obvious line of inquiry was to locate witnesses, to doorknock in the area. Those living nearby might have information about unfamiliar people or cars being around on Saturday, or perhaps the first firefighting crew had seen something. Bertoncello was already plotting out the next move.
He was a tall, slim man in his early thirties; his perfect baldness accentuated his facial features and rightly gave him a cerebral cast. In his spare time, Bertoncello chose to do jigsaws, Sudoku, and other logic puzzles. Sometimes he might stare at one for two or three days—a problem as inexplicable as this scorched scene—and not write a thing down, then at some point it would click. He’d piece together the right bits. It would all make sense. He was prevented now, though, from seeing the vast complexity of the damage by the surrounding hills: the topography compartmentalised the view of the destruction.
Adam Henry had sat beside the crime scene photographer as the helicopter flew over this patch of ground. Hovered above the areas of origin, Henry saw the two deepening V-shapes where the fires had started, and then ash to the horizon. Oddly sensuous shapes unfurled underneath him as they flew low over gullies and crevices and rises, revealing houses that were fire-flattened, dead wildlife and farm animals, the shells of tractors and farm equipment, burnt fences, and surviving livestock wandering the debris-stricken roads, eating any vestiges of green.
The detective directed the photographer to each rectangle of burnt land that needed documenting. This was a version of omnipresence, seeing the death scenes he had investigated twenty-four hours earlier, but with no godlike power to intervene.
From the air, some houses looked to have been peeled. A roof skinned off one revealed a blueprint of ash. The spaces in which a family had slept, ate, washed were demarcated in black and white. From one angle, the rooms may have been the chambers of the heart. It was a mental exercise to see all this horror and not keep asking, almost as a tic: Why? Who?
For all the science, Adam Henry knew that arson was a crime of which the Arson Squad—like everyone else—knew very little. In the mid-nineteenth century, pyromania was considered to be ‘a morbid propensity to incendiarism, where the mind, though otherwise sound is borne on by an invisible power to the commission of this crime that is now generally recognized as a distinct form of insanity’.
Along a lonely bush road, what was to stop a person dropping a lit match, or leaning out the car window with a barbecue lighter?Over the 75-year history of the mental health bible, the DSM—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the classification of pyromania has fallen in and out of fashion and different editions’ pages. Today, of the multitude of people who deliberately light fires, only a scarce few are considered to have an all-consuming ‘fascination in, curiosity about and attraction to fire’ teamed with ‘pleasure and relief when setting fires’. The behaviour is now believed to be better accounted for by the DSM’s section on disruptive impulse control and conduct disorders. An individual’s tilt towards the antisocial and a mad lack of restraint.
Through the years, various agencies have tried to establish criteria for profiling fire-setters. But most international studies focus on the deliberate ignition of houses, cars and buildings, rather than wildfire arson, a form of fire-lighting that, although not unique to Australia, is a national specialty. Of vegetation fires in this country, 37 per cent are deemed suspicious, and 13 per cent maliciously lit (whereas 35 per cent are considered accidental, 5 per cent due to natural causes, and another 5 per cent due to reignition or spot fires. The rest are shelved under ‘other causes’.)
Adam Henry knew the basic hypotheses of the FBI and various other profiling systems, and was conscious some were fairly complicated. One prominent model used this equation to explain the behaviour: fire-setting = g1 + g2 + e, where [e = c + cf + d1 + d2 +d3 + f1 + f2 + f3 + rex + rin].
What the sum tended to find was that fire-setters were more often than not male; they were commonly unemployed, or had a complicated work history; they were likely to have disadvantaged social backgrounds, often with a family history of pathology, addiction and physical abuse; and many exhibited poor social or interpersonal skills. It was a plausible profile, but hardly different from that of many non-firesetting criminals. In other words, close to useless.
The Arson Squad was aware that there were more deliberately lit fires near the urban–rural fringe—places where high youth unemployment, child abuse and neglect, intergenerational welfare dependency and poor public transport met the margins of the bush, the eucalypts. And that pretty much described most of the towns in the Latrobe Valley.
Living back in Morwell, you were three times more likely than the state average to experience long-term unemployment (22 per cent of kids lived in jobless families). The rate of kids in out-of-home care was the highest in Victoria, as was the rate of crimes committed with children present. You were 2.6 times more likely to be a victim of domestic violence, and the rate of substantiated child abuse was three times the average. All these statistics that hid as much as they revealed.
Three days after Henry’s helicopter ride, local detectives would arrest a man they found dirty, with matted hair, on eighty-three incest offences. DNA testing proved he’d fathered four children with his daughter.
The area over which Henry had flown was full of what appeared to have been relatively peaceful bush blocks.
That’s what it was like here: God’s own country alongside that of the beleaguered. As the helicopter turned, the trees became charred diagonals, and with each undulation the hills held up their damage for inspection.
Henry had grown up in the country himself. He knew you could feel a stirring, alone out in the bush. With no witnesses to your good deeds or your bad, the isolation gave you licence. Along a lonely bush road, what was to stop a person dropping a lit match, or leaning out the car window with a barbecue lighter? Henry looked upon the blackness beneath him and thought the arsonist could have been anyone.
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