Remnants Of The Ash Wednesday Bushfire Now Live With Me And Are A Haunting Connection To That Time

Remnants of the Ash Wednesday bushfire now live with me, and are a haunting connection to that time | Nova Weetman

The melted coins and jewellery were found in the ashes of my grandparent’s house after it burned in the 1983 fires

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On Christmas Day, my aunt gifted me an old plastic blue butter box with a sticker on the top. It says, Ash Wednesday, 1983, Nova, in her cursive hand. She told me she’d been meaning to give it to me for some time, but never remembered when we all gathered at Christmas, because of the chatter and the food and the celebration. But this year, she’d left it out so that she wouldn’t forget. Intrigued, my cousins and I huddled around as I opened the box. Inside were the remnants of jewellery and coins, found in the ashes of my grandparent’s house after it burned in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Mount Macedon.

My aunt explained that she’d met someone years ago who worked with the man who made the Melbourne Cup and there had been an assessment of the lumps of melted metal in the box and that some of them were genuine gold. We joked around about the high price of gold per gram, but I knew I’d never sell it. We emptied the box out and began holding the pieces tight in our hands, trying to guess what they once were.

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My favourite lump is large and misshapen, still a bright gold colour despite the temperature of the fire necessary to melt it, and there is no sign of what it once was. Perhaps a necklace, or a bracelet or a belt buckle. It fits perfectly in my palm, my fingers curling around the outside, and it has a weight to it that is comforting. The coins are blackened and impossible to read, but they are still the intended circular shape. They flake under my fingers, and I tuck them back into the envelope where they have been living for more than 40 years.

The contents of the box move me more than I think my aunt expected. I don’t have many items that belonged to my grandparents. I have a chair that I reupholstered last year, and an encyclopaedia my grandfather gave me, but that is all. The metal lumps in this box are a thread to the grandparents I knew when I was very young. When they lived in a house on a bush block on the side of Mount Macedon, with a thin wisp of a creek running at the back of their property, and native trees that stretched to the sun. The house was always cool, even on those blistering days. And not cooled by an air conditioner, but because it was well designed, facing north for the morning sun. I didn’t know my grandparents as well as I would have liked. There was no independent relationship, just that of a child who arrived with her father and watched vignettes of family that felt slightly out of reach. My grandfather was a quiet man. He wore thick cabled woollen jumpers and dark corduroy pants and hunted for new words in the dictionary. Playing Scrabble against him was always brutal, and there was no adjustment for my age. I never won but he made me keen to improve and try to impress him. My grandmother had a wicked laugh and dressed in clothes that I would now love to wear. Suede caps, tweed coats and thick mid-century jewellery. She had immense style. And I knew that even then.

I remember the day of the fires. Or at least I think I do. But perhaps my memory has warped with time, and instead of facts, I just recall the haze of worry and stress. It was February 1983, so I would have been at school or perhaps we were given the day off because of the heat. I know that my grandparents were evacuated, sent down the mountain with so many others, failing to fill their car with their favourite things because they thought the worst of the threat had passed. It hadn’t. People died, homes burned, and it was a brutal bushfire that raged across parts of Victoria and into South Australia.

Afterwards, my mum who was a budding photographer with a homemade darkroom, took her 35mm Pentax camera and shot photos of the site where my grandparent’s house once stood. I wasn’t allowed to go with my parents that day. But I remember watching Mum later develop the photos in the red light of the darkroom. They were black and white, large format, and she hung them on clips, and we waited for them to dry. I remember being chilled by what I saw.

I don’t know who picked over the cooled bones of the house and saved the lumpy metal and coins that I now have. Perhaps it was my grandfather who was a practical man, who understood the land and the bush and the risks of living on the mountain. But now the box lives with me, as a haunting connection to that time, and to the destructive power of a bushfire.