Text 1: The ridge, by Jess Kowalczyk

An original contemporary memoir extract.

I joined the volunteer fire brigade because my neighbour asked me to and because it seemed like the sort of thing a decent person did. In two years I had put out a burning car, a few grass fires and a barbecue that had got ideas above its station. Nothing in the training had prepared me for the ridge.

We were sent to protect four houses at the end of a gravel road. By two in the afternoon the sky had turned the colour of a bruise, and the sun was a small red coin you could look at without blinking. Then the wind changed, and the fire came over the ridge.

I had expected flames. What I had not expected was the noise, a roar like a jet engine that went on and on, so loud that Shane, our crew leader, had to put his mouth against my helmet to shout. Embers were falling everywhere like orange snow, landing in gutters, in hedges, on the back of my neck. We ran from house to house with hoses, putting out a dozen small fires that started in the minutes it took to put out the last ones.

When the front itself reached us, Shane ordered us into the truck. We sat inside with the windows shut and the sprinklers on the roof running while the fire passed over and around us. It took four minutes. The inside of the windscreen became too hot to touch. Nobody said anything. I held my own knees and counted, which is a thing I had not done since I was six.

When we climbed out, three of the four houses were standing. The fourth was a black square with a chimney in the middle. The owner came up the road that evening and shook each of our hands, including mine, and thanked us for the three we had saved. I still do not know how she managed it.

Text 2: The fire in the bush, by Eliza Thornbury

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1868, a woman living on a remote farm in Australia writes to a friend in England.

My dear Clara,

You will see from the shakiness of my hand that I am not yet quite myself, but I promised to tell you the truth of life here, and this week the truth has been fire.

For three days the wind blew from the north like the breath of an oven, and on Wednesday the smoke came over the hills so thick that at noon we were obliged to light the lamps. Robert and the men had gone at dawn to help our neighbours at the creek, and I was left with the two children and old Hannah, the cook. By three o’clock we could see the flames themselves, running through the long grass towards us faster than a horse could gallop, and hear the great gum trees catching one after another with a sound like cannon.

I did what Robert had told me to do. We filled every tub and bucket from the tank, soaked the sacks, and when the fire reached the paddock fence we went out and beat at it with all our strength. The heat was so fierce that my hair was singed and my eyelashes quite burnt away. Hannah, who is sixty if she is a day, worked beside me without a word of complaint, and Tom, who is only nine, ran with the water until he dropped.

Twice I thought we must give up the house. Then, near sunset, the wind turned, and the fire went roaring away to the east and left us standing in a black field, with the house still whole behind us and the fowls, by some miracle, still clucking in their run.

Robert came home at midnight, black from head to foot, and could not speak when he saw us. I am told that two families beyond the creek have lost everything. We are to share what we have.

Ever your affectionate friend, Eliza

Both of these texts are about fighting bushfires in Australia.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of fighting the fire
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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