The mobile phone reception on Ron Selth’s farm in the Adelaide Hills was always patchy. So when the 69-year-old did not report in on the morning after the Cudlee Creek bushfire, his family was concerned but did not immediately fear the worst.
“When my sister called me to say that they’d found a body I just couldn’t believe it. It just didn’t seem real,” says daughter Johanna Selth. “I was here in the US in Washington DC and was just like: ‘It can’t be him. There must have been someone else up there, because he knows what he’s doing and he wouldn’t have got caught like that.’ ”
The fire, which started on a day of catastrophic fire danger in the Mount Lofty Ranges on 20 December, destroyed 60 homes and 23,000ha of forest and farms before it was contained 11 days later.
The point of origin was reported to be a branch falling on to a power line, and it sparked in a heatwave two days after Australia’s hottest day on record, in the hottest year on record, in a landscape where the bushfire risk had been elevated because of drought.
These were the kind of deadly fire conditions that scientists have repeatedly warned would become more common in a heating climate. And Selth’s family say that unless there is urgent action many more families could lose a loved one to bushfire.
Johanna says the response from the Australian government so far has been “pretty disappointing and really upsetting”.
“If something good could come out of this, if something could change out of this in terms of the action that’s being taken on climate change, that would be a positive outcome out of the devastating negative outcomes that we’ve just lived through,” she says.
With siblings Luke Selth and Jasmine Berry, she has called on the government to take stronger action to reduce emissions.
“Due to climate change, these sorts of events will become more and more common, and it’s likely more and more people will experience the sort of tragedy we have been through,” says Luke Selth, a senior research fellow at Adelaide medical school.
Ron Selth and his family bought the 1950s farmhouse and 113ha sheep property at Charleston in January 1983, just weeks before the deadly Ash Wednesday fires. It had been threatened by fire before, and like most who live on the land in south-eastern Australia, Selth knew how to prepare the property and had spent time at the end of a fire hose.
Selth lived for most of the week with his partner Suzy in Crafers, a small town in the Mount Lofty ranges about 20 minutes’ drive from Adelaide and 30 minutes from the farm. He had built up an engineering company over more than 35 years, and worked on “thousands and thousands” of homes in the Adelaide Hills.
He stayed at the farm once a week to care for his 160 sheep, about 50 of which were killed or had to be euthanised after the fire.
But when his grandchildren visited he would be roped into building boys v girls treehouses and taking them boating on the dam.
“The three of us siblings all now live in cities, but my brother and sister used to take their kids up to the farm really regularly and whenever my kids are in Adelaide all they want to do is go back to the farm and spend time with grandpa,” Johanna says.
When Ron Selth returned to his Charleston home on the day the fire began, the region was under a watch and act alert, which meant there was an active fire nearby but they were not considered to be under direct threat. That changed in the evening. Selth’s neighbours, who also stayed to defend their property, filmed a “firestorm” roaring through soon after dark.
Selth had a plan to get to a safer place but was found at the house on an area of well-watered ground. His family are waiting for a coroner’s report to confirm suspicions that he collapsed before the fire arrived.
On the Saturday after the fire, a 40C day after Christmas, Johanna, Luke and Jasmine drove to the farm to find some trees still burning and their childhood home reduced to rubble. Only two pot-bellied stoves were left standing.
“It was devastating really to see that it had all gone,” Johanna says. “We didn’t take up our kids because they would have been too upset ... The whole thing was gone. Even most of the brick walls had come down so the fire was obviously extremely intense. There was almost nothing left.”
The rose bushes planted by their mother, who died of leukaemia 18 years ago, were also gone, as were the fruit trees. But across a narrow driveway, one of the sheds was untouched.
“It didn’t even have any scorch marks,” Johanna says. “It looked like the fire hadn’t made it across that thin stretch of gravel driveway.
“The one thing we didn’t care about [was] fine and everything else was gone.”
