By Kyra Gillespie
It was a wedding day to remember for Longwarry North couple Brian and Amy Dalrymple, who exchanged vows in Tynong at 1pm on Black Saturday with a smoke-filled sky as their backdrop.
Half the guests left to check if their homes were still standing, a groomsman left to fight the fires, and the bride and groom said ‘I do’ in a 47.6-degree venue.
Brian, then 23, said he would never forget the day.
“Once Amy walked down the aisle and we sat down together I looked at her and said, ‘I love you’, and the first thing she said was ‘gee these fires are bad’.”
Duty called for groomsman and Warragul CFA captain Paul Tandberg, who left after the service to fight blazes that threatened towns from the Bunyip State Park fires.
Other guests did not attend the reception because they feared for their houses.
Brian and Amy were both volunteers with the Longwarry and District CFA at the time and said a few of their friends from the CFA could not attend the wedding.
“Being in the CFA we totally understood. We were worried about our house as well, and did not know it was OK until the Monday,” Brian said.
“We were so lucky none of our friends died that day; they all fought the fires hard, and for many weeks and months after Black Saturday.”
Amy, now 29, said it’s surreal to look back at that day ten years on.
“It is a bit surreal sometimes, it was the hottest day anyone had experienced but I really don’t remember feeling the heat! Everyone else well and truly felt every 47 degrees of the heat though,” she said.
“The effect of the fires on our wedding actually started before Black Saturday, with many of our guests being CFA members, knowing they would be battling the fire (that was already burning in the Bunyip State Forest).
“So our attendee numbers had significantly changed by the night before the wedding. We still had lots of guests at the ceremony in Tynong though, and it was a beautiful wedding, with all the wonderful little touches my parents had put into everything, even while stressing that their own home was about to be lost to fire.”
The eerie silence on the day still sticks with the now mother of four.
“The advice from relevant authorities was to leave our homes, as the fire was almost certain to burn through where our home was, with my parents and grandparents homes at risk too. We had stayed until it was time to go to the wedding, but it was quite scary leaving with the sky a different colour, the eerie silence of no birds or wildlife, and the police officers telling us ‘you can’t go back now, it’s gone to crap up there’ as we passed through the road blocks.
“Everyone we loved was heading to the wedding (or on a fire truck!), so our pets were all at my grandparents’ house, with neighbours offering to grab them if need be. I wasn’t aware at the time, but my grandfather had left the wedding, and gone back for our dogs. He had managed to get through the road blocks because he needed to get his medications and only needed to go a few hundred metres from the road block.
“Thank God he did get them, as after the ceremony we learned that the fire had jumped kilometres in seconds and had burnt through – the neighbours barely had time to take shelter.
“Fortunately our houses were still standing, with everything around them burnt, my parents lost all their farm fencing, but thankfully their animals had survived. It was just good fortune that there were dozers in the area making containment lines, who ran lines right beside my parents’ home and saved it.
“Our road was closed for about a week afterwards due to fire damage, but I remember the haunting feeling driving down that road for the first time, with everything burnt, tree trunks still smouldering, and fire trucks still blacking out. Then the relief of seeing our house, followed by guilt, because our house wasn’t burnt when others lost everything.”
The couple then moved to Warragul in 2011; Amy stayed with the Longwarry and District fire brigade while Brian transferred to Warragul where he became a Lieutenant, then Captain.
Together they share four beautiful children – Elizabeth, Patrick, Annabelle and Theodore.
“Brian’s career is a busy one, and we have a family to raise, and so just recently he stood down as Captain and has stepped back into a Lieutenant role. I’m no longer in the CFA after 14 years of service, sadly, but when the time is right I may go back to it one day.”
Amy said Black Saturday has changed her perspective, both as a firefighter and as a resident.
“It’s definitely showed me a lot about fire activity, camaraderie, and the family that is CFA. The weeks of being on strike teams afterwards kept a lot of us going,” she said.
“As a resident, I wouldn’t hesitate to pack up and leave in the event of a another large scale and catastrophic fire. Knowing how quickly and intensely a big fire can move, I would rather rebuild than risk it.
“The aftermath, the fires that popped up miles away, and hot embers that we would discover weeks later, all showed that’s not all over after the fire front has gone through too.”
