Beginning again after the Yarroweyah blaze took everything

It was a harrowing experience for Lyn, who was home alone at the time, escaping in her car with merely the clothes on her back and her dog and cat.

Now, more than two months on, things are slowly looking up. Lyn and Andrew are no longer living in borrowed clothes or a caravan, but they are finalising the plans for their new home.

Lyn said she was grateful for the community’s generosity but was enjoying having her own space and clothes to wear.

“I am actually starting to feel a bit more like myself,” she said.

“I think what was getting me down the most was feeling like I was living in everybody else’s pockets, and I didn’t like that at all.

“We’re living at our daughter’s place now in her granny flat ... so we’ve got a little bit of space to ourselves and not feeling like we’re sitting on top of everybody.”

Alongside their house, a big loss for the couple is their community, having to live in Melbourne for now.

Lyn said she has found it “emotionally hard”, as she was used to being able to visit her friends almost every day, and it’s just “not quite the same with phone calls”.

“Navigating all of this is very difficult for me ... I am missing the community, I’m missing being up there,” she said.

“I am still feeling a little bit of anger and a little bit of sadness, but I'm getting over that slowly.

“It’s good that I’ve got my daughter here, and we can go for coffee or just sit down and chat.

“It breaks the monotony rather than just sitting in a place on my own where I’m nowhere near anybody I know, so I’m lucky in that way.

“I get to spend more time with my son, daughter-in-law and youngest grandson, who’s eight.

“I set up a little veggie garden just in pots with my grandson, and he has been watering them every day.”

Lyn said she had also been saving plant cuttings from her daughter’s house and potting them so she had some plants for when they eventually move back home.

Lyn’s dog, Banjo, was bundled into the car as she fled on that fateful day, and is still slowly settling in to their temporary home in Melbourne.

“Sometimes he just has a sad look on his face ... he’s probably wondering why this holiday is going on so long,” she said.

“He has been to the block and seen all the rubble and that there was no house there anymore.

“I thought it was important that he saw it.”

Lyn said recently Banjo had seemed a lot happier, going for regular walks and enjoying the horses that roamed free in the yard.

“He gets excited when he sees the horses ... it’s lovely,” she said.

Lyn said they had trouble navigating the government grants and found it was “more trouble than it’s worth”.

“So we just bypassed that and said, ‘forget it, we’re not going through all that, we’ve had enough, we’re stressed as it is’.”

The couple have managed to sort out their insurance and were able to access a few local business grants.

They are now in the process of finalising plans to rebuild on the same block of land.

“It’s dragged,” Lyn said.

“It felt like nothing seemed to be going quick enough for me, but I’ve learnt to be patient, and hopefully, we can get the bore done soon, and we'll have water on the property.”

Their new house will be different to their old one, and they are excited to see the plans come together.

“It’s a lot more modern, we've got an alfresco going in ... we rearranged the house on the block,” Lyn said.

Reflecting on that January day, Lyn said: “One minute it was fine, the next minute it was like chaos, I didn't know where I was emotionally at all.”

“I did have a couple of flashbacks of the fire a couple of weeks back,” she said.

“For a split second, I’d flash back to that night when I was asleep, and it would wake me up.

“But that seems to have stopped now, so I’m better in that way.”