The Marysville tragedy

Marysville began its life as a gold mining settlement and progressed on to be logging town but by the 1950s it had become a town to visit for a holiday, especially in autumn when the exotic trees turned into their red and golden colours.

This is exactly what my maternal grandparents did, alternating each year between Marysville, the similar town of Bright and seaside Rosebud. They would stay in guesthouses, which as far as I can remember had private rooms with a shared bathroom, and a communal kitchen along with an area to eat your meals and a lounge to sit and read or whatever.

I remember visiting Marysville with Ray and a couple of friends in the 80s, where we had high tea in the best known guest house in the town. I can't remember its name. It might come to me (Mary Lyn), which is where my grandparents stayed). In the 1990s we visited with my mother and stepfather.One year in the two thousand teen years, Ray and I visited the town, after the 2009 tragedy. I've just visited again and I cannot connect any of the visits together, and here is the main reason why.

During this visit, I looked around the town for houses with brick chimneys, of which there should be many in such a town. I did not see one. 

At the end of southern Australia's millennium drought on Friday the 6th of February 2009, our state premier appeared on tv to warn us that the next day would see terrible bushfires, with temperatures of 43/110 and people needed to evacuate to safe places at any sign of fire threat. He was derided for being melodramatic. The next day already burning fires fed by a hot, dry and strong north wind, with tinder dry forests turned into firestorms, the like that had not been seen for years, then with a southerly wind change, the fires became unpredictable.

There were 400 fires burning, 173 people died in Victoria, 45 of them in Marysville. Of four hundred buildings in the town, 14 survived. The town had quite simply been destroyed. Fire fighters switched from fighting fires to self preservation. So, there aren't brick chimneys in Marysville now.  

Sister, Bone Doctor and the two year old Little Jo were living in Bendigo, with Bone Doctor working at Bendigo Base Hospital, and on that day Sister and Little Jo were under threat from the fires and evacuated to the centre of town. I should look back at my old blog at what I wrote at the time.

The Marysville of the 80s that we visited was very different to the Marysville we visited in the two thousand teens, still quite bare after the fires, to a now gorgeous town full of new shops, places to eat, buildings and houses. By the number of cafes and restaurants and huge amounts of seating, it must be incredibly busy at times.