Spare a thought for those in Victoria, Australia

The wildfires in that State have claimed at least 126 lives, with 750 homes known to have been destroyed. The death toll is expected to rise dramatically as rescuers at last get into areas closed to them for days due to the heat and danger.

The damage is truly horrifying. Accounts from survivors are heart-rending. The extracts and photographs below are drawn from multiple articles in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The worst possible news came for three daughters as they waited beside a police roadblock for information about their elderly parents and disabled brother missing in bushfire-ravaged Narbethong.

As firefighters battle 31 fires still raging in Victoria, two of their husbands had gone through the roadblock in a desperate search for their inlaws Faye and Bill Walker and their son, Geoffrey, 53, who was wheelchair-bound.

Narbethong, in the Upper Yarra Valley, was razed by bushfires on Saturday, and the two men made their way to the ruined home today and made their grisly find.

Bill, Faye and Geoffrey were dead.

Their car had been parked outside the house, packed and ready to go with the key in the ignition and family dog in the back.

But they had left their departure too late.

The three bodies were found inside the house.

The couple's three daughters, Marilyn, Julie and Vivian, were inconsolable as they cried and hugged each other at the roadblock, outside Healesville.

. . .

On Saturday, Dixons Creek firefighter Drew Adamson stood and watched his home burn while he saved someone else's.

In the past two days, the CFA lieutenant has seen a body tumble from a smashed car and charred remains in the blackened shells of other vehicles.

He tried to help a woman find her sister's children only to discover they had burned in a house in the Kinglake fires.

Attending a community meeting at Yarra Glen this morning dressed in his ash-smeared CFA yellow overalls, his body shook from sheer physical and emotional exhaustion.

But Mr Adamson thinks he's been lucky.

His wife Sharon and three sons, aged four, eight and 10, are alive.

After what he's seen he knows that's all that matters.

On the way to fires in the Yarra Valley on Saturday, Mr Adamson's strike team was stopped just outside Yarra Glen to put out an overturned burning car.

When he opened the door of the wreck a body fell out.

His crew then tried to save homes at Steels Creek.

With flames surrounding them they moved on to Dixons Creek, north of Yarra Glen, where he saw friends' homes alight.

He knew it was too late to save them.

"Then (we) headed right up to the end of the valley and just the whole bush was on fire," he said.




"We tried to save every house that we could and just moved from one to the next one to the next one ... the ones we could, we saved, and the ones we couldn't, we just couldn't," he said.

One of the homes he was unable to save was his own.

While at Dixons Creek trying to protect a property, he looked up to see his own home ablaze. He returned this morning to find his home still smouldering and his two dogs dead.

"I saw the flames going up the hill and I saw our own house catch on fire and I thought, 'Well, it's too late for that now'," he said.

The CFA volunteer of seven years said the devastation was even worse at Kinglake where he had tried to help a woman find her sister's children. They had died together in a house.

"It's just like a bomb blast, like street after street is just no longer there. You see fireplaces and remnants of tin roofs still there and car bodies, cars that are half alight still," he said.

"You move through that Kinglake area and off to Kinglake West and through Smiths Gully and just house after house after house, and car accidents everywhere and dead horses on the ground and cattle.

"At one stage on Saturday night I saw a sheep alight running through a paddock ... it was just horrific."

. . .

Marie Jones of Canberra, who was visiting a friend at Kinglake, said a badly burnt man had arrived at the property where she was staying with his infant daughter, and told her his wife and other child had been killed.

"He was so badly burnt. . . . his little girl was burnt, but not as badly as her dad, and he just came down and he said, 'Look, I've lost my wife, I've lost my other kid, I just need you to save [my daughter]'," Ms Jones said.

. . .

Bodies in burnt-out cars will have to be removed first so that roads can be opened to the public before gutted buildings can be combed for remains of the missing. Victoria's morgue was full last night - and hospitals and universities were being asked to store bodies until formal identifications could be made.

Some of the 80 people in hospital were not expected to survive. Ten people remain in a critical condition.

It's horrifying to learn that many of these fires have been started by arsonists. The Australian Prime Minister has referred to them as 'mass murderers', quite rightly, and I hope and trust that the guilty are caught and punished as strongly as possible.

Meanwhile, say a prayer for those who've lost loved ones, and those who are desperately trying to find out whether their parents, spouses, siblings and children have survived.

Peter