WHILE one of the Riverina’s most ferocious bushfires raged outside, new mother Katie Hansen, with her three-month-old son Angus, prepared to die.
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She would soon join her husband Peter Hansen, who she believed had been killed in the fire just hours earlier. The family lived on a sheep station between Deniliquin and Hay off the Cobb Highway - kilometres from anywhere.
“I can remember walking with my baby around the property home - a big semi-detached old homestead - trying to find out which room was going to be the room that the baby and I were going to die in,” Katie said.
“It was absolutely horrendous.”
Thirty-four years later, there are still times Katie feels like she is stuck inside that homestead, experiencing the same painful emotions.
Although she lived to tell the tale, Katie suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after the disaster that ravaged huge areas of the Riverina.
She didn’t know it at the time, but training extensively and then working as a trauma specialist with the NSW Health Deniliquin Sexual Assault Service has seen her learn to manage her trauma symptoms as a result of what happened to her family and others that night and over the following days.
As a newly married woman, Katie moved from Melbourne to live on a sheep station called Warwillah in 1984.
In January 1987, a bushfire started on their property.
“I was disturbed to find out the power had gone off and almost simultaneously the postman came running around the house yelling that a fire was coming straight for the homestead,” she said.
“The mailman had driven 16km roaring down the driveway at about 120km/h to tell us that a powerline had come off the insulator and the fire, in 44-degree heat and absolute howling gale, was coming straight for the homestead.”
With no power, water or phone, Katie and girl from the property next door filled the baths as best they could with the gravitational feed from the overhead tanks.
“We put towels under all the doors, we dressed ourselves in whatever woollen clothing I could find and we drove, incredibly stupidly, with my three-month-old baby in the front of the car to the property next door, Willurah,” Katie said.
It turned out to be the worst fire in the NSW Riverina’s history.
“It burned out nearly all of the Riverina and killed and injured thousands and thousands of sheep on properties across the area and on the property my husband was managing,” she said.
“Early on in the fire, it actually killed a gentleman, who was driving, not that I knew at the time, a grader trying to put in fire breaks to prevent the fire getting to the homestead.”
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However, Katie didn’t know who the man was and the “general expectation was that it had actually been my husband”.
“We spent the night at the property next door hearing only the two-way radio and in that chaos, the girl I was with and her mother took off to try to save their horses,” she said.
“All I could hear was the two-way radio telling me that the fire was now coming directly for their house.”
That was the moment Katie surrendered to the fact that she and her baby would likely not make it out alive.
“I quite clearly didn’t die, the homestead was saved and we went on to fight another day,” she said.
“And I found out at about 2am, that it was not my husband who had been killed in the fire.”
The next morning, Katie walked outside to see a blackened landscape filled with dead sheep.
“I remember driving back to our property thinking it was like a black moon,” she said.
“There was nothing and I got totally lost in the paddocks out the back and I had to be rescued by a fire brigade who was able to direct me back to our property homestead.”
Over the next three weeks, Katie survived on autopilot - managing to function, to feed her baby, and the hungry firefighters who were helping with the clean-up.
But once the fire brigade captain left - deciding the family was able to carry on without them – Katie fell apart.
“I started to cry and once I started, I couldn’t stop. And I cried and I cried and I cried,” she said.
“No-one knew what to do to help me and they were all really concerned with the baby that I was still meant to be looking after.”
Eventually she went to the Deniliquin Community Health Centre for a crisis appointment with a counsellor.
“I went in there, still crying, and through talking out my experience of what had happened, the recollection of the fire and the evening and thinking me and my baby were going to die, thinking my husband had died and knowing this other man had died, I was able to work out by talking to the counsellor that I felt responsible. I felt responsible for the death of that man and for the fire,” Katie said.
Speaking at a Moama fundraiser for the Full Stop Foundation last month, Katie told the crowd this was exactly the sort of faulty thinking, self-blame and shame that almost all victims of sexual assault and domestic violence experience.
“Not willingly, but unfortunately, absolutely and catastrophically,” she said.
“This is probably one of the most common symptoms following abuse and trauma that we experience.”
While Katie was able to recover from the horrific events of 1987, she struggled most summers, particularly during hot and windy days.
“I found that I was unable to sleep. So, I would leave,” she said.
“I would go to the beach, to the holiday house and I would go for a month. It never occurred to me at the time that I was avoiding possible trauma symptoms but that’s exactly what I was doing.
“I eventually managed to handle the summers and was able to spend less time travelling away and obviously now in the role I’m in, I can quite categorically diagnose that I was suffering from PTSD.”
For many victims of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence or other forms of trauma, Katie said they would never experience their trauma symptoms only once.
“It will continue to be triggered by life experiences unless you receive counselling and ongoing support to help you deal with the symptoms and help address that faulty thinking, that shame and self-blame,” she said.
“I managed to deal with mine by understanding with education from the fire captains and the counsellor at that time, that it was not my fault that the power went off and that I didn’t know to ring anyone.
“I learned it was not my fault that the man was thrown from the grader and died. He really was a hero.”
But the thing about trauma triggering is that they can happen anywhere, and any time.
“The year before last we had a really bad fire season and I was struggling with really horrible, hot and windy days,” Katie said.
“I was watching television one night with my husband and one of those fire ads came on.
“The ones that tell you to leave early and in that and I saw a boy being dragged away by his father into a vehicle, leaving a dog standing in a ring of fire.
“That was it for me. I was in tears, all over again.
“Thirty-three and a half years after my initial trauma, I was back experiencing all of the symptoms that I had all those years before.
“It just brought me back to where I was before, so back to the counsellor I went. This time I did get on some medication to help manage my arousal because I couldn’t sleep.
“All I did was prowl the house at night watching out the windows and doors to see if there was fire. I was also unable to stop checking my Fires Near Me app.”
The impact of trauma is hugely significant, according to Katie.
“Without help and counselling, psycho-education and trauma informed care, which is what we provide, people really struggle to get past these triggering events and feel the symptoms of abuse many, many years after,” she said.
“Recovery from trauma is possible. It’s a process.
“With good counselling and support and doing some hard work, people ultimately should be able to look back and remember the traumatic incident but remember it without experiencing the physiological symptoms as if it’s only just happened.
“Experiencing trauma does not have to be a life sentence of suffering.”
●If you have experienced sexual assault or family or domestic violence, there are many services available to help you including:
The NSW Rape Crisis Line: 1800 424 017
1800Respect: 1800 737 732
NSW Health Sexual Assault Services, Deniliquin branch 5882 2925
● The Full Stop fundraiser, organised by Moama rape survivor Katie Devlin, raised a staggering $21,681.82 from tickets and auction sales as well as donations.
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