By Parker McKenzie
Brett Sansom was eager to celebrate his 16th birthday with his friends and family when he disembarked the bus at Beaconsfield Upper, preparing to celebrate a milestone.
Wednesday 16 February 1983 wasn’t like most days — there was a tension and dryness in the air that had people on edge — but Mr Sansom had other plans on his mind and barely noticed.
“It was over 40c that day, I came home on the bus but because my parents had organised a surprise party, one of my mates took me to the lake to have a swim,” he said.
“By the time we saw the smoke and tried to get back to the Pine Grove Hotel, the roads had already been blocked off.”
His parents Frank and Eva had leased the hotel in 1980, making the family well known to the small community in the local area. When the police sergeant waved him through the roadblock, knowing that he was heading to his home at the pub, Mr Sansom climbed onto the roof of the hotel and watched in awe.
“We were sitting on top of the hill, on top of the roof of the hotel, looking at the flames going towards Berwick and over Cockatoo,” Mr Sansom said.
“We were just looking at the rest of the world burning down. When it came around to about 8.30pm, the wind changed, all hell broke loose and we took off.”
That wind change, 110km/h from the southwest, sent the fire which had crossed the Princes Highway near Officer roaring up from Guys Hill and taking lives and property with it.
When the out-of-control flames reached Beaconsfield Upper, Mr Sansom’s home and the family’s business were engulfed by the flames, along with the rest of the town. 12 firefighters and nine residents lost their lives, while 100s of homes were destroyed and countless people were injured.
“It was horrific, my sister was trying to drive this little Toyota Corolla over fallen trees and it was pretty frightening,” Mr Sansom said.
“My mum was in front of us, she got directed down to Beaconsfield, we got directed to Emerald and then we had trees falling down in front of us and we couldn’t get through.”
After multiple hours in the car, with the entire town making the same desperate drive, Mr Sansom reached safety beyond the Dandenong Ranges.
It didn’t take long to return, however, and he remembers the aftermath of the hotel vividly; the cool room managed to save plenty of miscellaneous items, bottles of alcohol stored in wax boxes barely licked by the flames, yet the bar area was engulfed entirely, leaving little left. He remembers the signs reading “Danger: Keep Out” and “Looters Beware” erected soon after and the assistance of barrels of beer given to the family by other nearby watering holes.
“We operated the hotel out of a caravan for two weeks after. It was completely gone; the walls were so brittle that it was dangerous to walk in there,” he said.
“Once the fire went through, we were the town hall. People didn’t have homes and wanted to go congregate somewhere.”
His parents continued to serve drinks sourced from the Berwick, Hallam and Cardinia Hotels on fire-marked tables, with caravans, school buses and anything they could find being used to recreate something resembling an establishment, serving sandwiches to people needing somewhere to go and companionship of other locals.
Remarkably, it isn’t the first time the Hotel has burned down — the first in 1920 — and for the next 18 months, the pub was run out of a shed built by Lions clubs and other community groups.
After the building was restored and reopened in late 1984, it stayed with the Sansom family for a few more years before they moved on.
Now 56 and a resident of Ferntree Gully, Mr Sansom said the date isn’t bittersweet for him.
“I probably haven’t been the most humble bloke in my life,” he said.
“Through my 20s it was behind me. We had a brand new place and lots of people coming through.”
He said for people from the area he still knows, the events of Ash Wednesday aren’t traumatic to revisit, because the ones who lost everything didn’t stay to rebuild.
“The really traumatised families, you never saw them again,” he said.
Five years later, he was given a slightly macabre but well-loved 21st birthday present: An artistic depiction of the Pine Grove Hotel created by Tor Holth, which still hangs in his Kallista-based business, Cork on Cooks Corner.
“There were a lot of kids that couldn’t put it to the back of their mind, but that’s not how I’m built,” Mr Sansom said.
“For me, it was just another chapter in a very young life.”
