Research scientist Robyn Coy had already long been protecting vulnerable animals at her animal shelter in Tarcombe when the Longwood bushfire closed in and threatened their survival in a whole other way.

The fire arrived on the doorstep of Dr Coy’s 400-acre property on day one of the catastrophic event, Wednesday, January 7.

“I stayed up all night watching it glow, but it went that way and we thought we’d dodged another bullet,” she recalled.

The next morning there was a little haze across the hills in the distance, but it was mostly clear.

With electricity out at the property, Dr Coy headed into town to charge her phone and get more fuel for the generators that were dry from running firefighting pumps to soak around the house.

“I came back up and started looking for animals and then my brothers turned up,” she said.

“He was screaming at me, ‘The front gate’s on fire’.”

The fire consumed the neighbouring property and Dr Coy breathed a sigh of relief for her own after seemingly escaping another close call.

“We had locked all the cows and the horses around the house paddocks and had them grazed down to nothing, there was no fuel for the fire to burn, all you get are spot fires,” she said.

“Paul (brother-in-law) and I just kept walking around and putting them out.”

All of a sudden, the wind changed and the fire crossed the road directly into the path of fuel they had isolated on the sprawling property.

“You know how they tell you to take your fuel and your gas bottles, everything away from the house? But you’re never sure which way the fire’s going to come,” Dr Coy said.

“The fuel dump went up and created this huge dark red ball, and the wind kept blowing and just rolled it straight into the house, burst the windows; the house was gone in five minutes.

“We were standing (about 10 metres away), unburnt, not even hot, because the fire was burning in that direction, and we just watched it burn.”

Dr Coy and her brothers raced to the animals’ pens near the house, letting goats and kangaroos out, giving them an opportunity to at least fend for themselves.

Sadly, she couldn’t save her pet snake, which had been inside the home.

“I went back in to get her, but opened the door and got hit by a wall of flames, so I couldn’t get to her,” Dr Coy said.

They loaded the car, a modern-day Noah’s Ark of sorts, with six kangaroo joeys, a big doe (female kangaroo), a ringtail possum, a tawny frogmouth, a kookaburra and two parrots.

That was on the Thursday of the fire event, January 8.

On the Friday, they weren’t allowed back into the property.

On the Saturday, Dr Coy and her brothers, from Kilmore and Clonbinane, found their way in and began searching for animals.

Seventy-one of her 80 cows had succumbed to the fire.

She had to euthanase a further seven.

Two are still recovering.

On day four, volunteer veterinary group Vets for Compassion and the Humane Society for Animals Australia arrived to help.

“By that afternoon, they had the first animal in and that happened to be one of those ones that I released from the pen. He had slightly burnt feet,” Dr Coy said.

“I thought, we’ve got to set up a hospital, we’ve got to go; forget what you lost, do it.”

In three days, with shipping containers, temporary fencing and shade sails, a rehabilitation enclosure was erected by volunteers under guidance from Dr Coy, who was otherwise occupied at hospital with her brother, Steven, who had suffered a heart attack during the ordeal.

“We didn’t know whether he was going to make it, so I’d spend the mornings here working and then I’d spend all afternoon and all night at the hospital, maybe an hour’s sleep, and do it all again,” she said.

Fifteen weeks later, not much has changed about her exhausting routine, with ongoing health complications ailing Steven.

Initially she set up a makeshift surgery in the breezy double horse float she’s now living in.

In addition to her house, she also lost her treatment centre, pathology lab, joey-rearing facilities and the training facility where she used to train other carers how to use microscopes to identify diseases in animals, and other skills, in the fire.

“And a lot of other stuff, you know, my library burnt,” Dr Coy said.

“Fifty-odd years of books, notes, all my case histories.

“That’s probably the hardest thing.”

Dr Coy said although there was likely no way she will be able to replace everything and build the facilities up to what they were before that fateful day, she had no plans to stop doing what she was doing.

Her mother was a wildlife carer in Healesville in the 1950s and she said it was all she had ever known.

“Bluntly, I’ll die on the property; I’ll die doing what I’m doing,” she said.

“It’s not something you do, it’s something you are.”

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Tuesday, 16th May 2028

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