Jane Morrison pays tribute to her parents with a landmark Black Saturday memorial.
Lloyd and Mary Martin died as they lived – together. On a hill at Yan Yean cemetery, their gravestones, side by side, bear the infamous date – February 7, 2009. Black Saturday.
One headstone gives Mr Martin’s age as 83. Respecting Mrs Martin’s long-held secret about her age, the other says his wife was ‘‘considerably younger’’.
Some secrets are taken to the grave, but there is nothing secret about the horror of their deaths.
The couple will be remembered on two ‘‘narrative memorial walls’’ to be built this year at Toorourrong Reservoir, which backs on to their former horse stud on the Whittlesea-Yea Road, Humevale.
Four years on, their daughter Jane Morrison’s grief has eased but it will never disappear.
‘‘It is very different if you know someone is going to die. It is painful but it is expected,’’ she says.
‘‘I lost both parents in one hit. We are a small family – myself, my sister [Marisa Robbins], my son and daughter. Mum and dad were the linchpin that held everything together.
‘‘They had everything to live for. They played golf four times a week, went to the theatre and were health fanatics.’’
Morrison is on the Whittlesea council’s memorial wall project committee, along with Jane Bayliss, the daughter of revered newsreader Brian Naylor and wife Moiree, who also perished in the blaze.
The committee is seeking submissions of words and images to help tell the story of the fires. The words may be brief and simple, or they may be longer narratives.
The memorial wall will have the names of locals who died in the blaze and a second ‘‘narrative’’ wall will tell the story of the bushfire through poems, stories, facts and graphics.
Morrison’s mother was a 17-year-old theatre usherette when she met her future husband, a tenor who performed in Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma and Carousel.
The couple moved to Humevale and set up Pine Ridge Stud in 1978 to breed and race horses.
Their successes included Miss Kournikova, which took out the Group 1 Oakleigh Plate in 2001, and It’s a Giggle, which won the Bloodhorse Breeders Stakes in 1997.
Mrs Martin was a founder of the Wakeful Club, formed in 2001 to help women network and participate in the thoroughbred industry.
‘‘Dad had retired 18 months before the fires and only had cattle on his farm with its beautiful rolling hills, dams and Kinglake National Park beside it,’’ Morrison says.
‘‘He was in the CFA and his house was so well equipped with sprinklers, pumps and cleared land that it was supposed to be where people in his area evacuated to in case of fire.’’
On February 7, 2009, a friend rang Mrs Martin and urged her to leave.
But she wouldn’t go without her husband and he refused to leave.
‘‘I was at work and got home about 4.38pm,” Morrison says. “My son, Ben, said I’d missed a call from Nanna, my mother, and said she sounded different. Normally she would talk to him, but didn’t.”
The firefront swept through a short time later. “The pain doesn’t go away,” Morrison says. ‘‘You feel really bad, then you meet a woman who lost her entire family.
‘‘You need to sit down and talk to each other. Other people sympathise with you but back away if you start to speak about what you feel, but that’s what you need to be able to do; just talk.’’
■ To make a submission to the memorial wall project can contact the council’s Bushfire Recovery Team on 9217 2252 or bushfirerecovery@whittlesea.vic.gov.au
