AS FIRE descended on Pheasant Creek, near Kinglake, on Black Saturday, 16 frightened locals sheltered at Vicky Dunell's house.
Without concern for her own safety, Mrs Dunell set out to help others during Victoria's worst recorded natural catastrophe. For her bravery and selflessness, she has been awarded the Ambulance Service Medal in the Australia Day honours.
The shocked group of survivors hadn't all come themselves to the house in Kelly Court. Mrs Dunell and her husband, Ian, spent February 7 driving out hourly into the scorched, smoke-filled landscape. They picked up neighbours, listened to their stories, and gave them a place to sleep.
One neighbour, Jackie Saunders, said that with roads blocked by fallen trees, the Dunells' home was a haven because it was cleared and had water pumps.
The Dunells gave Ms Saunders; her husband, Robert; and Robert's parents, Margaret and Charlie Saunders, in their 80s, a bed and checked on the group all night.
''They were wonderful to us; they made us feel quite at home and safe and secure as much as they could. If it hadn't been for them, I don't know what we would have done,'' Jackie Saunders said.
This was just part of what Mrs Dunell, a volunteer with Ambulance Victoria's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), did on that hellish weekend.
When a local is badly injured or ill in Kinglake, a city ambulance could take 40 minutes to arrive, so CERT members are the first response to triple-0 calls.
As fire began to engulf Kinglake on February 7 last year, Mrs Dunell and two other CERT members - her husband, Ian, and local nurse Bart Wunderlich - twice halted the defence of their own homes to answer ambulance call-outs: first to a fire truck roll-over in Humevale Road and later to a report of a woman running down National Park Road with three children, one of them asthmatic.
Each time, the CERT trio's Subaru sedan was turned back by a wall of flames. Mrs Dunell later learned that the mother and three children survived, although their house was razed, and the fire truck crew escaped.
With city ambulances unable to reach Kinglake until midnight, Mrs Dunell set up a medical station at Kinglake West CFA and treated victims suffering burns, chest pain, smoke inhalation and shock.
In the next days, the CERT team went door-to-door, finding many burnt and traumatised people who hadn't moved because their cars had burned or they didn't know what to do.
''We'd treat them and advise them of what food and services were available in Kinglake, Flowerdale and Toolangi,'' said Mrs Dunell, who is now a paid bushfire case manager, advising on services and grants and offering moral support.
''It's fantastic. I love it,'' she said. ''It's quite an honour and a privilege to be allowed to go back in and work with people who are rebuilding their lives.''
She is honoured by her award but does not feel a hero.
''Everybody did what they could do or what they were trained to do on the day and for the following days and months after the bushfires,'' she said.
''When you do something for the community, i.e. with CFA or SES or ambulance, you don't expect any accolades; you do it because you live in a rural community and because you care.''
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