Mates Under Fire

A killer is on the loose in an Australian country town. Excited for the June long weekend, bubbly 23-year-old Rachelle Childs leaves work, calls her sister, and is dead within hours. Her burning, partially naked body is found nine hours later in bushland on a lonely coastal road. Her killer has never been caught. Now innocent people, once too afraid to speak, are breaking their silence. If you&rsq...

Has COVID-19 stopped the rebuilding after the bushfires? Dick Adams was a deputy police commissioner but he says he has never seen a disaster of this scale and it is his job to fix the coast. He is a recovery coordinator. His first job is to clear the remnants of razed homes and to rebuild community infrastructure. Sir Peter Cosgrove is running the business council response to the blazes. The peop...

Heroes are easy to find in Malua Bay. Raj Gupta is a lifesaver. Too humble to talk about his own fire losses, he would rather talk about the patients who come to his Malua Bay pharmacy. He opened it in the wake of the fires and dispensed medicine in the dark for free. Ken Sloan is the man you would want to see if a devastating fire had just ripped through. He runs the South Coast's best opp shop n...

Amid the horror, one thing is sure in Malua Bay. No one will be the same. We speak to Lifeline about how they are helping people come to terms with the trauma. Post traumatic stress is already apparent in many who stared down the flames and survived.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stoic fire chief Shane Fitzsimmons gave comfort to the people of Malua Bay 24 hours after the inferno. The toll of the dreadful fire season is never far when the commissioner recounts the toll of 25 deaths across the state, including six of his own men. The horror summer didn’t spare his volunteers like Steve Hillyer, a funny Australian larrikin. It's a wonder he has time to be funny, he is homele...

Former Wallaby Al Baxter was fearsome on a rugby field but on New Year’s Eve he joined more than 1000 people in a terrifying fight for life on Malua Bay beach. A whiskey in his beach bag settled his nerves to some degree after a frightening day. You will also hear from Jan Russell and how her extraordinary neighbours saved her home while she was sheltering at the beach. Herald Sun photographer Ale...

Paradise is a fair description of Malua Bay before the Black Summer fires. Crystal waters lapped at pristine sand, tree lined green hills with narrow roads where hundreds of families lived in modest homes rising above the waterfront. Then, all hell broke loose on New Year’s Eve morning. In the hours-long life and death battle which followed, 90 homes were razed, and forged in the fire was an incre...

The Daily Telegraph takes you into the heart of a community at the epicentre of one of Australia's worst bushfires in recent years. Meet the cast of characters, the heroes and the true Aussies in this new podcast serial, Mates Under Fire   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.