1 month ago
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A fortnight ago, Nick O’Brien was uneasy. He had a beautiful bush home full of his family’s memories, but no way to insure it.
“I was having lunch with a mate, and I was telling him, ‘I feel a bit nervous, I’ve been up here for 16 years and I haven’t had an event’. I just had some inkling that it could be time,” he said.
Then at 2.34pm on Friday, an alert popped up on his phone, warning him of a fire in Ravenswood South. Soon after, his family’s mud brick home on Douglas Lane, Harcourt was gone.
With O’Brien and his wife Jenny Plompen losing everything, they are now struggling to know what they can do, and if they can ever rebuild. Like many, they’re also struggling to reconcile the harsh reality faced by many unable to gain insurance in areas prone to natural disasters.
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Mostly, O’Brien can hold back tears when talking about everything he has lost, and even at the frustration of losing his insurance. But emotion gets the better of him when trying to explain all he has gained.
“It’s just been so, so humbling,” O’Brien said.
“It’s incredible. I’ve got people offering me houses, caravans, cabins ... I’ve got a guy who is going to remove all the debris for me and scrape the site.
“It’s amazing. They have their own families to worry about … it embarrasses me, the generosity that flows.”
It was prospecting, a weekend hobby O’Brien took up nearly two decades ago, that first introduced him to the area. When he found the quirky home set on four acres of bush on Douglas Lane, he fell in love and bought it two days later.
In the 16 years since, he and Plompen raised their three young children there and built their life around the home’s mud bricks and stunning views.
Nick O’Brien’s Harcourt property before bushfires destroyed the family home.
“It was whimsical. It was lovely, it was different,” O’Brien said.
“We extended it, we had four bedrooms and kids TV room, a big open-plan family area, a modern kitchen with Harcourt granite that looked out over a dam, and we had a freestanding cottage where my big kids would come up and stay with their kids.
“And I loved living out there. The air is clean, you see every star in the sky, the neighbours are genuine. The mud brick was fantastic, it was so thermal, and you didn’t need to have air-conditioning going,” he said.
But, he concedes, “I probably didn’t look at it close enough. It’s hard now, knowing what you know.”
Nick O’Brien’s family home in Harcourt after it was destroyed in a bushfire.
When COVID-19 hit in 2020, O’Brien was forced to take a pay cut and faced financial difficulty. Prioritising his children’s private education, he let his home insurance lapse. But when his situation improved, and he tried to reinsure his home, he was refused by insurer after insurer.
As a career property valuer and risk manager now working for the Bendigo Bank, O’Brien said he had some understanding of the insurers’ point of view, but was still angry at being rejected on grounds such as not being able to prove who built the house 50 years earlier.
“I tried three or four companies but, as soon as you mention mud brick, it’s something that’s not in the box, it’s not a standard-type house,” he said.
“I see it in the bank. Areas are becoming uninsurable with climate change and flood risk and bushfire risk ... I suppose you can’t blame the insurance companies, they are mitigating the risk element by not participating in it – but it does hurt.”
Nick and Jenny lived in Harcourt since 2010 with their three (out of six) children. On Friday, January 9, their mud brick home was destroyed by bushfires.
Fears over the lack of insurance increasingly worried O’Brien, particularly as warnings leading into this summer intensified.
On Friday, with his wife at work and his children at the beach, O’Brien changed into some old jeans, a thick shirt, a beanie and donned some leather gloves with thoughts of fighting the fire. But when the wind changed to a westerly, and he was directly in its path, he quickly put the family’s three dogs in the car, did a roundup of his neighbours, and left for the nearby town of Castlemaine to monitor the unfolding disaster.
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“I was just hoping to God it had gone through fast, and we would have something left,” he said.
O’Brien and a neighbour returned home the next morning.
“I drove up the drive, and it was pretty raw … We were the only one lost in the street. The only thing left standing was the mud brick walls.”
To an overwhelming extent, the community has stepped in to fill the insurance void, with a GoFundMe campaign set up by Nick’s six children over the weekend already generating more than $125,000.
The federal and state governments are also providing up to $52,250 to uninsured households impacted by the bushfires to re-establish their homes.
Of what they’ve lost, O’Brien says: “We’ve got six kids. There’s a lot of mementoes you bring through ... But there’s a lot of people worse off.”
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