Ann Fogarty
Ann Fogarty was born in Lancashire, England in 1950 and graduated as a nursery nurse in 1968. After marrying an Australian in 1970 she came to Australia under the “Ten Pound Pom” scheme, and settled in Berwick before moving to Upper Beaconsfield 3 years later. She worked in kindergartens in Beaconsfield for 5 years. She was still living in Upper Beaconsfield on Ash Wednesday, 1983, and suffered life-threatening burns during the fires.
Ann Fogarty & Anne Crawford
Forged with Flames is Ann Fogarty’s poignant and compelling story of her experiences of the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983 and its devastating aftermath as she struggled to survive the severe burns she sustained to 75% of her body, followed by a series of life-threatening events. These have had a profound effect on her psyche, her health and her spirit, yet the reader is repeatedly drawn to admire and be deeply inspired by her honesty and her incredible moral fortitude. Her triumph is coming out of it scathed but by no means defeated.
Brought up in a working-class family, Ann stepped out of her predefined life path in a small industrial town in Lancashire to work as a nanny in swinging 1960s London where she found herself living across the road from her teen idol, Cliff Richard. Her fate was sealed when she met and fell in love with a young Australian and emigrated with him to Australia soon after they were married. She embraced her new home, settling and working in a bushland community on the south-east outskirts of Melbourne with her husband and two young children.
On the 16th September in 1983, this seemingly idyllic life would be shattered in a matter of seconds when she was engulfed by a fireball in one of Australia’s worst bushfires on record as it swept across Victoria and South Australia, changing many lives forever. In the tiny Victorian town of Upper Beaconsfield where she lived, 21 people would lose their lives, 186 houses would be lost, and many people would be injured. She would ‘die’ many times before she could be safely returned to the world of the living.
Awards: Winner of the Australian Christian Literary Awards 2013