Anne Crawford
Anne Crawford was a feature writer for The Age and The Sunday Age for more than 10 years. She researched a documentary in South Africa about the historic post-apartheid elections in 1994, and worked as a volunteer in Nepal for three months documenting the work of the Fred Hollows Foundation in words and photos. Anne is also a published and exhibited photographer. She has previously co-authored three books; Shadow of a Girl, (Penguin, 1995), Through Other Eyes, (Pan Macmillan, 2002) and Doctor Hugh, My Life with Animals (Allen & Unwin 2012).
Anne lives in rural South Gippsland where she writes, walks her Red Heeler-cross, rides her precocious mare and volunteers with the CFA.
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