Forged with Flames

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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

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

“My world exploded. For long seconds I was oblivious to anything but pain. A fireball had hit me: a rolling, roaring gaseous monster outpacing the fire front and the one-hundred-plus kilometre-per-hour wind, causing everything in its path to combust.”

2013 | 9780987178510 | 230 pages | Paperback | 208 x 136mm | Memoir
Forged with Flames, Ann Fogarty, Anne Crawford, Ash Wednesday, true stories, illuminating, inspiring, living, hope, determination
9780987178510
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Ann Fogarty was born in Lancashire, England in 1950. She graduated as a nursery nurse in 1968 and worked as a nanny in London for the next two years. Read more.

One Ash Wednesday victim’s extraordinary story of survival, of acceptance and hope. A quintessentially Australian story that has as its central figure, a shy and unassuming Englishwoman. In the Burns Unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Rehab and later within the four walls of her home, quietly and heroically, she battles what would be everyone’s worst nightmare, in order to stay alive for her children.

“A testament of a young woman’s courage when trapped in one of the worst Australian firest fires. A must read.”

— Sir James Galway, world-renowned flautist