Five young children and their grandparents had a miraculous escape from the devastating fires raging through Tasmania by hiding for hours in chilly seawater under a jetty.
As the seven shivered and coughed in the water, chins below the surface to breathe the thin layer of clean air below the pall of toxic smoke, Tim Holmes took a series of photographs which he hoped would survive the flames as a memorial for the children’s parents.
Neither he nor his wife Tammy expected that any of them would survive.
But survive they did, against the odds, and Mr Holmes and his daughter Bonnie Walker, the children’s mother, have since been able to describe their separate and horrendous ordeals.
“The difficulty was that there was so much