Angry flames burst through the slate roof as if ignited by a grenade, soaring high into the night sky, shrouding the fairytale house in a hellfire orange haze. The glare of the fast-moving inferno, which erupted at 2am, lit up the faces of the 30 firefighters frantically trying to quench the flames and stop the embers from reaching neighbouring houses. Mercifully, no one was inside Shenley Croft, at 7 Mangarra Road in Melbourne’s Canterbury on that still, sultry night last December: the heritage-listed home had been empty and left to rot since it was sold to a property investor four years earlier.
As dawn broke, the full scale of the destruction became apparent: smoke hissing out of sections of collapsed timber flooring littered with scorched redwood shingles; the surviving rafters above a blackened skeleton. The telltale signs of a blaze deliberately lit – traces of flammable liquid – led police to section off the house with the blue-and-white tape of a crime scene. Locals reported seeing a white ute parked outside in the hours before the fire.
When she received news of the fire, Tarni James, whose father, Bob, had bought the house back in 1957 and whose mum, Merle, lived there until her mid-90s, burst into tears. All she could do when she arrived at her childhood home was stare into the “lonely and silent” charred remains, breathing in the smoky air, overcome with memories: the noisy family dinners, her mum teaching dance in the airy back studio, the the.