It is rather frightening just how quickly it happened and how unaware we can be of these things.
My wife and I had put the kids (all 4 of them) to bed and gone to bed early because I had flown in from work that night.
We were watching TV in bed and heard nothing.
It was only when we got out of our bedroom to get a drink that we smelt smoke.
The first thing we did was check the kids bedrooms and all seemed OK.
It was only on looking out the back window and seeing the glow that we knew something was wrong.
We live 10-15 houses from the actual park and the embers were flying over our house and going another 15-20 houses past us.
We manned the hoses in our front and back yard.
I must say a huge thanks to the firefighters as they did an excellent job of chasing the running fires from all the embers.