Vic: Pastor struggles as town recovers

AAP General News (Australia)
02-14-2009
Vic: Pastor struggles as town recovers

By Greg Roberts

ALEXANDRA, Vic Feb 14 AAP - Ivor Jones is a man of God and the Marysville pastor will
need all his faith to keep him strong on Sunday.

A memorial service is being held in Buxton - the first for him since the hellfire began
on February 7 - for admired education researcher Ken Rowe, 63, who was killed in the fires.

The service at the Buxton hall, near Marysville 100km east of Melbourne, will be held
the day after Marysville residents visited the town on buses for the first time since
the fires.

Mr Jones, 74, lived in Liverpool in the UK as a boy during the blitz of World War II
but says nothing could have prepared him for the Saturday hellfire.

"Liverpool was devastated during the war over four years but what happened in Marysville
took just three hours," he told reporters.

"As a preacher I preach getting ready a lot, we were never ready for this fire.

"This situation re-confirms that material things don't really matter."

Mr Jones, a Baptist, urged people to be stoic like the bible character Job, but strength
will be tested with the loss of life meaning many more services will follow Dr Rowe's,
who was a member of Mr Jones' church.

Another member of his church, Rod Liesfield, survived but his wife Elizabeth and their
sons James, 14, and Matthew, 13, died.

Inspiring and heroic stories will also emerge, to lift people's spirits.

On a bus into town, resident Simon Hudson said he sat next to a neighbour, whose name
was Anne, who had just been re-united with her husband Bruce and son Conrad for the first
time since the fires.

"They saved their house and have re-united... Bruce and Conrad are up there, they've
been doing it tough, their house is not well, they've been up there, but they're alive,"

he told reporters.

For many Melburnians over the years Marysville has been a place to show kids snow for
the first time and it is what Mr Hudson called a beautiful, historic, logging town that
its close-knit resident were "very proud of".

"It is a tourism town but people are embarrassed about all this help that is coming," he said.

"It's been seven days - a week today - but it only feels like yesterday.

"I think a few people have come to terms with it, in the first four or five days there
were lots of tears everywhere but now can move on, work out what we are going to do, where
we are going to go, how are we going to re-build."

AAP gr/ht

KEYWORD: BUSHFIRES VIC MARYSVILLE (PIX AVAILABLE)

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