There’s a dinner party game we play about disaster. But when fire bears down, the choice is stark

What you would grab if your house was burning down is an old question, asked lightly at dinner parties and on roadies. But with Victoria on fire again last week, it stopped being theoretical.

The reckoning of bushfire season has made me calculate what I’d put in my own shipping container. For me, all the stuff I’ve spent years buying and dusting and insuring, the things I thought defined me or connected me to the past, got weighed against another question: can you replace it, or can you not?

Which means most of it would be left behind in a flash. People and pets are automatic inclusions, of course – and hate to say it, but probably phones too – but my list was short after that.

The department store Santa photo where one kid is wearing a choker, one has a broken arm and one is on the knee of the only Santa ever to look off chops on meth. My dog Maggie’s ashes and collar. My grandmother Neita’s handwritten recipe book. My other grandmother Beatrice’s ruby ring.

The copy of Gone with the Wind inscribed on my 13th birthday by Mum. Ancient black suede Chloé sandals. The painting Dad brought home from Bali after his cousin died there in a 1974 Pan Am crash. If it fits in the container, the Moran modular my parents bought in 1977.

When I ask other people, they also go mostly for irreplaceables. My friend Mia: “Aunty Mary’s rings, birth certificates, my stack of rejection letters from TV news directors, all shoved in the Louis Vuitton handbag which has taken a decade to soften.”

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Paula, my Sydney mate: “The crystal glasses my grandparents carted over from Croatia as a gift for my parents when I was born.” Canberra radio announcer Gemma: “The at-home nail salon.” My husband: “Drums. Trophy for Glen Iris cricket club champion 1996-97. Mum in her urn.”

In the heat of the moment at the farm, one stoic 30-year-old had been similarly clear eyed about what counted. Once the photos and documents were packed, what she and the family valued most was each other.

Should the front move through, they’d run for the dam. “If the farm isn’t OK,” she’d texted, “we will be.”

That understatement held everything she didn’t say. Anyone who’s lost a home to fire knows the grief isn’t simple – the dislocation, the years to rebuild, the reach for things that no longer exist.

But only people are truly priceless. Uselessly safe at the beach, my last text late on the Friday before I went to sleep not knowing what would happen to her overnight, was short: “You run so fast to that dam.”

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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