Twenty years on, the Childers backpacker hostel fire is still part of me | Jessica Wiegand

I survived the Queensland fire that killed 15, including seven fellow Britons. After, there was trauma, but also solidarity and compassionIt’s been 20 years since the backpacker hostel in Childers was set alight while the people within it slept. People including me. Twenty years since I went to bed expecting to wake up to pick avocados under the Queensland winter sun, and instead woke to the deafening cracks of flaming timber and shattering glass as the building beneath me burned.Fifteen people died that night, and yet the man who lit the fire is due for parole this month. He is, apparently, a “model prisoner” – those words are so jarring against the backdrop of grief he unleashed. Continue reading…
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