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Childers blaze pain runs deep 20 years on

Tracey FerrierAAP
Fifteen people died in the arson attack on the Palace Backpackers Hostel in Childers, Queensland.
Camera IconFifteen people died in the arson attack on the Palace Backpackers Hostel in Childers, Queensland.

When the phone blares in the middle of the night, it's never good news for a cop in a quiet country town. Invariably someone is missing, injured or dead.

But the call that got Geoff Fay out of bed not long after midnight 20 years ago would deliver all three on an unimaginable scale.

Fay lived just two blocks from the Palace Backpackers Hostel in the Queensland town of Childers when itinerant fruit picker Robert Paul Long decided to set the century-old timber building on fire.

Even so, the local fire crew beat him there.

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Among them was rural fire brigade volunteer Col Santacaterina. Just six minutes earlier, he'd driven past the hostel on his way to the fire station.

He'd glanced through the thick fog at the two-storey structure but hadn't seen a thing.

When he returned with the fire truck - 360 seconds later - he couldn't believe his eyes.

Smoke billowed from beneath the verandah and windows along the side, an orange glow coming from the lower floor.

Terrified backpackers stood shell-shocked in the street. Others had escaped onto the awning of a neighbouring building. The firies hoisted a ladder and helped them to safety.

In the smoke and the chaos inside the hostel, Santacaterina and crew mate Hayden Whitaker found more panicked backpackers and got them out. Moments later, they were ordered out too.

The fire was going to flash over. When it did, the combustion of the super-heated upper floor generated a belt of wind that, in Santacaterina's words, just about blew the pair out the door.

It fell to Fay to cobble together a master list of the injured and the missing. He didn't want to think about the dead.

He moved efficiently between huddled groups of backpackers, shrouded in white sheets and blankets. Who are you travelling with? Are they out? Where were they when you saw them last?

In all, 15 names - mostly of overseas travellers who'd come to harvest local crops - would appear on the list of the dead.

Arson was suspected from the start. Two survivors were quick to tell Fay just that.

British backpacker Lisa Duffy gave Fay a name: Robert Long, who'd recently moved out of the hostel.

She would later tell a Queensland court that earlier in the night, Long had asked her "to leave the back fire escape door open".

He wanted to be able to get inside to beat up another backpacker he'd clashed with. He also claimed to be dying from cancer and expressed a desire to kill himself.

The name rang a bell with Fay. The day before, the publican at the Federal Hotel had found a suicide note, signed by Long. A second note had been slipped under the hostel door.

"I took possession of it, not knowing at that point in time what it was going to mean at the end of the day," Fay tells AAP.

As Duffy shared her suspicions in the main street of Childers, fire officers headed back inside. They were in a ground-floor dormitory when part of the ceiling fell in, dumping the body of the first known victim at their feet.

There was nothing they could do for him. Or any of the others who'd be found upstairs. One on a bed. Others at a window fitted with steel bars. Nine in a single room, the exit blocked by a bunk bed.

Long had left the hostel more than a week earlier, owing money. But on the night before the inferno, he was back at its ground-floor internet kiosk.

British survivor Neil Griffith would later tell investigators that when he'd gone downstairs, he'd seen a bin on fire, a cushion on top forming a bridge to a sofa.

Griffith tried to put out the flames and yelled to the man at the computer for help. Long replied: "I've got it", and calmly carried the bin out the back door, which closed behind him.

Griffith returned to bed thinking the danger was over. But as he was drifting off, he was startled by the sound of windows smashing in the fire.

He made it onto the awning next door. Some of his roommates didn't.

Long was at the centre of a manhunt that lasted five days, his image flashed on the TV news and plastered across the nation's newspapers.

There were at least six sightings of him in the Childers area but in the end, it was a police dog that picked up his scent on the Old Bruce Highway half an hour out of town.

Cornered on the banks of the Burrum River, Long wrestled with the police dog and used a knife to stab an officer in the jaw.

Another officer pulled his gun and fired, leaving Long with an injured ear and prompting a dramatic confession - "I'm dying anyway, I started the fire" - that had to be scrawled on a $10 note.

Long wasn't dying from his wound or from cancer. Earlier this month, he applied for parole having served the minimum 20-year sentence for the murders of Perth twins Stacey and Kelly Slarke.

He was never tried for the other 13 lives he took with prosecutors indicating it would have needlessly complicated legal proceedings and may not have changed his sentence.

The families of the dead and traumatised survivors believe Long remains a danger and should never be released, with desperate letters sent from across the world pleading for his ongoing detention.

Fay, still in charge of the Childers police station, understands their pain.

"Back at that time, you think oh, 20 years is a long time but ... it's not. From my point of view, that fire just occurred yesterday. It's still right there," he says.

"So many lives were lost, so many lives were destroyed. People are still grieving. Time doesn't heal a lot of things."

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