The Noojee postmistress, Mrs Gladys Sanderson … refused to leave her switchboard until the post office caught fire. Half an hour earlier it had started to burn but volunteers extinguished the flames. Before she joined other residents in the precarious shelter of the creek, Mrs Sanderson locked the money and valuables in the safe and had her brother wire the keys to her wrist.

‘If the worst comes to the worst’, she told the postmaster at Warragul in her last call from Noojee, ‘they’ll find the keys on my wrist.’

‘It was close on 2 o’clock when I left the post office. I got into a pool behind the hotel. There were about 60 people there. We just crouched in the river. It was about 20 feet wide and the edges were burning. Burning leaves and debris were falling in the water. We stayed in the water until about seven o’clock.

She was taken to Warragul to sleep that night. But the next morning she was back on the job at Noojee, operating a temporary switchboard mechanics had rigged up in a tin shed which escaped the blaze. Noojee, or what was left of it, was in touch with the outside world again.

[H, 13/1/39]