A PHOTOGRAPH SITS on the mantle in my father’s study. It has been there a long time, and I never paid attention to it until recently. It is a sepia-toned photograph of a woman in her early fifties with short brown hair. She wears a white dress. It was evidently taken at a party: she sits in an armchair with her hands clasped together, a glass of wine beside her. Her expression is unsmiling but gives the impression of warmth and intelligence. The woman is Anne Staniforth Carter. She is an aunt I never met, an aunt who died six years before I was born. 

At the beginning of my research, I knew little about Anne. I knew that my aunt had been married to an Anglican reverend. I knew she was Dad’s half-sibling, from my grandfather Staniforth Ricketson’s first marriage. I knew that she lived in the country at Mount Macedon. The final thing I knew for certain: my aunt died a sad and violent death. She perished on 16 February 1983, the night of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Her husband, the Reverend Bill Carter, drove away from their cottage without her. In his panic, he left his wife behind and saved himself as the flames closed in.

STORIES OF COWARDICE, unlike those of courage, make us deeply uncomfortable. Coward is a label we generally affix to those we call monsters: terrorists, paedophiles, predators. But cowardice does not just exist at the extremities of behaviour – it is both more quotidian and more human than that. 

William John Carter married Anne Staniforth Speed (née Ricketson) on 26 August 1978 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Mount Macedon, which is a small rural township that lies at the base of a dormant volcano. The interior of the old church was arrayed with daffodils. The bride wore a green opal engagement ring. Her dress was yellow. Afterwards, the couple honeymooned at a cottage by the sea in Sorrento. Then there was a pilgrimage to Europe.

The marriage was a second chance for them both. 

Born on Christmas Day in 1925, Anne had grown up in a prosperous family; part of her childhood had been spent at Hascombe, a Mount Macedon property with a spectacular hill station garden. Anne did secretarial work, married a doctor and raised three sons. Her marriage ended in 1966. 

Bill was born in 1922. He married and had children, worked as a primary school teacher and then as an Anglican priest. He loved the rituals of the High Church and the wearing of the priest’s cassock. Bill’s own divorce negatively affected his employment in the Church, forcing him to work on a temporary relief basis at various parishes as a locum priest. It was on one of these assignments that Father Bill met and fell in love with one of his parishioners, Anne Speed. She painted a picture of him titled Mystical Priest.

A relationship is impossible to reconstruct; it can only be glimpsed. Anne’s surviving letters indicate that she was a loyal partner, with realistic expectations for the second marriage and a large capacity for tolerance. She has been described by many as a sweet, loving, generous woman. She was a devoted Christian and was drawn to the teachings of St Francis of Assisi, who is associated with caring for animals and the environment. On their pilgrimage in Italy, she purchased a small statue of St Francis, which she later gifted to the Mount Macedon church. Every day, she wrote down the text of St Francis’ Peace Prayer, which concludes with the words: ‘It is in forgiving that one is forgiven / It is in dying that one awakens to eternal life.’

Father Bill had a more melancholic disposition and was dissatisfied with his life. 

His uncertain status as a locum priest – his exclusion from the permanent life of the Church – triggered a crisis of faith. On their honeymoon, Anne and Bill visited Taizé, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy. Bill was thunderstruck by the ‘beautiful’, ‘simple and unpretentious’ lifestyle of the Taizé, and the experience accentuated the depths of his dislocation from the Church. It left him ‘deeply depressed’; in his memoir, Trust the Dreams (1988), he describes having ‘fallen into a hole as dark as could be’. 

In 1980, Bill was offered an opportunity that promised to reverse his fortunes: a two-year contract to be the parish priest based in Leinster, a remote mining town in Western Australia. 

Arriving on a hot day in September, Anne saw the town from her plane seat: located in an arid landscape of vast salt lakes, Leinster looked like a ‘small mushroom city’ growing out of a ‘marble floor’. Father Bill and Anne (the locals nicknamed her ‘Sister Anne’) were warmly received in the town. Leinster was too small to have a church, so Anne set up one of their bedrooms as a chapel, buying a stained-glass window with the image of a chalice on it.

In her letters, Anne presents a mostly optimistic vision of their life in Leinster. She was industrious and energetic. She planted the garden with white and yellow bulbs. She worked as the town librarian three days a week and taught scripture classes. She played golf, she sewed tapestries, she adopted a sheepdog and called him Dookie. She read books, such as Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), which struck her as an indelible portrait of courage and grit.

Anne also accompanied Bill on his pastoral duties. The parish was large and sparsely populated, spanning hundreds of kilometres. In a banged-up (and much hated) old Holden panel van they called the Yellow Beetle, Bill and Anne travelled to tiny remote towns such as Wiluna, Leonora and Laverton to attend to their inhabitants’ spiritual needs.

In his memoir, Bill recorded his own experiences in Leinster, starkly contrasting with the picture Anne painted in her letters. He felt that he was unwanted and regarded with suspicion by the locals. He found the mining town troubled and unstable, far from the vision of the solid, close-knit community he’d witnessed in Taizé, and he hated the ‘tyranny’ of travelling that his position required. Above all, Bill found that the life of an outback ministry ‘permeates loneliness’. The landscape he describes is suffused with despair: ‘the sun beating down in the cloudless skies for the best part of the year, the dust, the flies…the wind with its squalls…you encounter nature true, raw and often harsh’.

Anne describes one incident in her letters that, in hindsight, is laden with foreboding. Travelling back from Wiluna to Leinster in November 1980, they stopped for lunch under a gum tree. It was extremely hot and there were hordes of flies. When they decided to leave, the Yellow Beetle failed to start, and no one responded to their call for help on the two-way radio. Bill insisted he would walk the four kilometres back to town, which sparked an argument; Anne became ‘very angry’ with her husband because he obstinately refused to take any water with him. The letter leaves Bill’s motivations ambiguous. The disagreement went unresolved, and he left her there alone. Five minutes later, Anne was able to start the Holden, and she drove down the road to collect Bill, who was ‘quite flabbergasted to see [her] at the wheel’. 

After the conclusion of his contract in Western Australia, Anne and Bill (and Dookie) returned to Victoria to live at Mount Macedon. Anne owned a pretty cottage called Clair on the main road; Bill thought the house looked like a little A-frame cathedral.

It must have seemed like the opposite of their life in the desolate mining town: green, vibrant, connected and safe. 

IN THE CHRISTIAN calendar, Ash Wednesday is the day of reflection and repentance – the day of turning around. During the service, ash is smeared on the forehead of the participants: ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’

In 1983, Ash Wednesday fell on 16 February.

It had been a summer of drought and bushfires. The week before, Melbourne had been covered in a dust cloud so thick it blocked the sun, creating an unsettling hallucinatory glow. The communities of the Mount were already on edge: a bushfire on 1 February had blazed through the forests north of Macedon and burnt thousands of hectares. People started keeping blankets and water in their cars.   

Ash Wednesday was a day of oppressive heat, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees. There was a total fire ban. The bush was bone-dry and ready to burn. Something strange was in the air – an eerie, enervating quality. Small fires broke out all over the place. Country Fire Authority (CFA) aircraft swept the Macedon Ranges.

At approximately 2.20 pm, strong winds blew a power line against a tree in Trentham East. The resulting bushfire burnt at great speed, rapidly entering Wombat State Forest. Available CFA units were sent out to fight the eastern flank. 

Back in Melbourne, the sky was filled with smoke and dust. In the afternoon, my father picked up my mother from her shift at the hospital on Lonsdale Street. She had not listened to the news that day, but it was clear given the immense heat that there would be fires. Mum suddenly thought of her sister-in-law and felt a palpitation of concern.

‘I hope Anne’s okay,’ she said.

At 5.10 pm, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a forecast that the wind would change at 9 pm, blowing the fire towards Mount Macedon. For some reason, however, this information was not communicated to residents of the area – a failure that would become the focus of a later coroner’s inquest. It was perhaps assumed that the fire would not cross the four-lane Calder Highway. Whatever the reason, the residents received no warning of the danger.

At 9 pm or so, the wind changed and the fire jumped the highway, taking down lines and causing the power to fail. With the fierce winds travelling 100 km/h, there was no time for an organised evacuation. There were only minutes to escape.

Many residents were watching Doctor Zhivago on television when the power went out. The snowy landscapes on-screen turned to black. Suddenly, there came a thunderous roar that rattled the windows, like the sound of a jet plane or a train. Spot fires appeared everywhere. The air was filled with thick, acrid smoke and burning debris and embers that flew horizontally. Someone later described it as a scene from Dante’s Inferno, like glimpsing the Gates of Hell.

Some residents were able to escape down the highway to Gisborne. Some sheltered in paddocks or at the sports reserve or in the fire station. Hundreds of residents (and animals) crowded into the Macedon pub. Through the windows, they saw cars exploding on Victoria Street.

At the cottage on Mount Macedon Road, Father Bill was in the study doing paperwork. Anne had gone to bed. The power outage had forced Bill to work by candlelight. He was partially deaf, so the noise of the approaching fires passed him by. Earlier that evening, he’d taken Dookie for a walk and felt a sense of eeriness in the enveloping darkness – what he later described as a ‘heavy ominous touch’.

Bill heard Anne’s voice: ‘There are sparks!’ 

She had come to his desk in her nightdress, her face etched with fear. Bill looked out the window and saw embers. He described them later as ‘falling in the spacious Gothic-like areas like snow’.

Anne was emphatic. ‘We’ll have to leave.’ She disappeared down the spiral staircase.

Bill, in a ‘terrible moment of realisation’, swept all the books on his desk into a suitcase. The collection included his Churchman’s diary, which he referred to as his ‘right arm’. In shorts and slippers, he hurriedly descended the stairs and went outside to the open carport, where their Commodore was parked. 

Anne was not there. 

He ran out to the street, shouting, ‘Anne! Anne, where are you?’

The fires were close now. Flaming debris was being hurled down to the ground; the sparks were blown by a savage wind so strong they looked like ‘laser beams’. He looked over and saw that there was still a car in the driveway of his neighbour, Mrs Fraser.

Bill recounted the story of that night twice on the record: first to the coroner’s inquest in September 1983, and then in his memoir. In both versions, he states that in that terrifying moment, he came to the following conclusion about Anne’s whereabouts: ‘I [thought] my beloved had managed to pick a ride from any car escaping.’

The sheepdog, Dookie, was with him. Bill grabbed the dog, got into the Commodore and drove down the hill – a ‘horror ride’ as he watched houses engulfed by flames. He made it safely to the high school in Gisborne, which was sheltering bushfire refugees. 

ANNE HAD NOT, of course, caught a ride from a passing motorist. 

Only moments before Bill appeared outside the open carport, Anne had passed through there herself. She went to the cottage next door to assist her neighbour, Joan Fraser, a widow in her mid sixties, who was in severe distress. The Age later reported that Mrs Fraser’s son called her that night, finding Anne with her, and implored them both to leave immediately. Mrs Fraser responded that they wouldn’t be able to make it out by car as it had become too dangerous outside. She told him the situation looked grim and that she had filled the bath with ice water. The conversation ended there.

Bryan Power’s Memories of Ash Wednesday (2023) records the story of the Huttons, who lived behind Anne and Bill and whose house miraculously survived:

Mr and Mrs Barney Hutton…remained with their home throughout the holocaust of last Wednesday night…despite the heat and smoke, the Huttons made an attempt to reach Mrs Carter and Mrs Fraser, they could do nothing but their efforts under the most extreme of circumstances are deserving of recognition.

In all, seven people died on the Mount that night: Jack Farquer, Amy Farquer, Nellie Thompson, Frank Archer, Stephen Henderson, Joan Fraser and Anne Staniforth Carter.

WHAT IS A coward?

In the only full-length scholarly treatment of the subject, Cowardice: A Brief History (2014), Chris Walsh offers the following definition: ‘A coward is someone who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.’ 

There are two relevant parts to this definition: the first is the existence of a positive moral duty – a duty to help, to save. The second part, according to Walsh, is the presumption of human agency – the ability to make choices and to act. The idea of cowardice posits ‘a moral self that is held responsible for its choices’. It is only the potential for cowardice that makes courage possible and worth celebrating. Courage is the inverse of cowardice; it represents the moral self who has successfully fulfilled their duty to act.

What was Bill Carter’s duty to Anne? Did he have a duty to at least attempt to save her life?

Bill’s testimony was an attempt to muddy the moral equation and render the question moot. He claimed that he’d made a simple mistake – that he thought Anne had left without him; she’d been the one to panic and hitch a ride from a passer-by. If this had been true, it would have made her the coward rather than him. 

There is ample reason to be sceptical of his explanation. There is nothing in Anne’s biography that suggests she would have abandoned her husband in a moment of danger. Quite the opposite: Anne always demonstrated excessive care and concern for the welfare of those around her. The Carters had a working car, the Commodore, which Anne was more than capable of driving herself. Also, if Anne had hailed a ride from a passer-by, why not ask them to wait for Bill? He was no more than thirty seconds behind her. Moreover, there is Anne’s relationship with her neighbour, who was widowed and alone in the next-door cottage. Following the death of Mrs Fraser’s husband, Anne reportedly said: ‘I am going to look after Joan.’

Finally, before he left Clair for the last time, Bill noticed that Mrs Fraser’s car was in her driveway. There was every reason to think Mrs Fraser was home – every reason to think Anne was there too. 

So, on balance, it seems Bill Carter’s explanation was a lie. A lie designed to protect him from the accusation of cowardice. And a lie that was, itself, a secondary act of cowardice, because it suggested that Anne was the one capable of abandoning a spouse in mortal danger.

A simpler and more plausible explanation: Bill Carter panicked. He thought he was going to die if he stayed a moment longer, and so he left.

HISTORICALLY, COWARDS HAVE been despised, treated with silence and erasure.

In Dante’s Inferno, the first cries he hears after passing through the Gates of Hell are the cries of the cowards. They exist at the outer perimeter of hell, doomed to chase after a blank banner for all eternity, bitten by flies and wasps. ‘Let us not speak of them,’ Virgil says.

During World War I, 115 Australians were court-marshalled, primarily for desertion. There is a dearth of research on the subject. None were executed – this was barred by Australian law – but the British Army executed hundreds for the same offence. 

In the 2025 Southern California wildfires, there were reports suggesting that a woman might have abandoned her disabled son and saved herself. The actual situation was far more complicated and devastating, but still the comments on X divided between condolences and condemnation (‘monstrous’, ‘weird’, ‘narcissist’, ‘evil’).   

A curious thing that I’ve noticed: whenever I bring up cowardice in conversation, the subject is often changed to courage instead. When I talk about Bill Carter with my dad, he shifts the topic to speak at length about his (and Anne’s) father, Staniforth, my grandfather, who rallied his platoon and saved the life of an officer during the landing at Gallipoli, receiving a Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions. Dad finds it difficult to talk about Bill’s behaviour in more direct terms.  

Why does cowardice make us so uncomfortable?

In the many books published about Ash Wednesday, there are stories of courage on every page, such as that of the firefighters who defended the Macedon pub. These books are all about heroes, and Bill Carter is not mentioned once. We are better able to talk about the parts of tragedies that bring out the best in us. We spotlight stories of courage and imagine that is how we would respond in that situation.

Cowardice, by contrast, we reserve for the worst of us: the brutal dictators, the terrorists, the violent criminals and sex offenders. By othering those who are cowardly and describing them as monstrous, it allows us a safe distance from such behaviour, to imagine it is not something we are capable of.

The film Force Majeure is about a picture-perfect Swedish family on holiday at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. One afternoon, they sit on the deck of a restaurant, looking up at the mountain. Pleasantness turns to horror: an avalanche is descending. The wife screams and hugs the children; the husband runs away and leaves them behind. It turns out to be a false alarm and no one is injured. He returns and denies that he abandoned them, but a crack opens in the marriage that becomes a chasm. The wife is appalled by her husband’s weakness, by his inability to fulfil his duty as a partner and a father.

How would I have responded in Bill’s situation? I consider my partner, Tom, whom I love deeply, who is as generous and caring and curious as Anne was. I think I’d stay behind to find him – I think I would never leave
him behind.  

But how do I know?

The impetus to behave courageously is culturally encoded and contradicts our biological programming. Consider: when Bill left Clair, the fires were very close. Sparks were flying; it was difficult to breathe. It was extraordinarily dangerous. We have a physiological mechanism for self-preservation: the ‘fight or flight’ response. The threat activates the sympathetic nervous system, triggering an acute stress response that prepares the body to either fight – futile in these circumstances – or flee. How could any of us, in the same situation, say that we would not also follow the dictates of our biology?

And yet.

Anne and Bill both faced the same danger. Her first thought wasn’t to save herself. It was to save the life of her neighbour.

AFTER ASH WEDNESDAY, Bill Carter moved to Mont Albert and resumed employment as a locum priest. In his memoir, Bill is silent on the subject of guilt and regret. He does not explain how his relationship with the Church or the communities of the Mount were affected by Anne’s death. He does, however, describe his grief: he likens it to the experience of being tossed around on a turbulent sea. Although there was some suggestion of rebuilding Clair, Bill never returned to live at Mount Macedon. He died in 1999 and was cremated at Lilydale Memorial Park.

Anne Staniforth Carter’s funeral was held on a ‘pleasantly warm summer day’ at St Paul’s Church in Gisborne on Saturday 26 February 1983. It was ten days after Ash Wednesday. The church was overflowing. In his funeral address, the Reverend Ken Parker spoke with eloquence about Anne’s ‘richly creative and very rare personality’. Anne was, he said, ‘involved in a continuing struggle for freedom…she carried the marks of suffering which came from her struggle to be free’.

The Macedon church was rebuilt in 1986 and christened the Church of the Resurrection. It features a ten-metre stained-glass window depicting the destruction wrought by the fires, underneath a cross. The old church bell was recovered from the ashes and installed in the new belltower, dedicated to Anne’s memory.

ON A MORNING in late December, Tom and I drive to Macedon. We have been staying in nearby Woodend visiting his sister over Christmas. The day is unseasonably cool; it is drizzling as we park outside the public cemetery.
It is a remarkably beautiful place, hushed and encircled by trees. Anne’s grave is in the Anglican section, on a family plot where her brother, mother and son are also buried. We find the grave, with a simple granite headstone. The plot has become unkempt and overgrown.  

In his memoir, Bill dwelt on the intense emotional connection Anne had with Mount Macedon: there was something ‘mysterious’ about it, something that ‘breathed into [her] a spirit that was never erased’. All her life, Anne’s heart ‘never wandered far from the Mount’. 

Tom starts to clean the area in front of the grave. He picks up a frond off the ground and sweeps away the dirt and debris. The grave is soon tidy. I shiver as the day grows colder; all around are shades of green and brown. The bulk of the mountain can be seen behind pines and eucalypts. I am touched by the tenderness of Tom’s action, at his small act of unprompted kindness. He respects the dignity of the dead. 

_{Image courtesy of Dave Hoefler from Unsplash}