THERE was no room for a woman and her child on Christmas Day, 165 years ago.
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But unlike the Biblical Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Moreys were turned away not from a Bethlehem inn but a Bendigo bank, shortly after 3am.
And far from being long distant travellers looking for a stable, the Moreys were locals fleeing the largest structure fire Bendigo had witnessed to that point.
"Mrs Morey, in her night-dress only, barefooted, with a child in her arms, had just escaped from [a] burning house," the Bendigo Advertiser reported the next day.
"The succour requested by Mr. Morey for his wife, was denied to the unfortunate lady, and the door pitilessly shut against her by some one."
It was hard for people to understand why anyone would have done that. The bank doubled as a home complete with servants, so there was always someone around even in the early hours of the morning.
Still, people could probably forgive whatever confusion had played out on that doorstep, in a moment when panic was engulfing downtown Bendigo.
Fire 'raged with frightful violence'
The 1857 Christmas Day blaze was Bendigo's "first great conflagration", as the Advertiser described it at the time.
Bigger and deadlier fires would strike in the centuries to follow but this one was ferocious.
It raged through the most populated part of the burgeoning goldfields' settlement, either engulfing or badly damaging more than a dozen businesses and homes.
"For upwards of an hour the flames, fanned by a south wind which threatened to increase, raged with frightful violence, and the fire flew with alarming rapidity from store to store, and from outhouse to outhouse fencing and lumber, often being carried onward in great flakes," the Advertiser reported.
"Several persons whose property was burning, or was in immediate danger of becoming a prey to the devouring element, were to be seen standing listlessly looking on, apparently paralysed, while others risked their lives in rescuing their property," the Advertiser said.
The accounts of narrow escapes were harrowing.
One man sleeping off a few too many Christmas Eve drinks at a friends' place awoke to "suffocating heat and found the flames creeping along the ceiling", the Advertiser reported.
A "slightly scorched" servant girl carried a child to safety despite burning clothing.
Some people suffered burnt hands as they ran in and out of strangers' buildings to move valuables, livestock and potential fuel out of the flames' way.
The crowds of helpers were joined by police keeping order and 59 volunteer firefighters manning hoses.
So many people assisted that a food-vendor began giving out free refreshments.
Veil of disquiet in days that followed
It was only by sheer luck that the wind died down long enough to stop a larger chunk of what we now call the city centre being destroyed.
"As the day dawned, a scene of destruction presented itself , which almost beggars description, Williamson-street being full of broken and damaged household furniture, stock, broken and partially burnt doors, windows and shop fronts," the Advertiser reported.
Some embers picked up again as the mercury climbed that summer's day, but firefighters were able to douse them before any more property was lost.
Authorities launched an inquiry a few days later but failed to establish a cause.
That made people uneasy.
"Some person must have been cognizant of the act of negligence which produced so disastrous a result," the Advertiser's editor opined.
"As long as people are ignorant of the cause of any such occurrence, they are troubled with the dreadful suspicion that it may have been the willful act of some malignant enemy, to whose evil designs they are always exposed."
Still, you were never going to find the cause of every fire, the editor acknowledged as he wrote from a desk not all that far away from the disaster site.
As for the Moreys - the family that sought shelter and had a door shut in their face - they got their own explanation of at least one thing they had experienced during the fire.
Mr Morey wrote a letter to the Advertiser's editor a few days after the fire to say he had met with the person who had turned his wife and child away.
"And having heard his explanation of the affair, I am quite convinced that such refusal was not intended, and arose from a misunderstanding," he wrote.
Mr Morey, alas, did not specify exactly what it was.
This is the latest in our "WHAT HAPPENED?" history series.
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
