BLACK Saturday survivors Mary and Reg Kenealy have finally moved into their new house, almost two years after their Marysville home went up in flames.
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The move was accompanied by excitement and sadness as the married couple, curators of the Marysville Historical Society, returned to the place where lives were lost and homes destroyed.
''It's been a very emotional experience because you're coming back into a town that's so different to what you knew and loved,'' Mrs Kenealy said.
The move is more than just a physical relocation for Mrs Kenealy, who has felt like ''a fringe-dweller'' since moving to their rental property in Vermont, a unit located in the same block in which Mr Kenealy's parents had lived 20 years ago, and one street away from the first home that the Kenealys bought as a married couple.
''You felt as though you didn't belong to either community; you didn't belong to Melbourne and didn't belong up here [in Marysville],'' she says.
Their newly built Victorian cottage is a smaller version of the house they had always dreamed of owning, says Mrs Kenealy, with cream fireproof weatherboard, a soft eucalyptus-green roof and a verandah extending across the front of the house. Keen gardeners, the Marysville couple have been planting their garden since they found the property in November, and had their builders construct the house around their growing flora.
In their front garden stands a flowering crabapple tree, its two trunks twisting around each other. The tree was planted by the couple and their family to mark their wedding anniversary in February, and signifies their re-establishment in Marysville and the union of the two, who have been married 51 years.
As the second anniversary of Black Saturday approaches, the return of another family to Marysville also helps to alleviate the pressures felt by the community to have rebuilt their town by now.
''People can't believe that it's taking so long to get the town re-established,'' says Mrs Kenealy. ''We still have a service station that operates out of a shipping container.''
The Kenealys had been travelling between Vermont and Marysville up to three times a week as they established the new site of their historical museum.
However, now that they are back in Marysville, they are thrilled to be able to devote their time to the renovations of the historical society museum, which are due to be completed in February. Despite a detailed fire plan, the Kenealys lost 145 years of Marysville memorabilia in the blaze.
Now, with a home, a museum and a collection of historical artefacts donated by the public, the Kenealys are starting to feel like they are back where they belong. ''I think we've slept better the last three nights than we have in 22 months,'' says Mrs Kenealy. ''We're home.''
