“It’ll all be better after February 7. It’ll be history then.” She paused. Tears began to form in her eyes. And she sighed. “Give us a hug dear”.

Carol had helped me after the fires with a smile and cuppa tea. She lost her house, salvaging some old china plates. Close friends of hers died. People with horrific burns were brought to the Country Fire Authority shed where she worked as a volunteer.

In the following days she selflessly worked around the clock, keeping things running for the crews still putting out spot fires.

Seeing me had brought everything back. We only spoke for a few moments before she teared up. We hugged and she left and walked off down the street.

Kinglake is no longer grey and dusty. The inescapable smell of wood smoke is gone and its air is clean and fresh. The trees have fluffy green foliage, but underneath the trunks are still black. Everywhere, everything and everyone is reminder. It has been a year, but the trauma is only so far beneath the surface.

“My son kept asking me: ‘Are we going to die?’” a mother recalled trembling. Sally is now medicated, so is her husband and her daughter. Her son is only eight and so the doctors are trying not to give him pills, yet. At the age of seven he had the responsibility thrust on him of saving his home and his life with a wet towel and a bucket while all around him burned. The next morning, like other children in Kinglake, he learned his best friend had died in the fires. After six months he told his counsellor he doesn’t want to talk any more, it wasn’t helping.

For others that day is what they want to talk about. They need to talk about. They also need to find the right person to listen.

Counselling is available at the local schools, local GP clinic and over the phone.

But then there’s black humour about it all.

Almost every adult seems to be able to recite the stages of grief by rote. “Shock, anger, etc. I’ve been through all seven,” one woman told me. “And that’s just in the last half hour!” She laughed.

And as if modern daily life wasn’t enough to create stress, the triggers for panic attacks, angry outbursts or moments of uncontrolled sobbing are inescapable. Weather events like a strong hot wind, a dust storm, the winter fog or a red sunset. Confined spaces or open ones, the front doorstep. It all depends on where people were when the fire hit; where they felt they were going to die.

And then there are the places of the many dead. The houses, now vacant lots. The bend in the road where the five car wrecks were or where you last saw someone alive.

This is what people in Kinglake live with and live in.

But that doesn’t stop the questions.

“Why don’t you just get over it?” asked one woman of another almost provoking a brawl on a train out of Melbourne. Or the visitors who come into the town, see the greenery and the nice clean prefab buildings and say “what’s so bad about this”. Or yet others who feel enormous empathy with the suffering of Kinglake and yet ask the person serving behind the counter of a local shop “so did you know someone who died?”

Everyone knew someone who died. And today they will gather on the local football oval. Families on picnic rugs. Friends in arms.

They will mourn the dead as the sun sets on the first year since the Black Saturday bushfires claimed 173 lives.

It was also marked by mass absenteeism from work on the Monday before the Australia Day holiday, as Australians stretched the long summer slumber to include just one last long weekend. The contrast could not have been sharper with the subject matter of the first major Prime Ministerial message of the year, that Australia was going to have boost productivity if it was to have a viable economic future.

Kevin Rudd had spruiked his message in every Australian capital city during the week before Australia Day in a swoop of the nation that raised some still beach sand-encrusted holiday eyebrows.

Mr Rudd cited soon to be released data that includes a population forecast for Australia of 36 million by the year 2050. It’s currently 22 million. The rub though is that the population is aging. Australians, he said, would have to increase productivity to cover the costs. Perhaps as a lure to those workers looking at a delayed retirement or longer hours, Mr Rudd said a two per cent increase in productivity would deliver $AU16,000 extra into the average pay packet. A lot of Australians still opted for the extra long Australia Day weekend though – no additional productivity there.

The issue does pose a very real set of policy dilemmas. But by hitting the speakers’ trail so quickly, Mr Rudd also reminded us its an election year and was attempting to set the agenda.

Kevin Rudd will also be judged though on the promises he made at the last election just over two years ago. He has fulfilled a pledge to bury the previous government’s widely despised workplace laws. On the wider issue of the economy, the Rudd government will continue taking the credit for Australia’s emergence relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis, while the opposition will portray a big spending government that can’t be trusted with taxpayers’ money. Undelivered though is the promise to sort out Australia’s ailing health system with a federal takeover from the states if necessary.

Then there’s the bigger picture. Before being elected, Kevin Rudd referred to climate change as, quote, the great moral challenge of our generation, unquote. But Copenhagen was at best a disappointment, and Australia had styled itself there as a leader; Canberra will now pledge only a five per cent cut to its national emissions without some major deal internationally; and and the legislative future of its planned carbon pollution reduction scheme remains uncertain. It is perhaps little wonder that Mr Rudd’s pre-Australia Day swing around the states made no mention of that great moral challenge. But then, the polls do show Australians are less concerned about climate change than at the last election.

Climate change though will feature in what’s already emerging as a contentious debate about the size of Australia’s future population. Both the Prime Minister and the opposition leader want a big Australia, to boost the population to shore up economic growth and expand the tax base to help pay for the aging national profile .. with health costs forecast to be among the biggest burdens. But very quickly in this dry continent, where climate change effects are predicted to be severe, critics have questioned where the water will come from for all these new people and how already choked cities like Sydney will cope with more people. It may not swing the coming election, but it is part of the debate Mr Rudd has invited. And there’s the immigration component of the discussion.

The election, due by year’s end, will be the ultimate test too for the opposition’s still relatively new leader Tony Abbott, a former Catholic seminarian with a sporting bent, who’s deeply socially conservative and politically divisive. The Opposition has worked through a series of leaders and expects a lot of Mr Abbott. It is hard to measure though how some of his commentary will play, like his remarks to a women’s magazine this week that women shouldn’t give away their virginity lightly. Such comments are incendiary, and especially sensitive in the race for the ultimate Australian political prize.

Twelve hours later, standing in a morgue in Chennai, I decided to abandon my career as a fashion journalist.

Fifteen months later I followed Geoff to Jakarta, where he took up the position of Indonesia correspondent in March 2006.

I was still a green reporter, with absolutely no broadcast experience.

But I was no longer the romantic backpacker, now the bonefide partner of a ‘correspondent’, harbouring not-so secret ambitions to topple his fiefdom.

And so I threw myself into the murky world of radio journalism.

The scandal of Playboy Indonesia’s first edition, was quickly followed by the rumbling ring of fire which killed nearly 6,000 people in central Java, the first of several disaster stories we would cover.

Later that year Aceh elected their first governor and then, most shocking of all, we discovered I was pregnant.

I’ve always been a reluctant gusher when it comes to the life affirming experience of motherhood and piling praise upon mini genetic replicas.

Sure he is a good looking kid, speaks two languages. But he’s not toilet trained and probably no cuter than your child.

There is no escaping the fact however, that Charlie’s arrival in the world in July 2007 was the defining moment of my years in Indonesia, my life so far and in so many ways also of my reporting career.

Of all the cliches about parenthood that I have read or heard (and inflicted upon others) the most true is that the revelation of extreme vulnerability profoundly alters your view of the world.

You find compassion muscles you never new you had. For anyone this is a good thing but for a journalist, I believe, it is a gift.

It means that now, when I sit down in a slum with an HIV positive woman, and listen as she describes the discrimination her daughter faces in school, we both cry.

It means that when I learn that 20,000 women have died in Indonesia this year because of complications in pregnancy and childbirth, I want to scream and shout and picket the Presidential palace.

I wish now that I could go back and hold the hand of the Indian mother who sat on the steps of a gleaming white cathedral in Tamil Nadu in the days following the tsunami.

A slip of a woman and catatonic with grief after losing her 10 children and countless grandchildren to the swallowing seas.

Even now I wouldn’t know what to say, except that my son’s presence in the world makes her horror even more unimaginable.

Then there are the things I haven’t learnt; such as time management.

Which is why I find myself headbutting yet another 5am deadline; attempting to sum up five of the biggest years of my life in under four minutes.

And whilst my time is up in Indonesia, I know there will be many more deadlines and, I hope, miraculous reporting adventures at home in Australia and Asia.

And perhaps, another baby.

In Jakarta this is Katie Hamann for Correspondent’s Notebook.

In almost three and a half years, I’ve retraced the steps of the Khmer Rouge, mourned alongside supporters of the late Philippines President Corazon Aquino and greeted the first monks to get across the border from Burma after the Saffron Revolution of 2007.

I’ve dined with Malaysia’s opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, as he made the wedding rounds during his comeback campaign in 2008.

I waited and I waited and waited for Hillary Clinton during the US Secretary of State’s first ASEAN meeting earlier this year.

I watched the Socceroos flame out during the 2007 Asia Cup and marvelled as a jubilant Iraqi team took out the honours.

I’ve been in the presence of the Thai king, who is revered and holds a place in every Thai’s heart.

I’ve attended a royal funeral, an event steeped in Thai tradition and culture as a nation farewelled the King’s late sister, Galyani Vadhana.

My posting has taken me to Pakistan, to the spot where just days before the country’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, where grief overwhelmed.

And to Padang Indonesia, where I walked through the rubble of the earthquake and saw the resilience of a people too used to their homes and their lives being shaken apart.

I made a brief official visit to Rangoon, before a nasty foot infection forced me home, and then found myself on a blacklist of journalists stuck reporting from afar, when a cyclone and protests exposed the failings of the military junta.

I spent a memorable day in the company of Imedla Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, who at 80 years of age, is unapologetic about the two-decades under her dictator husband, Ferdinand.

But so much of what has happened in South East Asia during my stint, has brought me in one way or another to Thailand’s government house in Bangkok

My first visit was late on the night of September 19 2006, when the gates were locked, soldiers were armed and tanks blocked the entrance.

I had been in Thailand just over six weeks and the military had staged a coup.

Thais heard about it on the radio or on the television. That night, the Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra was forced out while he was travelling abroad.

Unlike past military takeovers, this time there was no bloodshed. It would be nice to say it has stayed that way, but since then government house has been occupied twice.

Firstly in 2008 by the yellow-shirted protest group opposed to Mr Thaksin’s colleagues who took office in the 2007 elections. And then thus year by Mr Thaksin’s red-shirts who surrounded the building insisting that the court-installed government of Abhisit Vejjajiva get out.

The Red-shirts would later storm a meeting of regional leaders and then riot on the streets of Bangkok.

There have been fatalities on both sides and fears of yet more violence to come because the divisions are deep.

I was back at government house this week. But this time the military was there purely in a ceremonial capacity for the Thai King’s birthday.

It was a strange experience for me as I remembered the tense moments inside and outside these gates at the height of the protest as I took part in one fo high society’s big annual events.

In recent weeks as I sort and pack and ready myself to leave Thailand, I’ve been looking back at my time here.

On Christmas Day 2006, I met the coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin.

A year later I would interview another general, Surayud Chulanont, who was the reluctant post-coup Prime Minister.

I never met Thaksin Shinawatra, I caught a glimpse of him last year when he returned briefly to Thailand.

But of the three Prime Ministers I have met, Samak Sundaravej stands out.

The blunt speaking chef turned politician, who was the first elected post-coup leader, was kicked out because he continued to host a cooking show.

It was an absurdity at the time and looks even sillier now with the benefit of hindsight and the litany of sins of other politicians that have been revealed.

I was saddened when I hear that he had passed away this year after a battle with cancer.

But what I will really take away from my time in South East Asia is the ordinary people who have touched my life.

In the south of Thailand, there was the doctor who took his life into his hands every time he treated a patient, because he worked in a Thai government funded clinic, which was opposed by the insurgents there.

The wonderful Australia gentleman with a zeal for getting Cambodian kids to drink clean water.

The Burmese refugees who’ve been unable to leave camps on the Thai border after more than two decades.

The parents of a young woman in the Philippines who will never know what happened to their activist daughter.

I’ve traipsed through palaces and parliaments and paddy fields and while there have been stressed and strains and aches and pains, I have loved ever minute of it.

This is Karen Percy, signing off for the last time as South East Asia Correspondent.