15 backpackers died in the Childers hostel fire. It took decades for survivors to tell their stories.

It took 20 years for Jessica Wiegand to feel comfortable talking about what she experienced.

About the moment she sat down, alone, on the floor of the Childers Palace Backpackers Hostel in rural Queensland as a 19-year-old British backpacker, surrounded by darkness and thick black smoke and thought, "Ok, this is it".

As the realisation she was going to die hit, she found herself in a moment of calm.

"Everything just stopped. I stopped struggling. I stopped trying," she told Childers the podcast twenty years later.

Watch: The host of Childers describes the accounts he heard while talking to survivors. Post continues below.

She'd woken just after midnight on June 23rd, 2000, to what sounded like fireworks. She knew instinctively she didn't have much time — that there wasn't much oxygen.

She also knew she didn't really know her way around the building. She'd only been staying there three days.

As the fire took hold, Jessica stopped feeling fearful. Thinking back, she knows she experienced something so close to death she "nearly stepped over that threshold".

In that moment, someone took her hand. Together they found themselves crawling through the blackness and suddenly she was out, she could breathe, she could see the grass.

They'd managed to find a fire exit door.

Surrounded by other travellers who'd also escaped, Jessica stood and watched as the building was engulfed.

She might've survived that night, but for Jessica that was only the start of her trauma.

"It's made me very aware of how we don't know when we are going to die. Up until then [I] didn't really think about it. It made me very vulnerable. The (court) psych reports stated that I had a year of PTSD…realistically that was much more like five or six."

For a long time Jessica felt very detached from every one and everything. A constant sense of sadness, and then eventually that turned into nothing — she felt blank and flat and emotionless.

"For a long time I felt like [I was] on the outside looking in…and feeling not really able to tell anyone. Like people couldn't possibly understand if they hadn't been through it."

It wasn't until 2020, that she actually started sharing about it.

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15 people died that night, in a fire that's still described as one of the worst fatal fires in Australian history.

There were no fire alarms or illuminated exit signs in the building leaving many scrambling. They had to make a life and death decision between turning left, or right in their hunt for a way out.

Nine women and six men between the ages of 18 and 48 perished in the fire. They came from the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Japan, South Korea and Morocco.

Paul Cochrane, host and producer of Childers, was working for a local TV station at the time, and was one of the first journalists on the scene.

"I was doing radio crosses the day after the fire from a public telephone box across the road, feeding coins in with a queue of backpackers standing [behind me] wanting to ring home, but they had nothing. I remember emptying out whatever coins I had in my pocket and handing it to one of the British guys," he told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Listen to the full episode below. Post continues. 

Cochrane was also one of a handful of journalists invited in to tour the wreckage, and he can still remember the feeling as he walked into one dorm room in particular where ten victims were found.

"The image that is the most stark for me is seeing that room with bars on it. We're talking about jail bars...metal bars on the window. Under some of those windows were numbers spray painted on the wall in black spray paint — that was where they found the bodies. They were right under the windows, so you can only imagine that those people were trying to get out. That [was] really difficult to grapple with," he shared.

One of the hostel's occupants, Robert Paul Long, then 37, who had been kicked out of the hostel in the days prior, was found guilty of arson.

He was arrested in dense bushland after a week on the run — but was only convicted of the deaths of the two Australian victims, twins Kelly and Stacey Slarke.

"The rationale from the the prosecutor was if anything was to go wrong in the trial, it gave them room for appeal and they had 13 other people that that they could lay the charges against. Under the the judicial system at the time, two victims or 15 victims, the penalty would be the same," Cochrane told True Crime Conversations.

"It's still heartbreaking for them [the families of the victims], I think they understood but didn't necessarily agree with it. It's still very difficult [for them]."

A painting by Sydney artist Josonia Palaitis of the 15 young backpackers who died in the June 23, 2000, fire in the Childers Palace Backpackers Hostel. Image: AAP Image/Peter Wallis.

Cochrane decided to revisit the case on the twenty year anniversary, releasing a podcast series in which many survivors gave their first interview. Or in cases like Jessica — it was their first time talking about the fire in detail to anyone.

"There's a lot of PTSD [amongst them]," Cochrane told True Crime Conversations.

"They're a really resilient group of people, and one of the things that came out of doing the podcast was that some of them spoke about it for the first time and for many the only time."

"I guess that's one of the other really disappointing elements of the sentencing of Robert Long, is that his sentence didn't apply to the 69 survivors either, whose lives have been torn upside down," he added.

In chatting to the survivors, Cochrane realised he too was deeply affected by the fire, having covered it as a relatively young journalist.

"It was profoundly cathartic for me [talking to everyone again]. Channel 7 were very good in offering counselling at the time, but I didn't take up the offer. I was adamant I was fine [but I guess] it's been in the back of my mind for a long time."

Many of the survivors are still in touch with the community of Childers despite making their homes on the other side of the world in their native countries.

"[Locals] opened their doors and said 'come and have a sleep, have a shower, clean your teeth,' basic little things that we take for granted. That community wrapped its arms around those survivors, and not just the survivors — [they were] a point of calm and a sense of security for family thousands of kilometres away in another country dealing with the torment of their children being involved."

One of the rooms destroyed in the fire. Image: 7News/QLD Police.

Many of the survivors are still connected via a Facebook group. They share their life updates, even decades later, and consider each other friends. They have a shared trauma that has forever bonded them.

Dutch backpacker Minoeska Teeuwen even married a fellow survivor, James Whitehurst — a UK national — who she stayed in touch with via email, and met up with at reunion in London a year after the fire.

As Jessica told Cochrane in his podcast, she feels like she lives "more fully" because "I felt like I had to live for the 15 people that died, almost to make up for the fact that they died".

It's accounts like hers that show the long-reaching affects of a fire that didn't just kill 15 people, but changed the lives of dozens more.

If you're passing through Childers in 2025, there's a memorial to the 15 victims inside the old hostel which has been restored to its former glory, but now serves the community as an art gallery.

As Cochrane points out, it doesn't mention the survivors. It doesn't tell their stories. It doesn't share their pain or their experience.

And like the families of those who died, they too have been living with the pain that night caused for decades.

Feature image: QLD Police/7News/AAP.