Our columnist Caroline Hutchinson was devastated when she heard that the heritage-listed Wallcliffe House on the banks of Margaret River in Western Australia was destroyed by fires. Her family built the historic homestead.

THIS is the photo radio personality Caroline Hutchinson didn’t want to see.

In the morning sunlight, the blackened ruins of the heritage-listed Wallcliffe House on the banks of Margaret River still smoulder.

The once-grand limestone homestead in Prevelly, Western Australia, is little more than crumbled walls and rubble.

The Coast radio personality yesterday described the images as the saddest thing she had ever seen.

Ms Hutchinson’s great, great, great grandfather Alfred Bussell built Wallcliffe House in 1865.

It was passed through the generations to Ms Hutchinson’s late father, Jonathan Terry.

On Friday, after reports a fire had escaped from a prescribed burn in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, she had hoped a miracle would save her childhood home.

But her worst fears were realised yesterday when media and residents were allowed to return to the blackened area and photos of the devastation began to emerge.

“The loss of Wallcliffe is devastating for our family obviously, but an enormous loss for Australia too,” she said.

“Thousands of books and photos, even Alfred Bussell’s diary, were still in the house.

“The truth is Wallcliffe was never really ours. It belonged to every descendant of Alfred and Ellen Bussell in particular, every West Australian in general.

“We were just the lucky ones who got to live in her.”

In 1986, when Ms Hutchinson’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he sold the home to his best friend Mark Hohnen.

“Mark and Cate Hohnen loved Wallcliffe as much as we did,” she said. “Over five years Cate worked tirelessly to restore Wallcliffe to her former glory, even replacing the tin roof with the original shingles.

“In time, they sold her to Michael Chaney and he, too, was a more than worthy custodian.”

Ms Hutchinson said for her family, Wallcliffe provided the idyllic childhood.

“It is probably sacrilege to admit, but our dress-up box was brimming with fox furs and evening gowns dating back 100 years,” she said.

“We spent hours in the mulberry trees, stuffing ourselves with their huge sweet fruit until we could barely climb back down.

“We canoed on the river, sat every night on the veranda to watch the sun go down and went to sleep at night in Alfred and Ellen’s bed in the ‘big room’, soothed by the sound of relentless rain on the corrugated-iron roof.

“Where was that rain when Wallcliffe needed it most?”

Ms Hutchinson said she was not sure if the historic building could be rebuilt.

“How do you re-create the dark musty cellars where the convicts lived for 10 long winters helping build Alfred’s dream?” she said. “Or the dining room where Ellen fed the survivors of the wreck of the Georgette?

“Will the architect know about the broken boards on the veranda where our cat Tommy bailed up a dugite? And will a new hallway ever smell like Gran’s homemade potpourri?”

The fire has destroyed 28 houses and nine holiday chalets in 3177 hectares.