![The aircraft dropped onto tram power lines and crashed into the gable of the Gulles' house at 55 Matthews Avenue [on right]. Photo: John Krutop](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/e09cf97f-1f06-45f6-b947-70daa3229801.jpg/r0_0_729_410_w576_h298_fmax.webp "The aircraft dropped onto tram power lines and crashed into the gable of the Gulles' house at 55 Matthews Avenue [on right]. Photo: John Krutop")
Essendon, July 10, 1978: Catastrophe and comfort, the warmth of the burning plane and the blazing house somehow made a haunting contrast that cold winter's evening.
The plane had hit the house, slewed across the back fence and slammed into the rear brick wall of the backyard neighbour's place.
Three men were still trapped in the wreckage.
The ABC television evening news had just started as neighbours rushed with hoses and buckets to put out the fire engulfing the twin-engine Partenavia aircraft.
But the first house was a conflagration and beyond saving.
Inside, six members of the Gulle family were trapped. They all perished.
In 1978, communications and emergency responses were far less sophisticated. Those locals who first fought the fire had been summonsed by the bang or the wails of sirens as police, ambulance and fire brigades sat stymied in peak-hour traffic.
The three men inside the crashed plane appeared conscious but the heat and the tangled wreckage made it impossible to free them from the wreck.
Panicked neighbours hovered between frustration and fear as they tried to wrench the mangled aircraft door open while wondering if the ruptured fuel tanks that had already ignited the Gulle home might blow.
Then help arrived. Firefighters struggled for more than an hour with hydraulic "the jaws of life" to cut the last victim from the plane. All three on board were seriously injured.
Minutes after the crash, Sam Gulle had returned home from work and watched helplessly as his wife Pauline, their sons Michael, 12, Robert, 6, and Graeme, 1 month, daughter Karen, 7, and Mrs Gulle's mother Phyllis Toms, died in his home. He'd recently sold the house and was moving his family to a country property at Meredith west of Geelong.
When the ambulances left and firefighters said the blaze was under control, I went looking for the telltale PMG red and by 9pm stood shivering in a telephone box up the road from the Gulle home in Matthews Avenue.
"For the people, living beneath the flight path of Essendon's east-west runway, the crash was something they feared every day," I told the Age copytaker.
Little changes.
The Partenavia was on a training flight and had climbed to about 100 metres when a simulated failure of one engine together with the raising of wing flaps from the take-off position put the nose down and it descended onto the Gulle home.
Tuesday's fatal plane crash at the DFO retail outlet near Essendon Airport may have burnt into national attention partly because of the fear of flying and grief becoming a public event.
But in 1978, grief was a much more private affair.
Days later after the crash, an Age photographer, Bruce Postle, attended the Gulle funeral and returned to the office with a stunning photograph of Mr Gulle collapsing as his baby son's casket was lowered into the grave.
The late Age editor Greg Taylor refused to publish the photograph, saying Mr Gulle had been through enough.
But Postle's photograph was accidentally sent by picturegram machine to the West Australian newspaper and it appeared. Postle won a Rothmans National Press Photography Award for the shot.
The Age published the Gulle photograph in 1984 in a story pondering when grief becomes public property.
