The people killed in the fire were:

1. Moulay Lalaoui-Kama, Moroccan-born Australian

2. Hui-Kyoung Lee, Korea

3. Michael Ernest Lewis, England

4. Natalie Morris, Wales

5. Julie O'Keeffe, Ireland

6. Adam John Rowland, England

7. twins Kelly June Slarke and

8. Stacey Louise Slarke, Australia

9. Melissa Jane Smith, England

10. Gary John Sutton, England

11. Atsushi Toyona, Japan

12. Joly Van der Velden, Netherlands

13. Claire Louise Webb, England

14. Sebastian Westerveld, Netherlands

15. Sarah Ann Williams, Wales

The fire was started at about 1 am, apparently in the downstairs recreation room, but most of the backpackers who died were on the second floor of the hostel. The timber hostel did not have working smoke detectors or fire alarms. Local firefighters raised a ladder to allow some people to escape. The 69 traumatised backpackers who survived the fire were housed locally — the Isis Cultural Centre became the recreational, food and communication centre for them.

Princess Anne visited Childers on 2 July, just a week after the blaze, to meet the surviving backpackers and others involved in the disaster.

Bill Trevor, the Isis Shire Mayor, travelled to England and the Netherlands in October 2001 to consult the bereaved families about the memorial proposals. He negotiated to rebuild the Palace in its original early-1900s style.

The Queensland artist Sam Di Mauro made a 7.7-metre-long glass memorial wall that was set into the new building.

The Sydney artist Josonia Palaitis was selected to paint portraits of those killed. She said it was "the most technically challenging and emotionally charged portrait I've ever undertaken". The artist's greatest challenge was to suitably portray the youngsters from the photos of them provided by their families: she managed to arrange them while maintaining the precise poses of those photos. The background was researched by her to be typical of the Isis area fields where they had worked picking crops. "The response to the artwork was overwhelming with families ecstatic with the result."

By Barbie Dutter - Telegraph.co.uk

March 16, 2002

A HOMELESS fruit-picker with a history of menace and mental illness was found guilty last night of starting a fire at an Australian youth hostel that killed 15 backpackers, seven of them British.

Robert Long had denied arson and two specimen charges of murder, but after two days of deliberations a jury unanimously convicted him on all counts. Long, who will be sentenced on Monday, faces a mandatory life prison term.

For 19 days, the Supreme Court in Brisbane had heard harrowing accounts of the blaze in June 2000 that reduced the century-old Palace Backpackers Hostel in Childers, Queensland, to a blackened ruin.

Survivors travelled from Britain and across the world to describe their frantic struggle to escape. They told how they squeezed through windows, crawled along smoke-filled corridors or scrambled to safety across verandas as 15 of their friends became trapped inside.

Long, 38, was portrayed as an attention-seeking oddball with a boiling hatred of the young travellers with whom he briefly shared lodgings.

He falsely claimed to have been diagnosed with lung cancer and given only two months to live. He also wrote two suicide notes, one of them left on the counter of a local pub.

After the fire, Long went on the run and was found by police five days later, hiding in bushland less than 20 miles from Childers. During a struggle with two dog handlers, he produced a knife, slashed a police dog and stabbed one of the officers on the chin.

The second officer then opened fire with a handgun, hitting Long in the arm. Believing the wound to be fatal, Long said: "I'm dying anyway. I started that fire," the court was told.

Further damning evidence was given by a British survivor, Keith O'Brien, who said he had overheard a snatched conversation in which Long threatened to "burn this place down".

The jury of seven men and five women, who were sent out on Thursday morning and were locked in deliberations until after 9pm yesterday, filed into court and stood solemnly in a line as Justice Peter Dutney asked them to deliver their verdicts.

Three times, they stated in unison: "Guilty".

Long, a diminutive, heavily bearded figure who had been attentive but impassive through most of the trial, showed no emotion as the courtroom erupted around him.

The family of Kelly and Stacey Slarke - 27-year-old identical twins from Western Australia who died in the blaze - wept, hugged and exclaimed: "Yes!" when the verdict was returned.

Long had been charged only with the Slarke twins' murder to expedite the proceedings, and to allow for other charges to be brought in the event of an acquittal. As well as the seven Britons, three Australian backpackers, two from Holland and one each from Ireland, Japan and South Korea died in the blaze.

The British victims were: Gary Sutton, 24, of Bath; Mike Lewis, 25, from Bristol; Natalie Morris, 28, from Cefn Coed; Sarah Williams, 23, from Aberfan; Melissa Smith, 26, from Thatcham, Berks; Adam Rowland, 19, from St Leonards, Sussex, and Clare Webb, 24, from Ascot.

The mayor of Childers, Bill Trevor, said: "Justice has been served. It is a result for the parents. It is a result for the survivors.

"It won't bring back those lovely young kids but what it will bring is some peace of mind to those families around the world and across Australia who have waited for this moment.

THAT the quiet, well-ordered country town of Childers, 54km south of Bundaberg, should be the scene of a murderous arsonist's bitter revenge invites comparisons with a Stephen King novel.

Yet, as a Brisbane jury concluded in March 2002, Robert Paul Long, 38, torched the Palace Backpackers Hostel. Like the vicious pair who burnt the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane in 1973, Long sentenced 15 young people to a terrifying death.

He has been sentenced to life and will serve at least 20 years.

June 23, 2000, is a day that Childers residents — still coping with the grief — will never forget.

It was payday for the backpackers who flood into the area between April and June to work on local farms, and the cheerful and well-liked young people naturally got down and partied before many returned to their hostel.

About 12.30am a fire started in a downstairs TV lounge and quickly became an inferno, rushing up the stairwell and consuming the century-old former pub.

The fire alarms, which had been malfunctioning, had been switched off by the management and residents awoke to the screams of their friends and the sound of breaking glass. Seventy struggled out but 15 did not.

Before the ashes had even cooled, Long was named as a likely suspect by his former de facto, Christine Campbell, but the killer had fled town.

He was caught 30km south five days later after a violent struggle with police during which, police said, Long admitted his guilt.

Ms Campbell had claimed that Long had tried to burn to death her, their daughter and her two other children in a Darwin caravan park in 1997 but the Northern Territory police had not charged him.

Long had left the hostel two weeks earlier after not paying his rent and he had asked the backpackers to leave the back door open for him.

They slammed it shut and his rage — recalled by witnesses — knew no bounds. His precarious hold on reality deteriorated as he sank into an alcoholic depression.

What emerged at and after the trial was that Long was a seriously disturbed loner who invented stories of terrible personal tragedies to seek attention and sympathy. He would drift around Australia working in low-paid jobs and for a while his stories were believed and he was accepted. He claimed he was dying of lung cancer, his wife and children had died in fires or a road accident, his niece had died of leukemia and his girlfriend had just committed suicide.

When his stories began to unravel and his drinking increased and his work suffered, he would head off, leaving behind unpaid bills and sometimes fake suicide notes and unexplained fires.

Long's life began in Corrimal, a Wollongong suburb. As a youth he was convicted of stealing women's clothes from clotheslines. Later he would be sentenced to four years for burglary and other charges involving an assault on his then de facto.

By Greg Roberts and Peter Fray - Smh.com.au

June 20, 2003