Saturday 01 February 1997

I'm no firebug, says teenage hero

By JASON KOUTSOUKIS,
crime reporter

Pier van der Merwe is not an arsonist. He is a hero, a teenager who helped save his parents' house by dousing it with water as the flames of the Dandenong Ranges fires raced ever closer.

When he was captured on television film speeding around a bend in the Dandenongs at the height of the fires, police thought he was acting suspiciously. In fact, he was acting on police instructions to evacuate the area.

``I was actually following my mother who was in a car,'' the 16-year-old said yesterday. ``We were riding straight to the fire refuge in Ferny Creek after being directed by police to evacuate our house as soon as possible.''

Little did Pier know that on Thursday morning police were holding a news conference in Melbourne to identify him as a person wanted for questioning in connection with their arson investigations. Police said the motorbike rider was spotted at two or possibly three places near the fires last week.

Detectives asked that Channel 10 film of the motorcyclist riding his trail bike around the bend in One Tree Hill Road be distributed to the media in

the hope that the motorcyclist would come forward, or that someone might recognise him and go to the police.

The tactic had an almost immediate and chilling impact. ``I found out I was on the news when my neighbor came across screaming and yelling `You're on the news and they think you lit all the fires','' Pier said.

``I didn't believe him at first, but when I saw all the other news I was worried. But then I decided I couldn't get in trouble for it, so I just rang up my parents and told them everything that had happened and we rang the police straight away.''

Pier lives just 200 metres from the spot in One Tree Hill Road where a Channel 10 camerman filmed him as firemen battled the flames spreading through Tremont and Ferny Creek.

Pier said that as the fires spread towards his parents' house that Tuesday, his mother had loaded the family car with a few personal possessions and taken with her the neighbor's children, James and Tom Lanyon. He decided to follow on his ``most precious possession'' - his green trail bike.

He noticed a television camaramen filming him as he sped along One Tree Hill Road and thought he might appear on the television news that evening.

Inundated yesterday with calls from friends who saw reports of a ``suspicious'' motorcyclist, Pier said he didn't think anyone really thought he could have lit the fires. ``Nobody that knows me would actually think that I started it or anything, but you never know what anybody else is going to think who doesn't know me, so that's a bit of a worry.''

Mr Alan Ross, the principal of Billanook College where Pier is a year 11 student, said the idea that Pier was in any way responsible for starting the fires was an impossible allegation. ``He is one of the bright young leaders of the school and a boy of integrity,'' Mr Ross said.