The first emergency call came at 12:31 am, from a pay phone across the street, because the building had no working alarm to raise. Crews arrived seven minutes later and fought the blaze for four hours. In the smoke and darkness, with no emergency lighting, survivors did what they could, waking strangers, dragging friends toward the windows. Around seventy people escaped, some by jumping from the upper floor onto the roofs of neighbouring buildings; ten of them were injured. The cruelty of the building itself emerged later, at the coronial inquest. In one upstairs room where ten young people died, every occupant, a bunk bed had been pushed against a fastened exit door, and the windows were barred. The mayor, Bill Trevor, put the horror plainly to reporters: the hostel had not burned to the ground, he said. People either got out alive, or they did not get out at all.

It is easy, with a death toll, to let the number stand in for the people. These were not statistics. They were sons and daughters who had saved up and flown to the far side of the world, picking tomatoes and cane by day and sharing a cheap bunk by night, the way young people have always travelled. Among the Australian dead were twins, Kelly and Stacey Slarke, who died together. Identifying the victims was agonisingly slow: the hostel register recorded arrivals but not departures, most of the travellers' passports had burned, and for those with no relatives in Australia, even DNA was hard to obtain. Families on three continents waited for confirmation of what they already feared. When the artist later commissioned to paint the fifteen worked from photographs their families provided, she set them against the Isis district fields where they had spent their last days working, so that the portrait would hold not just their faces but the place itself.

What Childers did in the days afterward is the part of this story that deserves to be told loudest. The survivors had lost everything, clothes, money, papers, friends. The town simply absorbed them. Residents knitted blankets and gave away food and backpacks. They invited strangers into their homes for meals and showers. Local businesses handed over clothing and supplies. Many of the survivors were housed at the Isis Cultural Centre while embassies arranged their journeys home. The grief reached well beyond the town: investigators, reporters and politicians came, and on 2 July, Princess Anne visited to meet the surviving backpackers and the people who had cared for them. A small inland community, more used to cane harvests than international news, found itself holding the sorrow of seven countries at once, and did so with extraordinary gentleness.

The fire was arson. Robert Paul Long, an itinerant fruit picker, had lived at the hostel before being evicted on 14 June over $200 in unpaid rent. He had voiced a hatred of backpackers and had threatened to burn the place down. He was found in bushland days later and arrested. In March 2002 a court convicted him of two counts of murder, brought over the deaths of the Slarke twins as a way to move the case forward quickly, and one count of arson; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of twenty years, and remains in prison. The case also forced a reckoning with how budget accommodation was regulated in Queensland, where stand-alone smoke alarms could fail because guests removed their batteries, and tired old timber buildings packed with travellers had too few ways out. The law was changed in the years that followed.

The town chose to rebuild rather than erase. The Palace was reconstructed in its 1903 style and reopened on 26 October 2002 as the Palace Memorial Building, attended by families of twelve of those who died. At its heart hangs a memorial wall by Queensland artist Sam Di Mauro, a 7.7-metre sheet of glass, one and a half tonnes, lowered through the roof during construction. It holds fifteen light boxes, one for each person, filled with images their families chose to show the lives they had lived. Beside it hangs the painted portrait of all fifteen by Sydney artist Josonia Palaitis, who called it the most emotionally charged work she had ever undertaken. More than a million people have since passed through the building. They come, in part, to stand before that glass and that painting, and to remember young travellers who came to a small town to work, and never went home.