Regeneration

I'll begin with a snap of our house from Google Earth showing the main spots referred to below.

 The image below was taken at point 1 and shows a row of very damaged Photinia robusta.

The ones closest to the camera were very sorry for themselves, and as I pruned them most of the cut surfaces appeared seemed brown and the twigs, brittle.  However, moving up the line to point 2, the cut surfaces were greener and the twigs sappy.  Some living buds were evident!

 Going across the lawn, to point 3 this Grevillea looked rather sad.

However a lot of the twigs had little opening buds.

 Point 4 is the haunt of Callistemons.  They are not only developing vegetative growth ...

 ... but have a couple of scrappy flowers.  This may well be a stress response (last go at reproduction ...) but it looks nice.

 A similar story applies at point 5 to a flowering Prunus ...

 ... and a Westringia.

 As I moved around pruning - to try to encourage the plants to direct their energy to the viable parts - I couldn't work out why some bits were fried and others apparently OK.  I know the fire came from the West (orange arrow) but the Northern side of the plants appeared to have been saved.  This suggests fire coming from Southish (red arrow). Very strange.

Then I worked it out (or at least rationalised what happened).

A saint in a helicopter dumped a bucket of water which splashed as shown by the blue arrows.  That saved a lot more than the shrubs - so thank you (again and again).