Exhausted but relieved, the last thing he expected was to survive a far more immediate near-death experience as he drove to work on Monday morning - but that's exactly what transpired.

Heading along The Lakes Way with his 11-year-old daughter Ava beside him, a tree fell on his car.

Thankfully, its trunk struck the rear part of the roof and only a branch hit the windscreen.

"It was a miracle," Mark said.

"It was down to milliseconds. If it struck the windscreen that would've been a completely different story."

As it was, the branch smashed the windscreen and Ava received some glass in her arms and legs.

Mark emerged from the car unscathed.

"My main concern was my daughter," he said.

"She was a bit shaken up. I just kept telling her, 'We're okay, we're okay.'"

Fortunately, an off-duty paramedic and Mark's own family doctor, Simon Allan, were among the first people to pull up.

"It was lovely to see Simon's face," Mark said.

Both father and daughter were assessed at the scene by paramedics and given the all clear, while the offending tree, which had been burnt in Saturday's fires and was still smoldering, was extinguished and removed from the road.

Afterwards, Mark and Ava spent the rest of the day in the company of friends and family, reflecting on their good fortune.

"It was just a day to be together and reflect," Mark said.

The incident capped off a dramatic few days for the father of three, who stayed behind to defend his home on Oak View Road as a large fire front bore down on it on Saturday night.

"The front came across at about 8pm," Mark said.

"You could hear it roaring. It sounded like a freight train coming through."

Although Mark had taken every precaution to prepare for the fire, including wetting down his house and lawn and sending his family and pets into friends' places in town, he said the prospect of facing the fire alone was still an unnerving one.

"It's very lonely when a fire front is coming through when you're by yourself," he said.

"I didn't know how it was going to pan out."

With the wind swirling around and no fire crews on hand, the situation was touch and go for a number of hours, but sometime around midnight, Mark said the wind dropped and it allowed the recently-arrived fire crews to get on top of the flames.

"When the last bit of bushland burnt out it was a good feeling," he said.

"I felt for everyone else though. I got off lucky."

With two close incidents in two days behind him, it might seem like Mark has nine lives, but there could be more to it than that.

In the wake of the Black Saturday bushfires back in 2009, Mark and a friend gave a car and more than $4000 in donations to a family who had survived the fire, driving down to Victoria to deliver it to them themselves.

Not only did he learn some valuable lessons from the family that he's since applied to his own bushfire survival plan, he might very well have accumulated enough good karma to see him through not one but two precarious situations.

Either way, he's grateful he and his family are safe and thankful to all the members of the community who lent them a hand.

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