Without Warning

by Jane O'Connor

  The barn was designed and ordered by May, but then we had to grind through the bureaucratic processes. While it is recognised that displaced people need to get back into accommodation as quickly as possible, there is an underlying concern that some might find their converted sheds and barns eminently liveable and affordable, and not move on to building new homes; temporary dwellings are not good for rate revenue, or for property values and community ‘amenity’. In our case, the delays appeared to be more a matter of misplaced paperwork and a local government struggling to cope with the enormity of the task. We just wanted our own roof over our heads.

  ‘Just build your barn and move into it. If anybody gives you a hard time about any of it then tell them personally from me to go and get rooted!’ It wasn’t the sort of conversation I would have expected to be having with the head of a government body, but Christine Nixon, chair of the state’s Bushfire Reconstruction Authority, was accessible, touchable, and oozed warmth and empathy. ‘I’m interested in getting people housed and back on their properties, not in bloody councils holding up bloody permits,’ she said. Her support and practical, no-nonsense approach almost reduced me to tears. It was in the middle of a rebuilding expo, where she was happy to be personally approached, and it made the difference between us punching on or giving in and putting up a ‘For Sale’ sign rather than battle endless delays.

  While the barn would put some initial value onto our devalued land, we were conscious that common sense had to prevail. It needed to meet our need for a temporary dwelling and have a future use, but not become an overcapitalised white elephant once a house went up. We started to sensibly plan a small kitchen, living area, bedroom and bathroom. I had only one demand: even if it was a barn, I wanted a bathtub—soaking in a bath is my stress-reliever and escape hatch. We calculated that it would take two years to fully execute the sort of house we wanted, so there had to be some domestic pleasures in the meantime.

  Mind you, there were months of work ahead just to get the barn in liveable condition. Whatever time you think such a project will take, think again: concrete floors take longer than expected to dry, tradesmen need to attend for anything that requires compliance certificates. But once the building materials were delivered in late June and the construction crew swung into action, the basic structure was up in less than a week. The concrete slab was poured a week later and we were itching for it to dry so we could plot out an interior.

  Staying with John and Julie during this time was invaluable— instead of having to drive from elsewhere, we could simply go across the road. We could also devote any spare time to searching for practical and cost-effective items. This is the point at which temporary accommodation can turn into a serious money-pit, and a mantra formed in our heads: ‘This isn’t a house. It is a temporary dwelling.’ While it would provide additional living space in the future, it had to be able to be converted back into a straight barn without too much hassle if that’s what some future owner wanted.

  We installed water tanks first, to ensure we could harvest any rain and have a ready supply, albeit from a tap on the tank initially. Then we began looking for building materials that could be salvaged, and sourcing the best options for anything new. It was an indulgent husband and my longing for a bath that turned up an astonishing stroke of luck and transformed a big red shed into the Barn Mahal. Sean answered an advertisement for a spa bath with all the fittings, pump and accompanying shower for $200. ‘I’ll go and check it out. If it’s in good condition, that’s cheap therapy. We couldn’t buy a bath and separate shower unit for that,’ he pronounced.

  A few hours later, I received an excited phone call. Not only was the spa unit in top condition, but the seller was demolishing an entire house and had offered anything else we could use. He wanted to get on with building his new home and didn’t have the time to sell everything individually. We offered him, in addition to the $200 for the spa, $2500 for whatever we could dismantle. This included the kitchen and all its appliances, sinks, mixer taps and cabinetry, as well as bathroom vanity units, new toilet suites, ceiling fans, sunblock blinds, boxes of double power points, wardrobe fittings, even some carpet. We hooked up the trailer, thanked the Lions Clubs for the tools they’d given us that would do the job, and linked up with our friends Patsy and Jimmy Gansen, who’d driven up from Gippsland to help.

  It took a weekend to dismantle and carefully stack our treasure trove in preparation for several trips from the opposite side of Melbourne and back up the mountain. By dusk on Sunday, the seller was curious about what we were going to do with it all. When we explained our situation, he wanted to give our money back. No way, Sean and I agreed; what we’d bought for a minuscule amount would make for an unexpectedly comfortable temporary home. It was the ultimate piece of recycling.

  John’s large shed came to the rescue for storing it all. The kitchen set-up was top of the range, twenty years old but in pristine working order. ‘How insane is that? A designer kitchen in a barn,’ I kept saying. It was a far cry from the couple of flat-pack cupboards, a single sink and a cooktop that had been on our initial plan. ‘When people see it installed, they’ll think we spent a big chunk of grant money on it,’ I said. Paranoia dies hard.

  Towards the end of August we had the shell of a dwelling. Patsy and Jimmy loaned us their caravan, which initially sat outside. At least there was shelter from the weather and a place to make a cup of tea while we were working there, and we could gradually move bits and pieces in so they’d be on hand when needed. Meanwhile we continued to develop the house plans, intending to mark out the exact house site before committing the design to draughting paper.

  We had lost about 3.5 kilometres of fencing in the fires and wanted to replace it as soon as possible. Apart from anything else, we wanted our horses to come home, not only to have our ‘tribe’ back together but also because pasture was growing like crazy. That lush growth could provide vital feed for a neighbour’s flock of sheep that had eaten his paddocks out. In a connected community it makes sense to share resources: we had grass (and lots of it!) but neither the time nor the energy to slash it, whereas our neighbour was having to bring in fodder to keep his livestock going. A bonus was that the sheep would happily eat the weeds that were thriving in the post-fire regrowth.

  Our goats also needed a secure boundary. We’d had to bring them back from temporary accommodation off the mountain, after the perpetually curious male, Billy Bob Thornton (an escapologist at the best of times), took a special liking to the rose bushes poking through nearby fences and started leading the others out through the fence on raids. Back at Number 59, they’d generally stick on the property, bar the occasional excursion, but with no fences we couldn’t replant anything or it would be instantly eaten.

  Immediately after the fires, there just weren’t enough fencing contractors available, even for those who could afford the full replacement cost. Within weeks, a voluntary fencing group called Blaze Aid was formed by Kilmore East farmers Kevin and Rhonda Butler. They had lost their fences on Black Saturday and in order to secure their 1500 sheep, rallied help from friends, family and volunteers to get the job done in a week. The Butlers were so grateful that they decided to keep the volunteer crews going. The deal was that if a property owner supplied the materials, they would send in a crew to get it all installed. After numerous knock-backs from professional fencing contractors, we put our name on the Blaze Aid list. The Blaze Aiders copped a lot of flak for supposedly doing fencing contractors out of paid work, but the latter weren’t exactly lining up on our property (and in fact we still haven’t had calls back from some of those we approached).

  The service was amazing. When our turn came, a Blaze Aid team arrived first to assess the materials needed, ordered these at a better price than we’d been able to source, had the goods delivered instantly and turned up with the volunteer crew on the appointed days. Nothing is that simple, though, and before anything happened we had to have full site inspections done to locate any fibre-optic c
ables and so avoid a post-hole digger blacking out the town’s internet and phone connections. It was July when they did start work, and the weather was absolutely foul. Many of the volunteers were camping overnight in tents and caravans, others driving hundreds of kilometres each day. They worked like crazy, snatching a coffee out in the rain or politely asking if they could move an old outdoor table behind the barn in order to cut the ice out of the wind for their smoko. They were soothing, kind and reassuring human beings who brought a lot of light our way. A few extra little jobs were done as well, the resourceful team leader Craig using his tractor to hoist our new header tank onto the stand—a task that would have required us putting together our own crew. In November the Butlers received Victoria’s Local Heroes Award 2010; no one deserved it more.

  The psychological boost afforded by our renewed feeling of ownership and security was immeasurable. I’d apologetically asked if the Blaze Aiders could start with the front fence, because that demarcation line seemed to me to say that people owned this property and were going to live here, that this was our space. ‘I know it seems crazy when there’s a main-road boundary that needs doing,’ I said. One of them replied, ‘That’s not crazy, love. We had one person who wanted a gate to go up first. She wanted a gate back because it made her feel secure.’ When I arrived home from work and saw the front fence back in place, I cried like a baby.

  8

  Lost landscapes

  IN September 2009, we sat and ate pies with good friends who had come to tell us they were quitting the community for good, even though they would retain property here. These were people who had been involved in local issues, who cared what happened, who stood up to be counted, people of high intelligence and great humour, with whom we had shared many good times.

  ‘It’s a totally different place now. It just feels weird. It’s not what we came here for,’ they told us. They’d sat in the Kinglake pub carpark on 7 February and watched their just-renovated house burn down across the road. They stayed near the mountain in the aftermath, but found the loss of their familiar surroundings gutting. Others in their circle had also made the decision to go, so their familiar circle and their environment had fractured at the same time.

  Even by November 2009, nine months after Black Saturday, whichever road you took to get onto or off the mountain you were faced with a long stretch of devastation before you entered an unburnt zone. Amidst all the rhetoric and spin associated with government and community rebuilding efforts, we heard plenty about community re-engagement, community healing and community renewal. Yet the significance of having to live with such a dramatically changed landscape seemed to me to be little acknowledged. Nobody quite put their descriptive finger on the fact that survivors were grieving for a lost collective environment—sights, sounds and smells—as well as for their own personal surroundings.

  For some time we avoided familiar and much-loved drives, down to Strathewen or through Flowerdale. There was too much visual and human pain. Driving to and from work or elsewhere started to get a little easier as time went by. ‘The Windies’ acquired some sparkling new ‘furniture’ to replace the melted road markers and signs: freshly painted white lines, luminous audio strips to indicate the edges, 60 km/h speed limits (previously 80 km/h), and flashing, solar-powered warnings for motorcyclists to slow down.

  The speed with which this and other roads were restored to driveable condition was phenomenal. But the landscape cannot be reinstated in such a way, and will not be the same again in my lifetime on the mountain. Precarious corners that lost underpinning soil and rock remain a little flaky and are signposted with warning markers; former blind bends are no longer blind; at night, the city skyline is now visible in spots where no lights or views penetrated before. The vegetation that clothed the landscape has pretty much gone and the contours of the stripped roadway against the side of the mountain can be clearly seen across the gullies.

  My former ‘Time to relax, you’re nearly home’ landmarks on this road, just after St Andrews, now evoke a sometimes crushing sadness. This is the fireline, the spot where the flames were snatched by the changing wind and sent hurtling up the mountain. That frontier is still clearly visible—on one side the land is green and untouched, on the other it is black and barren—and causes a jolt. There is no longer a big green umbrella to drive under near the apex: instead, raw stumps ooze sap and bulldozed road verges are bald and rutted. ‘Closed’ signs populate the entrances to bushwalking trails. Even a minor shower of rain turns the naked rock to waterfalls; a downpour engenders a veritable river of blackened mud sluicing down the culverts and over the road. The breezy, verdant drive, with its diverse landscape and wildlife, has turned into a toxic trip. Sometimes I zip through it as a matter of course, but at other times it hits me hard and there’s a lump in my throat for the entire journey.

  The higher up the mountain you go, the greater the destruction; the steeper the slope, the greater the momentum the fire gathered. The national park has become a forest of twisted black twigs, in places looming like a gigantic, bad hair transplant. Some trees have resprouted, but it is a deformed growth, a desperate survival mechanism. Not much of the undergrowth has returned, although tenacious mosses greened up some spots after continuous rain in September, and by spring 2009 there was a cascade of purple heath tumbling sporadically over the rock face.

  The experts say that the moss will allow self-seeded eucalypts and wattles to get a foothold; other people believe the fire created such intense heat that it killed the seed in many places. Now, months later, there is generally nothing here for wildlife to eat and they are conspicuous by their absence. Road kill is disheartening at the best of times, but to see it in this charcoal landscape is tragic.

  Even heading along Deviation Road could cause a stomach lurch. Every trip to any part of the mountain turned up something new, different or changed: the pine plantation at Pheasant Creek flattened and more roadside trees gone, temporary dwellings on neighbouring properties, buildings that seemed to have sprung up overnight and without thought, the hundreds of walnut trees in John’s paddock now dead and showing no signs of regeneration— another everyday sight gone. Later in the year, drier spring conditions saw wood smoke hanging in the air for weeks as people burned off their combustible debris. It didn’t matter whether or not you had suffered property loss, changes like these affected everybody.

  At the same time, every familiar nook and cranny on our own place was irrevocably changed. No more the joy of seeing spring buds or autumn leaves blazing against the blue-grey native foliage; no more enjoying the endless pleasures provided by the huge trees with their diverse wildlife; no more flowering gums for the butterflies. Our extensive and much-admired garden had been our haven: a walk down the brick paths to pick roses and Easter daisies, admiring the towering rhododendrons and camellias, trees to sit under, and, of course, for the birds to enjoy. But re-landscaping had to take a back seat to getting a roof over our heads and by the end of 2009 we had not even reached the stage of practical planning for the levelled site.

  Once, almost everything we planted was guaranteed to thrive under the nurturing canopy. Now plants would snap and fall over before they could get a proper foothold. A future garden will bear no resemblance to what was there before: any revegetation plans will have to take account of the absence of windbreaks and shade cover, as even a decent shower of rain pounds in with nothing to break the fall. There are still trees that may or may not survive; others have a tenuous grip on the earth and could succumb to an aberrant wind. Only time will tell.

  The best-case scenario, we have been told, is that it will take seven years to establish a good, basic garden. The renewal of those fabulous old-growth trees that money couldn’t buy will be for future generations to enjoy. In addition to any other considerations, good plants are not cheap and such purchases have to take their place on the list, behind more pressing needs. There is also the matter of what we, and many others in the same situation, should and shouldn’t
plant again, what might affect our bushfire risk levels. With such a changed environment, what will take hold will depend on the changed composition of the soil and the new levels of exposure to the elements. Where new trees are located matters hugely now: away from buildings to minimise the chances of ignition and of filling the gutters or house surrounds with leaves.

  The views from every part of the property have also been totally altered. Now the panorama is of paddock and sky, the barn windows providing the only frame. The new housing estate near the township, previously not visible from Number 59 because of the tree coverage, is now a conspicuous suburb, complete with street lights. Parts of the main road, also once blocked from view by our careful planting, are wide open and we are on view to the passing traffic. The distant ranges that now form part of the vista were in the past blocked by bush. Some of this bestows beautiful new views, but other aspects have been an assault on the senses. The curtains that we’d drawn on our part of the world have been rudely pulled back—it’s like having a shower with the blinds up, in full view of the neighbourhood.

  Another associated but unanticipated transformation has been the change in the sounds around us. The stripping of so much vegetation has created a wind tunnel at Number 59, and the sheltered backyard where once barely a leaf stirred on a windy day is now prey to noisy, swirling and buffeting gusts. Every tyre passing on the main road is loud and obvious, and there seems to be traffic day and night. Previously, we were never conscious of such a volume; it was difficult to tell whether cars and trucks were on the distant main road or pounding down Deviation Road. Chainsaws, mulchers, power-tools, trucks and tractors have turned the mountain peace into a constant racket as people frantically work to clear blocks and restore their lives. At weekends, there’s the constant rumble of tourist traffic; Sundays have ceased to be sleep-in occasions. It is likely to be thus for the foreseeable future.