Kinglake-350

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ He stares into the charcoal landscape and thinks about it for a few seconds. ‘I’m right.’

  For Cameron Caine and Sergeant John Ellks, the permanent officer in charge of the region, the darkest moment comes early on the Sunday after the fire. Ellks has come back to Kinglake at first light. He was on leave and has been fighting all night to save his own property in Whittlesea, then reported back for duty as soon as he was able.

  The two officers meet at the site of the crash that claimed the life of their friend Gennaro Laudisio. Cam gives his senior a sad debriefing from the night before.

  They spend the morning doing more welfare checks, often with the CFA—sifting and searching through gutted homes. Whenever they find bodies, they cover them with a blanket, try to afford them some dignity. But often there’s very little left: a skull, maybe a few bone fragments. Sometimes what they believe to be two bodies later turns out to be four.

  They reach the house in Reserve Road where they make the discovery they’ve both been dreading: the Buchanan children, Macca and Neeve, as well as Bec’s brother Danny, and family friends Penny and Melanie Chambers.

  ‘It was a terribly emotional experience,’ says Ellks of that period. ‘We all broke down occasionally.’

  Roger Wood arrives back in Kinglake that afternoon, gets straight back into the grim task.

  The police have been ordered to exercise caution: work in teams and restrict their searches to the daylight hours. The houses are still smouldering, and sifting through a building reduced to rubble or dragging aside sheets of twisted corrugated iron is not a task for a couple of cops working with their bare hands.

  But they’re under enormous pressure: they have grief-stricken friends and relatives on the phone begging for information, struggling to deal with the agony of not knowing. Most searches are carried out during the daylight hours, but such is the pressure they are under that they sometimes have to stretch the rules. By the second day there are more officers on the mountain, though still not as many as the Kinglake staff would like. Late that night Wood receives a call from a mate asking if he could check up on some family friends.

  It’s after midnight and he’s due to knock off; he’ll be going against orders. But there’s a family somewhere, racked, desperate to know, hanging onto a sliver of hope. He decides to do this one last job.

  He goes out with Mark Williams, one of the constables who was rostered on for that Saturday night but hadn’t been able to get up the mountain; he worked instead at Whittlesea.

  They get an address and drive out to the lonely ridgetop road, but the house numbers are destroyed. Wood rings back to get a better description of the property and the vehicles. Finds the place; is troubled to see that all three cars are in the driveway, incinerated. He’s come to know what that means.

  He takes a torch, walks around the house, beam sweeping. Nothing. There’s no structure left, just a pile of smouldering rubble and roofing iron, the odd lick of flame drifting up from some persistent material, the odd shadow running over scorched ground. He pulls some timbers aside, a sheet of iron, a length of twisted steel. Still nothing.

  One last piece of iron.

  And there they are, huddled together in what might have been the living room. Two adults, two tiny children cradled in their arms.

  He trails back to the car, sits in the driver’s seat and covers his face with ash-covered fingers. Gives himself a moment. The image won’t leave him, though; hasn’t yet. Never will.

  He and Mark ring the house with blue police tape, marking it for the victim identification officers who’ll be following.

  Wood is an Aussie bloke; he tends to keep his deepest emotions close to his chest. Jo recounts the story of their coming home after the death of the baby, Jesse. Roger’s response, heartbroken as he was, was to throw himself into the farm work and spend long hours on the tractor or fixing fences.

  But now the pain mounts up. There are so, so many deaths.

  A few days later Wood pulls up outside the house of a good friend, a fellow parent at Strathewen school. He’s come to say good-bye. Garry Bartlett died that Saturday, along with his wife, Jacinta, and their youngest daughter, Erryn.

  He sits in the car, staring at the devastation. He thinks about the times they had together; a school working bee just the weekend before. Garry was a landscape architect, a local legend for the amount of work he put into the environment and the community. They were beautiful people.

  Wood finds himself slumped against the car window, weeping. Not just for this one lost family but for all of them, all the poor souls in the district who died on his watch.

  ‘We did our best,’ he tells himself. ‘We all did: me and Cam, the firies and DSE crews. It wasn’t enough.’

  Soon afterwards he and his station colleagues get together, resolve to go to every one of the funerals. And, over the next few weeks, that’s exactly what they do.

  BUSHFIRE BRAIN

  When the sun rose on the Sunday from hell, the residents of the ranges crawled out of their shelters and hideaways, ash-covered and stunned. Bedraggled, staring out into a post-apocalyptic world.

  All was black and smoking as far as the eye could see. No power, no water, no communications, no word of loved ones other than those within eyesight. Charred remains littered the earth: small birds, wallabies, power poles and cars; people. They commenced the nerve-shattering business of discovering who’d survived and who hadn’t.

  All too often, the news was bad. There were 173 deaths overall, 120 of them from the Kilmore East fire. Of the 2000 homes destroyed, 1200 of them were in this region.

  As the magnitude of the disaster sank in, outside help began to arrive. The CFA became the focal point of the relief effort, dishing up meals, dispensing emergency supplies, acting as first port of call for the incoming organisations: Red Cross, army, Centacare, Salvation Army. Politicians and pop stars, cricketers and camera crews, they came and went. Some stayed longer than others, some kept in touch afterwards.

  And then there were the funerals. The professional advice was only to go to those of people you knew well, otherwise the accumulated burden became too heavy. But many residents found themselves turning up to a dozen or more heartbreaking ceremonies. Again and again, at churches and centres all over the region, the melancholy ritual was repeated: the flowers and photos, the treasured objects— footy jumpers, teddy bears, battered guitars—the weeping relatives and weak tea. The casket, or caskets; the long black cars.

  People moved through it all in a state of shock.

  Then, as the disaster receded, they set about rebuilding their lives. Some, maybe 40 percent, left the community. Whether or not that decision turned out to be wise varied enormously. Some said they felt like aliens down in the ’burbs and returned as often as they could; they missed the shared experience, the solidarity. Others were glad to be out of the place.

  Demolition crews and insurance assessors moved in, builders and bureaucrats followed. The quality of the builders—variable at best—and the pedantry of the officials charged with issuing everything from building permits to lost documents became hot topics of conversation.

  People were making life-changing decisions, but often they were in no state to do so. The experts called it post-traumatic stress; the locals had a more vivid expression: ‘bushfire brain’.

  The world seemed disordered, adrift, not quite real. Residents were on edge, forgetful, insomniac, frustrated by minor obstacles. There were individuals who threw their belongings into the car and left the mountain, unable to face filling in another form.

  Some turned to drink or drugs to ease the pain; the police found more and more of their time taken up with domestic violence and drink-driving.

  The human desolation was mirrored in the devastation of the natural environment, which had been what drew people there in the first place. There was a general fear that the bush was beyond repair, that it would never recover its former glory. Even to an experienced profe
ssional like Tony Fitzgerald, the destruction was deeper than anything he’d ever imagined.

  ‘Fire like that,’ he says, ‘all bets were off. We weren’t sure what would come back, if anything. Our worry was that we’d be left with just scorched ground.’

  The magnificent stands of mountain ash that had been his working day’s delight were obliterated, the massive trunks that remained staring out over the land like monuments to dead kings. The hundreds of hectares of the Everard block had formerly been covered with a thick storey of banksias—a pyrophiliac species if ever there was one. Normally in a fire their wafery seeds would fly out of the cones and waste no time re-establishing themselves in the ash bed. After Black Saturday Fitzgerald and botanist colleague Cam Beardsell were shocked to find the trees totally destroyed.

  ‘Even the cones were burnt,’ he says. ‘You’d find a blackened stump, thick as your thumb. That was it.’

  After hours of searching, they came across a single tree that had survived through some quirk of physics or topography. Determined to hang on to any symbol of hope in those dark days, they immediately threw a protective barrier around it. Took cuttings, replanted them at the nursery.

  But they were worried. There’d already been twelve years of drought. If the rain failed for one more year there would be unimaginable changes in the landscape. A Burnt Area Emergency Response team carried out a geomorphological study of the region and made a startling discovery: there’d been a shift in the very composition of the earth. The soil to the south side of the park, with its high clay content, had been burnt so deeply it was now glazed, like pottery fired in a kiln.

  As Fitzgerald and his crews worked away in the charred landscape, they were chilled by the silence that lay upon it. The sounds that normally formed the soundtrack to their working day—the birdsong and the screeching insects, the thumping kangaroos—were gone.

  The bigger birds might have fled before the flames, but the smaller species—the fragile wrens and robins, the treecreepers and silvereye—had been wiped out. Larger animals such as kangaroos would normally outrun a fire, but in this all-consuming blaze they had been trapped. He’d seen it on the day: they’d flee to what they assumed was an island of safety, only to find themselves overwhelmed as the fire swept in from every direction at once.

  Stella and Allan Reid ran an animal sanctuary named Wildhaven, on the road to Kinglake. Stella, out on a CFA truck when the fire struck, watched from a distance as her life’s work—and her home, and very nearly her husband—were incinerated. Touring the property afterwards, she was devastated by what she found: ‘Hundreds and hundreds of animal bones: kangaroos, wallabies, possums, echidnas, their little teeth lying in the white ash. Between our home and Kinglake few survived, millions died.’

  The rangers made spotlight walks, searching desperately for signs of life and came up with nothing. They found the bones of kangaroos wedged into wombat holes where they tried to shelter. They stared up into the scorched crowns, wondered how anything—any sugar glider or koala—could have survived.

  Roger Wood was no exception to the general mood. In the weeks following the fire, he threw himself into the recovery operation with the slightly manic energy shown by all the emergency services personnel, a determination to do whatever they could to alleviate the despair. And there were moments of light amid the overwhelming blackness. He came across friends he’d feared were lost, was the occasional bearer of news that was good rather than bad, was able to find some satisfaction in putting his local knowledge to good use.

  On one of his trips down the mountain, driving past the ruined house of his good friends Drew Barr and Angie O’Connor, he was amazed to spot Chaz, the dog they thought they’d lost. He was sitting faithfully by the photo album Drew had soaked as they fled. Roger arranged for the CFA to take the album and the dog down to St Andrews, and the photo of Angie’s joyful reunion with the family’s lost pet was flashed around the world.

  Even that little incident had its downside, though. ‘I just about got killed trying to save that album,’ said Drew. ‘Then I opened it up and found that it was an old one of Angie’s—and the photos in there were mostly of her bloody ex-boyfriend!’

  Between recovery work, funerals and the post-disaster tension in the town, it was a hectic time for Wood. But within a few days it became apparent that something was not quite right. What started out just after the fires as a nagging pain in his neck became, over the next few months, a searing agony that left him barely able to move. There were strange shooting pains up the length of his arms, too. He’d never had such problems before. The doctor suggested that the huge adrenaline overdose of Black Saturday would have had a lot to do with it.

  A series of tests showed the pain in his arms to be carpal tunnel syndrome: no picnic, but curable with an operation. The neck was the real worry. The diagnosis was severe damage to the upper vertebrae, with bulging discs at C3 and C4. Prospects of recovery were reasonable, but there were no guarantees. There was every chance that his career was over, even that he’d end up in a wheelchair.

  When he was given the news, Wood’s mind ran through the events of Black Saturday and zeroed in on the incident at the Kinglake West school: leaping the high cyclone-wire fence as the fire closed in, crash-landing on his back.

  He was forced to take leave from the job that had defined him, uncertain whether he’d ever be able to go back.

  As the days grew short and the winter wind came scything down the slopes around St Andrews, his situation grew progressively bleaker. This fit, powerful man who could spend all day breaking horses or splitting wood was laid so low he could barely lift a screwdriver, let alone an axe. He spent slow, frustrating hours staring out the window at the blackened slopes; taking the long walks the doctors had suggested might help the injury.

  None of it did much good. By October he knew that surgery was his only chance. Even more frustrating than his personal situation was his inability to help the Kinglake community. Cameron Caine was on long-term leave as well. Now, more than ever, people needed to see a familiar figure in the uniform. They’d gone through the nightmare side by side; it seemed only right that they should go through the recovery together.

  He could still drive. He and the family would often pile into the Pajero of an evening and drive up to Kinglake, share a meal with friends at one of the community venues that had sprung up after the fire. An essentially positive person with a strong family to support him, Roger Wood never succumbed to the depression that afflicted so many others in the wake of the fire. But his head was full of dark memories, haunting images. A counsellor told him he was suffering from post-traumatic stress. Its most potent manifestation was guilt.

  ‘Survivor guilt, I suppose you’d call it,’ he says; we’re talking in his living room, months after the fires. ‘Still can’t get it out of my brain, things we did that day. What we saw, keep going over it. Every decision I made. Made ’em on the run, had no choice; but you keep asking yourself, Did I do the right thing?’ He picks up his mug of tea and contemplates the far wall. ‘We did our best, me and Cam, but Jesus there were a lot of poor buggers didn’t make it.’

  If there is a single emotion that runs like an electric current through the minds of just about everybody touched by Black Saturday, it is guilt. I interviewed dozens of survivors and almost all of them manifest it in some way; scratch the surface and it’s there. It’s like an infection that keeps breaking out.

  One of the firefighters was moved to comment: ‘Geez, I lost my own house, just about lost me life. I know we saved a few people. Why the fuck do I feel so guilty?’

  Some feel it because they survived and their friends didn’t. Some because the neighbours lost the house and they didn’t. Emergency workers feel guilty because so many people died: their primary responsibility was to save lives, ergo they must have failed. Parents feel guilty for putting their children through that terror. Many kids even feel guilty for not being able to help as their parents fought the fire. Some fee
l guilty because they stayed, others because they left late and were nearly killed. Just about everybody feels they should have been better prepared.

  Dr Paul Valent, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, commented on the second anniversary of the fire:

  Something major has happened that’s implanted in the brain. It’s like a big, dark gravitational force. Everything has imploded in there. It’s invisible but it’s got enormous energy. You can’t think about it, you can’t talk about it, and you don’t have words for it. It’s overwhelming.

  Disaster survivors, he says, can

  … disconnect parts of their minds: emotions, thoughts. But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole any more.

  What Valent is saying is that those with the richest emotional lives—people who are by nature caring and empathetic, the very people most likely to find themselves at the forefront of a disaster— are the most likely to suffer from negative feelings such as guilt and sadness in its wake.

  Mid-winter, the snows arrived. Scattered all over the region were people huddling over tiny radiators in shacks and caravans, the denuded earth around them slushy with ash and mud. Many an anxious glance was cast at the incinerated bush, the grieving neighbours, the mounting bills.

  People were horrified by the expense of rebuilding: the new Bushfire Attack Level regulations could add anything from $100,000 to $150,000 to the cost of building a house in the flame zone. In some cases it might have doubled the cost—and the increased costs meant most people found themselves underinsured. Many, maybe 30 percent, were not insured at all. The fire was a financial as well as human disaster.