People wondered whether they’d ever again own the roof over their heads. Nothing raised the hackles as much as somebody outside the burn zone asking, ‘Things getting back to normal up there yet?’
Many a soul in the Kinglake Ranges wondered if things ever would get back to normal.
RESURRECTION
The seeds of the recovery were there all along. They’d been planted by various members of the community, whether they realised it or not, almost as soon as the roar died down. It was just that the results, like mountain ash germinants, took time to emerge from the ashes. Outsiders came in to help, and they were important, but the real driving force to the community’s recovery could only come from within. And it did.
Out of a hundred possible examples, here are a handful.
The Strathewen school burned down on the Saturday night. The principal, Jane Hayward, and her colleagues didn’t know whether their own houses were still standing but they spent the Sunday organising a new school for the shell-shocked kids, half of whom had lost their homes, all of whom had lost friends. The new school opened a couple of days later in nearby Wattle Glen, and young survivors scattered all over the area were able to link up with their mates and help each other through the recovery.
A group of local women—Jemima Richards, Kate Riddell and Arwyn Taylor—set up a relief centre that morphed into an organisation called Firefoxes and went on to provide an astonishing range of support activities for families in the district.
A woman named Lesley Bebbington, who had lost her own home to the fires, recognised that the young people of the region were experiencing a trauma of their own. She organised a youth group, supported with her own funds, that soon had a hundred teenagers turning up at the centre.
Barely a week after the fires, with the bush still smouldering all round him, Cameron Caine addressed a meeting of the Football and Netball Club and asked whether they could form a team. The response was an overwhelming, ‘Bloody oath we can!’ The entire district would follow the fortunes of the Lakers that season. Sport was one of the poles around which recovery revolved.
Art was the other. A manna gum near the bridge at Strathewen came to be known as the Poetry Tree. That blackened stump was a lightning rod for the storm of emotions that swept through the region: songs of love, death and memory were plastered all over its scorched bark. A community choir called the Phoenix Singers rose out of the ashes. Blacksmiths forged leaves for a steel memorial tree; they received contributions from all around the world. Local musicians sang alongside artists such as Paul Kelly, Lee Kernaghan—even retired-rocker-turned-politician Peter Garrett— at concerts throughout the district. There was barely a painter, poet or songwriter in the ranges whose work was not shot through with bursts of crimson.
The twin poles—art and sport—came together one blustery afternoon in September when local muso Ross Buchanan, whose children Macca and Neeve died, got up at the local football grand final and joined Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a performance of the national anthem. The emotional resonance was extraordinary. There is a tribe in New Guinea, the Kaluli, who hold that music is a form of communication with the dead; there were those on the oval that afternoon who felt, fleetingly, the same thing.
As the people of the community found the resources within themselves to rise from their near-death experience, so did the environment.
Tony Fitzgerald found cause for hope in fleeting images of resilience: a koala spotted trundling along near the Strathewen school, a lace monitor that must have buried itself as the storm passed over it. His greatest thrill came the day he flew over the ghostly remains of the mountain ash at Wallaby Creek and spotted flashes of green among the sea of brown.
He pinpointed the spot on a map, made a closer inspection on foot and found that maybe as many as fifty trees had survived. Some were even sending up epicormic shoots. In both cases, they were breaking the rules: mountain ash will not normally survive a cranking fire like this one, and, unlike other eucalypts, they don’t make use of epicormic growth.
The long-term survival of the many of the drought-stressed trees was still dependent upon rain. The rainfall that winter was reasonable, the next it was incredible, the wettest year the state had ever known. The CFA found themselves rescuing people from floods, not fire. Fitzgerald went into the forest, marked out a couple of metre-square plots, counted around two hundred mountain ash germinants springing through the chocolate soil.
‘That was a breath-taking moment,’ he says. ‘They were coming back. I might be standing in a cemetery of big dead trees, but the forest was recovering.’
It wasn’t just the mountain ash, of course. Botanist Carl Just found that the combination of fire and rain was doing astonishing things to the bush. He identified some fifty species—among them tall shaggy peas, bluespike milkwort and long-style bitter-cress—that had never been recorded in Kinglake. The orchids were amazing, tiny medallions of colour amid the black and green: locals had never seen them in such profusion.
There were still heavy loses. A significant stand of old-growth myrtle beech rainforest at the headwaters of the Plenty River, for example, was totally cooked. A handful of mountain ash survived, but thousands died.
‘After the rains,’ said Fitzgerald in March 2011, ‘most areas of the park have now got good, solid vegetation, with 80 to 100 percent covering. But on some of the dry ridges it’s still at around 50 percent.’ The bare, scorched earth is becoming badly eroded, with vicious gullies cutting into the slope, rock falls common. Its long-term prospects are unknown.
As so often happens, what’s happening in the environment is reflected in the residents. You hope you’ve turned a corner, but it’s a dicey business at best: sometimes you run into a brick wall.
‘The State Emergency Response Plan dictates that the infrastructure of communities that have been struck by disaster should be better than it was before, and by and large that’s happening,’ says Colin French, a member of the Community Recovery Committee. ‘Schools, the church, the tennis courts, the Building Advisory Centre, the National Park Visitors’ Centre, the Youth Space, they’re all coming along.’ As is the Wilderness Camp he and his wife Michelle have been working furiously to rebuild. ‘But inside people’s heads, it’s a different matter. Some are coping. An awful lot aren’t.’
Michelle recently returned from a women’s weekend get-together at Mansfield. ‘I’d thought most of us were getting on top of things,’ she comments. ‘But when you sit down and talk, heart to heart, you see that a lot of survivors are still grieving, still deeply scarred.’
The scarring expresses itself in many forms: people can be quick to anger or tears, frustrated by the smallest things. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, according to Carole Wilson. ‘There’s been a lot of marriage break-ups, suicides,’ she says; local medical professionals report a sharp increase in stress-related illnesses.
‘I look at other disasters differently now,’ says Di MacLeod. ‘Earthquakes in Japan, floods in Queensland. You understand what people are going through.’
Perhaps the most troubling long-term manifestation of the scarring is among the youth of the community. ‘The fire brought about a fundamental change in the relationship between kids and their parents,’ says Lesley Bebbington. She recounts the story of a teenager screaming at his mother as the house was engulfed, ‘Are we going to die?’
‘I don’t know,’ she yelled as she dashed back to the fire.
Lesley comments: ‘They’ve seen that their parents are not infallible.’ The result is a sharp increase in family stress and breakdown, as well as adolescent risk-taking behaviour of every description: alcohol, drugs, promiscuity. There are stories of children sneaking anti-depressant pills to their parents in the hope that it will make things right. ‘One mental health youth worker told us he had seventeen kids in a critical condition,’ says Bebbington. ‘In a population this size, he’d normally expect one.’
Two years after the fire less than half of those hoping to
rebuild their homes have managed to do so; most remain in rented accommodation, many in shacks and caravans.
All of them view the countryside now through the filter of fire. A crimson sunset or a mystic valley can make you shiver. The wind will keep you awake at night. Houses are no longer assessed for their architecture or views, but for their vulnerability.
The survivors’ world will never be the same.
A REFLECTION
We no longer have roots, we have aerials.
McKenzie Wark
Some years ago I lived for a time with Warlpiri people in Central Australia, and spent many an evening watching them sing to the elemental forces that kept the country whole. Prominent among those forces was fire. They respected fire as one of the shapers of country, they understood it, they feared and respected it. Ceremonies were always performed by firelight, with the participants often running a gauntlet of flaming brands. The embers that floated off into the night sky merged in their myths and in their minds’ eye with the constellations whirling overhead. Fire inevitably entered the dreaming. Walk into any collection of Aboriginal art and chances are there’ll be a fire painting on the wall.
These dreamings are not trivial. They are not abstract philosophy to be buried away in books, or cute stories to be told around a campfire. They are lessons about how to live in the land, truths that have evolved over tens of thousands of years. They determine the behaviour of every individual, from the infant to the elder. To Aboriginal people, they are raw power.
So how does contemporary Australia respond to the dilemma of fire?
With lawyers.
On February 13, 2009 Premier John Brumby appointed Justice Bernard Teague to head the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission with the announcement that it would ‘leave no stone unturned’. And after daily media reports of 154 days of evidence from more than four hundred witnesses, the Victorian public must surely have felt that had been the case.
The Royal Commission, as is usual with Australian government inquiries, was conducted by that profession whose primary function is to find somebody guilty or innocent. The question of how things—systems, organisations, training—can be improved to stop the calamity happening again is also central, but the blame game always appears to be more so, at least in the eyes of the media.
In this case the main villain of the piece was held to be CFA chief Russell Rees who, as the Age reported on the day of his resignation, ‘copped severe criticism in the commission’s interim report, which concluded he failed to take a direct management role on Black Saturday “even when the disastrous consequences of the fires began to emerge”’.
The heads of the other emergency services involved—the police, the DSE—were also criticised.
When the Royal Commission released its final report in July 2010, prominent among its sixty-seven recommendations were those calling for an overhaul of the ‘stay and defend or leave early’ policy, an increase in the amount of fuel-reduction burning, the replacement of overhead power lines and a buyback scheme for dwellings in dangerous locations.
The recommendations are sensible and practical, along the lines of the sensible recommendations made whenever there’s a disaster and a commission or inquiry is constituted to stop it happening again. Where they are adopted, they will most likely save lives.
But one of the dispiriting features of these inquiries is the assiduity with which those recommendations are ignored once the trauma has passed. In 1939, after Black Friday, the Stretton Inquiry’s recommendations included: reconstruction of the relevant fire authorities, reallocation of resources, establishment of refuges, an increase in controlled burning. Seventy years later, years in which our society’s wealth, science and communication capabilities have increased immeasurably, Justice Teague and his colleagues were forced to cover much of the same ground.
Sometimes, through sheer intelligence or perhaps because of the emotions generated in a jurist who has peered into the abyss, there are flashes of wisdom. Justice Leonard Stretton, who headed the 1939 Royal Commission, coined one such insight with the comment: ‘They had not lived long enough.’
He meant that his fellow Australians were living in an environment into which they had not had time to evolve. Unlike the Warlpiri, they were strangers in their own land. They—we—shot first and asked questions later.
If we had not lived long enough in 1939, it seems that seventy years later we still haven’t. Indeed, it could be argued that we’ve gone backwards: 71 people died on Black Friday in 1939, 173 on Black Saturday 2009. Of course the population has grown, but so have our defences. The victims in 1939 had no idea what was coming until they saw the inferno surge over the hill. Now we have aircraft, radio, radar, the internet, a well-equipped fire-fighting force and a vastly greater understanding of how fire works. But still, the devastation was terrible.
What’s gone wrong?
More miles on the clock we well may have, but our cultural awareness of the environment has not kept pace. Some would argue that it is slipping backwards: ‘As we’ve become more addicted to the trappings and technologies of the virtual world,’ comments fire scientist Nic Gellie, ‘we are losing our awareness of the natural one.’ Technology can be a snare for the unwary. One of the images that recurs from that day is of people who perished because they were staring at a screen and not at the sky. Others seemed to assume that, because there were a couple of fire trucks in town, one would necessarily be propped in front of their own house when the blaze came.
People involved in the emergency services shake their heads in despair as they drive through their own communities: they see overgrown houses in dangerous locations, woodpiles on back verandas, gutters stuffed with leaves. Whenever there’s a crisis, they have people rushing up at the last moment and asking, ‘What are we supposed to do?’—as if the CFA had not spent years trying to tell them exactly that. As John Handmer said at the Royal Commission, some people were ‘in denial of the fire threat to the last, purposefully ignoring—in some cases, mocking—the advice of friends, relatives or agencies’. These people, he said, ‘had made a conscious decision to take no action’.
Then, when the unthinkable occurs, we search for scapegoats: it’s all the fault of the CFA, the DSE, the local council, the tree changers, the police, the greenies. It’s always somebody else. The accusing finger sweeps out, searching for a target. Only rarely does it turn back towards its owner. We blame the government for insufficient preventative burns—but what is government if not a reflection of the people it governs? Most of the land around Melbourne is privately owned, and landowners almost universally lack the knowledge (and, rightly, the confidence) to put match to fuel. It simply sits there, accumulating energy, salting away firepower.
Our failure to engage with fire is a failure of our culture. The lesson of how to live with our environment has yet to sink into our bones. Rather than adapting to our environment, we are isolating ourselves from it, building barriers of plastic and steel between ourselves and the real world.
But environments don’t just go away because you ignore them. They need to be worked at, handled with care, respected; and if they are not, they can come back and savage you. Empires from the Mayan to the Egyptian have collapsed because this adamantine truth was disregarded.
Now, looming like a spectre behind these considerations, is the question of global warming. As the planet heats up, scientists predict that temperatures and rainfall will increase. These make a deadly duo: rainfall will increase the fuel load and heat will bring it closer to ignition. Future fires will be worse than ever.
Modelling by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation forecasts that the number of fire-prone days will increase dramatically. By 2050, days of very high to extreme fire danger for southern coastal cities such as Melbourne will increase from the present five to ten per year to between ten and fifteen. Further north, the situation worsens: high-danger days will rise from twelve up to seventeen a year for coastal communities su
ch as Sydney. The residents of inland cities such as Canberra or Bendigo will face catastrophic conditions: twenty to thirty-five dangerous days a year.
What will rural Australia look like a hundred years from now? Conceivably, a procession of dying towns and jungly thickets from which frequent fires erupt and lash the dwindling population. Fire one year, flood the next, each giving a fillip to the other.
Town dwellers will be affected too, and not just the millions who live along the city’s edges but all urban residents. Even a city of steel and stone is in many ways a reflection of its environment. Its occupants need drinking water, and fire can do terrible damage to a city’s water supply. They need the green lungs of the forest to purify the air they breathe. They need food. As the smothering blanket of global warming descends and the oil runs out, our cities are going to have to become more self-sufficient, and that will be made vastly more difficult if they’re located in an environment fraught with fire. And fires, like floods, rip massive holes in the economy: they destroy homes, businesses, livelihoods.
Such concerns seem to have been largely absent from the trophy-hunting convolutions that surrounded the Black Saturday Royal Commission. So eagerly were barristers and journalists circling for a kill—why did the Police Commissioner go out to dinner that night? What happened to the missing map?—that there was little attention left, it seemed, for an examination of the nation’s soul.
There were few headlines about people’s lack of preparedness. Nobody was questioning cultural conditions such as rampant expansionary consumerism or a political system in which any attempt to reduce carbon emissions can be exploited as a chance to arouse fear and win votes.
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