7 February 2009
I walked past Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, in the Exhibition Gardens this morning (Monday, 9 February 2009), shortly after 7am, on my way to work. He was speaking to a news crew, with the backdrop of the parched gardens behind him, a false Autumn of dead leaves shed from heat stressed trees lying at his feet. He looked sincerely grave.
Reflecting on this, I phoned my father. He told me that the death toll from Victoria’s bushfires, still burning, had risen from 93 confirmed dead at 5.45am this morning, when I turned on the radio at breakfast, to 108, and is expected to rise.
We spent Saturday indoors, of course (apart from an insane outing by my mother and I in her new air conditioned car to buy craft and food supplies). I looked out the window mid afternoon and felt drawn outside. It wasn’t that the sky looked menacing or spoke of the horror that was going on elsewhere. I couldn’t even smell the smoke from the fires, as we could in January 2006.
The sky looked flat and dead. Everything looked dead.
I took a handful of photos that capture nothing of what it was like at that time, which turned out to be precisely when the temperature peaked at 46.4 degrees celcius (around 115 on the old scale), the highest ever recorded here in Melbourne.
The dead grass crunched underfoot. No metaphors other than the obvious can describe the wind. It was straight from hell. It was as if it were lying in wait for me, swirling around my bare legs, piercing blazing needle sharp fingers into my flesh. The camera felt like it was melting in my hands and I went straight back inside.
I couldn’t stop listening to the ABC radio emergency broadcast. There were fires around Bendigo, and between Camperdown and Pomborneit, where I have family. At one point the town of Cowwarr, where my parents lived for 15 years was threatened too. They are all okay.
But Marysville. A whole town. Gone. Many’s the time we’ve spent lovely long weekends there, part of our honeymoon there, even a week of peace working on my book back in 2004. We stayed at a family friend’s house just outside the town. Like almost every other dwelling in Marysville it has gone, including the houses of all the neighbours. Those friend’s son’s house and business in nearby Narbethong has gone too. They are all okay – but people died in Marysville. It is all gone. A whole town. The 100 year old houses and trees and the new.
If only the sky would darken and rain would fall. I don’t want to see the sun today.
When I lived in Kallista, Cathy and I stayed at the house to defend it as the fire approached. The other two in the house headed with their worldly belonging to the local fire shelter. We had prepared, wet towels, lots of water, cleaned up around the place. But is was only as the fire got closer that I realized that our water pump was electric. If the power went, so did the water. I packed the car with one load. If we left that might be all I had left at the end of the day. The car could hold no more.
The fire was perhaps only half an hour away. The helicopters were flying overhead putting out spot fires and bombing the front. And then the wind changed. I don’t know what the cfa did, but that put the fire out. In the street where one of my friends lived, three people died in Ferny Creek in that fire, as their house burned. It was the most emotionally draining day of my life.
But the world recovered. Funerals were held. Houses rebuilt. Long time locals would say, and that house over there burned in the 64 fires. This one in the fires of ash Wednesday. I was amazed at their resiliency. They live here by choice. They knew the risks.
What happened next surprised me. First there was war. The birds were at war and it lasted about two weeks. They had to reestablish their territories as there was now much less forest.
I used to drive thorough the forest at sassafras to go to work. For the first week the fires still burned in various logs on the ground. First the forest went pink as a mould covered the ground. That was replaced by a white mould a week or so later. Then when it finally did rain, green shoots started to appear. Slowly the forest started to regrow.
I can imagine it’s a day that will always live in your memory Brian. A terrible experience.
The bush always comes back. We visited Pomborneit after the fires there in January 2006. It was a bleak, fascinating landscape, already coming back to life.
But the human loss in these fires has been appalling. I received a forwarded email this morning – I really wish it had not been sent on to me – from a man in a society of which I am a member, informing us all of the death of his son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, aged 3, 7 and 8 in the Kinglake fire. I don’t know how you recover from that.