It’s not that we didn’t know it might happen one day. Anyone who lives in the bush is aware of the dangers of bushfire, especially when you live in a state that has been in drought for twelve years. Bushfires are not surprising. I’d grown up with them in the mountains of Victoria. My father had survived a previous disaster, Black Friday, 1939, by finding haven in a creek with twelve fellow timber-workers. Sixty-nine Victorians had died that day.
What we didn’t know about the fires on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009—and which we will never forget—is that the fires would have such unstoppable fury.
For thirty-five years we have lived in St Andrews, a beautiful little hamlet in the foothills of the Kinglake Ranges, well known for its little pub, the St Andrews Hotel, which dates back to the gold rush of the 1880s and for its market held every Saturday across the road, with its chai-tea tents and palm-reading and stalls selling falafel wraps and farm equipment and the buskers doing John Lennon songs. It’s a great and diverse community of farmers, artisans, writers and tree-changers, and it’s a happy place.
Then tragedy visited us. The February bushfires took the lives of twenty-two people in our town. A hundred and seventy-three people died in towns across Victoria. They were the biggest bushfires Victoria has ever seen and the greatest peacetime disaster we’ve known.
On Black Saturday I was hosting two relatives from Holland who were keen to see our famous little pub. We headed home instead, after a warning from a couple of locals. We primed the pumps and the diesel generator and prepared to leave. We were ready to drive away from what we held so dear, as so many people in the area had done. At 6 p.m., as we packed the car, the wind changed to the south-east and the fire turned away from us.
Our house had been saved.
Now there is that fleeting feeling of why us? They talk about survivor guilt. I like to see survival as imposing an obligation to help those who suffered loss, of loved ones or property.
This house is my touchstone. I’ve lived here thirty-five years, through good times and bad. When one day I realized that our family was worth $100 million, we never for a moment considered moving. Why would we? Our family is of this place. Stuart and Amanda grew up here, running around, jumping on the trampoline, swimming in the pool, looking for Easter eggs the Easter Bunny had left in the crooks of trees. We were always grateful the Easter Bunny was able to find us way out here in the bush and deliver the eggs with such great efficiency.
It’s a special place. I’ve made plans here, I’ve made resolutions here, I’ve worked out ways to save our family’s financial future here. There have been so many evenings when I have walked around our garden with ideas flashing through my head. I have walked around and given thanks for how my life has turned out. I gave thanks that I married a great woman, Bevelly, and was blessed with two much-loved children and four beautiful grandchildren. I gave thanks that the idea I had in 1976 proved to be a good one. I gave thanks that a friend, Kerry Packer, had chosen to help me out when I needed it. I gave thanks that in the volatile world of advertising and media Bevelly and I were able to keep our happy marriage together and stay in love.
From the moment we heard that neighbours had died in the fires— some neighbours we knew personally, others we didn’t, but people with whom we had a strong connection because of our mutual love of this beautiful town—we shared the grief that people around Victoria, Australia and the world felt. We were devastated by the carnage the fires had caused, as everyone in Australia and so many around the world were.
Black Saturday put everything in perspective. Reading the stories of families dying as they tried to drive away from the firestorm was devastating. I knew the roads on which these young families died. I had driven on them thousands of times, had marvelled at their beauty, their massive splendour. The country was where I felt free. It was where I escaped my problems in the city. It was where I returned every night after work for nearly four decades. I associated it with happiness and family. And now it was a killing zone, where lives were incinerated, older people, young parents, kids. Every night, when I watched the news, I could scarcely believe what people had gone through.
Our family was stunned and deeply saddened by what had happened to our beloved part of the world. We started hearing of some families in particular need. So I put $30,000 in a bag and took it with me in the car. We knew of a couple who was living with another couple with two kids, one of whom was a four-week-old premature child. They had lost everything, and the six of them were living in one room. I took $5000 out of the bag, put it in an envelope and took it to them. I bought a hundred pairs of boots from the local hardware store in Diamond Creek, and the manager personally delivered them to people who needed them.
We talked to locals around the community about who needed help first. Anne Leadbeater, a community organizer with the local shire in the Kinglake district, had seen a burnt-out house with the burnt-out frame of a bicycle. She told me about it, and the image was seared in my brain. It instantly became clear that you could start to rebuild the heart of families if you could give the kids a bike. Apart from anything else, it’s the way they get around, yet kids getting their bikes back would certainly be well down the queue of their parents’ priorities. We decided, with the help of one of our clients, Goldcross Cycles, that we would buy as many bikes as the kids needed. It turned out to be 160, which arrived in packs and needed to be put together. The Australian Army was magnificent. Four soldiers and an army of locals spent two days putting them all together.
On Saturday 21 February at five in the afternoon I drove the twenty minutes into Kinglake to see the kids get their bikes. Kinglake had been virtually obliterated by the fires; thirty-eight people from the town were killed. It was an incredibly emotional trip for me. To see mums and dads watching their little five-year-olds get a bike and crying was heartbreaking but uplifting at the same time. One couple kissed me.
A week after the fires I drove from St Andrews to Kinglake. The countryside looked apocalyptic—nothing but melted roadways, burnt-out trees, buckled iron signs. The true extent of the devastation left me speechless as I drove up the mountain. And the randomness of the fires struck me. To see three houses burnt and then a timber one sitting untouched was bizarre. Elsewhere, a house had burnt down but the timber post box survived, or the garage on the left burnt completely, but on the right was the bakery shop I would always go to, still there. To see Kinglake, a community I’d been through so often, almost completely destroyed made me feel very humble.
At the end of the third week after the fires I joined about six hundred residents of Kinglake. I saw their eyes lighting up and watched them hugging each other. In the aftermath of a natural disaster a strong community is critical. They stood in little groups and talked about their terrible experiences, of which there were so many. Watching them, and realizing what they had all been through, I had to fight back tears seeing parents with their kids and knowing that some people present were missing their parents or children. Everyone there had a story. They knew they were lucky to be alive, and were all in pain because of the overwhelming loss they had experienced. Being together was, I thought, giving them strength. No one here was a stranger, even the ones who didn’t know each other. Kevin Rudd talked about the Australian family, and what I saw that day was a solid example of that family of people.
I was greatly moved when I heard about the signs placed above bridges on highways in Sydney urging New South Wales people not to forget their brothers and sisters in Victoria. Again, this is the Australian family.
In the days afterwards it was hard to think of anything else but the fires. I took a lot of calls asking after me and the family. Were we OK? Had the house been spared? People were very kind to call. I was grateful for the care of friends and work associates. And, amid the emotion, it’s interesting what jumps into your head. I remembered the 125th anniversary of St Andrews at the end of 2007, when the local community arranged a weekend of celebrations. In a chilling irony, fireworks was the great attraction.
On the third Thursday after the fires I was listening to the ABC, and its evening host, Derek Guille, had been broadcasting every week night from a local area that had been affected by the fires. That night he was at St Andrews Pub. I decided to go and say hello. I arrived at 10.15 p.m. and had a great chat with Derek, who is a warm, empathetic man, perfect as a presenter during these dark days. There was a wonderful spirit in the pub, and I was pleased the ABC had taken the trouble to broadcast from there. For me it represented the excellent job the ABC had done in its community-service role in keeping everyone informed at a critical time.
As the fires continued into a fourth week they were threatening Warburton, where my father has lived for the past thirty years. It was where he planned to spend his old age, and has done so. On 23 February the people of Warburton were advised to leave or execute their fire plan. I spoke to him during the day, and he had decided to stay. He was near the Yarra, and he said if the fire got too close he would get into the river. Amazing for an 88-year-old.
I was impressed by the way the media handled reporting the fires, and I wrote an article in the trade magazine AdNews with the images fresh in my mind:
In our Australian way of self-examination we so often knock the tall poppies in the media, but not this time. We feel it is our job to point out weaknesses and simply take the strengths of the media for granted. As a commentator I am as guilty of this as any.
During the four weeks of the disaster, the media has been the source of news, learning, understanding, grieving and context.
I saw in the now black hills of St Andrews the journalists and crews reporting, empathising, and because they were there in the first few hours, crying with us: respectful, and not intrusive, but professional.
As opposed to the generation of my father, today’s media has had an immediate role and has been instrumental in bringing a nation together. In advertising we sometimes assume and therefore forget the amazing power of the media as part of our life. For the last decade, there has been a tendency in our communication industry to knock big media and champion the niche channels, which are important but finally not the whole picture. This time we have to acknowledge that big media … had its day. It was magnificent on 7 February 2009.
This is one local’s perspective—mine. There were, of course, many others. St Andrews resident and journalist with the Australian Gary Hughes lost his family’s home and came close to losing his life on Black Saturday. From his perspective as a journalist and as a victim of the fires, Gary didn’t see the media’s performance in the same way.
Writing in the Australian on 23 February, Gary was disappointed for several reasons. He believed the media were at times intrusive as they poked their cameras into huddles of reuniting loved ones, that they may have overstepped the mark in reporting intimate details of how people had died, including publishing the ‘last desperate words, the last moments of sheer terror of those who had died … don’t strip the dead of their dignity’. He said, ‘The media should also be aware that its tight “cycle” of reporting a disaster is totally out of synchronization with the reality facing victims.’ He wrote:
During that first week, the predictable cycle began with horror and disbelief, followed by the harrowing tales of survivors, followed by the heroes, followed by the death knocks, followed by the volunteers, followed by the returns to gutted homes, followed by the uplifting, optimistic stories of plans to rebuild lives, houses and communities.
Even I, despite my inside knowledge of the way the media cycle runs (‘We’ve had enough rubble shots’), found myself unconsciously being swept along by those demands, trying to provide uplifting, optimistic stories of plans to rebuild lives, houses and communities.
It was saturation media, with so many media people working on the story. Reading Gary’s words and consuming the media as a local but not as a victim, it’s probably right to say we saw the media do both good and bad work.
One week after Black Saturday. I’m driving along the road from Kinglake to St Andrews. Small children were playing, just being small children, irrepressible in their energy and optimism.
Driving back along the scorched road out of town a sight struck me. In front of one burned-out house was a caravan. And then a little further along—a tent and chairs. People were coming back. They were coming home. They weren’t going away. The human spirit is enormously strong. It gives strength to what I’ve always believed— that there is a great future if we remain as a family. In the end, the only thing we’re going to have in the tough time ahead, is each other. And that won’t change.
Dad has always seemed like a rock to me. I can’t overstate how much Dad did for us, during such difficult periods. Every time our mother left home must have been hell for him. To have Dad to our family home—to share meals with us, to reminisce, to play with his grandkids—has meant so much to me. I owe my father so much.
My very earliest memory is Dad coming home after a day at the sawmill at one of the tiny towns we lived in, and picking me up for a cuddle. Maybe I was three years old, or four. I know I was very little because Dad picked me up almost with one hand. Harold Mitchell senior was a tough man, not usually given to much cuddling. He was a big, strong sawmiller, but he always had time for us four kids. I remember when he picked me I’d admire his rough, scarred hands from a lifetime of physical, outdoor work. And I’d look at him: the big wide smile, the kind word. These moments weren’t everyday moments at all. But there were enough of them for me to feel very much loved and wanted, as all four children were.
I kept close to Dad over the years. He moved from place to place. Sadly his second wife Rose died of cancer, and he got married again, to Elva. They’ve been together for twenty years, and they live in Millgrove, near Warburton, 60 kilometres from Melbourne.
Dad still chops his own wood, heading out with his chainsaw, always rejecting offers from me to help him financially. He did accept a new plasma TV, because I know he loves watching sport. And I gave him a lawn-mower.
Dad never understood what I did for a living. He has no idea what I do, simply no idea. For quite a while, when he was in his sixties, he was the caretaker of a building in Melbourne that housed the advertising agency Monahan Dayman Adams, an interesting quirk of history given my early years with Phillip Adams, one of the agency’s partners. It later became known as Mojo.
‘Son,’ Dad once asked me, ‘is your business anything like the agency Mojo?’
‘Nothing at all, Dad, nothing at all.’
‘Just as well, because they drink a lot, and a lot of the girls don’t wear bras.’
Dad’s little caretaker’s room was down near where the boiler was. It was warm there, and he was easy to talk to, so people working at the agency would go down there and tell Dad their stories and secrets. Some of them, some of Australia’s biggest advertising people, went down there to confess. If I had grilled Dad, he wouldn’t say anything. I learned that discretion from him.
In an article in the Age in 2009, the writer said: ‘Old Harold is proud of his son … Just quietly, though. No fuss. But he’s done well … “I reckon one thing he has learnt from me is hard work. Very proud of him. He’s come a long way.”’
I suppose I have come a long way. There have been successes and failures. I have nearly gone broke, and I have had $100 million in the bank. I have learnt not to take either too seriously, because neither defines you. It’s not what happens to you that’s important, it’s your reaction to it that has the meaning.
Coming from a broken family did influence decisions I made in later years. It reinforced my desire for a strong family life. I’ve had one wife, which is rare in the advertising industry. My passion for the family unit staying together was, clearly, influenced by what my siblings and I had been through. What I saw in Dad was a single father performing daily miracles, as all good single parents do. My father had to be Mum and Dad. He had to be the provider, the supporter, the nurturer, the ear for our problems. It was many years before anyone mentioned the words ‘quality time’. I have never stopped admiring how well he managed. These days there are lots of single fathers, managing to create happy households with love and hard work. Back then, there was probably less support and less understanding of how hard the job was.
I have realized that the pain of my mother’s leaving never left me. It’s been possible to submerge it within me, move on and be happy, but I don’t think a teenager watches his mother leave the family and gets away without being affected. I haven’t analysed it in much depth. I just know that without a mother there’s a gap in a boy’s life, and I’m sure my siblings felt the same way. But you get on with it. And, in some indefinable way, you might even gain some strength from it. It could be the case that my single-minded ambition to make something of myself—to never say I didn’t work hard—might have been developed in some part because I had known some pain as a teenager.
You’d imagine the feelings are deeply submerged, but they’re not. I couldn’t look at the casket my mum lay in. I have trouble watching movies in which children are in trouble. I feel very sensitive when I hear about parents who are drug addicts or alcoholics and have little kids. I have a real struggle with that.
I can’t remember my mother being loving and caring because she was such an intense person. My father was strong and picked up all that. I don’t think that lack of love hurt me. I got just enough of it to be able to build the values of family and security into my life. I lived in so many different towns and so many houses over such a short time as a youth. Is it an accident that in my adult life I have lived in the same house for thirty-five years?
My two brothers had real challenges in their lives. Rodney, four years younger than me, went to Vietnam and came back disillusioned. He now lives in Albury, NSW, and runs a small transport business. Terry, three years younger, went into the army, had a failed marriage, found life difficult, stayed in East Gippsland but never quite coped. He, like me, became an alcoholic, and that’s what really destroyed his life. He spent his last few years as an invalid pensioner. In February 2009, Terry died.
My sister Vicki, a retired bank executive with two children, is a terrific person, very down to earth.
Our mother died in 2008, and I went up to Traralgon for the funeral. It was a small service, just my sister and her husband and son and three of my cousins from Gippsland who had looked after Mum for some years. I was nominated by the family to say a few words. I wanted mostly to thank the cousins who had looked after her. I felt some strange emotions that day. One of them was a sense of loss, that she and I had both lost because she had chosen not to be in our lives. It’s only every now and again that it wells up in me, and my mother’s funeral was one of those times.
At the podium I said twenty words before breaking down. I couldn’t finish. The words caught in my throat. I’ve always thought women are stronger in situations like this, and it was my sister who came up and stood beside me to console me. The pain of my mother leaving was always in my mind without me knowing it.
It all seems so long ago. Sometimes I think about the early days. LP Hartley had it right when he said, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ They sure do. How could I have known that the son of a sawmiller would thrive in such a glamorous, sometimes brutal, often avaricious, world as media and advertising? Back then, the outside world was coming to me through a transistor radio. When I heard the ads between the shows on those hot nights in Stawell I was listening to my future. If I had known that, I might have relaxed, knowing that everything would work out fine. But of course I didn’t relax. And I never relaxed. Relaxing doesn’t work that well in media and advertising. I don’t relax today. Maybe one day I will. There’s a slightly funny joke that says that death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down. Well, it didn’t take such a dramatic development for me to back off.
It’s strange looking back over sixty-seven years. And it’s true—not bravado or fear of their mortality—when older people say they still feel twenty-five. They don’t want the convertible and the blonde (or maybe some do). It’s just a feeling—that being twenty-five wasn’t all that long ago.
My philosophy is that you don’t live in the past, you live in the present and the future, and you hope that you can make some positive steps to help others. The best thing you can do is live the life that you think should be lived and if people can learn from that, it’s a great strength.
While I don’t deny the past, I have always been more interested in the future. I suppose I’ve spent my life getting on with it. I don’t make a lot of fuss. Despite turmoil around me and economic meltdowns, and the ghost-like faces of some businesspeople I meet who’ve had their wealth halved in six months, and general bleakness, I find myself like the man in the cartoon in the New Yorker, lying on a psychiatrist’s couch telling the shrink: ‘The things that should bother me don’t— should I be worried?’
The only medical condition that seems to afflict me is that I’m terminally happy. I’m going to have to live with that and, as they say in my business world, manage the expectations that go with it. So I try to live for the moment, and sometimes, like everyone in their sixties, I wonder how many moments I have left. All I know is I’m not going to waste any of them.
I leap out of bed at 5.15 a.m. and can’t get into life quickly enough. I always want to squeeze everything I can out of the privilege of life. When I see negativity and moaning, I want to scream out: ‘Build a fence and get over it. Live large! It won’t last forever.’