CHAPTER NINE

WEEKS LATER

Three weeks later, Pat Maurovic found a small tree burning on the hillside by her house at the head of the valley. A change of wind had ignited smouldering embers and it burned for hours, inaccessible on a steep ridge. While fences and trees continued to burn after 7 February, the valley’s experience of wildfire had been extreme but brief. The larger fires across a great swathe of central Victoria continued to burn for weeks. The ‘Kilmore’ fire joined with the ‘Murrindindi’ blaze to form a ‘complex’ fire that continued to burn, though at a lower intensity and speed. For the people of Steels Creek, seeing — and, worse, smelling — the smoke from what many called the ‘Healesville fire’, away to the east and north-east, became an unpleasant reminder for several days of what they had faced. Continuing the confusion of Black Saturday, radio broadcasts continued to warn that Steels Creek was in danger.

Here is another parallel between fire and war. The CFA’s documentation for February 2009 resembles that of the Australian Imperial Force in the Great War: it began (on Gallipoli) very scrappily and became (in 1918) abundant. The CFA’s records for 7 February are patchy. One early entry reads: ‘no idea who owns plant [i.e. equipment], how got there … no time sheets entered’. By the second week of the bushfire campaign, the records include full message logs and operational records; the firefighters were clearly tired but on top of their game, with crews reporting and vehicles deployed across a wide front. But they began on Black Saturday with incomplete telephone and radio logs, complaints of missed rendezvous, and crews not arriving or not being used as well as they might have. This is understandable: they were facing the greatest natural disaster in Australia’s history. The chaos that the CFA faced in the first shock of the Black Saturday fire also explains the relative lack of official records documenting the fire in Steels Creek.

The emergency services continued to fight fires for almost another month. Not until 5 March did the aerial reconnaissance report ‘nil activity’. The fire had drawn in over three thousand Victorian firefighters and over seven hundred from other states or overseas, as well as local-government crews and staff of Melbourne Water, Parks Victoria, the Victoria Police, and Ambulance Victoria. The firefighters used almost two hundred and fifty appliances from the CFA or Department of Sustainability and Environment, and over a hundred from other states, as well as sixty-six bulldozers and forty-four aircraft. It was a massive effort and — in contrast to the chaos of 7 February — overwhelmingly effective.

In the meantime, the valley needed to be cleaned up after the few hours of fire. When torrential rain fell after the fire, the charred mud clogged boots and floors. Everyone recalled the amount of mess they had to clear up — the black, ashy muck tracked into kitchens and carpets; the fine, white ash that drifted in through every window. Trees had to be lopped or felled. Later, as the ground cover grew, they had to cut grass and weeds. Soon, green shoots emerged, even on blackened ground. Judy Anderson described shedding ‘copious tears’ at the sight.

People showed acts of astonishing generosity toward neighbours. Individuals lent or even gave away cars, and allowed others to stay in houses for weeks or months without paying rent. One group of neighbours on Willow Bend Drive paid a couple’s mortgage for a month each, in turn, for four months, rather than see them go under. ‘We just did it to get rid of their worries’, one benefactor explained. More broadly, survivors noted not only how generously the uninsured were treated, but also how some insurance companies reneged on their policies.

While insurance payments could meet material needs, the destruction of buildings represented more than the sum of the insurance assessors’ spreadsheets. The loss of Roundstone most visibly deprived John and Lynne Derwin of both a business and a home, but it also deprived their staff of employment — Judy Anderson would no longer supplement her farm income by working as a ‘dish pig’ in the kitchen. Architect Brian Spears had designed the winery buildings, and now could see their ruins virtually from his front gate. More broadly, the people of Steels Creek had lost one of the few places in the valley where they could meet.

Many remained in profound shock at what they had seen, felt, done, and experienced. They drew upon professional helpers — chaplains were for a time a presence, regardless of denomination or belief. Locals spoke to counsellors in the relief centres, and to those on hand. Dave Gormley described how he felt a particular bond with one of the police officers who had investigated Lynne James’s death; how they had talked for hours about what they were both facing. Above all, the people of Steels Creek talked to each other, in a further manifestation of their collective resilience and a demonstration that the invocation of ‘community’ was not mere rhetoric or planning jargon — it had a real, human value, in every sense.

In the April/May issue of The Jolly Thing, Andrew Chapman sadly explained the incomplete rainfall records available: ‘one of our observers [Greg Leonard] lost his life, two other observers [Andrew Chapman and Dave Allan] lost their homes … and the fourth observer [Malcolm Calder] lost his gauge along with the garden and many outbuildings’. Andrew rallied to record that he, at least, did retain his gauge, ‘slightly singed’.

Steels Creek’s weekenders experienced the disaster somewhat differently from its permanent residents. Most weekenders spent the evening of Black Saturday, and many days after, in acute and continuing uncertainty. Shirley Milne scoured the internet looking for reliable news of what had happened. Steels Creek was ‘such a tiny place … insignificant’ in the broader picture. The first reference she found to it was on the British Red Cross website. Then her daughter, in Canberra, told her that she had seen a report of seven deaths in the valley, and asked, ‘Mum, what’s happened to your house?’ Shirley could only reply that she did not know, but thought that it was probably safe because they would surely have heard more if the fire had passed through Steels Creek.

Although they lived in outer-suburban Ringwood, only thirty-five kilometres from their holiday home on Old Kinglake Road, the Milnes did not learn for ten days that their cottage had been destroyed. Obedient to police advice, they did not attempt to enter the valley. They tried to find out through the bushfire information line, but naturally got no answer. They approached the shire, whose exhausted staff they thought were ‘quite rude’. They tried the police, getting ‘no response whatever’. Eventually — more than a week after the fire — they were able to speak to a policewoman, who asked if they would like her to go and find out for them. Shirley appreciated the offer, but, having learned that the road was now open, decided that they would see for themselves.

They drove to Steels Creek, still not sure whether the house had survived or not. Months later, Shirley was able to describe the moment when they drove around the bend of Old Kinglake Road and saw the ruins. ‘We have always parked our car here, but it was different this February evening.’ She and Jim sat in the car, horrified by what they saw: a beautiful native garden now only ‘gritty ash’ and burnt trees. And — more oppressive than anything — there was now silence where before they had always heard the sounds of a living forest. Then, Shirley watched as ‘a glorious orange and black butterfly fluttered over the dry creek bed’. This she took as a promise of what would follow. ‘Life remained — nature was not dead’, she realised. ‘The future will be a new adventure for us all.’

Steels Creek’s weekenders, although a part of the community for years, missed out on the intimacy that others were able to call upon in the days and weeks after. This is plain from the abrupt way in which Shirley Milne learned of the death of her long-time neighbours the Aherns. Sometime during the week in which they waited, not knowing if their cottage had survived, Shirley called one of the Aherns’ mobile phones. It rang, and a voice answered. ‘I’m trying to get through to Leigh Ahern’, Shirley said. ‘Oh,’ said the voice, ‘he died in the fire.’ ‘And that was how I found out’, said Shirley.

Official bodies, too, did not always give the weekenders the same consideration that they gave permanent residents. When Shirley and Jim Milne returned to their block after the clean-up, they found that Telstra had stuck a post in the middle of their driveway and laid a log across it, preventing them from even entering their property. Although modest and self-possessed — having been a secondary school teacher for thirty years, Shirley knew how to keep her temper — Shirley exploded. ‘That really made me cross’, she said sternly. ‘There’s nothing else [left], but this is ours. And then these other people had come along and we couldn’t even get onto our own land.’ She spent many hours on the phone trying to get someone to recognise that she and Jim owned their block and that Telstra had erred in blocking entry to it. She was ‘passed from pillar to post’. This treatment, she recalled, was ‘hurtful’, bringing emotional distress comparable to the shock of losing the house in the first place. Not until the end of March — seven weeks after the fire — did Shirley find her way to the recovery centre in Yarra Glen. When she did, she found officials who ‘actually cared what happened’. She described the way she was received and treated as ‘beautiful … I just couldn’t get over it’, after having been ‘pushed around’ by other agencies.

Steels Creek’s weekenders include the Anderses, Rudi and Shirley, who own a weekend house on Steels Creek Road, just down from the community centre. Rudi, a Dutch migrant who has lived in Australia for over fifty years, and Shirley, a microbiologist, had designed and built their house together. With its cement-sheet walls, wired-in eaves, and curtain of pavers, it is highly functional, but Rudi and Shirley had chosen its materials and design very carefully. ‘We built this house to be fireproof’, Shirley said proudly. When the Anderses said, ‘we built this house’, they meant it literally. ‘We nailed every nail, sawed every piece of wood … with our own hands.’

Rudi had served in a State Electricity Commission fire squad, and both had attended CFA courses. They knew the danger of fire and the extent of the 1939 fires, and had calculated the various ways in which their bush block might burn. They imagined the scenarios by which fire could come, and prepared their property to meet them, cutting vegetation, cleaning gutters, and raking leaf litter away from the house. They imagined what might occur, deciding not to be around when fire struck because of the danger of falling trees breaching what was otherwise — as Black Saturday was to prove — a fireproof fortress. Like many weekenders, they were not in Steels Creek on Black Saturday, but their careful preparation paid off. Although the bush around their house burned, and the ground around their pavers was scorched on all sides, the Anderses’ home survived.

Rudi and Shirley also stayed away from Steels Creek in the days after the fire. A neighbour called to let them know that their house had survived, but they exercised extraordinary restraint and did not visit for a further two weeks. When they finally made the journey from Melbourne, driving in from Christmas Hills, they were both stunned by the sight that awaited them. Everything had changed, and although she knew that the house had survived, Shirley felt ‘almost scared to look’ by the time they reached their gate. Rudi walked up the blackened hillside behind their house and saw Guy Williams’s house standing alone on the ridge; Shirley could not face the sight.

Almost everyone in Steels Creek believes that the warnings they received were inadequate; indeed, non-existent. (Although Judy Anderson recalls the ‘constant urgings’ to recognise the threat of fire before 7 February.) Margaret McLoughlin spoke for many when she said, very firmly, that ‘it should have been spelled out that this was an unbelievably, ghastly, diabolical, treacherous day, far more so than we’d been led to believe’. Margaret is only one of many who made the point that ‘I had the radio on all day, and there was nothing about Yarra Glen. I didn’t even know where Kilmore was.’ As Robert Manne pointed out in his bitter but — in the circumstances — restrained article ‘Why We Weren’t Warned’, the CFA’s warning messages on Black Saturday were distinguished by being tardy, vague, uninformative, and even incorrect. Its ‘information officers’ issued messages couched in language that might almost have been calculated to misinform. The message drafted at the Kangaroo Ground control centre at 3.00 p.m. merely advised residents of a huge area north and west of Steels Creek, warning vaguely that they needed to be ‘aware that the activity in the area has increased and has the potential to impact directly’. (As Manne pointed out, the area affected included communities such as Kinglake, Strathewen, and St Andrews, which between them lost over eighty dead.) In the event, this warning was not distributed, but others like it were. A more active and useful rendering of this text might have been to warn people that a major, catastrophic fire, out of control and fanned by strong winds, was heading directly towards these areas and could be expected to destroy huge areas and kill large numbers of people.

What Jane Calder called the ‘compulsive talking’ about the fire lasted around three weeks. That need to talk, Jane reflected, ‘is a vital stage in recovering’. By three or four months after the fire — when I first came into contact with them — people had begun to become more reticent. People were — as I found — happy to talk, but it was no longer a compulsion. Still, months and even years after the fire, it is a topic to which residents return.

People wanted to know what had happened, to make sense of it. Like many Australians, Victorians or not, they took to scouring newspapers, searching for answers to the most basic questions: What happened? Why? Shirley Milne, prevented from visiting her property by roadblocks and by an undue sense that she had no right to enter, sought answers by searching the internet for online news bulletins. She soon created a large scrapbook of cuttings, interspersed with her own musings, writings, poems, and photographs. ‘My Quest for Understanding’, she wrote, ‘my response to the tragedy’, but also, ‘my journey to the future’.

The fire affected many of the valley’s children. In the days after Black Saturday, Stephanie Giffard heard that four families whose children also attended the Dixons Creek Primary School had not been contacted. In the event, no children were killed or injured in Steels Creek, but she and others feared ‘that the children would have to deal with something a lot more severe’ after the fire. The school, which had begun its first term just before the blaze, was closed several times between the summer and Easter holidays, disrupting children’s learning, especially for those new to school. Readjustment to the new normality took time. Some children experienced classic symptoms of anxiety such as bedwetting or clinging, often being disturbed as much by the disruption following the fire as by the experience of seeing the flames.

One couple noticed how a grandson of theirs — normally a lively, but not aggressive, boy — took to swinging a stick at plants, slashing angrily at burned vegetation in the days after the fire, saying, ‘I hate it, it’s horrible, I don’t want to live here’. A few weeks after the fire, his grandfather replaced their burnt block number with a temporary cardboard sign. The boy noticed it, saying, ‘Oh, that’s where we live, isn’t it! I like this place again.’ As his grandmother reflected, ‘Those numbers said to him that this was where he lived.’ The boy still slashed at burnt plants for a while, but the sign’s appearance marked the beginning of the end of his disturbance. And so it was for many older residents of the valley, although the process would in many cases take much longer.

Outside the fireground itself, the question asked by every family and workplace was ‘How can we help?’ The first relief came from those closest, from the communities of the Yarra Valley that had not burned. The initial efforts were individual. Leader reporters described hundreds of local people donating goods, clothing, money, ‘and a smile’ to the relief centre set up at the old IGA supermarket in Yarra Glen. Later the focus moved to a recovery centre in the Yarra Glen memorial hall. Shire employees put in long hours, often voluntarily; one team helped to care for stray stock (including Lynne James’s surviving animals), using the Montells’ place as a depot. Bushfire survivors spoke highly of the staff in these centres, many of whom were volunteers — including, astonishingly, people who had also lost their houses. Many people dropped into the relief centre to chat with those who had shared and understood their experience. As relief and recovery gathered momentum, tons of goods — from baby clothes to cattle fodder — arrived by truck from across the state and the nation. The three hundred and sixty million dollars in relief funds would be administered by the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority (VBRRA), which was established on 10 February under former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon to coordinate a recovery and rebuilding effort of unprecedented size in Australia.

Two weeks after Black Saturday, the Australian government declared Sunday 22 February a ‘national day of mourning’, in memory of those who had died — at that time thought to number over two hundred. The ceremony, called ‘Together for Victoria’, revived a response common in times of war, but not seen in Australia since the shocking Port Arthur massacre of 1997. Melbourne hosted the main ceremony, at Rod Laver Arena, where up to fifteen thousand people gathered to hear the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, the Victorian premier, John Brumby, and civic and religious dignitaries. Princess Anne represented Queen Elizabeth. The governor-general, Quentin Bryce, affirmed that the bushfire communities would rebuild, ‘no matter how colossal the effort’. The service included brief speeches by federal and state opposition leaders Malcolm Turnbull and Ted Baillieu, representatives of Christian churches and the Aboriginal community, local councillors, and Christine Nixon. The ABC broadcast the service live. Hundreds of thousands watched in homes, but also in public on large screens set up at the Sydney Opera House, at Sydney’s Stadium Australia, and at services held across bushfire-ravaged Victoria.

In Yarra Glen, the service coincided with a local observance at the racecourse, a refuge during the fire and that day the scene of a fundraising race meeting. Large television screens displayed the national ceremony at Rod Laver Arena. The local ceremony mirrored the larger national event. The mayor of the Shire of Yarra Ranges, Len Cox, addressed the crowd before the telecast. Mr Cox, who had been closely involved in the shire’s response to the emergency, spoke in memory of those who had died, saying that the service offered ‘hope to those who have been hurt’, specifically mentioning those who had lost their homes.

In Steels Creek, a family barbecue became a focus for a further informal ceremony of remembrance. About one hundred and sixty people gathered at the community centre to hear Keith Montell speak of their lost friends, and to express the desire ‘to try and return to normal, to keep things moving forward’, as the Leader reported. It became a mantra for Steels Creek — and much of Victoria — in the months after the fire. Hugging became an index of trauma and of common experience. Jane Calder felt that, immediately after the fire, and for a few weeks, she could hug a stranger — a neighbour, but not a friend. Soon enough, though, barriers of reserve returned.

Within a fortnight, the Leader reported a ‘speedy start to rebuild’. Len Cox offered practical help, such as making available free copies of plans lodged with the shire’s offices, and waiving rates for those who had lost houses. The shire’s staff also distributed masks (to protect against asbestos) and other equipment to help those sorting through the ruins of their homes. But few could contemplate rebuilding so soon. Blue police tape blocked entry to many properties, and the clean-up of rubble would take months. It would be a long time before many could begin to plan the physical restoration of what they had lost. The Shire of Yarra Ranges issued over one hundred and twenty-five building permits specifically for bushfire properties in the two years following the fire, most around Steels Creek. The Lloyds, Angie and Graham — who had lost Graham’s son, Greg, his girlfriend, Melanee, and her brother, Jaeson, in their house — began to rebuild almost immediately. They moved into their rebuilt house on Steels Creek Road almost exactly a year after the fire.

Indeed, if, in the days and hours before the fire, the existence of telephone trees and the calls that criss-crossed the valley suggested that the place truly was a community, then, in the weeks and months after it, the real meaning of community became apparent. ‘It’s been a case of people helping people’, Keith Montell said to Leader reporter Bryan Allchin. Many people pitched in, helping to clean up properties and build fences under the aegis of Blaze Aid, which channelled volunteers including retired farmers and those wanting to lend a hand. Some brought useful skills; others ‘knew nothing about agriculture, but they had big hearts’. Volunteers turned up out of the blue. The Jolly Thing’s food writer, Judith Augustine, wrote that, rather than reviewing gourmet food, she ended up making sandwiches for these volunteers. (Because Yarra Glen is a mecca for foodies, she naturally made smoked salmon with capers, and classic Virginia ham with cheese — on wholemeal bread, of course.) Anne and Mike Watkins — whose house on Uplands Road escaped destruction, but sat among burnt bush — had fourteen members of the Newfoundland Dog Club come to clear their block and that of their neighbour. By the end of the day, Anne said, ‘we had fourteen chimney sweeps’. Many helpers were complete strangers. Bruce and Kerry Williams recall ‘a guy called Greg’ who ‘stopped to lend a hand’ — that was all they knew of him. Judy Anderson recalled a couple from Queensland in a caravan, and a cop on a motorbike on leave from Sydney. Steels Creek also benefitted from the vast surge of generosity seen for months after the fire. From the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, from South Australia and Queensland, and, indeed, from overseas, came gifts of fabric, which were distributed by the Steels Creek Stitchers.

Five weeks after Black Saturday, torrential rains across Victoria ended the 2008–09 bushfire season. But the fire had left hillsides bare and, across the valley, gullies became rushing torrents, especially on the lower slopes of the steep Yarra Ridge. At his winery, Ian Brammar watched a creek that had not flowed for years overtop the walls of Rudi and Shirley Anders’s dam, spreading black mud and debris across their property and over Steels Creek Road. A few hundred metres north, Janet and Scott McLean woke in mid-March to find that rainwater had cut a ravine three to five metres deep in a gully leading towards the road. The flood left the property of their neighbour Linda Lyons with a coating of black sludge. Scott McLean took Mail reporter Kath Gannaway to their block (where they had lost their house to the fire), showing her where ‘all the rain is just washing everything down and there’s nothing to stop it’. Higher up the valley, Joe Maurovic’s dam was contaminated with a mixture of black, ash-tainted mud and (probably) dead animals that had been washed into it. Joe found difficulty in locating authorities that would accept the problem, let alone fix it. Caught between official agencies that would not help him clear his dam or even remove animal carcasses, Joe had to pay to pump two million litres of contaminated water from his dam. In the following months, workers from the shire and other agencies installed barriers intended to reduce erosion, but the problem remained. In August, Ivan Filsell, the coordinator of the Steels Creek Landcare Group (in abeyance while landowners concentrated on their own properties in the fire’s wake), found the problem had continued into the winter; he saw sludge flow off the hills and into his dam. Three months later he could still see soil washing off bare hillsides in the rain. Then in December, and again in January 2010, further floods washed debris — even tree trunks — across the road.

The rain at least helped to revive Steels Creek’s treasured gardens. In the days after the fire, Jane Calder — so proud of the garden on which she had lavished so much work — could hardly bear even to look at the scorched remnants lying around the house. Then one morning, a few days after the fire, she went dispiritedly down to the vegetable patch and saw leeks and silverbeet sprouting. Thinking they might recover, she watered the bedraggled plants, beginning the renaissance of her garden. Philosophically, she came to see the fire as an opportunity: ‘in half an hour the fire solved thousands of problems’. The Age newspaper’s gardening reporter published an article on the Calders’ loss. It brought a cascade of letters and even money to help rebuild the gardens of Steels Creek, and prompted two stories on ABC Television’s Gardening Australia in April and May. ‘The world gave us about a month’, Jane remembered, ‘and then everything started again.’

For some families, the aftermath of the fire literally stayed with them. On Willow Bend Drive, Jo and Brian Spears found that their house became a place of refuge for their elderly neighbour Val after her release from hospital, for an itinerant worker who had returned to Steels Creek after he had been burned out at Kinglake, for contingents of volunteers fencing the valley’s paddocks, and for various other short-term guests in need. The strain became severe, especially for Jo, whose natural impulse was to help. Eventually, Brian realised that she needed to be relieved of the burden of others’ problems. Jo sought counselling, and the Spearses began to return to normality — after not just one night but an entire season of disruption.

Most of Steels Creek’s residents faced these continuing worries without any consistent formal support. In talking to people in the months after the fire, there was frequent mention of ‘caseworkers’ dealing with them, so that the casual visitor might have been forgiven for imagining a network of trained social workers dedicated to helping those affected by the fire (the usual atrocious jargon used was ‘fire-impacted’). The reality was that many were untrained or unprepared for the role, and the turnover among them was high. Some were excellent — Jo Spears describes hers as ‘like an angel to us’. But caseworkers were mostly allotted only to those who had lost their homes — realistically and understandably, since there were probably too few to cope with the numbers affected. The result was that those who had faced fire and had not lost their home — whether by their own efforts or by good fortune — had only the help they could find individually; hardly any had a single person or agency to take a close, direct, consistent interest in their welfare. Even though everyone speaks highly of the staff and volunteers at the Yarra Glen relief centre, Steels Creek people ultimately took care of each other.