CHAPTER TEN

MONTHS LATER

As survivors moved from temporary accommodation (with friends or relatives), their need for household goods sharpened. Two months after Black Saturday, many victims still lacked beds and bedding. In April, the Yarra Glen relief centre was appealing for beds (and mattresses and bedding), towels, pots and pans, fridges, and televisions. People who had lost everything needed to replace items that most households build up over years — power tools, wheelbarrows, brooms, rakes, extension cords, and power boards; even gumboots. The centre reported one hundred and fifty calls a day, and was still recording new registrations from people affected by the fire who, eight weeks after Black Saturday, were realising or perhaps admitting that they needed help. The Yarra Glen centre assisted people from as far away as Kinglake, Marysville, and Narbethong, as well as residents of Steels Creek, Dixons Creek, and Chum Creek.

Newspapers and other media recorded extraordinary acts of generosity. A group from the Gembrook community market appeared at the Steels Creek market in March to hand over a cheque for twenty-five hundred dollars. Yet, even as Steels Creek became the recipient of external charity, it continued to raise and donate money to worthy causes beyond the valley. The Yarra Glen Artshow at Easter 2009 raised over three thousand dollars for the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal. The event resulted in a further twenty-seven hundred dollars to local CFA units. The Steels Creek Stitchers held a smaller afternoon tea than usual, but still managed to raise six hundred dollars for the Cancer Council.

An important reflection of Steels Creek’s sense of community was that, within months, several residents had instigated what became the Victorian Bushfire Project, involving researchers at the Australian National University, the National Museum of Australia, and independent filmmaker Moira Fahy. By May 2009, a group — Moira, historians Tom Griffiths of ANU, and Christine Hansen and myself of the National Museum — had visited Steels Creek to meet residents and discuss how we could best help the community understand what had happened and recover from it. Working with residents, we developed three related projects: a book on the broader history of Steels Creek, this book, and a documentary film.

Despite the devastation of the fire, fundamental values remain largely unchanged. One of the explicit shared values of the Steels Creek community is a regard for their environment. In May 2009, with her eco-farm still in blackened ruins, Amanda Williams said that she and Edd wanted to ‘find a way of living on this land that’s appropriate’. They began planning a new house, incorporating the ruins of the old, and using a passive solar design to reduce their calls upon scarce resources.

But for the time being, temporary accommodation remained anything but suitable. Some of Steels Creek’s homeless were housed in transportable schoolrooms, nicknamed ‘dongas’. Over five hundred surplus portable classrooms, hastily converted into temporary accommodation, were erected across the state. Bearable in an emergency, the six-metre-square rooms became home to several families around Steels Creek for a number of years, through winters and summers. For some, the dongas became a spur to rebuild or move on; others attempted to make them more habitable. They are a reminder that the fire did not end when the flames went out.

Bruce and Kerry Williams noticed that, at first, the slopes of Yarra Ridge were pitch-black at night. Looking from their converted schoolroom, they could soon see odd pinpricks of light, as people moved into temporary accommodation. That winter, Andrew Chapman reflected on the way lights were returning to parts of the valley that had been black by day and night since February. The Chapmans had installed a caravan on the site of their place, ‘Kilravock’. Andrew noticed how, with the bush gone, he could see more lights than before. To his east, he could see the lights of Keith and Lindy Montell’s house, on what he called — ever the real estate agent — ‘Steels Creek Heights’. Below them, he could see the Steels Creek Estate winery, which had escaped the fire, and the temporary residence of Sally Ferres and Dave Gormley, whose house had not. To the north, he could see the lights of Pat and Joe Maurovic on the hillside, clearly visible since the fire had destroyed an intervening line of cypress trees.

In the months after the fire, Shirley and Jim Milne often visited the site of their cottage. Even though Grocon contractors swept the site clean — sooner than the Milnes would have preferred — they continued to fossick, finding oddments that connected the bare, burnt site with the rich, joyful life they had known in the house. They found melted cups and cake tins, and a fragment of melted aluminium that Shirley decided had been the frame of a loved tapestry. Even back home in Ringwood, they would discover things that evoked their stays at Steels Creek: the cans of home movies taken there; the databases on the computer that listed their books (now all ash) and vinyl records (melted as the cottage burned). Like many families, the Milnes lost precious family records and treasures.

While to many the sight of blackened hillsides depressed the spirit, to some the changes wrought by the Black Saturday fires merely represented another phase of a natural cycle. To Rachana, who had looked out over the hills in all seasons for many years, the sight of bare slopes was awe-inspiring. ‘Oh God, I didn’t know what it was like underneath’, she exclaimed. ‘Oh, look what you can see!’ She appreciated ‘the power of the fire’ both to destroy and to change. Although sad to see the retreat that she had worked so hard to build destroyed in a few hours, she nevertheless tried to see the buildings as ‘a vehicle to enable what we needed to have happened’ — that is, as the name of the centre suggested, ‘human transformation’. Observant because of her philosophy, Rachana looked closely at burnt leaves, seeing the delicate patterns of veins and capillaries in them as they fell to earth. ‘I accept it totally’, she said. ‘I don’t have a problem accepting it.’ Even so, she conceded that ‘the smell was revolting’.

It became clear — indeed it seems obvious — that the extent to which the fire impinged upon people’s lives influenced their attitudes toward it. Those who had saved their houses through their own efforts, especially if they were not close to those who lost their lives, expressed the most positive responses. Fighting to save a house, although arduous and frightening, gave most people a fillip, a boost that helped them to cope with the inconvenience and stress in the months following the fire. Those who had lost most felt worst — and for longest. Even so, many survivors, including those who helped to save their homes, would feel disoriented for months. People repeatedly said they didn’t feel themselves or felt their minds ‘scrambled a bit’, seemingly powerless to think otherwise. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything anyone can say to make it better’, Julie Scott said in mid-2009.

Survivors’ accounts convey something of the strain that everyone in the valley felt for weeks and months after the fire. Alby laughingly reflected that ‘everything was a bit of a blur … functioning, but functioning at a blur’. Psychologists studying behaviour under extreme stress — such as disaster or war — are familiar with this phase, in which, as Alby said, ‘everyone was going on straight out of adrenaline’. This period lasted days or weeks. It left everyone desperately tired, although the real damage seemed to be caused when survivors found that they could not stop reacting as they had during the crisis of the fire. Yarra Glen psychologist Rob Gordon, already an expert in trauma counselling, helped people across the region to recognise and respond to the effects of the stresses with which they lived. Some found that this phase lasted months, and virtually no one in the valley (and fire-affected areas far beyond it) was left untouched. Dr Gordon spoke at over forty sessions in the area over the two years following the fire.

The people of the Yarra Valley placed a great deal of reliance on Rob Gordon’s advice. Many needed help, to cope with both the stress of handling the material problems they faced — where to live, how to earn, how to rebuild lives — and the emotional strain of dealing with dozens of problems and choices at a time when they were least able to decide anything. (One survivor later spoke of being ‘unable to get out of first gear’ for years after the fire — unable to make decisions, or making bad decisions in the fog of confusion and lethargy that would not lift.) Rob Gordon’s greatest service to the people of Steels Creek was to identify and describe what so many were feeling — to reassure them that feeling lost, depressed, isolated, angry, or just tired was perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed or frightened of. His workshops and information sessions attracted dozens of people — though perhaps those in greatest need stayed away.

In the aftermath of the fire, the Victorian government acted swiftly, on 16 February appointing a royal commission under retired Victorian Supreme Court Justice Bernard Teague to investigate the fires’ ‘causes and circumstances’, the preparation for and response to the fires, and ‘any other matters’ that the royal commissioners deemed worthy of inquiry. The royal commission convened for one hundred and fifty-five sitting days over the next two years, examining over four hundred witnesses and twenty-seven hundred documents or exhibits, and producing over twenty thousand pages of transcripts and sixty-seven recommendations, at a cost of about ninety million dollars. Its proceedings, explicitly intended to explain the loss of one hundred and seventy-three lives, included the detailed reasons for the ten deaths in Steels Creek.

The royal commission asked whether enough warning had been given before the fire. The people of Steels Creek — like their fellow Australians and, especially, the residents of much of central Victoria — asked, ‘Why weren’t we warned?’ The political scientist Robert Manne — whose own home in Cottles Bridge escaped burning, but not by much — asked the same question in an article in The Monthly, stating, ‘For ten hours we had learned nothing whatever of a monster fire a few kilometres away.’ Manne analysed the evidence given by CFA and other officials to the royal commission, and condemned the prevailing ‘Stay or Go’ policy as fatally hampered by ‘utopian impracticality and … internal contradictions’.

Over months following the fire, the royal commission heard the testimony of witnesses ranging from Christine Nixon and the CFA’s fire commissioner, Russell Rees, to residents of a dozen townships and localities where lives and property had been lost. The royal commission embraced digital technology fully, arguably becoming the most responsive and inclusive of any such investigation in Australian history. It also sought to make direct contact with the victims and survivors of the disaster, swiftly convening twenty-three meetings across the state’s fire-devastated areas.

The three royal commissioners — Bernard Teague, Ronald McLeod, and Susan Pascoe — and their staff held a meeting at the Yarra Glen racecourse on Monday 30 March. About one hundred and forty people participated. The sessions were not formal hearings — reporters and photographers were excluded from the meetings. Participants raised concerns that would be heard over and over in the newspapers, on radio and television, at the royal commission’s hearings, and in conversation across Victoria. People expressed frustration at the lack of clarity in the warnings they heard, about restrictions on the removal of trees, and about the red tape that had begun to frustrate those affected by the fires as they sought to recover.

Through 2009, the royal commission gathered evidence. Several Steels Creek residents submitted accounts of their experience of the fire. Ian Wood and Jo Spears spoke for many Steels Creek people in testifying to a royal-commission community consultation that they received ‘very little warning’. Some Steels Creek residents accept that philosophically; others remain critical that the first intimation of the fire’s approach was the ember fall preceding it. John O’Neill, especially, emerged as a voice of those contesting the idea of compulsory evacuation. John based his stance on the grounds of individual responsibility. ‘I believe strongly I have a right, as long as I’m not being stupid, to stay and defend my property’, he told Bryan Allchin of the Leader. But who was to say what might constitute prudence? Even John’s determination was qualified: he would not have stayed if his children had been younger.

The royal commission’s hearings were fully reported. The testimony it gathered — variously apologetic, expert, embarrassed, exculpatory, and evasive — was published in the press or in the electronic media. In August 2009, the commission released its interim report, and Victorians had their first opportunity to read a considered account of what had happened. It documented the worst of the institutional failures in command and control. The tone that the commissioners chose was measured, infused with the legalese and bureaucratic speak of modern officialdom, although its recommendations were no less revealing. CFA chief Russell Rees ‘did not become actively involved in operational issues’, it stated, blandly and passively. Though the royal commission exposed much damaging testimony, its final report focused on reform, not recrimination.

While the announcement of the royal commission came promptly, and while relief and recovery services were established relatively quickly, the Victorian government’s official response to the needs of those affected did not go uncriticised; nor should it. Many Steels Creek people, in common with many of those affected by the fire across Victoria, found the official response slow, cumbersome, and frustrating. While people across Australia reacted to the fire swiftly and generously, and while the Victorian government allocated staff to recovery and relief work, the disaster was of such a magnitude that some of its effort was either wasted or misdirected, often unavoidably.

The practical reaction was in many cases magnificent, and it seems churlish to criticise public servants and volunteers who worked so long and so hard, often under stressful conditions themselves. But the recovery effort did cause anguish. For example, the construction and development company Grocon was rapidly contracted — at the cost price of about fifty million dollars — to clear the sites of buildings destroyed by fire once they had been released by the police. This happened quickly; often too quickly. Many families reported that sites had been cleared — bulldozed and carted away — sooner than they liked or were able to cope with. While Grocon’s workers were sometimes able to find and restore to owners treasured items in the ruins, they found themselves dealing with survivors who were, as The Australian reported, ‘angry and difficult to please’. Residents — many of whom were not present when the contractors arrived — found that Grocon’s tidy solution of simply razing the site did not suit. Most were given forty-eight hours to sift through the rubble to salvage keepsakes. Family members of those killed expressed their distress at sites being cleared before they were adequately prepared for the loss. But Grocon worked efficiently: its teams cleared the last of almost three thousand sites within five months of the fire, completing most in a much shorter period.

Another example was in the allocation of caseworkers to help guide those affected by fire through the maze of questions and problems — practical, financial, legal, health, employment, and education — that they faced. While the program was jointly operated by the Victorian Department of Human Services and the federal agency Centrelink, those involved as caseworkers were drafted from numerous agencies — in fact, seventy-eight — and many of them had little experience in all the areas required. The task was a very demanding one, requiring skills in dealing with often-traumatised people and across a great range of practical areas, calling upon services often swamped by hundreds or thousands of people also in stress. Evaluation of the program disclosed relatively high levels of satisfaction, although it was higher with individual caseworkers than with the service as a whole. Some Steels Creek people expressed frustration at caseworkers who did not stay, but were generally satisfied with the help they received.

Responsibility for the state’s determination that ‘we will rebuild’ was given to the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority (VBRRA), headed initially by Christine Nixon. The authority faced a huge responsibility, not least in meeting the expectations of thousands of people across the state. Its challenge was simultaneously to restore the infrastructure of community life and to support communities in less tangible ways.

The authority tackled these challenges by devising thirty-three Community Recovery Plans. Yarra Glen and Steels Creek’s twenty-page plan included ideas specific to the need to prevent fire from again devastating the valley and its inhabitants. The plan proposed many initiatives, from reducing fuel in the bush to organising ‘counselling and support for people — People First!’ In the spirit of Steels Creek’s traditional self-reliance, the plan urged that local government should ‘work for and not against the people’. Proposals included medical, tourism, and information centres in Yarra Glen, and a ‘central community hub’ — the idea of community was at the heart of the plan, as ever. Steels Creek also gained funding for the refurbishment of the tennis club’s rooms. Yet while the community centre obtained funds for the involvement of local residents in the ‘Steels Creek History through Stories’ project — of which this book is a part — curiously, so far, it has gained no other VBRRA funding. Altogether, the recovery authority eventually distributed more than forty-three million dollars to over two hundred community projects. Despite the best of intentions in providing funds, many residents of bushfire-affected areas criticised the authority’s attitude. A retired brigadier and a leader of the community recovery effort in nearby Marysville condemned the VBRRA’s approach, writing to the royal commission that ‘the style has been bureaucratic, the pace plodding, and the effect devastating’.

While the authority achieved substantial success, it also moved with maddening deliberation. Steels Creek residents certainly felt frustrated. Coming from a community that was used to acting with autonomy and self-reliance, its leaders were disappointed at the way the authority both centralised and controlled, exerting a virtual monopoly over programs to assist communities. Critics — notably Fran Bailey, the Liberal MHR for the federal electorate of McEwen — argued that the unduly bureaucratic VBRRA model had prevented decisions being taken swiftly and that the organisation had failed to respond rapidly to the needs of those affected by the fires. Malcolm Calder was glad to receive VBRRA funding for the Steels Creek community, but was frustrated by having to wait until August 2010 for it to arrive. The authority insisted on filtering submissions for funding Moira Fahy’s film about Steels Creek families in the aftermath of Black Saturday, but took months to decide, and then did not support the venture. While the magnitude of the recovery effort demanded a statewide approach — and, therefore, necessarily complex negotiations between levels of government, its various agencies, and community representatives — the VBBRA organised itself in a way that was at odds with Steels Creek’s preferred approach. Ironically, this bureaucratic process added to the survivors’ stresses.

The stresses remained, because the fire would not cease to be a factor in people’s lives. Everyone — from neighbours chatting when they collected their post, to suited barristers at the royal commission — dissected the fire, both in particular localities and as a whole. The discussions returned again and again to preparation and warnings. The warnings — or the absence of them — was a matter for authorities. Preparation, however, rested with individuals and families. There was a tendency to assume that those whose properties burned had been unprepared or underprepared, and that those who defeated the fire had been better prepared. However, many who had faced the fire warned against a simplistic view. Keith Montell pointed out that topography, a house’s placement, preparedness, and luck were all relevant. Robyn Allan, who had lost her house, warned against the idea that the ones who survived did so because ‘we knew what we were doing’ — they didn’t necessarily, she said. Facing a threat of the magnitude of the fires of 7 February, Robyn stated flatly, ‘I believe we couldn’t have saved the house.’ But assumptions to the contrary left ‘that sort of little bit of tension’ within communities affected by fire.

The Yarra Valley’s wineries, already hurt by sustained high temperatures, suffered widespread, though mainly minor, damage. Spot fires caused the loss of vineyards as far away as Yarra Glen and on the south bank of the Yarra, around Coldstream and Gruyere. Some large wineries — such as De Bortoli, on the Melba Highway in Dixons Creek — had enough staff to fight spot fires. Most of the wineries worst affected lay in Steels Creek. Some, seemingly directly in the fire’s path, escaped almost unscathed. Others, as we have seen, managed to save their vines even if they lost buildings and sheds, as at James Calder’s and Richard Tomlins’s places. The Giffards lost their thirty-year-old boutique vineyard, ‘Wildbrook’, one of the oldest in the Yarra Valley. Of all of the wineries, the one most severely affected was Roundstone, with its restaurant and cellar destroyed. It went on the market in 2011, perhaps the single greatest economic casualty of the fire in the valley.

The CFA faced change, too, and not only in senior managers removed after being criticised in the fire’s wake or in policies discarded after the scrutiny of the royal commission. Some local brigades feared a harmful drop in numbers. In the immediate aftermath of the fires, the authority recorded large numbers of people calling to enquire about volunteering; approaches that, in most cases, did not translate into trainees. The failure of well-intentioned people to join compounded the departure of trained firefighters who — stressed or even traumatised by their experience of ‘Black Saturday’, when they were called out for days or even weeks — decided to withdraw. Across Region 13 as a whole, volunteer numbers held up. Some brigades launched recruitment drives in order to reduce the load upon their existing members. The support the CFA enjoys, directly through volunteering or indirectly through donating, demonstrates how it remains one of the bonds that hold together a broader community.

Some criticised the tardy response of emergency agencies. The first time the CFA visited some properties at the head of the valley seemed to be on the Monday following the fire. ‘That’s a long time if you’re suffering or badly wounded’, one man observed. In the ABC Country Hour broadcast from ‘Rose Glen’ in December 2009, individuals asked again and again, ‘Where was the warning?’ Many reported listening to the ABC, or checking the CFA website, and coming across no mention of Steels Creek. Yet despite what one resident called an ‘underlying anger’, they remained positive toward the authority and its volunteers.

With the physical recovery under way, some people’s minds turned in frustration to the search for legal redress. By mid-2009, around five hundred people across the bushfire-affected country had joined a class action; some sixty people joined the action after a meeting held in Yarra Glen early in June. They sought damages from the firm responsible for the powerline that had apparently sparked the original Kilmore fire. Proceedings continue, slowly.

A stream of visitors passed through the region. Their intrusion was resented by some, but local businesses valued visitors. In October 2009, HRH Prince Michael of Kent asked to meet people of a community affected by fire, and on Monday 12 October called in on Steels Creek. The mayor of the Shire of Yarra Ranges and Malcolm Calder greeted him and, during a ‘country-style’ morning tea, explained what the fires had done to their community. ‘The valley was consumed by fire’, Malcolm said, ‘and within a few hours over sixty houses were destroyed and we lost ten of our good friends.’ ‘I admire your resilience’, the Duke replied.

The various arms of the community centre helped in the recovery effort and were, in turn, helped by individuals and bodies from Victoria and beyond. Jane Calder and the Steels Creek Garden Club coordinated the distribution of plants — many donated — to restore fire-scorched gardens. As early as March, the garden club began to give out plants to locals, regardless of whether they were members of the club. Former residents who had not been directly affected by fire took a leading role in coordinating and offering practical help from across Victoria in a ‘garden renaissance project’. Help even came from overseas. Christine Mullen’s father, in Florida, donated money to buy new cookbooks and garden tools for those who had lost homes, while the Dalai Lama — bizarrely — donated packets of wattle seeds.

The Steels Creek Tennis Club, which had been so important in symbolising the resilience of Steels Creek people, replaced the light towers on the courts as early as late March, with direct funding from the state government and the shire. Tennis Victoria also donated new racquets and balls to the club’s seventy members, and sporting businesses distributed clothing, footwear, and gear. Suitably equipped and motivated, the Steels Creek club won both of the premierships in their section of the Eastern Region Tennis Association, a remarkable achievement for players from a club and an area that had been so severely affected. Donations from other clubs continued to arrive — players wishing to play under lights from September 2009 to the year’s end were not charged light fees, thanks to a donation from the sporting clubs of Hoppers Crossing. So energetic had the tennis club been that in November 2009 it was recognised in the Victorian Community Sport and Recreation Awards at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for its ‘outstanding contribution to bushfire recovery’. The accompanying citation recognised that ‘sports clubs such as the Steels Creek Tennis Club are at the heart as many communities rebuild … in the months and years after the fires’. The tennis club, with new clubrooms from 2010, is as strong now as it was before the fire.

The croquet lawn at ‘Kilravock’, which Andrew Chapman had lovingly cultivated in the guise of ‘Bill the groundsman’, was scorched. His Atco Royale Reserve mower was now ‘bushfire sculpture’. Someone donated a new mower, and a member of the Kew Croquet Club in Melbourne gave replacement croquet sets. ‘Bill the groundsman’ expressed his determination to restore the lawns to playable condition again. By August 2009, ‘Bill’ reported that the lawn had regrown, and a croquet tournament was organised for October.

Vegetation and animals slowly returned. A fluorescent green moss quickly colonised the ground. Early in March 2009, walkers on Old Kinglake Road saw two wombats — a mother and a joey — both looking weak and starving. They were surrounded by blackened bush, while ash still fouled the creek. The walkers called the wildlife rescue service and arranged for them to leave food for the animals until sufficient natural vegetation grew. Gradually, birds returned: currawongs, then kookaburras, black cockatoos, and wood ducks. In June 2011, Parks Victoria noted that the colony of eastern bent-wing bats that had roosted in mines on nearby hills had been reported as returning to the site in numbers.

As biologists, Malcolm and Jane Calder have watched the regeneration of the vegetation of Steels Creek’s bush hills with an informed interest. Four months after Black Saturday, Jane warned people not to remove trees or uproot seemingly dead plants in their gardens too hastily, describing plants in her garden that had seemed dead but were actually recovering — even if they had to be protected from rabbits, which were attracted to gardens from scant feed in the bush. A year on from the fire, the Calders showed Leader reporter Emily Webb how the bushfire-ravaged slopes were recovering. Native trees that survived the flames were regenerating well, particularly given the effects of sustained drought, while between the fire and the drought many introduced species had been killed off. But faster-growing weeds had taken hold more rapidly in some places, and Malcolm feared that some native plants would not reassert themselves. Attuned to natural cycles of growth, the Calders looked philosophically upon the changes that fire had brought to their valley. ‘The regrowth of nature is slow, just as our own recovery will be slow’, Jane said. ‘Given time, the bush will recover’, she recognised — implying that the people affected by the fire also needed time to recover.

In the fire’s aftermath, one of the Yarra Valley’s economic mainstays, tourism, diminished. Potential visitors either realised that burned hillsides would make a visit depressing or felt uneasy at intruding. The result was to harm the income of businesses dependent on tourism. In March, the Yileena Park winery hosted a community fair, ‘Steels Creek Revival’, hoping to attract visitors from Melbourne to remind its market that almost all of the valley’s businesses needed custom. But even participating in such efforts demanded stamina. Lynne Derwin, whose Roundstone winery had been destroyed, decided to take part in the Yarra Valley’s annual Grape Grazing Festival in April, after the Domaine Chandon winery offered the Derwins space to exhibit and sell their wine. The kind gesture impelled them to begin rebuilding their presence in the market, but Lynne realised that the optimism would demand a price. ‘I don’t know how we will go on explaining our story a hundred times over’, she told Bryan Allchin of the Leader newspaper. ‘Every time you tell it, it is like picking at the scab on a very large wound.’

The fire prompted not only practical and financial responses. Bushfire survivors saw artistic reactions as a valuable part of their recovery. In April 2009, the Yarra Glen Artshow included works contributed by local artists reflecting on and responding to the fires. Malcolm Calder’s watercolour of burnt gum leaves, Tangled Leaves, Tangled Lives, expressed the way the fire had become a part of the lives of so many Steels Creek people. The show include a large, even disproportionate, number who responded to the experience of 2009 in a variety of media — in paint of various kinds, in embroidery, and even in welded metal. Margaret McLoughlin is, like many artists in the affected areas, ‘fascinated by all the new regrowth’. Indeed, the valley’s annual art shows since 2009 have reflected the gradual healing of both the country and people’s lives. Judy Anderson confessed that she ‘cried heaps’ after seeing their work.

Hannah Sky felt sad that many people were moving away. ‘A community is destroyed’, she thought later in 2009. This — a reflection of the disorientation many bushfire victims felt in the aftermath of the disaster — was too extreme. Hannah herself soon realised that ‘the community will be like the bush’. She said, ‘It will come back, but it’ll be different’, just as the wind and rain now sounded different from before the fire. (Until leaves grew back, the wind no longer rustled the trees; and the rain fell in big splattering drops onto the bare ground, no longer muffled by the bush.)

Much of the debate in the year following the fire was over the policy the Victorian government should encourage or enforce. The official policy was described as ‘leave early or be prepared to stay and defend’ — shortened to ‘Stay or Go’. The doctrine seemed firmly based in the evidence of what would be safest. It appeared to offer a clear-cut choice. In practice, the choice was nowhere near clear, because most people preferred to hang on to see how things developed, often believing that they could leave at a time which fire authorities considered imprudent to suicidal. (In his Inferno, Roger Franklin discussed a 2005 survey in which 20 per cent of respondents plumped for staying and 20 per cent for going, while fully 60 per cent of respondents said that they didn’t know, and would wait and see.) As Malcolm Calder later wrote, ‘We need good information to make the decision.’ Amanda Williams pointed out that property owners with responsibilities to animals or guests (or both, as in her case) could not simply leave at will, and that going ‘could cause financial or emotional mayhem’.

Whether people living in areas prone to bushfires should stay or go, and when, and at whose direction, became a lively discussion. Many expressed a strong desire to retain control of their own fates. Bruce Maskiel — who had sheltered with his wife and their neighbours the Sharps in the Maskiels’ hidey-hole — believed in individual responsibility. ‘People have the right to stay, or go’, he told Mail reporter Kath Gannaway when Grocon contractors arrived to clear the rubble of his burned house, although he added, ‘in any event they must have a fallback plan’. Whatever that plan might be, Bruce expressed the common view that a fire plan ‘can’t be having a fire truck on your doorstep’. The Calders — having both stayed and gone — have discussed what happens next time, and now consider that ‘going’ must be based on reliable warnings, which were not issued on Black Saturday.

One element largely not discussed by survivors is the question of ‘personal shelters’ — fire bunkers. Although bunkers had saved lives in 1939, they had fallen out of use generally; in Steels Creek, the Maurovics’ stone cellar and the Maskiels’ hidey-hole were the closest anyone came to having a bunker. David Allan argued that properly designed and constructed personal shelters should be available in bush areas such as Steels Creek. Official views tended to discourage protection in favour of evacuation.

The fires and their aftermath saw not only the best of human nature, but also its detestable side. Dave Gormley found that devastated house sites around Hargreaves Road had been looted in the days after the fire — systematically turned over in search of melted jewellery. Hannah Sky and Len Brennan, who had lost their house, spent more than a year after the fire living in a caravan and lean-to on the site. They began rebuilding, but, in November 2009, thieves broke into their caravan and stole from their few remaining possessions. While some (such as Len’s photographic equipment) were replaceable, Hannah lost jewellery that had been handed down in her family for over two hundred years. Her losses included a gold ring that she had inherited from the Victorian pioneering family the Hentys, and Chinese artefacts presented to her grandmother by Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in appreciation for her efforts in raising money for the victims of the Nanking Massacre. A few weeks later, having abandoned any hope of seeing the heirlooms again, Hannah and Len followed a rabbit while walking in the still-recovering bush near their caravan. The rabbit led them towards a garment, a dress of Hannah’s that the thieves had apparently dropped — and wrapped in it was the missing ring. Hannah and Len, who had been reluctant to disclose a negative story, were now able to share the pleasure of friends and neighbours delighted at their good fortune in retrieving something from the loss.

Some Steels Creek residents felt that their experience of fire had been disregarded. When in January 2010 Prince William toured Australia, he visited Whittlesea, Kinglake West, and Flowerdale. The Mountain Views Mail reported ‘mounting anger’ in Steels Creek, quoting one resident as claiming that ‘out of 100 people in our community 17 died and it seems like we have been forgotten’. The figures understated the valley’s population and exaggerated the number of dead, but the feeling that popular memory of the fire had become associated with Kinglake and Marysville (which, in fairness, had each lost three times the number of lives) seems to reflect local feeling. Some noted that Steels Creek barely figured in the ABC documentary broadcast to mark the fire’s first anniversary.

The first of the rebuilt houses appeared by the end of 2009. Over the following months and years, many more buildings followed. For a time, there was a rash of new sheds — largest of all being the barn that Edd and Amanda Williams erected at their Brockspur Eco-Farm (Andrew Chapman gently sent up the barn as ‘Brockspur Cathedral’). Commenting on the appearance in The Jolly Thing of photographs of new houses, Andrew Chapman wrote that ‘we hope that they give heart to those still undecided about building or just starting the lengthy process’.

Indeed, there were long-term members of the community who could not face the prospect of rebuilding or — in some cases — the potential danger of a future fire, and they left the area. The fire, as in so many other ways, acted as a catalyst for a change that might have come anyway, but certainly prompted fresh consideration and different decisions. Other residents moved to temporary accommodation — only to find, as Cheryl Crynes wrote, that moving to Mooroolbark ‘turned out to be a sad mistake’. It wasn’t until she and Jim returned to live in a shed on Greenwood Lane that they felt adequately supported.

Even months after the fire, a sense of optimism coexisted with feelings of disorientation. ‘This is an extraordinary time to live in this community’, said Hannah Sky, reflecting her neighbours’ feeling that they were almost privileged to be living through such a time, among such people; ‘almost’, because she of all residents realised that the fire cost many of them terribly. And the fire would not go away. For the best part of a year after, ‘it’ became the dominant presence in the lives of the people of Steels Creek. ‘Oh, God’, Hannah said five months after the fire. ‘We’re sick of talking about the fire!’ Then she added, ‘But we still end up talking about the fire.’ The fire changed Steels Creek — for the better, some thought. Joe Maurovic reflected that ‘nowadays I see people more careful, and much closer to the community’.