EPILOGUE

FIRE AND AN AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITY

Questions about Steels Creek’s dead remained unresolved for over a year. On 17 May 2010, on the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission’s 150th day of hearings, the commissioners heard reports relating to the deaths of Leigh and Charmian Ahern, John and Jenny Barnett, Greg Lloyd and Melanee and Jaeson Hermocilla, and Greg and Gail Leonard; later, they heard of Lynne James. The commission went to a great deal of effort to make the special hearings into the deaths more sensitive toward the feelings of the bereaved families than is usually the case with official investigations. Hearings were held in an annex rather than the arena of the main court, and adopted a less formal procedure, which was fitting in that its principal purpose was to establish the circumstances in which victims had died. Even so, the process was difficult and even confronting for families and friends. Police investigators necessarily dealt matter-of-factly with distressing details, and often had to present visual evidence of the places in which loved ones had died. Detective Superintendent Paul Hollowood, heading the police’s Phoenix Taskforce, reported on Operation Angora, the investigation into deaths arising from the Kilmore fire. The commission sat through what Bernard Teague described as ‘86 sad hearings over 23 days’, in which the commissioners heard details of every one of the one hundred and seventy-three deaths that the fires had caused. Thanking the police, the commission’s staff, and the counsellors of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, Teague called for a minute’s silence in memory of those who had died.

The police collected photographs of properties before and after the fire, created maps showing properties destroyed and the locations of bodies, and even filmed the area to give the commissioners detailed understanding of the topography. The overwhelming impression given by the Phoenix Taskforce is of professionalism and a concern to establish clearly and fully what happened. These are among the most difficult pages of the transcripts of the royal commission, in that they deal with the last, terrifying moments of those who perished. During most of the hearings, members of the victims’ families were present. The commission did not always see its participants behave with dignity — the questioning of some witnesses was aggressive and demeaning. But in treating the deaths of the one hundred and seventy-three victims of the fire, the commission acted with humanity. The sensitivity of the commissioners, the counsel, and staff assisting is seen no more clearly than in their dignified and careful demeanour during those days of the commission.

The ten people who died in Steels Creek all died inside houses — the one place in which most of us usually feel safest. The conventional wisdom is that retreating into a house provides the safest option — the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council promoted the slogan ‘houses protect people and people protect houses’. The statistics of previous fires suggest that this is true; but only up to a point, and the firestorm of Black Saturday reached and exceeded that point.

The royal commission’s deliberations attracted strong media interest when they told of what news editors call ‘human interest’, or when they revealed incompetence among those entrusted with responding to the fire. As journalist Roger Franklin noted, when witnesses discussed the details of hazard-reduction burning or even policies (such as whether refuges should be constructed or encouraged), reporters — or, rather, editors — were less interested. Again ending its deliberations with a minute’s silence for the fire’s victims, the commissioners presented their final report in July 2010. They recommended that a simple ‘Stay or Go’ policy be overturned. In future, people should be encouraged, urged, or even directed to leave early; properties should be abandoned to firefighting agencies, which will be unable to defend them. The result — very many fewer deaths but probably vastly more property damage — seems an acceptable, preferable outcome. As The Age headed its editorial on the day after the interim report’s release, for Victorians, ‘living with the risk of fire would mean living responsibly’. ‘Responsibly’ could mean leaving houses at risk of burning, deciding not to live in the bush, or living with greater constraints on what could be built, where, and how. But establishing how that responsibility might be fostered remains elusive.

After the fires, arguments raged over whether ‘greenie-inspired’ policies adopted by local councils had increased destruction and even ‘cost dozens of lives’. Jo Spears testified in a royal-commission community-consultation day that the deciduous trees planted around Willow Bend Drive had helped to protect her property. She and Ian Wood of Steels Creek argued that the survival of the old oak tree on Steels Creek Road demonstrated that moist, less oily, introduced trees did not burn, while eucalypts with ‘oil and stuff in their leaves that make them go “bang”’ were a greater hazard, especially close to houses. Ian Wood told a Herald Sun reporter that road reserves thickly planted with native trees and cleared with only ‘token slashing’ provided routes for the fire to spread. Matters such as these — matters of life and death when fire returns — remain important to the people of the valley.

At barbecues and dinners, at market days and at the tennis club, in encounters at the shops and by the roadside, people in Steels Creek discussed questions like these. In doing so, they reaffirmed their membership of a distinct community. At the end of his book Disconnected, Andrew Leigh suggests ten ideas to boost social capital. It will come as no surprise to learn that Steels Creek people practise all, or nearly all, of them. They mingle socially in public, walk together, shop locally, give freely, use new technology to keep in touch, run healthy organisations, volunteer, and lobby politicians actively. Despite the trauma of Black Saturday, they turned it into an opportunity to build more facilities and programs for the benefit of the district’s people. Black Saturday destroyed large parts of Steels Creek’s physical being, but it arguably left the social fabric of the valley stronger than ever.

In her ‘Moitun Diary’ — named for the weekender that she and Jim had lost, Shirley Milne described 21 June 2009, when they drove up from Ringwood to enjoy ‘The Shortest Day and the Shortest Lunch’ at Steels Creek Estate. The food was delicious, and Jim enjoyed a glass of red wine. Inevitably, talk turned to the fire. Then the Milnes drove a kilometre or so to the site of their old house on Old Kinglake Road. As they rounded the bend, Shirley saw a large patch of earth on the hillside, the livid orange scar hemmed in by blackened trees. She saw both the scene before her and the sight that she had seen so often over the past thirty years, recalling how ‘our house was always spectacular because it was so beautifully placed on the land’. That day, Shirley and Jim could still see the police tape tied between the trees, marking the outline of the now-vanished house. ‘Nothing remains’, she wrote. ‘That part of our life is over …’

The fires challenged many people’s views of how they saw the natural landscape, especially vegetation. By the end of March, some fifteen hundred residents had signed a petition presented to the shire, calling for it to lift its restrictions on the removal of trees. Some remained anxious about trees that had been killed or severely damaged by fire and the danger that they posed; others, about the dangers of trees burning too close to dwellings. All sought to regain control of their immediate environment, contesting the council’s right to determine the danger they faced. The petition connected with the continuing debate, running all over Australia, about whether bushfires had been exacerbated by a reluctance to cut or burn growth.

But for others, the fire destroyed more than trees, houses, and fences. Hannah Sky — whose commitment to the ideal of ‘community’ and to Steels Creek in particular has been notable — felt ‘distressed’ by the changes the fire had brought to her community. By late 2011, she and Len, now married, occupied a new house, built near the site of her old miner’s cottage. Materially, she seemed to have rebuilt her life, but she felt a continuing sense of loss. For Hannah, things could never be as they were. She recalled how, when her son, Wirrun, had been seriously ill with renal failure, she would often return home from hospital at night to find that her neighbours had fed the dogs, lit the fire, and even left cooked meals. Those people had included Leigh Ahearn — now dead — and Rob Fallon — now living elsewhere (though still close enough to visit). In the wake of the fire, Hannah felt that her community had been diminished, even ‘destroyed’. She felt left out of processes that she believed should have been inclusive, and which had once been so. She thought that the intrusion of bureaucracy, even a well-meaning one, had tainted an ideal that had worked for the valley’s people. She believed that ‘all this money has been a disaster’ — it had led to competition, jealousy, patronage, and dissatisfaction. Hannah’s sadness at these changes exposes a truth: while communities will heal, they will do so by changing in ways that not everyone will find congenial. More positively, Hannah has forged new friendships, with bushfire survivors whom she did not know well before the fire. Her final insight bears recording: the key to a community’s healing after a disaster such as this, she says, is inclusion.

The fire — or, rather, the response to it — gave the people of Steels Creek a renewed sense of appreciation for the relationships they shared. Reflecting on both the experience of the fire and the frustrations and aggravation of its more protracted aftermath, Lindy Montell still thought that, ‘despite everything, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else’, a feeling expressed by many of her neighbours. Indeed, the number of residents who have rebuilt houses, even in areas in which fire remains a threat, is striking.

Steels Creek has survived as a community. One of the lessons its experience offers to other Australians is that strong communities before a fire mean a greater chance of recovering afterwards. Rob Fallon, standing on the site of his house, reflected on what the fire took away: ‘we lost neighbours — good friends’. But he also felt that, as a community, Steels Creek remained united: ‘because we’re all in it together, we feel strong’. Their resilience is impressive, even among communities that weathered the firestorm of 2009. At a conference held in Melbourne in March 2012 to consider ‘sharing responsibility’ for bushfires, Jane and Malcolm Calder spoke about how their unity and cohesion as a community had sustained them. They displayed a quilt, made by the Steels Creek Stitchers, that bore images of the community centre (including the Filsells saving it), the names of Steels Creek’s dead, and a litany of words that for them represent ‘community’. The quilt now hangs in the extended community centre. While the fire drew heavily on the valley’s reserves of social capital, it is clear that its residents continue to replenish stocks of that vital, if intangible, commodity.

But a strong sense of community could not halt or avoid all of the psychic consequences of the fire. Many of those affected, and especially those who lost their homes, described the pain of loss. One spoke of ‘always being sad’; another of how, three years on, her husband was ‘getting more and more depressed about the whole event and its repercussions … not coping at all well’. Others saw deeper costs. A man who lost his house observed in mid-2010 that ‘the suicides are beginning, the divorces are everywhere’. Some regard this as unduly pessimistic and unsubstantiated — the belief, perhaps, itself a reflection of the stress the fire induced. But many talk about friends ageing from the burden of rebuilding, and of others giving up and leaving for less stressful places. In many ways, the silent witnesses to the story of Steels Creek are those who have left before telling their stories, and those who, burdened with the physical or emotional struggle of recovery, have no time or energy to recount a painful story. Hints emerge from other people’s stories: of a single mother with two children whose house burned; of a man committed to hospital with mental illness in the months following the fire; of people struggling with debt, cancer, or the breakdown of relationships. But if community means anything — and in Steels Creek it means a great deal — that sense of community seems to have buffered the blows that follow such a disaster, or at least to have enabled people to deal with the resultant problems more openly, swiftly, and effectively.

One sign of the valley’s recovery was that its people again became givers rather than getters. Having benefitted so much from the help of strangers in 2009, early in 2011 the people of Steels Creek found an opportunity to ‘pay it forward’. The tennis club raised sixteen hundred dollars for the victims of floods in Queensland, while Dorothy Barber and Joanne Spears volunteered to travel to Kerang to investigate coordinating donations for locals affected by floods soon after. Dorothy reported on how she and Jo had seen ‘shocked, stunned, enduring looks’ on people who had watched their homes inundated and livelihoods ruined. ‘Governments can do so much,’ she mused, ‘but nothing replaces the random acts of kindness that we experienced when the volunteers turned up with help …’

One day, Steels Creek will look much as it did before the evening of 7 February 2009. In an earlier draft of this passage, I wrote ‘soon’, but residents corrected me. Shirley and Rudi Anders wrote that ‘it will never, in our lifetime, get back to what it used to be’. But they also wrote of their interest in watching ‘the cycle of changes the regeneration is going through’. The Steels Creek community, too, has suffered, but will also recover, especially under its vigorous local leadership. Andrew Chapman reflected that the main change he saw after the fire was that ‘it widened and strengthened’ the community.

Much has changed since 2009. Most fences have been repaired or replaced; houses have been rebuilt; new buildings will go up as plans to develop a winery or a B&B mature. Grass has already grown on once-blackened hillsides; new timber will age and weather. The effects of the fire still show in blackened trunks and scorched hillsides; but, in time, even those scars will be masked by greenery. And the regrowth itself is a cause of concern: the dense undergrowth that has sprouted is becoming fuel for future fires. Steels Creek people observe that trees are growing and will continue to grow, and they know that one day the next big drought will come, too, as it did in 2009.

Fire doesn’t only destroy houses and take lives. Just as fire sucks the oxygen out of the atmosphere, it also diminishes our capacity to describe it adequately. The CFA, in the way of bureaucracies, abhors the active and descriptive, so its operating procedures talk of ‘fire events’ rather than simply of ‘fires’. Burned houses become ‘fire-impacted sites’. The CFA does not fight fires, but ‘manages fire activity’. The Bushfire Recovery Authority, another bureaucracy, seems to talk exclusively of people who were ‘impacted by the fire’, rather than the more direct and active ‘affected by fire’. It encouraged these people to ‘access’ relief and reconstruction services. This sort of linguistic claptrap is almost as distressing as the sight of leafless bush and blackened paddocks. And it will last longer. Already, people now routinely talk about ‘issues around the degradation of native vegetation’ rather than simply of ‘degraded country’ or ‘erosion’. We need the linguistic counterpart of Grocon to bulldoze this sort of babble and encourage people to use English again. Our capacity to describe, evoke, and analyse what happened on 7 February, and — even more — our capacity to understand and feel it, have been impaired.

The fire has left in its wake big questions that will affect the lives of the people of the valley for decades to come. How does their experience match the conclusions of the royal commission? Next time, will they ‘stay’ or ‘go’? How has Black Saturday changed the way they feel, think, believe, and act toward their environment, fire, and the nature of their community?

On the afternoon of 7 February 2009, one hundred and seventy-three people died in a natural phenomenon that they could do absolutely nothing about. In fact, while individuals can survive fire — and several of the people of Steels Creek did successfully defend their homes — a fire of the magnitude of Black Saturday’s cannot be fought, not with any certainty of success. Those who fought and survived were not only brave, but lucky, too. A fluke of wind, a broken window, a melted hose, a clump of gums too close to the house — any one of a thousand factors could have rendered valiant defence irrelevant in a record of even more deaths.

For many Steels Creek people, 7 February 2009 marks a boundary between distinct phases in their lives. Keith Montell again spoke for his community in describing it as ‘the biggest event in all of our lives’. Shirley Milne captured the memories that were all she and her family had of the time before. After visiting the bare orange earth that was all that remained of her house, Shirley took off her shoes and noticed that a tiny fragment of charcoal fell onto the floor of her house in Ringwood. This ‘token’ evoked a string of memories of the life that ‘Moitun’ represented before the fire:

I thought of sunny days and frosty nights

Of soup steaming on the hob

And crumpets toasted over the open fire.

She thought of the animals that she had lived among — the birds drinking at the nearby pond, the echidnas rooting under the house, a wombat who, memorably, lived in a hollow under a log on the nearby creek bank.

All gone now, only memories remain of a peaceful haven

Devoured by a fire-storm as if from another world[.]

But to Shirley, the fragment of charcoal reminded her that ‘even the horror of the fire is powerless to remove memories of the peace and beauty that I loved’.

And next time? Just as there was a last time — even if that was in 1939 or 1962, or longer ago than most Steels Creek people can remember — there will be a next time. While the next fire may not be as big or destructive, we know that Steels Creek is located at the conflux of weather patterns, temperature, landscape, and vegetation — fuel — that makes bushfire a periodic visitor. What about next time?

Some have already decided. They have moved, or have made plans to move, shifting to the city or to wetter, greener, less fire-prone places. They have chosen to forsake the many advantages and pleasures of living in Steels Creek, weighing them against one of the area’s major disadvantages. Ray and Bronwyn Dahlstrom, who lost their house in the fire, have moved to Gippsland; they were conscious of ‘living on borrowed time’ and feeling — in such proximity to bush that was already growing more fuel — that ‘it’s going to happen again’. Rita and Bruce Maskiel have moved to Hawthorn. Some have decided that while they will remain in Steels Creek, they will never again stay to face the kind of fire that claimed or threatened their lives and homes; next time they will ‘go’ rather than ‘stay’. Some of those who stayed to defend — the O’Neills, the Williamsons, the Giffards, the Montells; most of the residents of Valley Road — will stay and defend again. Having survived the worst that nature could bring, they would remain again — but they will be better prepared next time. The Boffas will make sure they have copper rather than plastic pipes, but will send their children away while they stay and defend by themselves; Michael and Christabel will fight next time on what Michael calls ‘a familiar battlefield’. Guy Williams, whose aerated concrete helped him survive atop Yarra Ridge on a site exposed to the full force of the fire, could be found in 2010 analysing his house’s weaknesses and working to remedy them. He started to enclose his carport, to ensure that burning cars would not again imperil his house and fill it with toxic gases. Guy may easily survive ‘ordinary’ fires and, living on a hillside blasted of timber, may not face any fire for some decades — but you feel sure that if anyone is going to beat it next time, he will.

In March 2009, The Jolly Thing republished an essay by environmental historian Tom Griffiths, ‘We Have Still Not Lived Long Enough’. Written within a week of the fires, Tom took as his text an observation made by Justice Leonard Stretton in investigating the Black Friday fires that devastated Victoria in 1939. Tom argued that, in 1939, white Australians had not understood the forces of fire in an environment in which fire was inevitable, because they had not lived in it for long enough to accumulate and absorb knowledge of what it was capable of. By 2009, Tom wrote, it seemed as if they had still not adequately heeded the implications of living in such a place. He wrote that Stretton meant that ‘lived experience alone, however vivid and traumatic, was never going to be enough to guide people’. ‘They needed history’, he concluded, to inform their use of this land. Malcolm Calder, busy enough in the wake of the fire, read and reflected on Tom’s article and, realising that the people of Steels Creek needed to record their history of the fire, organised the collaboration that produced Moira Fahy’s film; Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen’s community history of Steels Creek, called Living with Fire; and this book.

But have we really not now lived long enough to realise that the people of Steels Creek — and the whole of south-eastern Australia — live under the influence of Stephen Pyne’s ‘fire flume’? Seventy years on from Black Friday in 1939, in the wake of a massive expansion of environmental and ecological knowledge (and, indeed, with the fine environmental history of this very region of Victoria in Tom Griffiths’s book Forests of Ash), it was surely harder to make the claim that we had not lived long enough to know. We know that fire is recurrent and inescapable. We know that it is a perennial hazard, which periodically can burn huge areas and kill many people. We know that however we seek to ‘manage’ the bush, it will burn. The people of Steels Creek know these things. As Malcolm Calder reflected, ‘we have chosen to live here. We can’t complain if the bush turns on us’. But ‘knowing’ is relatively easy. What is harder is altering the circumstances of our lives to accommodate that profound environmental fact. As I was finishing the manuscript of this book, stories appeared in newspapers and online reporting that the La Niña effect was ending, and that El Niño would soon return. The Southern Oscillation Effect will influence Australia again and, in due course, drought will recur and, with it, sooner or later, bushfire.

The 2009 fire deprived the valley of many things. It destroyed houses, animals, and trees. It changed people’s futures, livelihoods, and relationships, and, for some, irrevocably changed a place and a community they loved. It also killed ten people in Steels Creek. Their names are now recorded on the quilt made by the stitchers in time to be installed in the newly extended community centre, opened in April 2012. For them, though, there will be no next time:

Charmian Ahern

Leigh Ahern

Jenny Barnett

John Barnett

Jaeson Hermocilla

Melanee Hermocilla

Lynne James

Gail Leonard

Greg Leonard

Greg Lloyd