Escape from the Flames

Jade Macmillan

THERE IS A LOT WE USUALLY TAKE FOR GRANTED IN AUSTRALIA. Clean air, for example. Safe drinking water, a tank full of petrol, and mobile phones connecting us to the world. The spread of coronavirus has caused a sense of emergency on a scale most of us have never experienced before. But in bushfire-affected parts of the country, it feels all too familiar.

Driving to the New South Wales south coast from Canberra on New Year’s Eve, my ABC colleagues and I felt nervous. Mild anxiety before a big assignment is normal, the adrenaline helping to push you through long days and the pressures of filing. But as we passed under dark then bright orange clouds near Cooma, we wondered what we were headed towards. Road closures forced us to find a back route, obsessively checking the RFS Fires Near Me app and Live Traffic website along the way to choose the safest option. Technology provides a level of comfort, the reassurance that the information we need is at our fingertips. Until it fails.

Early on New Year’s Day we made our way to the coastal community of Bermagui, where thousands of people had evacuated to the local surf club or hurriedly set up camp on grassed areas nearby. Little to no phone signal meant we couldn’t file live TV reports as we’d planned. It was a mild inconvenience compared to the impact on residents.

Richelle Jackson and her three young boys had escaped to the coast in the early hours of the morning the day before from their dairy farm at Coolagolite, near the badly hit town of Cobargo. ‘The boys and I stayed for a period until the fire reached our farm and the ferocity of it was pretty huge, just the noise and the heat that came before it,’ she told us. ‘It was coming up the hill and we were bunkering in the dairy. The boys were under woollen blankets and I was out there trying to just wet things down. And I’m usually pretty resilient but it was the kind of sound that made you go really weak at the knees.’

Richelle’s husband had stayed at the property to try to protect their dairy herd and the communications breakdown meant she couldn’t get through to him. ‘I was relieved to get the boys out of there but it was scary leaving your husband behind,’ she said.

Mobile phone outages weren’t confined to Bermagui. Further north at Narooma, we noticed a group of people lining up on the side of the road, waiting to use one of the only forms of communication left – a payphone. Many of them were tourists, trying to reassure panicked family back home that they were OK. Others wanted to check on friends around the region. ‘A bit of a throwback,’ a teenage girl remarked, gesturing to the payphone, but one she was thankful for.

Lines started becoming a common sight as the crisis wore on. The first time we saw people queuing for groceries was in Narooma on New Year’s Day. The power was out but the local IGA borrowed a generator from another shop nearby and opened up to shoppers, who used the torches on their mobile phones to browse the dark aisles. ‘There are people here who don’t have anything, they’ve been evacuated and they’ve come with nothing,’ the owner said.

Major road closures meant that even the large supermarkets had difficulty keeping their shelves stocked. Bags of ice became a rare commodity and bottled water got harder to find. Some stores ran out of baked beans and tinned spaghetti. Staff guarded the front entrance, letting in small groups at a time. They explained that not all of their colleagues could come to work because they’d lost their homes, and those who were there were doing the best they could. I never once saw the type of panic buying or aggression caused by Covid-19.

We’d barely begun to understand the scale of the damage caused on New Year’s Eve when visitors to the area were given an unprecedented warning. Conditions were forecast to worsen again that weekend, prompting the RFS to declare a massive ‘tourist leave zone’ all the way from south of Nowra to the Victorian border.

Queuing for a public phone, Narooma, NSW. (Jade Macmillan)

Residents being briefed at the Narooma evacuation centre. (Jade Macmillan)

With road closures still in place and limited fuel supplies, moving thousands of people in just a couple of days wasn’t easy. Power outages prevented some petrol stations from opening and the ones that could had long lines of motorists waiting to fill up before they could get out. Traffic jams formed in small country towns, and major highways became clogged with cars, trucks and caravans as people spent hours taking the long way around to avoid areas still burning.

Once the tourists had gone, many locals felt some sense of relief. Their communities were still under extreme threat but at least they could now focus all of their attention on each other and their preparations. Like so many others had already done, the worst-case scenario for some involved evacuating to the beach.

Larry Vogelnest was one of hundreds of people who had been forced onto the sand at Malua Bay on New Year’s Eve. He had evacuated from nearby Rosedale with his partner and her 11-year-old son as the fire got closer.

‘You could feel the heat and the wind coming over,’ he said. ‘There must have been about a thousand people there, all crammed on the beach, and it was just frightening, absolutely frightening. We knew as adults that we were probably going to be fine. But I think for the kids, it was something they couldn’t comprehend, they just thought they were going to die.’

As the predicted catastrophic days grew closer, people in the town of Moruya were considering their options. An evacuation centre was up and running but long-time resident Ryan Gallagher was also preparing for the possibility of heading to the river instead.

We met on the jetty near his house and watched waterbombers swooping down to the water to re-fill. When I asked what his evacuation plan was, he said, ‘Possibly come right where I am. Stand by the river, ready to jump in if I need to. I only live just up the road along the riverbank so I can make my way to here pretty quickly.’

Ryan described the sense of nervousness felt across the community. ‘There’s a fire rip-roaring in that’s meant to take us out,’ he said. ‘You can kind of feel that tentative angst in the air. You know it’s coming and you prepare the best you can.’

Ahead of the worsening conditions we headed to Narooma, one of the towns feared to be most at risk. An indoor sports stadium was serving as the official evacuation centre and while the media was kept out for privacy reasons, local shire councillor and volunteer Lindsay Brown recalls there being hundreds of people inside as well as ‘probably 60 dogs and cats and a bird’.

‘There were people who had brought their own bedding, some people had brought mattresses, fold-up beds, others had just brought blankets,’ he said. ‘We had ladies and gentlemen who came in their walkers and sat in their walkers. They slept in a seated position, they couldn’t get down onto the ground.’

Local businesses and charities helped to keep the centre stocked with supplies while evacuees were offered medical and mental health support. ‘In Narooma you couldn’t see where the fire had been, but you saw the glow, you saw the threat,’ Lindsay said. ‘You knew it was coming, but you didn’t know when. Some people told me that they in some ways hoped the fire would come through and burn their house down because at least then we’d know. Evacuating multiple times, the stress in that is just incredible.’

Rather than going to the evacuation centre, many in Narooma had set up camp at the edge of the local inlet. Some told us they were from smaller communities nearby where they didn’t feel safe. They had tents, camping chairs and cooking gear, and their kids played in the shallow water. If it wasn’t for the smoky skies and the nervous atmosphere, it might have seemed like a normal summer holiday spot. But people were prepared for the worst and if the situation got too dangerous, they planned to get into the water.

In town, residents did what they could to try to safeguard their homes. The RFS asked those defending their properties to leave their yellow-lid recycling bins out the front so firefighters would know who had stayed behind. A large fishing boat stocked with food and water invited on board elderly people and those with children, in case they needed to head out to sea. Hundreds packed into the evacuation centre car park each day for the latest briefings from officials standing on the back of a ute with a microphone. And then they waited.

On Saturday afternoon, 4 January, the sky turned orange before becoming dark much earlier than normal. Thick ash, like the stuff that had rained down on Bega earlier in the day, started falling, forcing people on the water’s edge into their cars. Thankfully, though, the night didn’t bring the devastation that had been feared. Narooma was spared for the time being.

Australia’s Black Summer wasn’t yet over and residents on the south coast would endure more heartache before the crisis ended. But even when the emergency passed, it would still be a long time before life returned to any sense of normality.

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On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Maddy Barry’s patisserie in Bermagui was full of people who had just been evacuated from towns nearby.

‘You’d say, “How are you, guys?” and they’d just look at us so blank and say, “I don’t think we have a house any more,”’ she said. ‘And for some people it was true and for some people they didn’t find out for days afterwards if they did or didn’t.’

Maddy gave away free food and coffee and put a donation bucket for the local RFS on the counter. By the time she had to close the shop – when the fire threat intensified later that morning – she says more than $2000 had been raised.

Patisserie owner Maddy Barry and her kids in Canberra. (Jade Macmillan)

A week later, I caught up with Maddy in Canberra where she and her young family were staying with relatives while they waited for the danger to pass and for Bermagui’s essential services to be restored.

Her business was still closed, most of its perishable stock had been lost and the usually busy summer trading period had been brought to an abrupt end. But work wasn’t her only concern.

‘You never want to have that conversation with your four-year-old about why it’s not safe to go home,’ she said. ‘It’s heartbreaking.’

Months later, she’s still mindful of the impact the fires had on her two small children, Willow and Eli.

‘When we were up there [in Canberra] I’d bought them some toys from Questacon and [later] one of them broke and so Willow asked if she could have another one. And I said, “Yeah, next time we go to Canberra we’ll see if they still sell them,” and she asked, “Next time we go to Canberra like next time our house is going to burn down?”’

Through the most challenging times, small acts of kindness have inspired hope. When Maddy’s business eventually reopened, a seven-year-old girl celebrating her birthday asked her mum to donate the cost of a cake so the patisserie could make one for someone who deserved it. The recipient ended up being a long-time RFS volunteer who had recently become a grandmother. Cash has also been donated with the request that coffees for strangers are shouted until it runs out.

It’s that sense of community that Maddy was hoping would continue when Covid-19 first emerged. While her business has taken another hit, when we last spoke she felt lucky not to have been as badly affected by the pandemic as many others around the country.

She says people in her area are still focused on trying to recover from the fires.

‘Countless customers are still living in caravans or short-term rentals or have made the decision to sell their land and move into town,’ she said. ‘There are people who are only just taking their first steps towards rebuild or renewal, whatever that is for them.’

Jade Macmillan is a political reporter in the ABC’s Parliament House Bureau in Canberra