First Days

They said not to sign up until April but our brigade took our names and numbers straight away. I signed up with my partner. On our first Sunday we got given spare yellows. It felt great getting into them, even if I am just a pair of boobs above britches when I have them on. We had to bring our own boots, so we said, "Oh yeah we have a pair each," then went out and bought a couple of pairs with KRudd's stimulus money, (well yes KRudd, we think it's going to a good cause, thanks.)

We have two piece jacket and pants, leather gloves and helmets with someone else's name on them. My britches are a tad too tight and so I have to strain like a constipated person when getting on and off the truck. That's OK because when we finally become qualified, we get to order a whole new wildfire outfit of our very own. They are worth a lot of money. We will also get a pager each.

Our brigade has five or six new recruits. Our area has had over 40 people sign up after Black Saturday. There seems to have been an influx of new recruits state wide after the fires. In fact there have been so many new recruits that they couldn't even send me out my induction pack.

We have training on Tuesday nights, and on Wednesday and Sunday there is brigade training. We can only make it out to Sunday brigade training at the moment, as partner is studying for his MA in editing on those nights.

On the first Sunday we went over the tankers and learned the parts of the trucks and what's in each locker. It's hard to recall it all and I had a bit of brain meltdown after about twenty minutes - not a thing got in after that. Second Sunday we did inventory of trucks (the same thing as the week before only with a list to check items off with.) Third Sunday we studied wildfire behaviour and movement. I managed a session in comms on Wednesday night the next week, and then we did our first session of draughting, (drawing water from the river to fill the truck up with.)

Febuary 2009

The days immediately preceding the fires are harder to make sense of. I know that at six o 'clock am the next morning I rang the Bushfire Information Line and tried to find out if we could go back to our town. I had no idea then, if it stood or had burned. The lady on the other end told me not to go home yet. I waited impatiently and with some strange and unknown, grating feeling in my stomach that was something like anger but not quite

My mother-in-law rang at around lunchtime and told me that it was business as usual in our town, albeit a smoky one. I did not want to go home. The feelings of the previous night were catching up with me. I was not ready yet, but found myself grudgingly following my partner back in. He drove one car, I drove the other. There were still fires burning out of control all over the state. I can't recall just when we began to understand that people had died – was it that morning, or later on

Embers littered our yard and when we opened the door to our house a raqcid smell of smoke and burning things greeted us. We listened to 77.4, and I wondered around lost. DSE and CFA websites showed up the fires burning around us. Healesville, Steels Creek and Chum creek had gone up the left, a fire burned in parkland behind us, and Bunyip Ridge burnt to the south. We used the time to fire ready our home. I put buckets of water under windows, I pulled curtains back from windows. I moved furniture away from windows. I filled up the bathtubs, the sinks, anything that held water. I watched the sky. Helicopters came and went carrying circular orange water bombs. The weather had cooled. The officials on the news said that the largest of the fires would burn for weeks and weeks on end. The death toll began to rack up. I went home to my empty shell of a house during the initial days after, but slept in a motel in a motel in Croydon that my mother had paid for.I slept there for peace because my nerves were still frayed and I needed to get good sleep to cope with the days ahead

Depending on the weather, or reports, or levels of smoke, in the intital days after the fire, it took varying degrees of courage to go back home. I hadn't yet processed the events of the 7th fully yet. I could not cry for the dead. They sat in the back of my mind waiting until I could deal with them. Three or four days passed and the state, the country, the world, fell into varying degrees of shock and made plans to deal with the grief and help the victims. But we could not. We could not let our guard down. We had to stay fast in our thoughts, we had to stay prepared and alert. There was no time for raw emotions which would hinder the ability to think in an emergency. The fires were still around us and with each wind change, a different fire slowly ambled in our direction. We were lucky, we had weather on our side after the cool change and fire fighting forces banded together over the next two weeks to take advantage of the cool weather to create solid containment lines between the fire and our town. Healesville still suffered the ongoing trauma of fire on its outskirts, a lot closer than the fire was to us

Over the next two or three days, the motel room slowly filled up with more bags, photo albums, paper work, my paints, Rob's chess set, some of the boy's toys and games, which then got transported to my father's in Blackburn

As the days passed, the local shire, the police and CFA formed community meetings and showed us on maps where the fires were and what their movements were. I began to understand them. Most of the littler ones had been contained, which meant they were still actively being kept within a certain space but were not moving forwards. The bigger ones kept merging together to the back of us. At one time the papers were reporting that the fires sandwiching us from either side were only eighteen kilometers apart. When we drove back into the valley, you could look on both sides of you and see the smoke from them. The Bunyip fire did not seem to move at all for several days and we slowly forgot about that one. It was the larger ones behind us that were a worry

My first night back home, I found myself laying in bed as an involuntary shuddering throughout my body began and lasted until I fell asleep. I could not sleep well at night. Many people were the same. 77.4 was left on night and day to check for weather changes, changes in temperature, humidity, wind. We became experts at reading the weather. Every little movement of the wind mattered. We had been t old to implement our stay and fight or go early fire plan. Many people left the area and did not return for three weeks. many people didn't know what to do. It was unrealistic for most people to uproot their lives that way. It all began to take on the eerie feel of a Camus book after that

Other people around me who did not have the advantage of a few nights sleep in a motel, were slowly eroding into tiredness as the stress continued day after day. The community meetings were organised for every two or three days, it became some sort of almost quasi- religious community thing. The same police men, fire men, shire council menwere always up the front and I began to trust them implicitly. At times the meetings would be full to over flowing and chairs would have to be put up outside under a loud speaker to accomdate the crowds. Many people chose not to attend the meetings. Many people though there was much ado about nothing also. This began to divide the community. A map would be tacked up and the progress of the fire charted for the community. The Healesville fire, the Marysville fire and the O'Shannasy fire were renamed the Kilmore East Murrindindi South Complex. It presented as a giant fire front on the paper, having burnt through more than 76,000 hectares eventually. You could watch it grow in size on the website. It slwoly moved towards us and I sometimes wondered, “I can't see how they are possibly going to be able to stop this thing from devouring us.”

A feeling of inevitability sank in. People argued and raised their panicked voices with officials. They asked why the sirens didn't go anymore, why they couldn't go to the oval anymore. They wanted to know when trucks delivering water would be allowed back in to fill up courrupted water tanks. They formed tree phones and took it in turns to sleep and listen to the radio to alert one another.

The community stepped out of its complacency. I'd never seen the place so clean. Everywhere you went the council was mowing grass by the sides of roads, people were cleaning up the litter on their properties. We finished plugging our gutters and went around to my mother-in-law's to help clean up her hopelessly under prepared property. It was like the place got some collective fever. Paddocks that had never been cleaned were suddenly stripped clean of excess vegetation.

The other weird thing that happened, was that I became used to emergency threat stress. I did not stop having it, I did not stop being tired, or scared, I just got used to feeling tired and scared. Being tired and scared was the new normal. At times I asked myself who I was going to be when the fires stopped? Would I even recognise myself anymore when I stopped being frightened and scared? In those weeks normal life seemed an impossibility, things had changed so irreversibly. What was beyond the fires? Nothing. My identity was tied up with running away from the fires, attending community meetings, listening to 77.4, reading websites, collecting updates, watching for smoke and ash. I did not exist apart from the fires

Some days the air would be acrid and so smoky that my lungs would collect it and when I left the area I would feel myself take it with me, inside me, into clearer air, where I would cough it up. It took a while to be able to read whether or not our town would be smoky. In the end I figured out that it was on the days that the wind was pushing north west or east. Sometimes we would take the children out of the valley only to find the smoke inescapable and over the suburbs as well. Other times we would have a lovely sunny day in the burbs and think it safe to go home only to find ourselves driving into the smoke. But most disarming were the days when you would wake to a lovely blue, clean sky. On those days the smoke was pushing away from us and down towards the city. We fell into the habit of Camus' Plague evaders of going to cafes during the day time. It made us feel normal. It gave us somewhere central to be.

Convoys of DSE and fire trucks with their head lights on through the smoke, came night and day. Sometimes three or five, sometimes thirty at a time. Helicopters flew endlessly over head. I stopped to watch them as I hung my washing on the line. We watched them pass as we sipped chai tea at the local cafes. A park ranger sat day after day out the front of the post office so you could approach him and find out what was happening. A temporary radio station was set up for those who couldnt get 77.4. 77.4 was the life line. But 77.4 couldn't always get the news to you on time, niether could the CFA who were too busy fighting fires to tell of new ones straight away. The truth was, that if a fire broke out or broke containment lines, it could be a good 20 minutes to an hour before you even knew it was happening. Fire fighters came from every part of Australia, from Tasmania, Western Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, America. We read the names of towns we didn't know on passing trucks. 700 personnel and eight helicopters came to save our town. Hundreds and hundreds of consolidation lines were built up into the mountains between our town and the fires. Each day when the weather was cool and not windy was more time bought before the next high danger day. Our local staging area was packed to the hilt withing in rows sprung up for the people fighting the fires. Images of Black Saturday kept flicking passed my subconscious. I stopped once or twice to watch the list of the dead on TV and have a few silent minutes crying to myself.

As the horror of Black Staurday abated a little, the media turned their attnetion ontowns in the front line. We saw people we knew on TV, heard people we knew on the radio. The place was like a ghost town. No tourists, and barely any locals. Some days I was there, some days I was not. There were road blocks behind us to stop people going into fire affected areas and areas declared a crime scene, maily Marysville. We couldn't go home without being halted at a road block to give our intention. Signs of a wanted arsonist who frequented fires dressed in Queensland firefighting gear was hung up in shop windows for locals to identify and watch out for. We were not in the city, and we were not in the towns that had already burnt. We were a town in limbo

We had three high fire danger days in the end. I came down from my house on the first one, on a trip to the local shop, to find a town that looked half normal but half in panic. The smoke was already thick again and I was almost run off the road by a frightened man in a four wheel drive. People were still very spooked. We made the decision to leave eahc of those times, but it became gruelling. How many times could we do this? It was starting to wear, the endless sense of alertness and alarm, the endless packing and moving and coming back home. On the first evacuation after Black Saturday, a column of smoke rose and towered above our towns from the moutains behind and only one minor spot fire broke out but was quickly suppressed by a strike team. The second time we left we did so only out of obediance to the fire plan. We felt that if the containment lines held the first high fire danger day, they would also the second, and they did

On the very last evacuation. Brumby talked on the TV again, said they thought it was going to be as bad as Black Saturday in terms of weather: 38 degrees and 120 km winds. Mum booked me into the motel one last time. The guy at the motel said to me

“I just think the authorities are just panicking now – frightened.” I only looked at him. There was no explaining

I did a funny thing the day before I left that last time. I gave up. I pushed all my furniture back into their original places. I emptied all the buckets of water, let the curtains down, emptied the bathtubs and sinks. I knew, that if the weather fulfilled the bureau's prophecy, fighting it would be pointless. Making my house fire safe would be pointless. I made my house back to the way it should be. I wanted to be home again. I was tired of running. I could feel the end drawing near. If the fire didn't jump containment lines this time. They were not going to ... ever. If they did, there was an unspoken thought in the back of my head that I was too tired to care if the worst happened anymore anyway

That second last community meeting was packed and when we came out the road was full of endles fire trucks going out up and down the highway, trucks from all over. Some of the firemen waved at us and I waved back. I wanted to say “thank you thank you thank you” to them, to the people in the community meetings, but “thank you thank you thank you” would never have been enough. Some bonding was happening that made no sense other than the situation

That morning we woke to a cold and rainy day outside our motel window. There was only a mild breeze. I was sick of it all. I knew the authorities were only trying to protect life. I was not angry at them. I was just angry. We didn't know what to do, so we decided we'd just mosy on home slowly. It took us a day to get home on a trip which usually takes us just under an hour. We went shopping, we stopped for tea. Sometime in the early afternoon the wind began to get really crazy. The trees were whipping around. The containment lines had held all through the northerlies. We'd thought we'd be safe. I knew that the southerly wind change would whip the air around, even though I knew a fresh outbrerak if lightening strikes were more of a worry at this point

Driving back home, the trees looked so muich bigger than they usually did because of the force of the wind. It was much worse in the country than in the burbs. The wind was frantic and grown eucalypts bent and twisted like toothpicks. I cowered behind my steering wheel as I looked up them outside. The road was strewn with bark and branches.We kept stopping at towns along the way, and my partner asked me at each stop if I wanted to continue

We sat on the park bench outside the library for quite a while, not sure whether to go back or go on. We considered the relief center that had been up in Lilydale every time the evactuation call was given. Neither of us made a decision. Rob was waiting for me. In the end I said “let's just go home

The streets desperately empty of cars and people. I just kept thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? This is madness?' It seemed the only people around were the firemen and they were nowhere to be seen either, as they were off in strike teams. When we drove up our road though, there was our nieghbour's car. She had stopped evacuating too. It seemed the exhaustion was collective

As the cold change approached, the wind got worse and worse. I picked fights with my partner about why we were even there. I kind of felt as though I were a soldier being told to stand steady as the enemy approached and I was losing courage. He said I was brave to come home and I said that no I wasn't, I was just stupid

When the cold change came, it didn't bring lightening with it, it brought rain – shitloads of rain. We ran out into it with excitement. Oh my god was there ever anything so good? It rained on and off for days after that. The earth around us greened up around us as if it had never been parched, leaving hardly any trace of the fires except for a tongue of burned forest on the hills behind us. Even though the rains came, it took another week or so for the fires to die down out our way. They said it would burn for a month or so up in the mountains behind us, flaring up in the gullies. But we knew that it was no threat to our homes and lives anymore

After all this, it took time to come back to normal. I dreamed bush fires for a few weeks to come after that. In some ways it was hard to settle to normal, in others it was surprising how quickly and naturally it happened. I've had my private moments.The strange thing is how bonded I became to the place I already felt I loved so much. When we build our house, we will build here and we will build out of concrete bricks. In the meantime, we have signed up to be trained as volunteer firefighters.

There are no words to explain how your fate becomes tied to a place when something like that happens I suppose. Many people in worse circumstances chose to never go back. I can understand that also. In my case, for now, I realize that the family block of land we own here, ties us to the place as much as the spiritual connection I feel with the land, and so the choice is between staying and being as well equipped and empowered as possible, or staying and feeling the same sense of empowerment every summer that comes along from here on in. And this is the story behind why I am training to be a firefighter

Black Saturday 2009

I was a civilian on Black Saturday, but that day and the month that followed changed who I was and how I interacted with my landscape forever. I think it's imperative to first say that my town did not burn down on Black Saturday. We were considered a bush fire threatened area. We were incredibly fortuitous, and my heart goes out in the deepest way to those in the towns surrounding us who were not so lucky.

In Victoria, the four days in a row above forty degrees was something we weren't used to. It left us hidden in dark houses behind drawn curtains, like rock lizards, lying flat on lounge room floors counting the hours and minutes until the days ended and the nights brought enough cool with them to be able to get up and move around freely.

I did nothing. I watched TV. It was too hot to move, and too hot to sleep. At night we opened all the doors and windows and at early dawn we drew them shut again. I began to feel like a vampire. We grew impatient with the weather. The landscape sizzled and became so dry you could snap it in half with the look of an eye. Boolara went up first, but it was so far away that it was just a news bulletin.

That summer I cleaned the yard futiley; raking the endless cork tree and dogwood leaves into piles that never ended. I made wasted requests that the land lord clean the dry leaves and twigs out of the gutters we could not reach, and that he put metal fly wire across the opening underneath the house. It was pointless, and I knew it. The house was indefensible.

Brumby gave the warning from TV two days earlier, flanked by policemen, CFA and officials. Everyone took it seriously. The hottest Victorian day on record, eighty kilometer winds, forest fuel lying dense and crisp across the state and up the trunks of desperate trees. I planned to take my two sons to the local pool and shelter there for the day, but never made it. My partner and I had a tiff the night before, and I awoke that morning drained of the energy to do anything.

The heat began relentlessly before the light of dawn and I found myself plastered to the futon with apathy, thinking about the one road in and out of my town, thinking over and over again how I should have already left, thinking that it would probably be alright; we'd had lots of hot, windy days before, lots of warnings every summer, but nothing serious ever really happened. Still, something was wrong with the day, something was very, very wrong. I would not let my oldest son to go and play by the river like he normally did.

I put cold washers on my face and stood fully clothed in the shower. I watched the clock. Morning passed and everything was OK. Noon passed and everything was OK. Early afternoon passed. The day was almost over then anyhow. I figured we'd just about made it.

When I looked outside and noticed that the sky had suddenly turned orange, the argument between my partner and I became a nothing. He came to the window and stood beside me. Embers, blackened and still warm but not alight, began to rain over the house in the twirling wind. Some of them were thirty centimeters in length. Friends in neighbouring towns told me they had even longer embers, and even pieces of house insulation fall upon their yards.

We put 77.4 on the radio and began to wet down the house. There seemed to be general confusion on the bushfire channel. There were fires everywhere. Marysville was on fire, but we couldn't fathom at that time that the wind had driven the embers over the mountain and down upon us from that location. I read later that firemen were getting more hits on their pagers in an hour than they usually got in three months. I felt something inside that I did not recognise as fear because it felt like something else; urgency, purposefulness, seriousness.

We decided to drive out of our narrow-roaded town and settle at my mother-in-law's house a few streets away. It was still very close but more slightly in the open, not on a slope, surrounded by more paddocks and not as hemmed in with mountains. On the way out I noticed people still relaxing by the river, even though the sky was becoming impending and embers rained around them. They seemed to go past the car window in slow motion. When we arrived, mother-in-law, father-in-law and cousin were inside. The house was locked up to keep the air-conditioned cool inside, but so that they also could not see outside to watch the weather and circumstances. They had the radio on 77.4. I felt increasingly nervous by how unprepared they seemed to the possible threat. I suggested that we wet down the gutters and house and from there we took it in turns to listen to the radio. There were fires being reported in from Strathuen, St Andrews, Kinglake, Marysville.

Things began to move very fast then. Time blurred. I recall that somewhere in all this a man rang up 77.4 and talked about the fires near his house. I recall him saying,

“No, No I have to go now mate. The fire is here,” before he hung up.

I also recall they said at some time that everyone in Marysville was safe. That they had all gathered on the oval. No one was hurt in Marysville. No one was hurt in Marysville.

The one memory that will haunt me is of a mother from Narbethong who rang up 77.4 from the side of the road. I can't recall just when I heard that phone call, I think it was in the early hours of the morning. She sat on the side of the road in her car with her two children after having fled blindly through the night. She was disorientated and did not know which roads were open, nor which way to go to safety. Shortly after a firefighter rang up the station and told her over the radio that Melba highway had been reopened and she could get out that way. He gave explicit instructions and she wrote them down from the radio in the front seat of her car. You could hear the shock in her voice. She still did not know what had happened to her. The humanity and compassion of the one firefighter as he did what we all wished we could have done for that lady that night, affected me greatly. I think that moved me more than anything else I heard or saw through out that night or the coming month.

I decided I was not going to go home and sleep in my house that night, I was staying at my mother-in-laws, and if the fire came through, we would fight it from there. The cold change coming through was bringing dry lightening with it, but no rain. That usually meant more fires. Night would fall in two or three hours.

My partner and I decided to drive back into our town as it was not on fire, and pack an emergency bag for each of us and the children just in case the worst happened. I began to feel a real sense of panic driving back in there because the sky was getting increasingly brown rather than orange and the one road in and out seemed enormously suffocating at that time. Afterwards, when I went through my bags to see what I had blindly packed in that twenty minutes, I discovered I had left my USB with my one and only novel on it behind, but had decided to pack a pineapple instead - go figure. Nothing like a bit of life or death thrill to put what's important into perspective for you.

We drove back out of our town and, passing my mother-in-law's house on the way, reached the next town along to get videos and pizza. (The plan being that the three children could make an exciting night out of it, unless or until the fire seriously threatened us,) but as we drove along we noticed a little lightening fire on the hills to the left of us.

"Do you want to turn back?" my partner asked.

"N .. no," I said. "We won't be long."

I reasoned that the hills to the left were always going up in little lightening strikes but were usually brought back under control quickly. I had no idea then that all our firefighting forces were in the neighbouring areas putting out fires in Chum Creek and Healesville and that we had no tanker, or water, to fight any new outbreaks in our area. I found out later that some outbreaks were in the hills adjacent to my mother-in-law's house and were put out with rakehoes alone.

How surreal it felt to be standing ordering fish and chips with my shoulders splattered with ash as though I had been wandering beneath a volcano. I looked to my right and saw another man ordering fish and chips and his shoulders too were covered in ash. My mobile rang, it was my mother-in-law

“Listen,” she told me. “A friend who worked in the CFA has just rung me. He says we should get out now if we're going to get out.”

“Can you bring my kids with you?” I reasoned that it would be more efficient and simple to have the five of them all come out at once rather then me go back cumbersomely past the lightening strike fires. It was to be the biggest mistake I made on the night. Across the valley the smoke from Healesville had plumed up in the distance. The fires were affecting us directly now. The DSE website was to record seven lightening strikes in the forest and moutains immediately surrounding us that night, the closest being only two kilometers from our house and visible from the road behind us.

Something like premature night had fallen. Cars began streaming out from townships in every direction, in what seemed like a slow, orderly fashion. They cartered horse floats and clothes piled to the roof, five children to a car, cats in cages. I looked down the darkness from which I'd come from, trying to see my mother-in-law's car. My anxiety grew as each car passed, as the train of cars grew, as the fires grew in the background and in my mind, They had my babies. I tried to stay calm, but of course I had no idea what was back there now, was the town on fire or not? And I would not know until the next day. All of my understanding of fire and implementing my fire plan worked reasonably well, except for the mistake of entrusting my children to someone else. It was to be an hour later before I saw them again. My father-in-law only grudgingly moved when 77.4 sent out a warning, and my mother-in-law, chillingly, felt the saving of the chickens of utmost importance in that dire situation.

When the children finally arrived we separated from the in-laws and went to my father's house. Night, and darkness, had well and truly fallen. The trip to into the suburbs took forty minutes, and every opportunity we had to see to the left of us through the trees and over the mountains in the direction of Healesville or Steels Creek, revealed a burning landscape. The hills looked molten hot in the night.

“Look at that, look at that!” I know I cried out many times, rising in my seat in something crossed between excitement, awe and terror.

The hills in the distance were dotted often entirely with red specks which must have seemed as insurmountable fire close up, and in places the flames were nakedly visible. Reaching high above the forest to the sky, you understood that those flames were so mammoth you could not comprehend it. It felt as though the whole world must be on fire. I could not know till afterwards that what I was seeing that night– the flames, the charred embers falling around my shoulders - was other people's death and loss from a distance.

When we arrived at my father's house we brought with us an overwhelming smell of ash and smoke. Our clothes, our car was covered in ash. We brought a little of the fire with us to the city. Everything felt strangely bigger and realer than real life, and yet surreal and far away, as if it had all been a movie and not real. That feeling stayed with me for the next three weeks as our town lay threatened by encroaching fires from three different directions.