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