Without Warning

by Jane O'Connor

  Nonetheless, whether your property was totally destroyed, partially destroyed, or not touched but in a fire-affected community, a case manager went with the territory. Given the scale of the task—seventy-eight communities were affected by the fires, and some 3400 properties damaged or destroyed—initial case managers were drawn from any source the state and federal governments could raid: some came from private welfare services, others from federal government programs. What they walked into must have been incredibly difficult.

  The first one appointed to us was extremely nice and eager to help, but as a youth outreach worker he wasn’t perhaps the greatest fit. And even while he was trying to get his head around our plight, he was still trying to deal with drug-affected kids at railway stations. ‘You’ll probably end up counselling him!’ Tania joked. He did his best to help us access services, but what we felt we needed most was an extra pair of arms and legs. Another couple we met revealed that they’d had six different case workers and still didn’t have a handle on where to go to next. Others had silently stopped accessing theirs when they left the mountain, whether temporarily or for good.

  Then, via a circuitous route and with a tinge of ‘It’s not what you know, but who you know’, we were connected with Bernadette Aylward. The Kinglake case management team leader, she’d been staying four nights a week with our friend Gretha Edwards in Steels Creek to be closer to ‘the coalface’. In a heartbeat, ‘No-bullshit Bernadette’ figured out what we would and wouldn’t tolerate, when she should and shouldn’t intrude, what we needed the most and when to just roll in and check us out and share a laugh. Bernadette would dangle weekend getaways under our noses ‘just in case’, though she knew we wouldn’t be diverted from our targets for achieving temporary accommodation. ‘I’ll call by for a cuppa’ was her way of making sure we weren’t just cracking tough. But most of all, she never patronised us or did other than credit us with the ability to handle our lives. She knew we’d whistle loudly if we needed to. And we did need to, at which times she spent days chasing down a building permit, sourcing a portable bathroom/ toilet arrangement to get us back on the block sooner, turning up to greet fencing volunteers, and organising to have vital goods delivered when we needed them. Turning up with a freshly knitted scarf and beanies on a cold day was another of her habits.

  It would be a tall order to find a Bernadette for every survivor; they don’t stamp too many out of that mould. Away from her own family for weeks at a stretch, she would sit in our freezing caravan and tick off a practical list of things she’d done for us. I jokingly came to refer to her as ‘Saint Bernadette’, but it wasn’t all that far off the mark. The weight she took off our shoulders and the extent to which she restored our faith in the system have been phenomenal; we have never felt like a number since she’s been in our orbit. Even being able to offload some vitriol to a neutral party has been a huge relief.

  The cold, wet autumn and winter following the fires brought another challenge: we were constantly ill with bout after bout of flu—the worst flu I can remember experiencing—despite having been vaccinated. All four of us succumbed at some point, and as one of us began to recover another would go down for a fortnight; we ran sick shifts to keep the household going. It played havoc with the psyche as well as the body: What’s wrong with me? Am I finally cracking up? We endlessly analysed whether what we’d been breathing in since February—the arsenic from burning fences, the melted plastic and rubber, the diesel, gas and God knows what else—had seriously impaired our immune systems.

  Then, in the middle of all this, we received a call to say our beloved horse Eliza was also ill. We rushed to where she was agisted, to find her scrabbling on the ground with terrible colic; she hadn’t eaten for days. We summoned an emergency vet, who pronounced her in extreme pain and the colic terminal, with euthanasia the only possible course of action. We sat beside our beautiful Clydesdale, stroking her face and trying to talk her into getting up, but she’d been down too long and the effort was exhausting. Her best mate Ricky was frantic, pacing the fence beside her, practically screaming. It took a long time for the young vet to find a vein and administer the fatal dose. Even the earth-moving contractor we’d called to help us with the burial sat on the bobcat with tears in his eyes: ‘That’s too bloody awful to watch.’ It was our first fatality and it wrung us emotionally dry. Ricky too was inconsolable, thrashing and screaming; we couldn’t even think of floating him out until he was calm enough to handle.

  Once back at John and Julie’s, we went through the worst personal time we’d had since the fires. It was as though we’d let Eliza down, and her loss became a crisis point of guilt, grief, anger and disbelief. Bernadette called the RSPCA, who organised to have Ricky housed elsewhere until we finished the fences and he could come home. According to the RSPCA’s 2009 annual report, a major insight they gained from the fires was how much surviving animals meant to their owners: ‘For many people who had lost so much, their animals were one of the few remaining reminders of their life before the bushfires and they took on even greater importance in their lives.’ The RSPCA estimates that around one million animals died in the fires.

  The RSPCA findings were confirmed again not long afterwards. We were in the process of moving goods between John and Julie’s and the barn, and Jazz would trot between the two with us, often getting bored halfway through and taking herself back for a nap. One Sunday morning I assumed she’d gone with Sean, and vice versa: it soon became apparent that she was missing. Not ones to wonder, we snapped into search mode. Julie and I spent hours scouring every nook and cranny we could think of. At the end of the day we came up with nothing and I was inconsolable. Another lost animal was just too much to deal with; the tears didn’t stop flowing. We leapt to the horrible conclusion that somebody had picked her up. We’d heard stories of dogs being picked up in bushfire zones and taken hundreds of kilometres before being handed in; people had assumed a solo pet was lost.

  On the Monday morning, poor Bernadette copped a sobbing ‘case’, as did the RSPCA. A few weeks earlier we’d offered Jazz, Harley and Meg to the RSPCA to be photographed as bushfire survivors for any fundraising efforts they could use them for. Jazz’s photo was emailed to us in an instant and a small ‘Find Jazz’ army was mobilised; Bernadette drafted other case workers to ring animal shelters as well. Then the call came. ‘There’s a female Jack Russell cross at the RSPCA shelter in Epping,’ she said. We emailed her photo and the shelter confirmed that they thought it was Jazz they had in custody, and Sean left work at lunchtime to get her. Epping is 40 kilometres away, quite a journey for a small, non-wandering dog. We’ll never know how she came to be there, but an ambulance crew had picked her up and taken her to the shelter with the express instructions that if her owner wasn’t found then one of them would take her. I felt weak with relief. Coming on top of our loss of Eliza, this had just about tipped me over the edge, providing another layer to that cumulative trauma. Then, for the icing on the cake, John decided to erect a makeshift roof over the back door. He was worried about me smoking cigarettes out there when it rained, fearing it might lead to another round of flu. But the scorched soil and grass had somehow been fused by the rain into a glass-like surface, and carrying in building materials one day John slipped and smashed his ankle. It took eight weeks of plaster, X-rays and immobility to restore his foot—it still gives him pain, which in turn causes me recurring guilt.

  One thing the fires have done is make us more aware of certain types of human behaviour—the worst as well as the best. For example, we came across people who drew on the slimmest of associations to claim some part in others’ very real loss—the ‘I know somebody who knows somebody who knew people who died in the fires’ thing, mostly from people not present in the community on that day and with only a remote or tenuous link. We came to cynically refer to this syndrome as ‘trauma envy’.

  Then there was a certain type of ‘tourist’. That people wanted to pay homage or to spend some money in the town wa
s something residents understood and gratefully acknowledged. But the flip side of the coin was insensitive ‘rubber-necking’, which could be the last straw for grieving people. Weekends turned into a nightmare of not being able to park outside the supermarket to get a bottle of milk; for weeks there was a traffic jam onto and off the mountain. We were aware of the arguments about reopening communities in order to get businesses up and running again, but every time there was talk of lifting the roadblocks I found myself on the edge of extreme panic. For me and many others, the closed community was a great comfort. People needed to be left in peace, to have time to regroup. We couldn’t even bury our dead for several months, because of coronial requirements, and the thought of strangers scrambling through the ruins was chilling.

  Signs went up on properties: ‘Please, no photos.’ People had died in some of these houses—who could want a happy snap of somebody else’s tragic rubble in the family album? Yet, unbelievably, it was common to see strangers posing beside burnt-out properties. On one trip to the township I saw some children being photographed picking up the flowers that locals kept refreshed at one sad location, the flowers subsequently being slung unceremoniously on the grass. It made me feel sick and sorrowful for the rest of the day. We lost track of the people who walked up our drive to take photographs, and sometimes what they wanted was a souvenir, something charred.

  The ravages of winter, both physical and psychological, began to abate a little as spring arrived. At least we could see some progress on the ground, and the emotional burden was becoming lighter. But we have no idea how we will cope with the height of summer. Survivors of Ash Wednesday have told us that the first anniversary is a raw time, as is the first day when conditions mirror those that brought the destruction. How will we feel when the weather bureau predicts temperatures over 40°C and a howling northerly? We won’t know until we live it.

  My granddaughter Carissa hates hearing about coming fire threats, the new warning systems, and she asks constantly whether it will be worse this time round. We just don’t have an answer.

  11

  Going home

  MOVING back to Number 59 on 31 August was cause for celebration. It was almost seven months since Black Saturday and the pull of being on our own land again was overwhelming, almost visceral. We had the barn up and a concrete floor, but not much else. It didn’t matter, though: we had shelter and could make greater progress by being on the spot. It called for a special effort to be made for dinner and a good bottle of wine to toast the homecoming. Having never used a portable convection oven to any great extent, it was going to be hit-and-miss, but on went lime and coriander chicken and it was left to its own devices while we set up some minimal furniture.

  We started our ‘new life’ with the caravan now parked inside the barn and one of those portable loos that caravanners cart around with them—really just a glorified potty with a lid and requiring some gymnastic maneouvres to get used to. But it was a five-minute drive to the communal shower and laundry facility that had been set up for people like us. We hooked up extension leads to a temporary power board on a pole in the garden.

  During the previous week we’d transferred most of our goods from John and Julie’s, and we simply announced on 31 August that we’d be moving into the barn that night. We knew John would protest and we were right; he was mortified, having envisaged a more gradual move. He feared that we were swapping Number 48 comfort for Number 59 hell because we felt we’d outstayed our welcome. ‘What brought this on? It’s too soon, things aren’t fully ready over the road yet, it’s too cold, has something gone wrong?’ he protested. We reassured him that there was only one motive: we just had to do it, setting (and sticking to) a date to move back in was imperative to ‘moving on’—the longer you are away, the easier it is to avoid the daunting task that lies ahead, to slide into the mindset that it’s all too hard. If we waited until every glitch and inconvenience was ironed out, we’d still be in limbo. ‘But I’m going to miss you,’ John said. We all laughed at that one, given that we were a few minutes across the road.

  That first night, while the chicken was ticking over, we jumped in the car to check out the shower facilities. I had on a pair of pyjama pants, ugg boots and a hoodie. ‘Be just my luck to get pulled over by the police,’ I said to Sean. There were a few little surprises—like the hot water that came through a very small instantaneous system and cut out before I’d even got wet, and the bitterly cold gale that whistled under the door and slapped the clammy shower curtain around my goose-bumped body. Sean suggested I try the men’s shower block, but I passed on that for fear that some hapless male would walk in. I made it back home, my wet hair wrapped in a towel, without bumping into any neighbours—not that they would care, but my personal dignity was taking enough of a battering.

  The communal laundry was a godsend in the early stages. It was, though, a little confronting to find all our gear folded beautifully by an anonymous volunteer from a church group that would descend and perform such chores. They even folded the underwear! (Sean began to refer to them as his ‘holy undies’.) It became a bit of a contest to collar an empty dryer, but we remembered that our stash from the spa man included a fold-up clothesline, which Sean installed on a wall of the barn. It was something I had long hankered after: an indoor clothesline, not dependent on the weather. And it left dryers free for the small army of women with young children, whose destroyed laundries had previously gone non-stop to keep up with the load. We had a donated secondhand washing machine stashed in the container, but it would be some time until we’d have the plumbing to get it working. Compared to those young mums, though, we didn’t have a problem.

  In addition, we were seasoned campers—over the years we’d lived out of the back of our Land Rover in some very remote and rugged holiday locations—and that experience helped enormously. Plus there were just the two of us. It made my heart ache when we’d pass young families trying to coexist in caravans, converted containers or portable classrooms. It takes a lot of guts to deal with that. At the same time, our circumstances now were not as romantic as those camping trips had been—digging a hole in your own garden doesn’t quite have the same appeal, and an attentive audience of two dogs didn’t add to the experience.

  But once the reality of being back on our block sank in, the temporary inconveniences fled and our sense of homelessness started to evaporate. We’d carefully inventoried what we needed to make the barn initially liveable and spent nights after work doing bits and pieces to fit it out accordingly; we knew it was crucial to accept that this was going to be an evolving process. We’d set up an outdoor table and chairs inside, turned a bookshelf donated by John and Julie into a makeshift open pantry, raided the shipping container for crockery, cutlery and cookware. We had the portable oven, an electric slow-cooker, a donated electric wok, and the caravan’s gas cooktop. The appliances sat either on the concrete floor or on a low coffee table near the only power outlet. And there wasn’t much we didn’t manage to turn out of those limited appliances: great lamb shanks, pasta, roasts, stir-fries and even a batch or two of biscuits. For dishwashing, we’d fill the kettle from the tap on the water tank outside.

  The Kinglake weather didn’t let us down on our first night, offering seemingly endless gale-force winds. ‘It’s a pretty good building job,’ Sean said. ‘There’s not a single squeak or creak in this structure.’ That was heartening. What did shatter our peace, however, were gumnuts hitting the steel roof like bullets, some having been rendered diamond-hard by the fire. They and the odd flying twig reminded us that this was a shed built for tractors and machinery, not to house human beings. But we figured that eventually we could install some sort of insulation in the roof over the living section. We cheerfully dished up the chicken, poured the wine and watched two excited dogs check out their new abode; it was months since they’d been that close to scrounging something off the dinner table.

  Sean couldn’t contain his glee, sitting at the table rugged up in a heavy
jacket, hood on and declaring: ‘I can feel the stress draining away, just being able to sit back here in our own place.’ Our attempts at extended conversation turned into helpless laughter when a downpour on the metal roof drowned out everything else. We couldn’t hear ourselves think. After the initial pounding, the continuing run-off was like a waterfall as it hurtled off gutters and headed to the water-tank inlets. The cold wind barrelled through the gaps under the doors and where the roof met the walls, but we felt like a couple of kids who’d pitched a tent out on the back lawn. They were our sounds: we were in our own space again, under our own roof, and we revelled in it. Sean didn’t stop chuckling proudly about having met his self-imposed deadline for our return.

  With minimal light and no heating apart from a hot-water bottle and a small blow heater, there was nothing for it but to retreat to bed in the caravan. It was warm under the the pile of doonas and blankets, but not really a space designed for two adults, a hot-water bottle and a little terrier. Jazz has always been banned from the bedroom, but here she had no physical boundaries and a blast of warm air to boot, so up she jumped. Meg, on the other hand, was delighted just to have us constantly in sight and hunkered down on her hammock bed, snoring loudly. We only needed Harley to complete the scene, but he was still with Tania. The caravan bed had a round-ended mattress that made it difficult to keep our feet on board. Then there was the low overhead shelf and cupboards—sit up in a hurry or roll over for a stretch and whack! ‘I can’t believe people tow these bloody things around the countryside and call it a relaxing holiday,’ I muttered to Sean. ‘It’s actually pretty comfortable,’ he said. Then again, he could sleep on a concrete slab.