Thankfully, we had the luxury of knowing that we could progress to a more comfortable set-up in a short space of time. Others camping back on their land had nothing to park caravans in and so they bore the full brunt of the cold; getting through a freezing night became known as ‘death by doona’. The trick for us was to keep focusing ahead and to realise just how little you can actually get by with. Apart from anything else, it doesn’t take much to mess up a caravan: leave some clothes, shoes and toiletries lying about, a few dishes in the tiny sink and your laptop on the table, and it’s chaos.
Another thing we had to learn was to not overload the power circuits. It didn’t take much to do so. If we tried to run the TV, kettle, fridge and heater at the same time, we’d have a blackout. There were no lights left burning unnecessarily at Number 59. For those who generate their own solar power and live off the grid, this is a fact of life, but for the novice it can take some practice. We also learned to be frugal in other ways. When water requires a dash outside in the cold and rain, recycling becomes a matter of course. Having been reliant on rainwater tanks for sixteen years, we thought we were pretty good at conserving water, but you can always learn new tricks. Actually being able to see your water supply dropping is a great catalyst for further frugality—we took to filling a 25-litre plastic container to save those cold, wet trips outside, and it became a challenge to see how far that quantity could stretch. Rather than washing just one or two coffee mugs we’d wait for a sinkload, and we re-used the contents of our hotwater bottle time after time.
The home comfort that pretty well everyone in temporary accommodation missed most was a some semblance of a ‘bathroom’—in other words, an on-site toilet and shower. The ever-practical case manager Bernadette got the picture that this might help keep people on their land once they’d returned, and indeed for many it made the difference between giving camping a go and staying off the mountain; they’d put up with a battered tent as long as there was some sort of bathroom option. Trying to use communal facilities and get to work in a reasonable state wasn’t easy: I’m a woman who can’t handle not having my hair right, which meant going back to the caravan to attempt a blow-dry—not always successful.
Any future guidebook should advise that these facilities be incorporated sooner rather than later, once there’s some basic infrastructure to support them. We could have been back home weeks earlier if that had been the case. Ironically, one night there was a piece on the radio highlighting the living conditions of refugees arriving in Australia. Some, it noted, were living in tents and caravans without toilet facilities, which just wasn’t acceptable in a civilised country like Australia. This made me chuckle: the ‘refugees’ in Kinglake and the other fire-affected zones knew how they felt.
It was late September before a much-coveted portable shower and loo arrived courtesy of the state government. We’ve probably all used one at some point—at an outdoor function, rock concert, on a building site. Not beautiful, but it does the basic job. Ours was plonked on the supposedly level gravel outside the barn and hooked up to the water tank. A rubber hose carried the soapy effluvium to what used to be to part of the front garden, eventually drowning the emerging relict daffodils and snowdrops; every time it frothed out into open view, we had to question the hygiene angle. The doors afforded a great view across the top paddock, but also straight up Deviation Road: a loo with a view—every home should have one. But, of course, this worked in reverse too, and a driver on the road at the right moment would witness the bathrobed O’Connors picking their way across the gravel, destination obvious.
Sean road-tested the shower but wasn’t a happy camper afterwards. ‘It’s been put on an uphill slope. Instead of the water going down the plughole, I’m in it up to my knees,’ he railed. Still, when it came time to get ready for work, armed with towel and highlighting shampoo, in I went. There was nowhere to hang the towel, so I slung it out onto the gravel along with the bathrobe and ugg boots. ‘The hot-water supply is limited, so don’t muck around in there,’ Sean yelled through yet another gale. As though we dedicated water conservationists ‘muck around’ under the shower anyway, but a shampoo and condition can be squeezed in. On it went, shampoo happening, then bang! The water stopped dead. Out I came, dripping, purple shampoo nicely frothed, retrieved the bathrobe and slippers and tore into the barn. ‘Oh shit, it’s blown the power,’ Sean offered by way of explanation. ‘I’ll have to reset it.’ While he did that, I resorted to the loo, freezing and still wet. As one particularly strong blast of Kinglake gale ripped the door open and sent it almost off its hinges, Murphy’s law dictated that there would be a truck coming down the road! There was nothing to do but wave at the truck driver.
Soon after this, we heard via the bush telegraph that there was such a thing as a luxury portable ensuite that could be towed on-site like a trailer. The sort of deal the star would demand on an outback movie set—complete with vanity basin, porcelain loo, good shower, towel racks, heater, exhaust fan and robe hooks, and able to be plumbed into the septic system. Granted, it seemed a bit precious in our circumstances, but it would provide a blessed few weeks of breathing space before our own facilities could be installed. A week later it rolled through the door—ablution heaven on wheels.
It was around this time that Carissa felt ready to come and check out the barn. By now we had a few more facilities and Sean had bought a smaller version of one of those patio heaters provided outdoors by cafés when the weather turns cold. It took pride of place on the table, since the gas bottle could sit underneath and the supply be fed up through the umbrella hole. In the future we could use the heater outside on chilly spring and autumn nights.
Bernadette was checking on our progress regularly and I mentioned to her that I needed to buy a bed since Sean had laid the floor in the mezzanine area that was destined to become the new boudoir, and we wanted Carissa to be able to stay overnight. A few days later, a Salvation Army truck backed up the driveway with a new bed on board. They also unloaded a pack containing all those small kitchen things you don’t know you’ve lost until you come to use them: potato peeler, can opener, tea-towels, strainer, cheese grater. Thank God for the Salvos—it was perfect timing.
It made sense to set up our new bed near the caravan, so Carissa could sleep in the caravan. Sean retrieved the piece of carpet we’d scored from the spa man and wheeled the bed onto it. Bliss! Something better than concrete for the feet to land on. The ‘headboard’ was a Colorbond wall. On Carissa’s first visit, she spent some time pacing out the barn floor, which of course stood above the old house site. ‘Is this where my bedroom used to be? Where was the old kitchen?’ She hunkered down in the caravan. ‘It’s like a cave in here; it’s cool,’ she decided. For Sean and me, having room to stretch in the bed was heaven. ‘Thank God for the Salvos,’ Sean repeated as he turned out the light.
But a few hours later we were both still tossing; my head felt as if it had been dipped in ice. ‘The metal is sucking the heat out of our heads like a vacuum cleaner,’ Sean explained. For some reason I found that immensely funny, along with his extended scientific rundown of heat exchange and lack of insulation. ‘In other words we need a woolly hat,’ I suggested. We crawled back into bed togged out in bright knitted beanies, which did the trick though they didn’t add much in the way of glamour. ‘I’ll put up some sheets of chipboard tomorrow. A couple of those where our heads go will make all the difference,’ offered my ever-practical, problem-solving husband.
The new ensuite was due to be installed in a few days’ time, and all the gear from the house demolition was ready to go once the wall panels were up. Having only nights and weekends to do the work would make it all a very slow process, though, and it was exhausting to be, in effect, working round the clock. People badgered us to get away for a break, a rest and change of scenery, but until we had a workable living space that seemed like a remote proposition. We did the sums. Given that Sean could carry out the majority of the work needed, how would the figure
s stack up if he left his job for several months and completed the barn, instead of our having to call in tradesmen for every major project? It was no contest. Even with electricians, plumbers and builders to do the compliance-certificate work, we could do the rest ourselves for far less. We had no personal debt and could live frugally on one salary in the meantime.
By the end of September and a month into the barn process, it sometimes seemed that we had made little progress. But it wasn’t long before the Barn Mahal started to turn into something of a tourist attraction: locals would remark on it, people would stop at the front gate and tradesmen would comment on how well it was coming together. We stopped feeling that we were somehow lagging behind and became stalwart about sticking to our schedule. Friends came to help and over one weekend we got the main wall panels in place. With a rapid undercoat of white paint, it started to look positively ritzy. Next, Patsy and Jimmy arrived to stay for a week, camping in their own caravan while they helped us get the outrageous designer kitchen back together. Suddenly we’d gone from an outdoor table and singed chairs to a workable oven, bench space and sink. Even with gas still to be connected to hotplates, and only moderate water pressure, we felt as though we’d moved from a tent to a palace.
As I write, the palace remains littered with building materials, power circuits are still to be completed to all areas and the mezzanine rooms haven’t been fitted out. Our furniture is still trendily minimalist, which we felt was preferable to showering better items with endless sawdust. A lick of paint on some donated pieces and there is actually something resembling a decor. There are books and cookbooks back on shelves, suggesting that somebody really lives here and they read. A vase of flowers from our garden sits atop the fridge. ‘Trust you to have to get that going on,’ friend Patsy remarked. We have our own bathroom and it looks fantastic—spa bath, shower, easy-to-clean wall panelling, a big vanity basin, a huge mirror and cork tiles on the floor. Apart from those tiles, every fixture was recycled from the spa man. Sean has also started sealing the concrete floor in the living area. That should spell an end at last to constant concrete dust, not to mention deliver that funky warehouse-apartment look. It is now—almost—home.
12
Future tense
‘I don’t think people want to hear much more about the Black Saturday fires,’ somebody remarked to me late in 2009. ‘It’s pretty much in the past now and everybody has sort of forgotten about it.’ On another occasion, a delivery driver arrived unexpectedly with a pack of household goodies. When the driver walked into the barn, she couldn’t contain her surprise: ‘This is the first time I’ve been up here. I had no idea that people were still living in sheds—how awful for you after all this time. The people back at the office won’t believe it.’
The human attention span is rather short, and it was ever thus. But for those who survived Australia’s worst natural disaster, it will take years to settle into some new type of normal existence. The approach of the first anniversary of Black Saturday encouraged us to take stock and to look to the future—wallowing in the past doesn’t endear you to anybody. In the same way, it’s of little benefit to continue feeling disaffected about the fact that new, and hopefully better, approaches to fire safety have come too late for us—feeling somehow cheated is counter-productive. Rather, we hope those measures evolve well enough to save lives in the future.
For our personal circle, though, what is being done to prevent future loss of life and property has remained a key debating point. By the end of 2009, we began to take greater notice of the Bushfires Royal Commission findings and political pronouncements, albeit with some cynicism. One particularly valuable conclusion, at least as far we were concerned, was that communities such as ours were hit by the fires before appropriate warnings were issued. Some survivors have felt overwhelming guilt about not having somehow seen the fires coming, feeling they should not have been so complacent, should have educated themselves better. It was a huge slap in the face when, early in the commission hearings, some authorities remained adamant that fire warnings had gone out in time; it made those on the ground sound like liars. The fact is that we were on fire at 4.30 p.m., but heard constantly until 6.30 p.m. that we weren’t affected. One of our neighbours sat in the Kinglake pub carpark ringed by fire and finally rang radio stations to tell them, before even the first ember alerts had been issued. Other parts of Kinglake didn’t see flames until around 6 p.m., such was the random nature of that particular fire. That ‘You should have known’ guilt was only exacerbated by the comments of outsiders who rang radio stations to rail at these idiots who choose to live in the bush.
Many people have felt excluded from the Royal Commission: community meetings organised by the commission to determine the chief issues, and who should give evidence, were seen as something of a ‘Take a number and we’ll put you in a group session’ token exercise. Most people didn’t have the energy to dispute this perceived wrong, and decided in advance that there was going to be some sort of whitewash. As evidence continued to be heard, though, we regained some faith in the commission’s preparedness to ask the tough questions. The new fire-warning scale established in 2009 was designed for the masses and distributed to all Victorians, but whether there is enough time for the messages to be fine-tuned only time will tell.
The endless evidence given in the Royal Commission about the inability of the fire services to work in unison or even communicate is a sad indictment on government inaction. But it is not surprising: having worked for one of those fire services a decade or so ago, all I can say is that nothing much appears to have changed. Much of the evidence has also made Ash Wednesday survivors very angry, revealing as it has that what came out of that disaster has still not been resolved twenty years later: fire refuges that didn’t eventuate or were not maintained; seasonal burning-off that became bogged down in environmental arguments; the unrelenting advance of housing demand well beyond the city fringe.
The inevitable consequences of these failures are reflected in the tragic evidence of people who lost loved ones in the 2009 fires and in attempts to determine what caused the deaths: people attempting to flee too late; others staying with a house as they’d been led to believe it was the safest option under normal circumstances; fire bunkers that proved useless, as people couldn’t get to them through the radiant heat; families who’d always said they’d leave on an extreme day instead following instructions to stay indoors and avoid clogging the roads with traffic.
The truth is that however many aerial water bombers or extra fire trucks had been enlisted, they could not have turned back the extreme, monstrous tide of Black Saturday. Once mother nature took over, the aircraft couldn’t fly and the trucks couldn’t get near the fire zones. Nor was there an easy explanation for the fact that certain properties burned and others with less fire-compliant features remained standing. We are closely studying new building codes, mandatory bushfire ratings, sprinkler systems and firefighting equipment: whether these can stave off fireballs that have the power of atom bombs can only be determined in the event.
In Kinglake’s case, if it hadn’t been for the dogged fundraising efforts of certain members of the community, there wouldn’t even have been a decent fire station for hundreds of people to head towards that night. A few months ago, Sean and I went yet again to a large hardware store on a Sunday for building supplies. Parked down-wind of the sausage sizzle was the Kinglake fire tanker, each of its uniformed crew holding a fundraising tin. After all they’d been through, they were still giving up their weekends to help subsidise equipment and a new truck. Leading the crew was our neighbour Craig Lawless, his burnt face now healed and sporting his usual big smile. Several weeks later we attended a memorial service for his father Terry, who had succumbed to cancer. This man had spent twenty-five years either captaining the brigade or raising the funds to keep it going. He would have wondered ‘What is all the bloody fuss about?’ when half the community turned up to pay tribute to him. You could have heard a pin
drop as a fire truck escorted the hearse off the mountain.
Another issue that has come under the spotlight is the fire levy and division of jurisdictional responsibilities between federal, state and local government during the fires, and how this was reflected in their actions, or in some cases inaction. Who steps in where? At what point are politics put aside in the interests of resurrecting ruptured communities? When does spin end and the greater good become paramount? That local government in fire-affected areas would struggle with the enormity of the situation wasn’t too difficult to figure out, particularly as one shire council administered the majority of the burnt areas in the Great Dividing Range. But attempts to politicise any shortcomings in this respect will, I hope, be reflected at the ballot box next time round. Failure to operate in a coordinated way across municipal boundaries, refusal to access outside help or high-level expertise, and attempts to exclude community input have not been lost on the ratepayers. In addition, new buildings have gone up without proper approvals, sneaking in under the radar while the majority of a shattered community— incredibly time-poor as they combine work with rebuilding from scratch—didn’t have the strength to object. In times like these, one would hope that the authorities could be trusted to truly represent the people’s interests.
Many discussions are still to be had, even a year on. In future, at what point is the army brought in and what tasks should they perform? At what level of death and destruction is one overall point of command assigned? Who is in charge of the ‘guide book’ from now on, making sure it is updated, relevant and transparent? Who will cop the flak if road rage and panic lead to greater injury during a mass evacuation on inadedquate road systems when the first ‘Catastrophic’ fire warning is issued?
Without Warning Page 17