gullybogan

Dear Reader,

It’s five months since Black Saturday, the disastrous bushfires that reduced homes and forests to ash, and ended or destroyed hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. Princess’s radio station says that the best way we can help now is to go back, to give their businesses our custom, to start acting as if everything is going back to normal.

So on Sunday we drove up to Broadford and then down through the ranges, through Flowerdale and Kinglake West into Kinglake itself.

It wasn’t what we expected. Truth is, you can’t start acting as if everything is going back to normal. Not yet.

Roadside signs placed by the council or some other layer of government along the way impertinently carried hollow advice such as “SMOKE ALARMS SAVE LIVES,” or admonishments in the poorest taste such as “DON’T MAKE AN ASH OF YOURSELF.” The trees behind these signs were dead, blackened, only the sturdiest of gums struggling to survive, putting out their fluffy coatings of near-death trunk-leaves.

Closer to ground zero, a more appropriate sign read, “FEELING THE HURT?” accompanied by the Lifeline (suicide/life crisis assistance service) phone number, and an encouragement to talk it over with someone.

As we slid through devastated hamlet after devastated hamlet, there was nothing we could find to say about what we were seeing that wouldn’t have sounded empty and meaningless. Then suddenly Princess pointed, her eyes lighting up.

« Look, the caravan park’s still in business, at least! »

« No, Poppet. That’s the town. »

Where homes had once been, makeshift tent and caravan arrangements stood duty. In some places prefab barns or kit garages were playing house while waiting for the actual house to be built alongside.

Occasionally, out on the road between the towns, there would be a letter box with no caravans or tents behind it. That would be a home where everyone had died.

I stood on the verandah of the National Park Hotel in Kinglake while Princess stood inside and admired their photos and read the pub’s personal story of the bushfire. It was too much for me.

Army tents and portabuildings stood alongside the usual tacky strip-shops in the gloomy winter streetscape of the former town. A water tank was painted with the jaunty promise that buying it and hooking it up to a spray system would help make your home defensible.

Maybe. Maybe not.

The tank stood near a sign for the local real estate agent, assuring all and sundry that they were *the* authority on property in the Kinglake region.

The people of Kinglake want to rebuild the place. Good luck to them. Before bailing to stand in the chill on the pub’s verandah, i’d read the display inside that told the story of how the original pub on that site – along with the rest of the town – had burnt down in the 1926 bushfires.

How often can you rebuild something that keeps burning down?

Sure, the pub was spared this time, as was the sheepskin products store, but what about next time?

The blackened verticals of the landscape between the towns were dotted with scraps of blue, red, and white. Australian flags hung from sticks and poles, or were simply nailed to charcoal-shelled gums. Symbolising something about the Aussie spirit, i imagine. Indomitability, and all that.

As we got further and further away from ground zero, and the trees slowly began to be less uniformly blackened, i kept thinking of the little kid i’d seen playing in the Kinglake pub bistro when we first arrived. I wondered what horrors he had seen in his short life. I wondered what happy series of circumstances had lined up to save him from dying in the holocaust.

The Royal Commission into the bushfires is starting to form ideas about the unhappy series of circumstances that lined up on that terrible day, and they’re starting to think about what should happen in the future in order to save us from these things. One of their recommendations is that future bushfires should have severity ratings (well, duh), and that we should accept that sometimes the Aussie spirit – with or without that water spray tank – isn’t going to be enough to withstand a fire. It might be useful when dealing with the aftermath, that spirit thing, but the foolhardiness of the fire defence services who tell us we can defend our homes so long as we’re “prepared” (whatever that means) is rapidly looking like a fatuous, dangerous lie.

Take a drive from Broadford to Yarra Glen, if you don’t believe me.

Yours,
Gullybogan