Black Saturday

7 February 2009 — The worst disaster in Australia's recorded history — and they're telling us it's going to be even worse this coming summer !

Some personal stories of survival in Callignee, Gippsland

Following is largely a diary kept in the month or so following the fires. It's not in any real order. I just added things as I found them out, or thought of them.

Sunday, 1 March. The death toll keeps creeping up. People are dying in hospital. So far 210 dead people and 38 still missing, over 2,000 homes destroyed and over 7,000 people homeless. This is not counting all the kangaroos, koalas, wombats, emus, alpacas, horses, camels, sheep, cows, pigs, cats, dogs, chooks, and even the birds. Although about a week later I noticed there were a lot more birds than normal round my way, I really don't think all the birds got away in time, because I've seen more than the usual number of dead ones in my back garden. Normally I would find one dead bird about once a year in my back garden. In February I found three in two weeks.

Certainly the entire koala population will have been wiped out, because they don't move fast enough. Jill's dad said, at such a time koalas go right to the top of the tree. If they survive up there, they come down after the fire very slowly. From the top of a very tall gum tree, a koala takes two weeks to get to the ground. But if there are no leaves left on the tree to eat on the way down - which there wouldn't be after these fires - by the time a koala gets to ground level he is so hungry and dehydrated, he just dies.

Even nature didn't stand a chance

It was so bloody hot. 46.5°C (116°F) in Melbourne, and 48°C (118°F) in some of the places where the fires were. A lot of people died because they didn't know about the fires and didn't have any time to make a decision to leave. They were inside with the curtains closed, as I was, too, with the airconditioner on if they had it. My friend Mardi Paul in Gippsland says a friend of hers only found out there was a fire heading her way because her sister in Melbourne rang to ask if she was all right! Some people died because, having found out too late, they tried to leave in their cars but couldn't see for smoke and crashed into each other on the highway. Some got out of their cars and ran away and managed to survive, but others who were injured in the car couldn't get out so they were incinerated.

I want to do something myself. I want to help in whatever way I can. I have no spare money, but I have a surplus of "stuff" in my house. The bloody Red Cross annoyed me. After about 4 days they thought they had enough "stuff" and said, "Don't send us any more stuff. It costs too much to distribute it. Send money." We're in the middle of a world-wide economic disaster, for Christ's sake! They've got no political nouse whatsoever. If the stupid Red Cross wants money, they had better chase the greedy parasites that caused this economic disaster, and - if the truth was really known - the climate change that caused this cataclysmic inferno.

After any kind of a disaster like this, working people will normally give til it hurts, but because the likes of that Pacific Brands CEO have run off with the profits, working people have got less and less these days, and unemployed people like me have got nowt. It's odd nobody has mentioned how these parasites got rich in the first place, by grossly underpaying the workers for the real value of their labour and pocketing the difference; then sacking the very people whose labour created the wealth in the first place.

An amount of money is coming from the government towards fire relief, and being raised by concerts and things, but this is rebuilding over 2,000 houses we are talking about, and producing clothing and "stuff" for over 7,000 people. In my opinion what is expected to be raised so far will not cover it, and the Red Cross thinks they can get money just by asking for it from the likes of me.

The Red Cross will not stop me giving to fire victims in the only way I can. I'll take my "stuff" to somebody somewhere my own self, I will.

All the time, and at the very worst and most inconvenient of times, bad politics will stuff people right up.

Wednesday, 11 February. My friend Carlee decided "with all this sadness around, we need a warm and fuzzy," and I think she was right. She sent me this story about a dog. Faith the dog

This article in the Age caught my eye because 30+ years ago I used to work with Philip Chubb at the ABC news room. I used to wonder what had happened to him. He is writing here about his own experience. To be bloody nearly burned alive, and then to sit down and write a factual account of it, not forgetting all the domestic minutiae and historical background, it's so typically professional journalist it's awesome. It's no wonder so many of them in my time there had drinking problems, pushing their own emotions right out of the way like that in order to get the story written.

Tuesday, 24 February. I was watching something, on commercial TV which I rarely watch. "Animal Rescue" was tending to animals in the fire. They had a kangaroo which was clearly hurt, but they couldn't get close enough to see what was wrong so they shot him a tranquiliser dart. Then they found he had burned his feet, which would not heal. They didn't actually say they would have to euthanase him, but a nurse started to cry, so I did, too. Then they had a domestic cat with all the fur gone from it's face, and the skin underneath was blistered. They took pictures of all the domestic animals they had and put them around the place, but people weren't able to recognise them because they were so disfigured by the fire. Then this woman turned up who thought this cat might be hers, and at the sound of the woman's voice the cat, Harry, started purring so they knew the woman was the owner. She took one look at him and said, "The poor little bugger." It really got to me.

How are animals supposed to survive in an inferno like that?

Wednesday, 25 February. Finally, the 18 day old lump in my throat turned into a flood of tears. Barry was a friend's cousin. I only met him a couple of times but I never forgot him.

Barry's girlfriend Sue rang him at 5.30pm on Saturday, 7 February. She knew there was a fire in his area, but Barry did not. Like everybody else on that day, he was inside with the curtains drawn and the aircon on. He didn't have a mobile because he thought they were "too intrusive."

So Sue rings, and Barry sticks his head out the door and smells the smoke, so he says, "OK, then I had better take action," and Sue said she would ring him in another couple of hours to see how he was going.

So at 7.30 Sue rings again and the phone is down. So she gets in her car and drives up there immediately. When she is stopped at a roadblock she becomes hysterical and has to be taken away and sedated.

At the memorial ceremony Sue told us about Barry's "last chance" plan which was a dugout with a door over it. She used to scoff at it, calling it his "bloody bomb shelter." When the cops got to his place and opened the door to the dugout they found Barry's body. Sue didn't say what killed him, whether it was heat radiation or suffocation. I suppose we have to wait until the Coroner's work is done.

Every single one of these 210 deaths has to be investigated separately, and the Coroner is going to take weeks to get round them all. The City Morgue is overwhelmed, with dead bodies parked in various hospitals around the place.

There were a number of pictures of Barry posted around another room at Trades Hall where we had the ceremony. There was one of Barry sitting on a leather chesterfield in front of a wood-panelled wall covered with packed bookshelves.

I was talking to Walter about it and I said, "That chesterfield, those books, that whole place; the whole lot of it is all ash now."

Walter said, "Things don't matter. It's people that count."

I agree. But, the thing is, people die eventually anyway. But when they die, their stuff isn't supposed to go with them. Stuff like books and photos and CDs and stuff, are supposed to become mementos for their loved ones to remember them by. All of Barry's stuff is now just ash.

That's the thing about fires. They are so damned devastating. Nothing is left behind.

At the moment there are major floods in Queensland and Northern Territory, which have also been declared disaster areas. But with floods, the lucky ones will get around all right in good wellies. The unlucky ones will lose their houses and cars, and some will be living in tents for a while. If they have boats they will be all right.

To my knowledge nobody died in the floods

Saturday, 28 Feb. This is only the second beautiful day since the fires when there's been no smoke around and the temperature bearable, so I'm going to do something outside.

Later rang my friend Anne in Morwell. She wasn't home so I rang her mother Mardi who lives in the same street. Mardi has lived in Gippsland all her life and knows everybody down there. Anne had told me about two friends who had died, and now Mardi was telling me about all her neighbours and friends who had lost this and that but stayed alive, and others who she knew vaguely who had died.

Without exception, everybody in Victoria knows somebody who died, or lost a loved one, or their house, or their pets, or their livelihood. Everybody is affected, either directly or indirectly. No-one is untouched. These have been the worst fires in Australia's recorded history, which is 150 years. They were not run-of-the-mill bushfires. Whether they were deliberately lit or not is beside the point. The fact is they were completely uncontrollable. They travelled at the speed of a bullet. Some people described flames as high as a three storey building.

After battling these fires for a week, Australian crews from all over the country went home exhausted to their families and were replaced by fire fighters from Canada, America and New Zealand. No fire here has ever been that bad that it took every fire fighter in the country, then some from overseas. And three whole weeks later they are not completely out. They're just not as fierce now. But that's today (1 March). Come back on Tuesday when we are expecting more high winds. It's the heat and winds that make a fire deadly.

Fire fighters work for no financial reward. They are volunteers. They take time off from their usual occupations to go and fight fires. Sometimes their boses are reasonable and co-operative. But sometimes their bosses are just arseholes and sack them. That happened during the Canberra fires, and it has happened again this time.

Water contamination. A lot of the people in the fire areas are not connected to a community water supply. All the water they have is what they collect from the rooves of their houses and any other buildings on their property, such as garages or sheds. Some people have dams, but wherever the water is it has to be pumped to where it's needed. Best strategic place for a dam is where excess water will naturally drain towards.

When it's hot, farm animals head straight for a dam, anybody's dam, which is where they died. Then they got covered with ash and charcoal...

Melbourne's water supply is collected in the fire areas where there are several huge dams. Three or four days after the fires I filled a watering can to tend to some of my special plants, and I noticed a very strong chlorine smell. I suppose I should be glad somebody doesn't want us all to get very sick, but, involuntarily or not, I never enjoyed drinking swimming pool water, so for a long time I will be either boiling or filtering.

2 March. More bad conditions expected for tomorrow, so **the cops sent five million Victorians an SMS. A mass SMS wouldn't have warned Barry, who didn't even have a bloody mobile, and I have a mobile but did not get the message. Walter, who is German, reckons sirens would be better. In Germany after WW2 they kept their air raid sirens because they are very efficient community warning signals. In Britain they got rid of them. You tell me why.

3 March. It's raining lightly today but the fire fighters are complaining about it because it's only making the ground slippy and buggering up the backburning. It's also extraordinarily windy, up to 120kph in some places. What makes fires really treacherous is not just heat, but also the amount of dry fuel around, and high winds to move the fires along. It's very, very depressing, and while it's happening it's very difficult to think about anything else.

** The woman from the office of my local MP rang today - about something else - and I mentioned Walter's suggestion about the siren. She said she used to live in the bush and they had a siren there, but a lot of communities voted to decommission them "because they were too noisy and a nuisance." That is fair dinkum what she said. She then said, "Now let's see if they can live with their decision."

Sometimes I think community voices need to be over-ruled.

26 May. The inquiry into the causes and management of these fires has uncovered some very interesting facts. Re sirens, one fire fighter went against "regulations" and sounded a siren about a week before Black Saturday and was "reprimanded" for it, even though lives were definitely saved because he did it.

I am not making this up. The truth about these fires is bad enough. I do not need to fictionalise.

1 Sep 09: "Community voices" have been over-ruled. As a result of the inquiry, from now on they will all have sirens and that's that.

Germaine Greer on fires and Walter's response: Germaine Greer might know a lot of things and has written good and interesting books, but this does not mean she understands a lot about fire management and how to prevent fires in Australia. For me it is very simplistic to refer to Aborigines and how they managed the country in the last 60,000 years. What do we really know about their fire management in so many different parts of the country over such a long period? Also the invaders have changed the country dramatically in the last 200 years and it cannot be managed any more as before, as most is now farmland and many different grasses and invasive plants in open and forested country. But this does not mean that some kind of backburning at the cool times of the year is often sensible. But it is also a matter of fact that a big percentage of fires in Australia occur every year because some backburning went wrong and the fires got out of hand. We had over the last 10 years a few such examples up here in our area.

Again, to live in the bush means to chose the risk that your property will be burned should a fire occur and you might even lose your life. I prefer this risk to a backburn on my property every couple of years that would destroy a lot of undergrowth, blackens everything for a couple of months, kills a lot of small animals and takes away a lot of the pleasure for me to live here. It's tragic that 200 lives have been lost but houses can be rebuilt. If tomorrow an airplane crashes and kills 200 people this is tragic as well, but life goes on and sooner or later we all board another plane.

I also disagree with the statements that arsonists should get away with their actions and only the governments etc are to blame. It is one thing that errors were and always will be made, or if some people deliberately lit fires because it gives them a special kick or whatever.

Cheers
Walter

Even arguments broke out amongst friends who have different ideas about fire management.

24 April 2009 They've scaled the death toll down from 210 to 173. Amanda at Kinglake, who is a nurse, told me that the seat of some of the fires was 1600 degrees. Celsius. Crematoria operate at 1300. So it could be assumed the other 37 were rendered to dust and then blown to New South Wales by those winds.

Someone in the United Kingdom well known to me referred to this drought here as "your recent dry spell." Up to their armpits in snow at the time, our friends and relatives in the northern hemisphere just didn't get it.

Ten years of minuscule rainfall — approximately 5% of what used to be the annual average — is not a "dry spell." This is the new climate; i.e. climate change or global warming or whatever you want to call it. This is not the 11th hour, either. It's not even one minute to 12. This is well past midnight.

If we don't send the capitalist system packing very, very soon, we are all stuffed.

How is capitalism costing us the earth? Don't ask. Just read Liz Ross's article.

Wikipedia has a very comprehensive article on these fires, with a lot more information than I could collate.

See how some survive

Five months later