Changed lives
Ian Munro
February 5, 2010
Ron and Anne Sorraghan walk their dogs on their burnt-out property at St .Andrews. Photo: John Woudstra
FIVE hours after the black smoke appeared high overhead, the flames arrived, and with them, the dark. A spot fire struck first, then the fire front. Ron and Anne Sorraghan had dressed to confront the blaze outside their St Andrews home, but unable to breathe or see, they retreated inside. They had 150 metres of cleared ground in front of the house, and maybe 20 metres of visibility.
The land was peppered with clumps of trees that lit up like beacons in the smoke-blackened afternoon. Then they dimmed, and the dark returned. Moments later, they lit up again. It was eerie, like watching slowly pulsing neon lights.
The Sorraghans reasoned this was a fire burning with an intensity that had near exhausted its own supply of oxygen. Then the trees reignited with the fierce wind.
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Black Saturday one year on
A car heads down the mountain from Kinglake towards St Andrews through the Kinglake National Park a year after the Black Saturday bushfires. Photo: Craig Abraham
For some, the Black Saturday fire front passed in minutes. The Sorraghans lived with it for an hour, moving from room to room as smoke consumed their home around them.
A year later, like many others, the couple plan to re-establish their lives in the fire zone. Not for one moment did they consider abandoning their property. It is their life. But something has changed. Not just for the Sorraghans but for Victoria and, indeed, all Australia.
Even in this highly urbanised society, the bush has a special place in our sense of ourselves. It may not be fully understood in the cities, but those who live in the bush know that fire is always imminent, if not this year, then maybe next.
Ron and Anne Sorraghan's mudbrick home burns.
"Who needs to be given a warning when the fruit on your trees is scorched brown?" asked one survivor of the fire that devastated Strathewen. He knew something serious was on the cards.
But like others burnt out last year — who say they well knew the risks and prepared for the worst — he never envisaged what would unfold on February 7, 2009. That much is evident in the toll of 173 lives lost and more than 2000 homes destroyed.
Stuart Morgan, who lost his home in St Andrews, speaks for many of the survivors when he says nobody expected a fire of such intensity. "We knew we lived in a fire-prone area, but this particular fire was not one we had been told about."
FROM the earliest years of European settlement, fire has asserted its place in our consciousness. One-quarter of Victoria — 5 million hectares — was scorched on Black Thursday, February 6, 1851. We have filled the calendar with such events. For generations of Victorians, including those not then born to witness it, Black Friday, January 13, 1939, remains a key reference. Fires that day burned 1.4 million hectares, taking 71 lives. With a fire danger index of 100, it was for a long time the benchmark.
The index is derived from measures of temperature, humidity, wind speed, most recent rain and seasonal dryness. It reflects the likelihood of a fire starting, its intensity and the difficulty of suppressing it. A 100 fire danger index was supposed to represent the "worst possible conditions", but it has been exceeded several times in recent years.
Last century, only Ash Wednesday, in 1983, exceeded Black Friday's destructive power, with 75 lives lost in Victoria and South Australia. It was comparatively small, burning 210,000 hectares, whereas in 2003 about 1.1 million hectares burned in Victoria's high country.
Black Saturday ranged up to 170 FDI and burnt more than 450,000 hectares.
An arc in the near north-east of Melbourne bore the brunt of the fires — and of the subsequent media attention: Marysville, Buxton, Kinglake, Strathewen, St Andrews, Flowerdale. But the entire state was challenged by searing temperatures and fire: 11 people died and 247 homes were lost in the Latrobe Valley's Churchill fire; three died and more homes were lost in fires near Bendigo and Beechworth; 68 homes were destroyed at Horsham in the state's west.
EVERY major fire eventually tells us something about ourselves. Ash Wednesday reflected the march of the suburbs into the bush. Perhaps Black Saturday 2009 will signify the multiplier effect of climate change on bushfire intensity. Coming at the end of the warmest decade on record, last year's inferno suggests a quickening of nature's rhythm of destruction and recovery.
Worse is the fear that climate change might be intensifying nature's inherent capacity to destroy. In his submission to the Bushfires Royal Commission, CFA captain and author of The Aus-tralian Bushfire Safety Guide, John Schauble, pointed to CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology research indicating the frequency of extreme fire danger days would increase by up to 25 per cent by 2020, and by up to 70 per cent by 2050. Viewed in this light, Black Saturday may not be so much an aberration as a model for the future. And the suspicion that this may be the first of many such fires has changed, perhaps forever, the way Australians view the bush.
For some, it was a choking black cloud. For others it heralded its arrival with the rich scent of vaporising eucalyptus. It threw spot fires like advance scouts. It burst through treetops and rippled over the ground like running water.
And it stole the air from your lungs.
In the late afternoon Toni-anne Collins walked her horse to a neighbour to be driven to safety. The fire was still 10 minutes away when she made to return home in Ninks Road, St Andrews. "I couldn't breathe and there was no air," she says. "There was no sound. It was still. There was no smoke.
"Petrified pieces of tree, entire leaves but they were black, were falling out of the sky but they weren't alight. They were dead. It was confusing. It didn't match anything you'd ever learnt."
She lost her home and marvels at her own cavalier departure, fleeing to safety in a soft-top convertible. Today she lives in a shed on the property and is trying to finalise arrangements with a builder. Collins' fire plan had been to leave, and leave early. She is now redefining "early".
IT WAS a day that rendered fire plans redundant, but at least those with plans had the advantage of awareness. “We did not think we were going to make it at one stage,” recalls Neil Minett, who, with his wife, Lisa, saved his Strathewen house while everything else around burned.
For two hours they fended off the fire, draining their swimming pool into a sprinkler system that washed over the house while the blaze stalled and started around them. "You would think it was gone, and suddenly it would whip up,” he says.
They lost everything but the house. "Living in the bush you always think this might be the year," he says, "but I still never thought the fire would be what it was."
Yet fearsome as it proved, Black Saturday has not triggered a wholesale exodus from fire-prone areas. Many survivors are as committed as ever to remaining or returning.
There are gains for those who remain. Stricken communities have bonded more tightly. Personal networks have expanded in shared adversity. They hold the bush more dearly, not less so, even as debates continue about which exotic trees may be more fire resistant and better suited to defending homes.
Without exception they laud the generosity of their fellow citizens who came to their aid. Luanna Bozzi says the public response made her proud to be Australian (this, despite the fact that four months after she and her partner helped save their rented home near Flowerdale they received a notice to vacate as their landlord saw the local housing scarcity as a chance to increase the rent).
Some are inspired by the return of native vegetation and feel closer than ever to the place. Visitors come and see blackness, says winemaker Cathy Lance, but the stayers see the green within the black.
From a precipitous ridge above Steels Creek, Vic and Raelene Gill overlook what seems to the visitor to be a charcoal forest. Distant gullies, once invisible, are exposed by a forest stripped to its skeleton.
Blackened trunks rise to bare upper boughs. But among their lower reaches are patches of green, again home to chattering kookaburras. The Gills were cheered, too, by the survival of their local echidna.
THEY escaped the fire by minutes, their departure delayed by repeated attempts to start a restored 1970 Holden Monaro. They had watched the fire all day but had to scamper as it accelerated through the gullies below. There was no time to think. One last attempt to find the Monaro's spark saved the car — and their lives — but most of their possessions were lost.
They have rebuilt, using fire-resistant panels for the exterior of their new home. Peace and quiet, that's the attraction, says Vic Gill. And it's safe for now. There's nothing left to burn.
Stuart Morgan and his wife, Rae, sold their burnt-out property outside St Andrews and moved into the township. It was not a rejection of the bush they loved, but acceptance that they could not re-create the orchards and vegetable gardens, and the self-reliant lifestyle they had crafted over decades.
"It's not that you have lost a house that's replaceable, and memorabilia that isn't replaceable," he says. "It's that you can't replicate your old life. At 62, you can't do it again."
Still, having moved into St Andrews township, Morgan says no one in the town seems any better prepared than they were last year. "We're all waiting for the royal commission in the end, to tell us some useful information,” he says.
If, as is likely, Black Saturday is a foretaste of what major bushfires may increasingly become, then it is a new era for the "fire continent".
The commission — set up nine days after the fires and due to present its final report on July 31 this year — has the advantage of the passage of time. Initial responses to bushfire are often unhelpful in adapting to the continuing fire threat, says Australian National University historian Tom Griffiths, as people rush to put lives and homes back just as they were.
In the longer term, there are some uncomfortable truths Australia has not yet grasped. “There are deep recurrent ecological realities that we are really struggling to come to terms with," says Griffiths, "and I don't see them being recognised in the interim report of the royal commission — which does not have a map, for example, of the vegetation in the area.”
Having studied the inferno of 1939, Griffiths says he was “overwhelmed by the awful appalling familiarity” of Black Saturday. It is our "recurring nightmare". “There are forests, and mountain ash forests are the classic example, that are evolved for these huge runaway fires and they will go on generating them, and I think we have got a long way to go before we accept that."
PERHAPS too few of us have truly understood that the Australian landscape is, in the words of American environmental historian Stephen Pyne, “a fire continent . . . built to burn". Or that on this continent, Victoria exists in what Pyne calls the fire flume, the most dangerous and fire-prone region of the country. Northerly winds bring dry warm air from central Australia. Temperatures rise. Humidity evaporates. And then there is the fuel. In Griffiths' words, Victoria's mountain ash forests are highly evolved to burn.
It is a fact that some believe has not been sufficiently recognised in recent decades.
Forty years ago, says Pyne, Australia was the envy of wildfire strategists for its institutionalised and disciplined control burning, but after Ash Wednesday that strategy fell apart.
Pyne is careful to say Australia does not need to be lectured on fire management by outsiders — and that the answers will have to be found by Australians in keeping with their social and cultural values. But, he says, while initiatives for smarter nature protection and better services to citizens in the "urban bush" after Ash Wednesday were worthy, "collectively they had the effect of shutting down the kind of landscape burning that was at the heart of the Australian strategy . . .
"Australia's past suggests better ways to cope than sending in DC-10s to drop retardant," he says."No serious thinker urges that the land — all land — be burned willy-nilly every four or five years, but I don't know how Australia can live with fire without using fire."
PYNE was recently visited in the US by a representative of the royal commission. His views on how the lessons of the "Australian strategy" were bypassed after 1983 will form part of the mosaic of opinion the commission must grapple with as it seeks to formulate a new fire-management regime.
But it is not just the past that the commission must grapple with. The fact that so many people on Black Saturday confronted fires of such unprecedented ferocity tells us that simply reverting to old ways will be not enough.
This is not news for those such as Ron and Anne Sorraghan, still putting their lives back together a year down the track. For now, they are living in a converted shed, and trying to find a builder for a new home on the site. But the memories of Black Saturday will always be with them.
After an hour had passed, and daylight returned in steadily longer intervals between the darkness, and the couple found they could breathe outside, the Sorraghans went to their cars. They did not take to the road, hazardous with fallen and still crashing trees, for another two hours. They sat there, the vehicles' air-conditioning filtering the smoky atmosphere, and watched the last of their home burn.
This weekend, the anniversary, some survivors will gather quietly and remember what they have lost. They will share stories of good luck and tales of unreliable builders who have stalled their plans to return or kept them living in sheds. They will recall absent friends.
They will continue coming to terms with their experiences, a task that, like Australia's experience with fire, will be forever unfinished.
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, но есть у меня подозрение, что все таки соотечественники знают друг друга несколько лучше, чем мы стобой 
. А ведь тоже известный в своей породе заводчик 
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