The town had never faced fire like this before. Preparation and community connection were crucial to how people responded.
Speakers:
Kirstie Pearce, town resident
Melva Woodgate, farmer
Kate Hodge, CFA volunteer
Donald Graham, Buchan East resident
Photo courtesy of Anna Fuhrmeister, age 11, Sarsfield.
Theme music and occasional other contributions by Spoonbill: https://soundcloud.com/spoonbill
Thanks to Daniel Bowden and to Steve Adam for sound engineering support.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
HOST:
This is the Three Towns podcast. It was first produced and published for the first anniversary of the Black Summer fires, in late 2020.
KIRSTIE:
It was exhausting. Every time the phone pinged, every conversation that you had with somebody. Just the waiting. We’d known it was coming for months, so November it started. So three months of waiting for this thing to arrive.
HOST:
This is Episode Two of Three Towns. We’re still in and around Buchan, in the hills in East Gippsland.
I’m Matthew Abud.
Last episode we heard how Buchan used the time it had to prepare for the Black Summer fires.
And they arrived on Monday December 30.
KIRSTIE:
I still wasn’t convinced that Buchan was going to be impacted, but we were definitely watching, keeping up to date with the app. We were talking to friends so there would be phone calls, this is where we know the fire is, this is the activity.
HOST:
That’s local resident Kirstie Pearce.
KIRSTIE:
I ended up going up to the pub to help Marg and Brickie with doing the meals for the CFA crew. So I popped up there and one other friend popped in to get some beer and she said, Oh we’ve heard Buchan’s going to definitely get impacted. And I said to Marg, Ok, I need to go, I’ll come back later. Didn’t go back later, obviously. So we just came home, got the fire cart, started watering down the house, watering down sections where we knew the direction of the fire was coming from. Underneath the house, obviously renovating the house has got lots of areas fire could get in, so. Then the CFA crew came through and they said What’re your plans? We said we were staying. They told us that when the fire came through the Buchan Caves reserve it would collapse on our property so we would be showered with embers and I went, Ok, so we’ll be dealing with grass fires.
HOST:
Kirstie wasn’t the only one who at first found it difficult to believe that the area would be hit so hard.
Melva Woodgate’s a local farmer, who’s been living a short drive outside Buchan for almost sixty years, since her early twenties.
MELVA:
This fire. We’ve had fires that have frightened us before, yeah, I’ve packed up everything that I thought was valuable in this house, how long ago, I’ve forgotten the years, twenty five years ago or something. But this time we thought, oh, no. It won’t happen. The day before, we knew the fire was coming, for sure, for weeks. And this particular day before the big bang, my family said to me, You’re not staying here, you’re going to stay in Buchan with our friend, or half a relation but a friend. Pack what you want the night before they said, put what you want in the car. Pack it all in and whatever. And I said yes but I don’t know, I don’t know what I should, I’ve got what I think, and they said You’re not going to take…? And I said No, it’s not going to, it won’t burn and they said You never know, you never know. But I think I’ve been through two or three times of it, it can’t, it can’t happen, with all the modern helicopters and God knows what around, it won’t burn everything.
So about one o’clock we got into the car and we got what I thought was necessary and took off. And then I, that was it I wasn’t to come back here. And I knew by the smoke and everything around that it was going to be a bit big. So I sat on the veranda with my friend at about four o’clock and we had our cups of tea and watched things and heard radios and God knows what. And then by five o’clock we knew all hell might break loose, so we started to have a couple of, little drinks of sherry or something.
HOST:
Buchan had prepared well.
But the fire was like nothing the town had faced, and there were many terrifying moments.
Last episode we heard from local CFA member Kate Hodge.
She says that even though this fire would challenge the town like never before, it could have been far worse.
KATE:
We’ve never had a fire actually burn into town, you know since settlement, so it was the first event of its type that’s gotten here. All of the plans were followed in a very structured way and as a result of that good preparation – it mightn’t seem like it, but I think we did really well to reduce the losses to what we did. We got ember attack and we got the fire fairly early in the afternoon, well sort of four, five o’clock, which meant that it was really hot weather, we had high winds, and there was a lot of conditions to try and deal with, and the fire spread really quickly once it hit the open country, which created the need to be very focused and careful around how we went about trying to fight the fire where we could and how we could.
HOST:
Again and again local knowledge of the houses and properties around the area, and the people who lived in them was a big factor in the decisions Kate and others needed to make.
KATE:
The first spot-fire that dropped into the valley just north of here, I was on top of the hill on the high point keeping an eye out. And we were directly above where the spot-fire started. By the time we got down there there were five other spot-fires in the surrounding space. We were pretty keen to go to this one though because it was on a piece of property where we knew there was an elderly lady with her elderly daughter, and that they didn’t maybe have the same level of capacity to protect themselves as in other spaces. So a DELWP vehicle and our truck went to that and we were able to put out the running edge that was going towards her house and pretty much see the fire off into the river catchment. And by the time we’d done that, there were several very big spot-fires and we were called back into town.
So I was given a piece sort of on the north-east side of town where the primary school and the rec reserve where the people were sheltering was, so I had a role of patrolling in that space along with a DELWP team that were up in that space. And we did really well, I think we probably had the better side of the fire to be fighting, because it was creeping down the hill slowly on that side, whereas over on this side of town where it was coming in it was being pushed really hard coming out of the forest with a lot of force behind it and it was just rolling in balls of fire in behind town here.
HOST:
Kate like several others also emphasises how, when the pressure was on, community connections and professional trust were key, to making all the preparation work.
KATE:
A lot of people that are in the CFA and also probably maybe five or six of the DELWP people are local. So there was definitely a local representation. As well as our contractors that were here who were working for DELWP, which are the people that were the earthmoving equipment and the dozers, excavators etcetera, most of them have local connections. So in a way it was like having a big family with, maybe I think we had three strike teams here that came out of Melbourne that joined our family for the actual event.
If we hadn’t had such capable leaders within those strike teams, who obviously had that level of professional trust not only for their own team, but who could see how well-set-up we were, how organised we were, they wouldn’t have worked in the way that they did and done the good work that they did which allowed us to preserve as much of the assets as we did around the space.
We had a truck driver who was from a group that were down towards the Bass Coast and he said, look I think I can get my truck in behind these houses, and it was a bigger truck which had more capacity to carry water, and he, once he got his truck in there everybody else followed in their trucks. But it was the strike team leader who had the confidence in him to say, if you think you can do it, then go ahead. I’m confident you know to be safe. Because you know the request was made reasonably and the leadership was trusting in the capacity of their staff and able to say, yep, if you think you can do that safely, then you do that. And that probably meant we saved our motel, and we saved quite a few of the assets on that top end of the main street.
HOST:
The fight was on in the town, and all around the district.
Here’s Kirstie Pearce again.
KIRSTIE:
I have a brother in Melbourne that’s been through fire, he got caught in a fire once. So he was talking to me throughout the night, just saying this is what you’ll see, this is what you’ll hear. But nothing can prepare you for the noise and the sight of it, it was just like a beast as it came over the top of the ridge-line from the caves, it was churning like – yeah, churning like a dragon, I don’t know how else to describe it, it was horrifying.
At that point I felt really small, it was probably one of the times where I thought, I’m not really comfortable with this. But Paul reassured me once it hit the top of the hill it was going to slow down, and it did. It also didn’t collapse on us so we weren’t showered with embers. But lots of fire, everywhere we looked around, the school, right around the back of the street, and the top of the hill, it was just fire. And then when the wind direction changed we ended up with grassfire coming across from the south, so that was very smoky. And I remember running up the driveway, Paul was already up there with the cart watering down the driveway and trying to just wet the grass along our perimeter, and I was running up the driveway and the smoke was that thick that I just couldn’t breathe. And every part of me wanted to turn and run the other way but I knew he was up there, I had to get up there. Once I was up there, I don’t know if it was the oxygen in the water but it was, yes I can breathe now, I’m going to be ok. But yeah.
Watching a couple of properties across the road really burning was difficult, because we could’ve, look at it and go could we go and help, but then they’re not there, we can’t leave our property, so there’s this real Catch-22 of a responsibility to people in your town versus what you’ve got to do to keep yourselves safe. So that was really heartbreaking just sitting there and watching those places go up. And I guess there’s that survivor’s guilt of, our place is safe but you’ve lost your homes and it’s – heartbreaking.
You do what you’ve gotta do. At the time I was just being very practical and very pragmatic, but afterwards you look back and go, that was pretty big.
HOST:
Meantime, in Buchan East, Donald Graham and his wife Bron were also waiting.
Although they’d only moved to their bush block a couple of years earlier, they’d already had one fire scare just the season before.
They got themselves as prepared as they possibly could.
DONALD:
So we decided to put in a couple of fire bunkers, because of the nature of our block and where the house was, we’d probably prefer to stay and defend the house, and the best way to do that was to put in a bunker, so that we have a place to retreat to if the situation was worse or different to what we might have anticipated.
We watched it in the paddocks probably seven or eight o’clock in the evening, and at that time I thought we were going to be right because the fire in the paddocks was only moving very slowly, in a big circle basically, and I thought the wind had changed, slightly, and I thought we were right. But anyway it came down the Tarra Range Road which was all state forest, and hit the back of our property.
About eleven o’clock we decided, because the fire was on us, the air was just raining down with embers, the wind might have been, hard to know maybe seventy kilometres an hour at this point. I know the embers were going horizontally pretty much. We decided that we’d get into the bunkers. There’s a peephole in the bunker which was pointed at the house, we could see the house had caught. I waited five minutes and got out, probably when I shouldn’t have done, and went down and endeavoured to put it out but the fire was in the roof.
I went back to the bunker for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. I was with my wife at the time of course, Bron, we were in it together. On the bunker door there’s a thermometer which gives you a reading of the outside air temperature, and they indicate that you shouldn’t go out there until it gets down to fifty degrees. I think when I went out the first time it might have been more than that, I don’t remember, anyway this second time I waited until it was down to fifty degrees. I went out, left my wife there, up to the shed which is situated about fifty metres from the bunker, uphill. I went up there, I found that there was a vehicle on, alight, and I had a eight hundred litres fire unit on a vehicle up there. So I put the burning vehicle out. We rooted around with the shed, I had two other small outbreaks in it, in the structure which I was able to deal with, probably for three hours, just to make sure it was completely out. At this time the fire front had passed, the whole valley was filled with smoke and still very hot. The trees, it was still dark of course, the trees were all lit up like Christmas trees with just the burning embers which were the ends of the limbs and the leaves still glowing in the dark. It was very pretty if nothing else was going on.
And after we were sure that we’d dealt with the fire in the shed we got into the vehicle and I started up and turned the air conditioner on, more because it was cooler, and we sat there for three hours and all this time, about every two or three or four minutes you’d hear a tree crashing down in the bush, where you know the fire had got into the base of the tree and it was partly hollow and would have burnt it out and just, so it was just all night, you could hear these trees crashing. Anyway so that was the long and the short of it all. We waited until, no I think about three o’clock in the morning we sent a text to the kids to tell them that we were fine, but the house had gone.
HOST:
Back on the verandah, Melva Woodgate watched the fire hit the Buchan township, while her family defended the home back on the farm.
MELVA:
It started to come up around behind us. And Lou said to me, Melva Melva get the hose, get the hose. And we went around with the hose around the back, by this stage it was coming around the back of her place, and next thing we could see the fella next door who is eighty-odd, and it’s starting to come down the side of his place and we thought, this is all going to go here! But thank God the fire brigade did turn up, three trucks, and they saved her and us from there. But it – God it was horrifying, it was horrifying. And everything would have gone.
Anyway the family were out here and I knew they were here and that was it. And I felt good about that, really good, and I felt safe about it. I felt that they would save it too. They had Toyotas with spray units on the back full of water, so they had three of them, and seven, five of my family and two outsiders, fighting it. They rang me, We saved the house, well we went on like lunatics in Buchan thinking what a blessing that was. But I’ve never been through a fire like it, ever ever, it was just unbelievable. It was frightening it was horrific, the whole town looked like it was going up where we were sitting, the houses that went in Buchan. It was crazy, it was scary as.
HOST:
Usually a fire would diminish in the cooler, more humid night air, and give people a bit of a break.
But this time it wasn’t until around three or four o’clock in the morning that there was any kind of lull.
MELVA:
They said, you get to bed, you go to bed Melva. I said You’re joking, there’s no way I can go, I know I was tired and exhausted from anxiety. I said I can’t go to bed, I’ll get into my car which was a comfortable car, put the seat back, and just stay there. But the next morning, oh my God. Everything was burned, it was just. I wasn’t allowed to come out here, I don’t think I came out here for three days because it was so much burnt stuff around the place and no, everything. It was dreadful, dreadful. Because we’re… But the smoke! And the colour!
HOST:
Even after that night, fighting the fires was far from over.
But it’s not too much to say that the community’s steps towards recovery started pretty much straight away.
Everyone knew where they’d be headed next – the Recreation Reserve building and football oval.
MELVA:
I think someone went around to tell us, that all, go to the rec, we knew the rec ground, recreation for everyone to go to. And then from that morning on, we knew we’d be having all our, everything down there, they’ve got generators, and everything to get thingsgoing.] So we’d be having breakfast dinner and tea there, every day. For weeks or more. Yeah. It was just unbelievable, like refugees really.
HOST:
Kirstie Pearce also headed down the next morning.
KIRSTIE:
So when the fire was over everybody went down to the Rec because that’s where we go, as a community that’s where we’ve always gone. It’s a place to gather for all sorts of things, funerals, weddings, parties. So the fire is an obvious one. So the rec reserve became a quasi evacuation centre because everybody went there.
HOST:
Donald and Bron Graham had to come in from their bush block first. A neighbour who owns the town’s motel, told them to pitch up there and grab some rest.
DONALD:
At this stage I had burnt my eyes during the evening, more probably from smoke than heat, I don’t know. So I could barely see. So I got my wife to drive the first car, and I followed her tail-lights pretty much. We went up to the motel, we couldn’t raise anybody there, so we just went to the first room that had an open door, went in. There was no power at this stage because all of Buchan, no power. We were filthy. We were black head to toe. All I wanted to do was lie down but I wanted to have a shower first. So we tested the water, and fortunately it was electric hot water but there must have been hot from the previous day. So there was enough water for us to have two showers. We got clean, and then we went to bed. For which we were really grateful, you couldn’t have asked for anything better, we just needed a bed, and to get clean.
Next morning we went down to the Rec Hall which was now the gathering-point, all sorts of people there I mean there was the locals and there was ambulance people there, heaps of firies. And they looked after us really well, I mean it was brilliant.
HOST:
That’s the next part of the story – how the community came together in those first days afterwards, and some of the things that made it work.
Thanks for listening. This is the Three Towns podcast. It was first produced and published for the first anniversary of the Black Summer fires, in late 2020.
I’m Matthew Abud.
Thanks to Spoonbill for the theme music. You can find a link to his work on the episode website.
And thanks to Daniel Bowden and to Steve Adam for sound design and engineering support.