People from around the district gathered at the Rec Reserve. The town worked together in response to the disaster.

Speakers:

Melva Woodgate, farmer

Kate Hodge, CFA volunteer

Donald Graham, Buchan East resident

Susie Edwards, Gelantipy Bush Nurse

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:

MELVA:

The Recreation Ground, getting together, was extremely important. It was just like, we all talked about our stories together. We all gathered there and we looked forward to seeing each other. And there’s families that live way out of town, that don’t come in very often, they’re like little rabbits coming out of their hiding places, and they all met in there. It didn’t matter what nationality or whether they were green black or white or whether they were greenies or not, we all got together. And you miss that after, when the virus and we can’t have anything. But it was one big happy group of family. Very important indeed. Very important. Wonderful.

HOST:

That’s Melva Woodgate and this is the third episode of Three Towns – I’m Matthew Abud.

The fire-front has passed Buchan, and several locals have sheltered at the Recreation Reserve sportsground. Others joined them afterwards.

Even then the fire was far from finished, with weeks of smoke and more peak days to come.

And Buchan was cut off for several days, with mobile phone communication also down. The community had to meet its own needs.

Local CFA member Kate Hodge and other firefighters had to expand their roles.

KATE:

Yeah so probably after that first fire front went through on the Tuesday or the Wednesday we got together a group of key stakeholders which included our DELWP and CFA captains, myself, and one of the strike team leaders from away and we sort of delved up jobs. As I said to you we had about a hundred and fifty local people from as far north as Suggan Buggan, which is a fair way north in our catchment, we had people from out to the east that had at that point we found out had lost homes etcetera. They’d come in as well. So we had a lot of people who had nowhere else to go. We couldn’t go anywhere because the roads had multiple very large trees over them. So we were stuck in the space at the Rec Building. I got the job of being down at the Rec doing the provision of food, water, shelter for people down there and supporting the logistics in that space and bringing that back to the group. Our strike team leader who was from away, he did the feeding of information in and out of the ICC and maintaining that communication in and out.

HOST:

The ICC is the Incident Control Centre, with authority over the fire response across East Gippsland.

KATE:

The guy from DELWP did the ongoing plans and work with the contractors and where to next with the firefighting side of things. And the CFA captain did the on-the-ground logistics behind getting our water up and running, because we had, at that stage our water had stopped working, so can’t fight a fire if you haven’t got water. So we had to go to pumping out of the river. The fuel at the roadhouse, we’re lucky, our CFA captain’s an electrician, we hooked up the largest generator we could find in town so we could get the fuel to run because we needed the fuel for fire trucks. And the fire trucks couldn’t get out to go and get fuel at that point, because we were stuck in here. So that was our core leadership team, and they’re not, like in my space I set up another group of leaders in the space down at the Rec. And one of the first things we realized was we’re going to need to be able to cook for all these people that were out of home and that were stuck at our space down there. No-one had brought large amounts of food with them or anything and we had one hundred and fifty local people plus we had three strike teams and a task force from DELWP. So we probably had a bit over three hundred people stuck here in the valley. So we pretty much raided all of the local fridges and freezers and started cooking bacon and eggs. I literally went and picked people’s chooks and pinched the eggs out from under them. One of my friends who’s in Western Australia, her son has an egg-selling business so I went and raided his chooks every morning to be able to get eggs to put into this community event. And I think that most people just pitched in.

HOST:

The community made up its own mind about what was needed.

Time and again, many told me that people went to shelter at the Rec reserve despite official advice.

Here’s local resident Kirstie Pearce again.

KIRSTIE:

CFA and DELWP had met with us prior to and they told us that Buchan, the Rec Reserve wouldn’t be an evacuation centre because it wasn’t built for purpose so it wouldn’t serve what we needed. Also concerns about that particular building being impacted, we were told to go to Orbost, and – I wouldn’t be going to Orbost. So after the fire was over we went to sleep and ended up going down there, there were a few people evacuated down to there, so there were a lot of people just cooking. And this is one of those towns that people just do stuff, you’re not allocated a job you just all get in boots and all. So we were cooking and making sure people were looked after and they felt cared for and listened to. There was definitely a lot of tears and a lot of de-briefing and story sharing.

It was very informal but it worked very well. I somehow fell into being the communicator. So someone had set up this Buchan Fires page. I wasn’t even an administrator on it but somehow I was the quasi-informal administrator of that, so feeding information into that page so people knew where to get what. So I kind of fell into that role, maybe because I’m just good at that side of things, I’m pretty good with social media. So we just all got together and made that happen. But yeah it was just that core group of women which I guess is kind of interesting, it was the women that pulled together. But it worked really well. Really well.

HOST:

Kirstie had only recently moved back to Buchan, after growing up there.

KIRSTIE:

So I actually really in some ways really found it beneficial for me, because I worked in Bairnsdale, I didn’t know a lot of women in town that well. So for me it was a really nice time to actually share some time with them and get to know them a bit better, and feel like I was back into the community like I was as a child, so it was a very special time for me in that sense.

HOST:

Many told this story: how along with the emotional shock, the fire brought people together and created new bonds.

This was also felt by Donald Graham – whose eyes had been injured from smoke – and his wife Bron. As they already told in a previous episode, they lost their house in Buchan East.

DONALD:

We weren’t the only ones in that situation of course, and as other people came in and told similar stories, you know that their house had gone… Interestingly, the people that had lost the houses, maybe it, from me, from my point of view, it looked like it was just a matter of fact. You’d expect them to be more shell-shocked, now maybe it hadn’t dawned on them or whatever, but it was just as it was. When we got in there and the ambulance bloke come over and did what he needed to do to my eyes, my wife broke down, which she needed to do, had a good howl not like I’d ever heard her cry before. But it’s what needed to happen. Anyway, from then on the Rec hall worked very well, it wasn’t perfect by a long shot but it served as a place of a gathering for the next fortnight probably. It was just as a community should be, it’s as simple as that, I mean it’s just what happens, and more barriers are broken down perhaps. From our point of view it’s allowed us, because we’re only newcomers, to get to know many more people. People who have been in the same situation as us, or not. But it’s probably accelerated that part of our relationship with Buchan by ten years. So from our point of view that’s been a positive, but not the price you’d normally want to pay for it.

HOST:

In the district outside of Buchan township, smaller communities were also coming together.

Susie Edwards was out of Buchan when the fire came through, and got back several days later.

She’s the Bush Nurse for Gelantipy, which is around fifty kilometres further into the mountains.

SUSIE:

So that’s a smaller population, so people were more fending for themselves. There was still no communication, especially up the mountain. There was no mobile phone coverage. So getting information to people was really really difficult. And that’s why we started our community barbeques. So through the Bush Nursing Centre we supplied all the meat and the salads. So we started doing it every Monday night. The first two we actually didn’t even have power. So it got to dark and I said, I’m going home I’ve got to get down the mountain. And apparently they sat around for ages, they turned on the car lights, and they sat around. And the first one I know, no-one even took a stubby of beer because they didn’t know if it was, if they were going to be allowed to drink because you know ‘the Bush Nurses organised it’. By the second one there were little eskies.

It was just an opportunity for everyone to get together. They all just wanted to talk about the day, the day and the night. Yeah. And how things panned out for them personally. Everyone was wanting to tell their personal story and that’s, basically listening was our biggest asset we could do for anybody, was to listen.

HOST:

Making sure people were ok was a priority.

Here’s Kate Hodge again.

KATE:

And we worked a lot with the police at that stage too, around trying to establish who was alive and who wasn’t. So on the Tuesday morning we had about twenty seven people on our list that we couldn’t account for. A few of us, like I’d been very active, I’d been around the place and I’d seen a lot of people. So I was able to tick a heap off from my travels and then I was able to tie in to people that I knew who had been into other spaces where I hadn’t, and we got it down to about seven or eight people and then we started working on that smaller number of people to establish who was alive and who wasn’t.

HOST:

We heard in the previous episode how the CFA turned a spotfire away from the house of Cherry, one of Buchan’s older residents.

But what happened there next, wasn’t clear for a couple of days.

KATE:

So there’s probably a very funny story in that one. So Cherry’s a beautiful lady, I won’t say her age but she’s definitely seen a few summers and probably a few fires as well. And her daughter was there with her as well, and they were seeing the fire front pretty early in the day and we were a bit concerned for them and it took us until Wednesday to actually check in and make sure they were still ok, because we couldn’t get down there there was trees burned over etcetera. So a couple of us actually headed down there in a private vehicle and cut our way down. And when we got there they were sitting in the car, it was about seven thirty eight o’clock in the morning on Wednesday morning in their nightwear, listening to the radio because their batteries had gone flat in their home radio, and of course we’d had no power at that point. So they had to run their car and listen to the ABC radio on their car to know what was happening. And I actually had my brother with me who’s a big burly policeman. He wasn’t in his police gear he was off-duty and we’ve both turned up and hopped out of the car. And Cherry’s known my car and she said Oh Kate, and then she’s looked and seen my brother there and she’s in her night things and she’s gone, Oh I don’t think I’m properly dressed. So we’d gone over to say to her Well you’d better come to lunch because there are a lot of people worried for you Cherry and we were just really happy to see that they were well and ok and we invited them to come to lunch and she’s said, Well I think I might need to make myself up, what time would this appointment be? So it was one of those things that filled your cup, it was a really memorable time.

HOST:

But Buchan had been hit hard.

Twenty six houses were destroyed across the district, along with extensive fencing and other buildings.

A much heavier tragedy was the loss of local resident Mick Roberts in his home.

KATE:

So we found out that Mick was deceased, and he was in his, we’d had a report from his neighbour that he was at his house, and it was probably quite distressing because it took us about probably a day or two to get the forensics people to come up and to do the work to you know, all the official business that you have to do, and the farmer was like, you can’t just leave him there you know, but you couldn’t do anything about that. So that was pretty distressing at the time.

HOST:

For myself – I do wish I’d been able to do justice to Mick’s loss, and what it meant for the community.

It’s sadly one of the things that COVID lockdowns interrupted, before I could make it happen.

For almost two weeks the immediate situation remained intense, and complicated.

Several factors were involved.

The days without mobile phone communication and the stress that caused was a big issue.

Another was the fact people were not allowed into Buchan because of ongoing fire risk.

More peak fire days also saw more partial evacuations.

With every story I heard, the details were really important to understanding how people responded, or what worked and what didn’t.

Some of those details include how people on the ground communicated with the Incident Control Centre, which oversaw the response.

But going into all that, is beyond what this podcast can do.

For the people at the Rec Reserve, the moment outside help arrived to give support, was a huge boost.

Donald Graham again.

DONALD:

Yeah well there was one group in particular who, I think they were businesses associated with what used to be the Brethren I think. They’ve got another name now. They came up and set up shop and provided meals, it must have been for a week. Brekkie, lunch, and tea. Very good meals, and very caring and do anything for you. They were brilliant. They were probably the ones that have stood out in terms of that first week or so, because they had volunteers who would have normally been at their places of work but provided great meals, and they were just friendly people who were enjoying what they were doing being of use to somebody else.

HOST:

Donald also says that because town had saved several vital assets, it was better-placed to immediately respond.

But things were tougher further out in the district.

DONALD:

We still had the community structure, the pub which was only relatively new, the general store, the roadhouse, the police station, the CFA buildings, the cave reserve was hit, but we only lost three houses. So Buchan, in terms of the township, got off relatively lightly. So the impact is on the farmers who had been struggling anyway, to have the last vestiges of grass go and then their fences are gone, and their cattle-yards and sheds gone, on top of everything else, was enough to drive you nuts.

HOST:

Buchan was getting through the immediate crisis.

But as Kate Hodge notes, it needed many adjustments along the way.

KATE:

No-one really educates you in the space of an emergency event has phases. No-one sits you down and tells you there’s the emergency and then there’s that emergency period which follows directly after that where you do the immediate recovery, and then there’s relief and there’s all these phases but no-one educates you in that. So you’re basically trying to feel your way along and understand when it’s time to shift from one phase to another and how you appropriately shift your whole community in doing that as well. Which can sometimes be a challenging job because for different reasons people can be more vulnerable than another person and have more need for support and assistance, or more perceived need for support and assistance. And that can mean that they’re reluctant to shift from that assistance into that next phase where they have to become a little bit more responsible for themselves as well. And finding that balance and moving, shifting people on in a way which is you know, empathetic and diplomatic can sometimes be a challenge. Or has been a challenge. I think, I think we’ve managed to negotiate it in most cases fairly well, and there’s been those who have just wanted to get back on with doing their own thing right from the very start. Very different people deal with these sorts of challenges in a very different way.

HOST:

Relief, recovery, rehabilitation

They might be stages that just about all places go through after a disaster, drawing deep on community ties and strengths.

But they’re absolutely never the same.

Each place will have its own experiences and even lessons from this – their own insights to share and stories to tell.

Buchan is one place with plenty of both – and has without doubt gathered far more since I was able to visit last July.

The next episode heads on down the road – to Cann River, very much in Gippsland’s far east.

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.