After the Black Summer fires, Sarsfield's Recreation Hall changed from a low-key place, to becoming essential for community fire recovery.
Speakers:
Jo Andrews, Secretary, Sarsfield Recreation Hall and Sportsground
Amy Fisher, Sarsfield Resident
Grant Woods, Fair Dinkum Sheds
Stan Barker, President, Lakes Entrance Garden Club
Rosanna Palmer, vocalist, Rosanna's Raiders
Photo courtesy of Anna Fuhrmeister, age 11, Sarsfield.
Theme music and occasional other contributions by Spoonbill: https://soundcloud.com/spoonbill
Thanks to Daniel Bowden 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.
JO:
And tonight we are cooking spuds. Or we’re not, Riviera Garages and Barns, a local business with their suppliers, Stramit, are cooking spuds for us.
MATTHEW:
So people have described this as the only place to gather in Sarsfield, it looks like it’s becoming a crucial hub for how people get through this stage.
JO:
So it is the only place, and it’s also not fire impacted, which is one of the reasons why we opened the doors to the hall about five days post-fire, as a drop-in centre for three weeks straight.
HOST:
That’s Jo Andrews, and we’re in the Recreation Hall in Sarsfield in East Gippsland.
This is way back in March, in a country before COVID.
Welcome to Three Towns, I’m Matthew Abud
MATTHEW:
This is something that existed before, or it’s in response to the fires, how do you think things are changing post-fires?
JO:
So before the fires we had quarterly get-togethers as a community and we put out over 250 flyers to our residents and we had about 30 people rock up every three months to have dinner with us. So we’ve seen a drastic change in I guess that community spirit and connectivity and the vibe will get stronger tonight as more people arrive, you’ll definitely feel it, it’s a really positive environment to be in.
HOST:
In February, my original idea was to visit some East Gippsland communities and gather stories about the different ways they were coming together.
It didn’t happen like that, because – well, COVID of course.
I didn’t get to talk to Jo or anyone else in Sarsfield again, until late October and November.
When we did meet, it was in the Sarsfield Rec Hall once more – which as you can hear, was pretty empty this time around.
The anniversary of the fires was coming up and memories were vivid.
JO:
We have an amazing view of the bush towards Clifton Creek and Sarsfield and that’s where the fire front came from. And you can just see the whole day that smoke plume building, you knew it was incredibly serious. I guess there was a slight level of surrealism with that because the picture was something unlike I’d ever seen, I’d certainly seen smoke and lived through that sort of stuff in 2003 but not this close to our house. So very early the next day, as in we still had burning things, myself and my brother did a recce out to my parents’ farm which required us to go down the highway and nearly all the properties on Coach Road were all gone and still smouldering. And I guess there was a bit of, a little bit of disbelief in the fact that it had happened but at the same time there wasn’t because you could just see that it was going to be a really horrible situation for us in Sarsfield.
HOST:
Sarsfield endured big losses from Black Summer, with seventy three homes destroyed, and over two hundred impacted by fire.
That’s nearly three quarters of all homes, in a community of six hundred and twenty five residents.
Half the local landscape burned.
There’s no shop or pub or main street.
The local school closed in the nineties.
But there is the Recreation Hall and sportsground.
By Black Summer, Jo Andrews had been Rec Reserve and Rec Hall Secretary for a couple of years.
In her own words it had been a low-key role.
That changed pretty quickly after the fires.
JO:
I think about a day or two after that the Lucknow Hall started mobilising with food relief. And I dropped into there on the way home and said We have a hall in Sarsfield that’s not used, if you need somewhere to distribute from let me know, my name’s Jo, blah blah. And within 15 minutes I got a call back to say We’ve got 150 food relief bags coming to you now. Go across to the Hall. So the first thing that I really started to engage with the community on was helping unload a 150 food relief packs, What are we going to do with these? So that’s where it started, and very rapidly evolved from there.
AMY:
From my side, I’ve been organising volunteers coming down and coordinating for the people in Sarsfield who need help and need assistance, between what jobs they have and what volunteers are coming down and what skills and trades are, as to what they can do and where they can help.
MATTHEW:
So this is like Tradies for Fire Affected Communities, it’s like Blaze Aid, it’s all of that?
AMY:
That’s right, yeah so Tradies for Fire Affected Communities and also East Gippsland Community Support, they’re the tradies that come down each weekend. But I was also talking with…
HOST:
That’s Amy Fisher.
Listening to this now, brings back the energy of the immediate recovery – everyone pitching in, people coming from everywhere to help out.
These scenes also recall the adrenaline that was helping to drive everyone’s efforts.
And the shock that was of course behind that.
Before the fire Amy prepared her house as best she could, and sent her kids to stay in Bairnsdale nearby.
She joined her partner on his farm when the fire hit.
Coming back next morning, she was sure her house had gone.
AMY:
Everything was black and everything was still smoking, and trying to get to my house from there, there was trees all over the road so it was driving, sort of weaving in and out between trees just to even get to my house. And as we went up the hill and turned off to my area, we could see the houses up the top, and it was like ok. And as we drove down I saw the house and I was relieved and overwhelmed and just teary, I was, I didn’t know, I had all the emotions all in one. It was fantastic but then you think of how many people who lost their places. I was so happy to have my house but at the same time kind of felt terrible for everyone else.
HOST:
It didn’t take long for Amy to come by the Hall.
AMY:
We’d had a few people going around trying to loot after the fires. So some people had become very untrusting. So we ended up getting some hi-vis shirts and going door to door and dropping off bags of stuff and trying to collect a data-base of names and who was still in the area and letting them know that this was open so they could drop in, and also be contacted so when things turned up, we sort of got to know who was in the house, who’d lost their house, that kind of stuff. Had they been directly impacted by the fires, so Jo did a lot, a lot a lot of work around that.
HOST:
So many people joined the Hall efforts – many of whom had never met before.
The way things panned out, Jo and Amy are the only two I got to sit down with, for a longer conversation.
Jo talks about how they had to continually adjust the ways they provided support, depending on where the community was at.
At first it was delivering donations – then having the Hall as a drop-in centre – and then a big community day.
All that, takes enormous energy, from people who had themselves endured a lot.
JO:
And so then it evolved that everyone was really really tired, and hungry, and hadn’t eaten anything but takeaway in weeks and really needed a break. So then it evolved to well let’s provide food and give everyone a really hearty meal once a week, free, you don’t even have to stay if you don’t want to, just come and eat and go home if you don’t want to talk to people. The other aspect that came into it, it connected people that wanted to help in a way they might not have been able to so we did the first dinner, as in Sarsfield people. But from then on we only did one other dinner and the rest were hosted by people that wanted to come in and cook for us for free. And we tended to have international cuisine. So it was really special and yummy and fun.
GRANT:
Grant Woods. Fair Dinkum Sheds in Bairnsdale and Sale. Tonight we’ve done chicken sticks for entrée. We’re doing baked spuds. We’ve got pulled pork. Spaghetti Bolognese. A friend of ours catered about four weeks ago. Then I got a phone call from our suppliers, and they said we’ve got a few people we’d like to send up there for some volunteering and stuff, and here we are.
AMY:
The community would get together on a Friday night, have a feed, have a bullshit, just relax, let your hair down. And it wasn’t always fire talk. Just being able to talk to someone who’d sort of been in a similar, might not have been exactly the same because no-one’s experiences are the same in what they go through, but sometimes hearing someone else’s experience, it’s kind of helpful, to go yeah, you know what, it’s been a shit time and it’s not just me and you know, maybe they’re coping better than what you are, that doesn’t matter. You’ve got someone there who knows what it’s like and it’s ok to not be ok. It was a helpful way to I guess grieve over certain things, and even just being able to know what’s out there support-wise. Having that other, another person to just bounce things off.
STAN:
Stan Barker. I’m president of the Lakes Entrance Garden Club. What we’re offering tonight is, if people want to come, we’ve got three acres of gardens, everything’s free, so they can go through and pick what plants, we’ll have people there that’ll help them do that. I think native plants are terrific in a garden, they attract the birds, they’re just amazing.
HOST:
Many people hardly knew their neighbours before the fires.
And now they do.
This is the really striking and wonderful thing – mentioned by almost everybody I met in Sarsfield.
But this same Friday night dinner, was the last one before COVID restrictions hit.
AMY:
It’s created the fracture again. It feels a lot like the bushfires has been forgotten because COVID has now come about. There was always going to be that next thing. But with it happening so quickly and so, it’s such a massive thing, it took over a lot of the focus, or all of the focus.
JO:
There was so much energy and time that went into those dinners. I guess we were needing to think about what our future strategy was going to be anyway, and this really unfortunately stopped it in its tracks sooner than what we thought. Which was I guess a shock to people, really. They didn’t have that opportunity. We looked at ways to provide food takeaway packs, but then at the same time I think the energy and the adrenaline that comes from the fires was really starting to wear off and it just probably hit everyone, and everything stopped.
HOST:
COVID put the brakes on, and prevented people gathering just when many still greatly needed to do that.
But those involved with the Hall kept trying to find ways to provide support.
JO:
I couldn’t handle the concept that someone that’s been through the fires would have to fight for a roll of toilet paper at the supermarket, after all this that is horrible! So I couldn’t say no to the offer of toilet paper, or food, or staples like rice and flour. So at one point we had boxes nearly up to the roof, in that whole centre area full of groceries that we then had to make into food packs. So we had a few people here and we spent many hours walking around in circles making food packs for everyone.
HOST:
Other donations kept coming, with one group in Traralgon, through a supporter named Dawn, sending goods to Amy Fisher.
But the Hall couldn’t keep holding all of that.
AMY:
After the fires I got a new carport and shed built because my carport is gone now. It’s not being used for me it’s all donated stuff, it’s like an op shop in there. I’ve got this new beautiful shed and I can’t use it, I can’t put my cars in there. Peter Williams from Deloitte, he ended up sourcing the shipping container for me, hopefully I’ll be putting everything in there next week and then I’ve got an online booking system and people book in so I know, I’ve got that COVID tracing.
HOST:
COVID brought a whole extra layer of problems. But its effects weren’t uniform.
JO:
I think for individuals their experience with COVID are all completely different. Certainly earlier days, some people actually appreciated not needing to go out and not having to explain their story to others, and an opportunity to have some down time. And others I guess they felt like they became isolated. For myself, I guess it gave me a chance to breathe and take a step back from everything because it had been a crazy ride.
HOST:
Donations and other support are critical. But they’re not enough for the long haul.
That needs community structures that can deal with government bureaucracies.
Setting up committees, and working out how they should operate, that’s a slow grind.
But it’s needed, if community voices are going to drive what happens.
JO:
Previously like I said I have worked in government and I’ve talked a lot about community consultation in my government roles. Now being in it, you can see the value of community-led recovery, and you can see that community knows stuff that agencies don’t know, just like agencies know stuff that community don’t know. So I think for our community we need to develop what that vision of community looks like and make it happen. From the very early days we had butchers’ paper up around the Hall that looked at immediate, short, and long-term priorities for community recovery, and also individual because there’s also that separation, what an individual within Sarsfield needs versus what the community needs. So we’d been gathering ideas and priorities about what we want recovery to be, and then how you deliver that was going to be more about a community collaboration. We’ve been just trying to navigate through the expectations that government have of community recovery committees, how you talk in that space, what funding’s available, all the applications. So there’s a whole lot of just that admin not so much fun stuff that you need to work through. So we’ve kind of sorted through a lot of that now, and it’s on to the stuff that people do want to talk about which are our priorities and getting money, making things happen.
HOST:
This is also something you hear in different places.
The work of community-led recovery can put a strain on disaster-hit communities themselves.
Sarsfield only elected the members for its ongoing Community Association in November.
Up until then, Jo was secretary for the Recovery Committee
JO:
I feel relatively comfortable about where we are but we definitely need to bring the community back together in some way soon, and that’s where I am really hoping through the Sarsfield Community Association we have a bit of an injection of energy and some new ideas and people to help keep progressing things. The people that have been involved to date have been really committed to the task. It’s been a hard slog though, and I feel like, well for myself personally we’ve set up everything, and the next group can really take with it and run with it. I would feel like we’ve achieved success if we were able to have a community event here again. One where we didn’t have to watch our numbers, even if it was circles all over the lawn for individual picnic spots for families, and making those sorts of ideas happen under this new world that we find ourselves in, the COVID world, I think are going to be really important.
HOST:
Along with hard times and real trauma, responding to the fires has brought Sarsfield’s creativity and heart to the fore.
But it needed the simple fact of the Recreation Hall to happen – a community space, and one untouched by the fire.
It’s hard to escape the thought that every community, no matter how small, needs something like this.
You could say it’s as much a part of disaster preparedness as anything else.
JO:
That initial focal point created here, has enabled that community vibe to filter back out into the community. There’s WhatsApp groups for certain streets withing Sarsfield, to build that local community and that may not have happened if people hadn’t got to know each other here.
AMY:
It would have made life even more unbearable without having a centralised space that you could go to, and it felt like a safe place. So I think without having this here, would have made it even harder. So what they were able to do here brought the community together.
HOST:
Thanks for listening.
This is Three Towns. 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.