Three Towns - SoundSage

Kids bring their take on the Black Summer recovery with the Sarsfield Snaps photography project.

Speakers:
Harry
Faith
Eliza
Harry
Tiana Felmingham
Michelle Perry

Photo courtesy of Anna Fuhrmeister, age 11, Sarsfield.
Theme music and occasional other contributions by Spoonbill: https://soundcloud.com/spoonbill

FULL TRANSCRIPT

TIANA:

Anybody want bubble wrap?

HENRY:

I want bubble wrap, I want the big piece. I’m having the big piece.

TIANA:

Rip a bit off if you want. Alright. Ok. Which way does that go? Jacob, Jacob. Jack.

HOST:

This is the much-delayed last episode of Three Towns. I’m Matthew Abud.

We’re back in Sarsfield once more, in the Community Recovery Hub

They’re opening the latest prints from Sarsfield Snaps.

That’s one of my favourite local projects after the Black Summer bushfires.

MICHELLE:

Kay.

HENRY:

Oh!

MICHELLE:

You like that one Henry?

TIANA:

Henry. Adrian!

HENRY:

Oh that is actually really good.

TIANA:

That is really good.

MICHELLE:

Not really good, it’s actually really good.

HOST:

Michelle Perry recorded this part. You can hear her asking Henry there.

For the Snaps, kids in Sarsfield took photos of what was happening around them in the days and months after the fires.

Several shots have been on display over the past year and more, around the local tennis courts.

Some of the kids talked me through their favourite shots.

MATTHEW:

Faith, do you want to show us your photo and talk about it?

FAITH:

So it’s a picture of the bricks outside our house and it’s got scorch marks from the fires and the moss that’s in between the bricks. I think I took it around the time when we first got back to the house. I guess it’s a bit of a combination because it shows marks from the fire but it’s also still got the moss and stuff from beforehand.

MATTHEW:

So it’s like, you have the damage but you have the re-growth, you can see the change happening.

FAITH:

Yeah. This is one of the ones that appeared in my school photo, I put in my school photo competition.

MATTHEW:

Eliza you’ve talked about it before, but do you want to describe this photo and how you took it and why you like it?

ELIZA:

Well I love it because I love fish.

HOST:

Eliza’s shot is of fish swimming in water.

ELIZA:

And I like how the shadow, it’s kind of a perfect photo because it’s just kind of swimming and cruising at the same time. But you’ve got to be quick otherwise if you’re not quick enough, you won’t get the photo right.

MATTHEW:

Winter swimming?

ELIZA:

Yes! Winter swimming.

MATTHEW:

I don’t think everyone could take this photo because I don’t think everyone would be brave enough to go swimming at Eagle Point in the winter.

ELIZA:

Yes, I guess so. Mum and dad were quite shocked that I did it. My brother isn’t, well he’s sort of into swimming but not so much like me because I love swimming, it’s my favourite thing to do.

HOST:

Of course, this is all from quite a while back – late last year.

I meant to wrap up this episode months ago.

But 2021 made that impossible on a personal front.

So it’s been over a year since I first heard about the Snaps.

That was at the dinners from the last episode, in the Sarsfield hall just after the fires.

TIANA:

So the idea is, we’ve got a whole heap of cameras here, some are more advanced cameras and some are some point and shoot cameras, so you guys I’m sure can manage the bigger cameras.

HOST:

That’s Tiana Felmingham, at one of the Sarsfield dinners when this idea got started.]

TIANA

And the idea is that you take them home, borrow them, for about a week or two weeks, whatever you can turn around in, and then take photos of your day. So the idea is that it’s Sarsfield Snaps for Sarsfield Kids. Anything at all that’s about your day. And then bring them back in and we’ll print them up for you, and you can also choose your favourite ones with the idea that we might be able to get some of them mounted, certainly here for the hall, but we might even be able to put them up in somewhere bigger one day.

HOST:

I asked Tiana back then, how this idea got started.

TIANA:

This idea came up really just from us talking at home, and we realised that there’s so much focus on adults after something that’s really stressful and for good reason, but a lot of the kids’ voices get lost in amongst it. And one of the things that was really important to me is one, that they were able to articulate their view of the world to the adults around them. And often kids can’t do that with words. So we wanted to make sure that they had an opportunity to share what they were thinking.

It’s one of those things that brews slowly, we want to be able to get it into the newsletters of all the different schools because Sarsfield doesn’t have a school, most of the kids are spread across at least six different primary schools and possibly three different colleges. So we want to be able to share that with the schools so that we’re capturing other kids. There’s a lot of families who have been displaced that have been displaced outside Sarsfield that are living in different locations now, and we want to be able to contact them as well.

HOST:

In a year of COVID, and long, slow recovery from the fires, the Snaps did their job.

In fact, it’s one activity that could keep going even in the middle of COVID restrictions.

They even produced a 2021 calendar from all the work.

With the numbers of photos they got, there are always more to show.

And from June twenty second – that’s this month – they’re holding an exhibition as part of Gippsland’s Winter Festival.

MATTHEW:

Henry. Let’s see your photo.

HENRY:

Mine’s a sort of green-y farm plain, with a tree stump that looks like a cubic version of a cow. And it’s got a blue sky with some burnt trees at the back.

MATTHEW:

And this is taken from the car window at high speed.

HENRY

Yes.

Why do you like it at high speed like this, why do you like the image that comes out?

HENRY:

It just gives it a little bit of a blur, which gives it like a, I don’t know how to say this, good look.

MATTHEW:

Eliza, what do you think about Jack’s photo here?

ELIZA:

I think it’s pretty cool because it’s like a fairy tale when darkness is coming from a wicked witch.

MATTHEW:

So this is like the sky, but there’s the dark clouds and everything like this?

ELIZA:

Yes. It’s really cool. I like it because it’s just like the witch has just said the curse over the land and it’s coming to dark, it’s turning into darkness, and the wicked witch loves it, darkness.

MATTHEW:

Sounds like you could write a story to this photo.

ELIZA:

I love writing stories!

MICHELLE:

What’s the best thing about taking the photos?

HOST:

That’s Michelle again, asking Harry the question.

HARRY:

Um, getting the aim perfect, like the adjustments instead of just having your hands like this, and then the thing’s down there. Just getting it perfect.

MICHELLE:

Ok. That’s pretty cool. Thanks for that. Well, I reckon that’s a pretty cool photo, so – awesome.

HOST:

That’s all from Three Towns. I’m Matthew Abud.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks also to Spoonbill for the music, and to Daniel Bowden for sound engineering support.

View Details

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.

View Details

Cann River locals who stayed, and those who left, all face immense stress.

Speakers:
Gus McKinnon, local contractor
Marija Mrsc, Bush Nurse
Julie Mustard, Tonghi resident
Susie Bady, then-Neighbourhood House Coordinator
Michael O'Brien, Cann Valley resident
Fred and Kerry Marchi, proprietors of Relics Cafe

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.

HOST:

This is the Three Towns podcast, and the second episode about Cann River’s Black Summer. I’m Matthew Abud.

The town in far east Gippsland was surrounded by fire for weeks in January 2020.

Many left – and those who stayed, and those who went, each faced immense but different challenges

Earthworks contractor Gus McKinnon and his crew didn’t let up in fighting the fire.

GUS:

We had a battle for a week. It tried to get in the valley, we had a fair few grass fires. A lot of the places up the valley here, the fire went from the top of the hill to the top of the hill, the ember attacks, then it burnt back down into the valleys from both sides. It’s all right when it’s trickling down slowly but then when you get the wrong day and the wrong wind and it’s off at a hundred mile an hour, and then…

We were lucky, I don’t know if it was the second day or the third day, we got half a dozen fire trucks that came out of Canberra. They were supposed to go to Mallacoota but they were cut off so they stopped in Cann River so they were really good. Them CFA people, they get upset if it’s a dull day and there’s nothing happening. The fire was threatening the telecom tower up at Noorinbee so they sent us up there, I’d sent a bulldozer up there so I went and had a look. Here’s the CFA in the middle of this circle here with the tower and there’s flames one side and there’s smoke and it’s hurting your eyes, and they’re all happy as Larry. They just love it. If there’s not flames and smoke and everything happening they’re not happy, they just love that flames and smoke.

Been firefighting for years and everyone knows what to do, so it was just a matter of trying to keep the fire out of the valley. The theory is you look after Cann River right, the hub at Cann River, but if you can look after the whole valley, you look after the whole valley. But once you get out of the valley up the top end and all the houses outside the valley, you can try to look after them but they’re in the bush. Soon as the fire gets too intense you move back to the valley, and if the heat gets too much in the valley well you move back to Cann River to the school, you’re based at the school so you all sit at the school. But when it dies down you go out and attack it. That’s why we saved Cann River because we went out and attacked the bloody thing. There’s nothing worse than sitting here waiting for it to come. I mean you’re going to sit here waiting until it’s licking the edge of the town. We had a chance to get out on the road and put firebreaks in so that’s, you know, we took it.

HOST:

Last episode told how, after the first fire front passed, locals were urged to get out of town before the next threat arrived.

Many did, but the evacuation – to Orbost, almost an hour to the west – didn’t go as they expected.

Bush Nurse Marija Mrsc explains.

MARIJA:

The convoy left some time in the morning, but then by the afternoon people were calling here saying there’s nothing in Orbost, where do we go? And they were told that there will be a refuge place in Orbost where they would have showers and counselling and all of that would be available, none of that was there. Who’s omission was that, I don’t know, I mean it’s kind of irrelevant you know what I mean. It’s something we can plan better for future, and better for communication or whatever. A number of clients we actually advised to leave, some of them had to leave by bus because they had no other transport, meaning that they weren’t free to attempt to come back earlier, but they had to wait until that very last time when obviously the buses were able to come back in. And that again put people under lots of pressure, not only financially but many of them it was financial as well, because some of them couldn’t stay at the refuge because of their health conditions and all of that. I think the idea might have been that, we’ll get to Orbost, we’ll be there a few days, the front’s going to pass and we can go home. But it wasn’t anything like it, some of them were out for three or four weeks. I think if people knew from the beginning they were going to Bairnsdale, that half of them wouldn’t have left.

HOST:

What was happening to the people still in Cann River, what was happening with those who left, and how to find that out – communication over these days and weeks was a desperate need.

Julie Mustard was one of the people getting urgent requests for information.

JULIE:

Oh I did, I had a lot of people asking me where’s so-and-so and all that. Because I do a Facebook page called Cann River and Surrounds. People that hadn’t been, they were contacting me to ask where their family was, their friends was, because nobody had phones. And there were people ringing up, oh I haven’t spoken to my sister for years and years, is she ok? Can I ring her? And I said, It might be not the time to ring that person at the moment because I knew the girl, and I knew how stressed she was. You couldn’t have coped with somebody that you hadn’t spoken with for years. I said but she’s ok, you know.

HOST:

That summer, Susie Bady was Coordinator at Cann River’s Community Centre, or Neighbourhood House.

Her home though is in Cabbage Tree Creek.

That’s a much smaller hamlet also in the middle of the forest, about half an hour to the west.

SUSIE:

I knew I was going. So it was all about when and where. The turning point for me was a video on social media from the ICC, where he was saying look, it doesn’t look that bad on the map of active fire now but this is the forecast map for tomorrow. At that point, Cann River was on the eastern edge of the forecast map. So they were expecting the fire to blow down from Buchan and cover Orbost and cover Cabbage Treek Creek, Club Terrace. And then the fire started in Wingan, the other side of Cann. Oh well! Get out! And by five o’clock Monday morning me and my three kids and my grandson were driving to Eden. I think I drove the whole way to Eden holding my breath. Got to Eden and let out my breath and went to sleep. And then all the roads out of Eden closed. There was no accommodation anywhere, ended up sleeping on the footy oval, on borrowed sleeping bags. Eden was good at looking after us, they did a lot at the footy oval, but we were all trapped there. I found a few people from Cann River there, that was nice.

HOST:

Susie’s husband Scott didn’t leave.

SUSIE:

He stayed, mostly because of the animals. Again where do you go, what do you do, so our two milking goats were not going to get to Eden. They don’t travel particularly well anyway, so he loaded them on the ute and brought them into Orbost. He was thinking that there would be a refuge in Orbost, when he got to Orbost there was a note sticky-taped to the door saying Sorry, we’ve closed it. And that was all there was. And he wanted to be able to get back in here once that front had come over.

So we were away that first time for eight days. Ended up having to come home via Shepparton and Melbourne, because the roads were all closed to get back any other way, so we went Canberra-Shepparton-Melbourne.

It was awful, it was terrifying. It was utterly terrifying.

Yeah. This was pretty common, for those who had left compared to those who had stayed. I think when you stayed, you saw what was happening. But when you’re hearing it on the radio and you can’t get somebody on the phone, it’s pretty scary. It was scary, and everybody was like that. I camped next to a friend of mine, in the Eden footy oval I was camped next to a friend of mine from Cann River who was feeling the same about her daughter who was a volunteer firefighter. You just don’t know, you just don’t know what’s going on. And you can ring every so often of course, you get telephone communication every so often but the hours in between are pretty terrifying. There were a couple of days I wasn’t sure if I was coming home to a husband or a house.

Yeah. And because the reality on the ground was very very different to the information you got from official channels and that was the hard part about being separated. Because it was obvious to Scott most of the time, not all of the time but most of the time, he felt fairly confident he was going to survive it. But it was not obvious to me from the official channels of information that he was actually going to survive it. And that was the really hard part. There was one morning when I was pretty sure he was going to die, when the forecasts were dire, and I, in those eight weeks had a daily round of phone calls to make to his mother and my mother and everybody was crying that morning, everybody was sobbing waiting for Scott to die and I called him last and he was laughing. I’m as safe as anyone he says.

I mean there were mothers separated from teenage children, there were husbands and wives separated, there were people a long way from all they hold most dear, and the information was so different.

Scott was here by the time the kids and me got home, on the verandah. The whole house was wrapped up in tinfoil, Sisalation, over all the windows. Coming up that driveway and seeing my house still standing and him standing outside it.

It was pretty awesome coming home.

HOST:

Just being able to find out what was happening, was by itself key for people to be able to deal with the stress and trauma.

Many people who lived further up the valley, out of Cann River town, had also left.

Michael O’Brien was one who stayed, and he quickly became a key source of information about what was happening around him.

MICHAEL:

It certainly wasn’t something that was planned. It was just my Facebook page. Everybody else had evacuated, the valley and the town and whatever, and everybody was spread to arseholes, you know they were everywhere. And there was very little information getting out from the area, it was all outside observations but little on-the-ground detail. Because I’m off-grid, my power wasn’t impacted, my internet satellite wasn’t impacted, my access to the news and television wasn’t impacted, I’m quite well set-up, like I’ve got a huge pantry in there and a huge freezer. People commented on all sorts of things but I think they – like I’d always start a report with you know, what are the facts, you know. The temperature is this, the wind is doing that, the visibility is this. Like I also, you know, with the local knowledge I was keeping an eye on people’s private property and giving them updates on how things were going, where the fire was in relation to their property. I was as surprised as any with my five minutes of fame, apparently everybody was tuning in to me, everybody from town, all the emergency services. I wasn’t alarmist, I wasn’t big on the panicking or whatever, I was just, you know, like it’s all pretty good. I remember a couple of posts, you know fire, fire, there’s fire fucking everywhere. The hills are alive with fire. It’s all good. It’s traveling slowly downhill, but you look at it, it’s all fire, it’s everywhere.

HOST:

At one point, the house of Michael’s neighbour was under threat.

MICHAEL:

I went up there, like I kept monitoring their place, keeping an eye on it. And there’s just this line of fire, and it’s coming down and it’s really slow, like it’s really taking its time, but there’s only one way it’s headed, it’s coming down, and it’s coming down to this house. And they only had one hose that didn’t reach the back of the shed, the shed’s on the high side, and the fuck do I do here. All I had was a lighter. So you know, little tufts of grass like this, I started lighting them up. And within about three minutes I’ve got whole trees burning, I’ve got thirty-foot flames, I’ve got Dante’s version of hell right in front of me. You know like the bush was tinder dry, once it got started it was off. And I’m thinking, I’m not sure I’m going to own up to this or not! You know, at a couple of points it was starting to head down the hill down towards the house and I was able to put it out with my boots, bit of fancy tap-dancing for about ten minutes, just keeping it headed in the one direction. And it raced up and it met the other fire, and didn’t get anywhere near their house because of it. And then I owned up to it. Now I tell the story. Otherwise it’d be, Oh I don’t know what the fuck happened there.

For me it was largely an adventure. You know like, each day was an adventure, each day was something new. I had a Chinook land in my paddock here. All that kind of stuff. Fire trucks here, you know. Boy’s own adventure.

HOST:

It took weeks, but finally the roadblocks were removed and the roads re-opened.

Because there wasn’t much fire damage, Cann River doesn’t face the long rebuilding process that other places do.

Many activities just started right up – the school year began, some businesses re-opened.

From talking to people though, the continued impacts are uneven.

For some, the fire is still very much front of mind.

For others, especially with the COVID pandemic, it feels further in the background.

It’s complicated. In a lot of ways, there’s obviously lots to be thankful for.

This is Marija Mrsc.

MARIJA:

And you know, I can’t go but not mention a number of people that took my children under their wing and said did you have breakfast this morning, come over here, I’ll cook breakfast for you. I like to focus on those things. It was rewarding in many many ways, because you know the community and you know people, on a different level, than just being a patient in a hospital or something, you were able to connect with them so much better.

HOST:

Fred and Kerry Marchi from Relics Café also felt the appreciation for what they contributed.

KERRY:

We ended up getting a couple of cards from people and a writeup in the paper, lot of newspapers we’ve had writeups in, The Age, RACV, The Sun.

FRED:

And a few of the fire brigade ones, we got some cards from them to thank us.

KERRY:

The SES.

FRED:

Which is really nice, just a thank-you means so much. When you’re doing 14, 15 hour days and somebody comes up and says thank you, you appreciate it. Means a lot.

KERRY:

Yeah.

HOST:

Locals are of course thankful the town was saved. But the experience also actually drives home future risk.

Perhaps ironically, that’s because of the crucial role played by Gus McKinnon’s contracting business.

KERRY

And that’s the thing too, you know like he’s an old-timer. So he’s been through this before and he’s probably been taught by his father and so forth and so forth. And now you worry about if that happens again, what, does this generation know what to do? Is there going to be that sort of help out there?

FRED:

If it happened now, without the local contractors here, you’d be buggered.

MICHAEL:

This is an issue, this is a real issue. If you take that forestry out, then you take out the business case for a business like Gus. And if Gus’s business doesn’t exist you don’t have those resources to call upon in times of fire. I’m not quite sure what the answer is.

SUSIE:

So it was common knowledge around Cann River, for years before this fire, that should a big fire come now that the timber industry was gone that we were utterly unprepared to manage it. There have been big fires before, and they have been managed, but by the timber industry. When that left, and whatever you want to say about why it left and what the consequences of that were for the forest and for the community, it certainly left us much, much less prepared to fight a bushfire. That’s undebatable.

HOST:

Listening to them, it’s perhaps not too much to say that Cann River’s bushfire resilience still rests on the industry from its past – and the future is far more uncertain.

Susie Bady says trying to get a response to this has been a struggle.

SUSIE:

There was a lot of floundering trying to get somebody’s attention to it. There was a bit of a lobbying campaign, it took a while to get coordinated and to coalesce. The area immediately around the Cann River township has areas that are managed by the Council, the Catchment Authority, Parks, DELWP, and Regional Roads Victoria. To navigate the boundaries between those six bureaucracies was just completely beyond us. So we went straight to our State MP, and started lobbying him to pay somebody to look after this stuff. And she’s a community-based bushfire management officer. And we got her – about three weeks before the fire.

HOST:

For Susie, this shows in stark relief, some broader realities Cann River confronts.

SUSIE:

The sense of being completely abandoned by the government bureaucracies and the world out there and the greenies from the city or even the politicians from the city or the university-educated people, that’s quite strong, and where that emergency preparedness stuff sat was, with that local self-efficacy and practical knowledge and handiness, and ability, was feeling really stymied by the fact that we’re surrounded by all of these hectares of publicly-managed bush, so these blokes could see what needed to be done and they knew how to do it but they weren’t allowed. And that’s how they felt about it.

HOST:

Gus McKinnon’s own thoughts on this are pretty clear.

GUS:

Why we have X amount of assets around town and they’re not maintained and you’ve got to have trees right up to the edge of them. You’ve got a mobile phone tower and you’re already in enough trouble and then the tower burns down and your telephone goes out, you’re in bloody big trouble then. So you know, prior planning, your seven p’s, but it doesn’t happen, so.

I’m trying to put a big dam in Cann River, put a big dam in so we’ve got a big water supply so we put sprinklers on the school and the Cann oval on the Hall. If we had the oval all set up with sprinklers, the sports ground with sprinklers, and plenty of water you’d just go and park there, you wouldn’t have to go anywhere. I mean I can’t get the dam put in because there’s do much red tape at the moment. You can’t put it there and you can’t do that and you can’t do this. Just leave early, that’s – where you supposed to go?

HOST:

Heading into another fire season, it’s the need to learn from what’s happened – not just in general terms, but deeply, at the local level – that jumps out to me.

That’s not just about learning how to deal with the physical risk. It’s also about the community’s overall wellbeing.

Marija Mrsc again.

MARJIA:

The incident was so massive, and it was so widespread, that I don’t think anybody could have been prepared for it. And that’s to be really fair, to say that. I think there were, when they realized how massive this is, it just became kind of damage control. We do what we can, right now. It’s so unpredictable, it’s nobody’s, you can’t sort of blame and say it’s them or this, it’s not, it’s how it happened. But we learn from it and say ok how can we better be prepared for future. But I do see events that created unnecessary either panic or additional stress, mental health issues. People came back here three or four weeks later feeling quite on-edge. You have this mixed feelings, you know, was it right thing to leave, and not to be here as part of the community. Some people were, I guess they weren’t blamed, but they were, the expectation was for them to stay. I don’t know why because we’re all individuals we all make our own decisions. I certainly, my plan wasn’t ever to stay for the whole entire time, but this year that’s how it happened.

HOST:

If you ask Gus, though, he’s planning on never needing to do this again.

GUS:

Oh well my back’s a bit crook and I’m about up to retirement, I’m 73 next week. I’ve been trying to sell out for the last couple of years. Had a farm here, sold the farm. I want to go live beside the sea. If there’s a fire coming, you can’t go wrong if you’ve got one foot in the water. Don’t keep one foot in the grave, just keep one foot in the water, should be right shouldn’t you, hunky dory. I’d like to just be on the beach on the edge of the water watching the smoke going up over the hill thinking some other poor bugger’s got to chase it. I’ve been chasing it most of my life.

HOST:

Thanks for listening.

Next episode we head back down the highway – to Sarsfield, in the western part of East Gippsland.

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.

View Details

When the Black Summer fires reached Cann River, local residents say one man and his team were the reason the town was saved.

Speakers:
Julie Mustard, Tonghi resident
Michael O'Brien, Cann Valley resident
Susie Bady, then-Neighbourhood House Coordinator
Gus McKinnon, local contractor
Marija Mrsc, Bush Nurse
Fred and Kerry Marchi, proprietors of Relics Cafe

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.

JULIE:

Years ago when the contractors lived here, they knew what they were doing. We didn’t need a CFA as much. We only needed the CFA truck when there was a house fire, not a bush fire. Only for one guy that was left here. He just pulled his men together, and they did it.

MICHAEL:

He and his crew probably had the greatest impact, more than the CFA, more than anybody else. It was them that saved the town.

SUSIE:

We’re surrounded by all of these hectares of publicly-managed bush, so these blokes could see what needed to be done and they knew how to do it and they weren’t allowed. And in the end what happened was exactly how they called it, it just played out exactly how they said it would, and it was only that last independent contractor who actually saved the town because he could move his dozers where he wanted.

HOST:

The person everyone is talking about is Gus McKinnon. He’s the earth-moving contractor in Cann River, and that’s where we are this episode.

Welcome to Three Towns, in the far east of East Gippsland. I’m Matthew Abud.

Last January the town of Cann River and the Cann Valley were surrounded by fire, and cut off for weeks.

But even under this threat, the town and valley lost very few buildings – a big contrast to many other places.

When the people I met talked about how they got through the fire, just about everyone mentioned Gus. His depot’s just in town.

MATTHEW:

This is the Toyota with the fire pump?

GUS:

Yeah. I set my own Toyotas up, put tool boxes either side, put my own fire pump on, 400 litres of water, so you’re all prepared. Got another fire extinguisher there. Just tow fuel tankers. [Phone rings] Hi Jude.

JUDE, PHONE:

You coming home for lunch?

GUS:

Oh yep, righto. Oh, no, I won’t worry, I’m supposed to go out and meet Roland, he’s gone out to the farm.

JUDE, PHONE:

He’s where?

GUS:

I’ll come home shortly, I’ll be there shortly.

JUDE, PHONE:

All right.

GUS:

Righto. Ok. See you.

MATTHEW:

It sounds like I should let you go for lunch.

GUS:

Oh no, I’m not worried about lunch. I’m living on painkillers at the moment so I don’t feel like eating.

HOST:

Cann River used to be a logging town, with several sawmills in operation. The last of them closed around ten years ago.

Now about two hundred people live in the town itself, and under four hundred if you include the valley and nearby areas.

Most of those I asked, say cheap housing is what brings in new residents these days.

The whole area is heavily forested. Leading up to last New Year’s Eve the threat was high.

GUS:

Everybody was pretty worried because every time a fire starts now it burns the bloody town out. So it didn’t come that day, it was fine, but the phone rang about 3 o’clock next morning and they the fire’s just out the road here. So I get out of bed and my son’s here so we get out of bed and we go, we went up the Princes Highway top of Tonghi. It was already ember attacks at the top of Tonghi and the fire was just spreading out in a circle in the bush. It wasn’t going real fierce, it was just getting started.

And I come back out here for a drive and by this time it had already jumped over the Old Coast Road and it was burning pretty fierce on the edge of the road and I thought, well as soon as it gets down over the Blue Nose and gets into the bushland just out of Cann River here, where the caravan park is, when it gets into that bush in the caravan park it’s just going to shower Cann River with embers and Cann River’s going to be in trouble, or if the fire gets into the farms, the whole of the valley’s gone because it’s just going to go up the valley on the grass and it’s just going to fan out from the valley everywhere. And I thought to myself we’d be able to get the machines through the Old Coast Road and get back onto the farms this side of the Old Coast Road to put fire breaks in for the whole town, to cut it off so it didn’t get into the bush at the camping park. So we had all the gear here and I suppose the secret to the success of this story was that we were totally cut off from everyone else and there was no red tape at all. No red tape to deal with, just whatever you thought to do, go do it.

So we took the wheel loader out, we took the grader out, we took the bulldozer out. Whatever gear we could round up we took out there. The boys all started cutting off the bottom side of the highway. I took my dozer out and hopped off the top side of the highway and started tracking up the edge of the farm land, putting a fire break in along the edge of the farm land. I wasn’t there long and DELWP arrived with their grader and they’ve got blokes. So we cut the bottom side off down and back into the river, and we went the top side all the way through the farm to the West Cann Road. You’re probably not talking a lot of people, there was only the normal crew on the DELWP here, which is probably only half a dozen people, and I had half a dozen, so it’s probably only a dozen people.

HOST:

Julie Mustard and her husband live in Tonghi, just a few minutes’ drive west from Cann River.

JULIE:

It was the storm that hit that night, about half past one, and I got up and I’m standing on the verandah there. And I thought it was falling stars, and I thought no it can’t be because it was smoky, we had smoke everywhere for days. And I thought oh it must be an aeroplane. And I thought no it can’t be that either. And I thought Oh there’s somebody driving up out of Lower Tonghi, there’s a road that comes up and I could see the headlights, but it wasn’t. They must have been fire balls because it started down there, that’s where it started, that went into Cann. So it was a completely different fire than what we were expecting it to come from.

HOST:

Cann River school was the local ‘safer place’ of last resort.

So Julie and her husband headed there, along with many others.

JULIE:

It wasn’t very orderly at all, it wasn’t. Because one brought their dog in, everybody was told to keep their animals out. Once one person brought their dog in, everyone brought their animals in. And I was one of them. Because Gruffy, he’d never been in the car, he’s always been on the property so he was very stressed outside. People were just mingling about, some people were quite upset. There was people in the hallway, there was people in different rooms. People tended to be in their own little group and go to a room. It wasn’t orderly done at all. Some people had mattresses, I don’t know where the mattresses come, I think they might have come from the SES and been brought into the building. And some people had mattresses on the hall, up and down the hall. And really, the situation of everyone being at the school, it could’ve been a lot of those people the next morning could have gone back to the houses, and come back for their food and stayed the night if they didn’t feel safe. But people were just living in the school and it was really, not very nice I don’t think.

HOST:

Several people had already left Cann River before it was directly threatened.

But gathering the information and weighing up the risk to decide what to do, wasn’t always straightforward.

Marija Mrsc is the town’s Bush Nurse.

MARIJA:

I remember thinking, do I make a decision, what kind of decision will I make. I had two children with me. And because of the high demand professionally down here, because there were a number of people when they were evacuated from the campgrounds that really desperately needed nursing services. Some were quite acutely unwell actually and the others just needed lots of reassurance basically. I made a decision for my children and I to come down here on that Sunday morning, so we wouldn’t have to drive, I live fifteen minutes out of town. I guess I was feeling comfortable enough with the idea that we’re going to be pretty safe. But that didn’t last very long I guess.

You know even a couple of days before it happened we were getting reassurance that, we’re getting the tourists out, because we don’t the overload in the event if something happens but Cann River is pretty safe. And I think the fire that started at Wingan threw everybody out because everyone was thinking that this one on this side here it’s going to be safe and it’s going to be ok, but when that one started it kind of threw everybody out a little bit and it was only a day before, a couple of days before.

With the app being sent out and that, I think the notification probably caused a little bit more confusion with people you know, because initially we were thinking of it’s referring to tourists only, and then later on when things started happening and obviously people were listening to the radios and that, so we ended up all going down to the school and yeah, it was quite an ordeal down at the school actually, with the number of people and dogs. Look all in all I think people were really trying to do their very best and compose themselves. I think, there were some incidences but I think it’s just to be expected considering that everyone was under pressure and the stress.

HOST:

Fred and Kerry Marchi run the Relics Café, which stayed open for the duration.

They’re pretty much always on deck there. It didn’t matter if I dropped in for early breakfast, or came by just before they closed at night.

FRED:

They’d have meetings at the school.

KERRY:

They’d have everyone on the tennis courts there and tell us what was happening and if you’re going to go, go now because if you thought the other day was bad this is going to be a hundred times worse you’re going to die.

FRED:

That’s what they said.

KERRY:

That’s what they said. I nearly started crying

FRED:

Kerry nearly started crying, she said oh what do you think, if we’ve got to go we’ve got to go. So we got in the car, I told a few people we were going to go, and we got in the car, I drove back home, got into the car port, I looked at Kerry and said, I can’t go. I just can’t go. And she said why and I said, well how’s everyone going to eat? People, the contractors, I said I can’t go. I said if you want to go you go with Anna and I’ll stay. I don’t know what I was going to do on my own. So we looked at each other and we said, no we’ll stay. Luckily we convinced the girl to go so she got on the bus and went. So we just stayed. I just couldn’t do it, I was sick in the stomach.

KERRY:

Yeah, we were ready to hand our keys over to DELWP to the shop, and just go and help yourself, and then we thought, nup.

FRED:

I couldn’t do it. That still brings tears to my eyes, I just could not do it.

KERRY:

Yep. Yep. I said to him, we’ve been through a lot now together.

FRED:

That was in the back of my mind though, gee I hope nothing happens now, I hope nothing happens. [But we survived, and we’re proud of it. We work hard and we’re proud of it.

KERRY:

Yep.

HOST:

Bush Nurse Marija Mrsc remembers very clearly, the push to get more people to leave town.

MARIJA:

The first impact was on that Tuesday morning, Monday night Tuesday morning, and then by Thursday I believe the first convoy left. And that’s one of the things that I really have significant concerns about, was the message that has been delivered to the community. The alarmism, the panic that was created, it was absolutely insane. And it was done by CFA community liaison officers. None of them were local community members, they came from down the line. You know, things like if you don’t go with this convoy on Thursday you will die, because the second wave’s going to be nothing.. I still recall his words, if you were here on Tuesday morning and what you experienced, that was nothing. The experience that people had on Tuesday morning was quite horrific actually. And it was, yeah, quite a number of people panicked, left, some regretted leaving mind you because they left their loved ones behind here. It was quite intense, I think the whole dynamic was quite intense. The panic that was created, I mean I had three cases after that, that people that had such severe anxiety that I actually had concerns, would they be able to drive themselves out in a convoy. One had to be medicated, the others I think either took something they had or whatever, I can’t remember now. It was quite significant actually, it was was quite a lot of panic. The guy who came afterwards, I can’t remember, he might have been from the ICC, facts were presented. This is what we’re looking at, this is what we can’t predict because we actually don’t know, and this is the worst-case scenario. And it’s your choice. So ot was factual, it was good, there was no emotion involved to that extent that people would really panic or become anxious or whatever.

HOST:

People have so many reflections on how the stress of this emergency was handled, and how people made decisions – everyone has their own distinct story about this.

One that I’ve heard a few times, is that it was always clear to locals that many people simply wouldn’t leave.

That might be because of community ties, or maybe out of professional duty, or maybe because they simply couldn’t afford it.

So a question that’s been asked, is whether this can become a clear part of any future bushfire plans for the town.

Because despite the risk, it will happen again. Many people won’t go. Even if the official policy says to leave early.

Fred and Kerry Marchi – along with Julie Mustard at the beginning – set about getting everyone fed.

At one point, that included grabbing an SES food truck for a while to do cooking at the school.

KERRY:

We had power

FRED:

Yep

KERRY:

And then the power went out. So then we started cooking under lights

FRED:

With a torch

KERRY:

With a torch. And then that got too hard and I see the SES guy at the roundabout and I thought, uh huh. So I ran over to him and we went down to the school for four days and then the power came back on and everyone said, oh can you open up, we need a real coffee. So that’s when we said yep, right, we’ll come back, and at that stage I had no cooks or anything because they all evacuated. SO then it was just egg and bacon rolls and things that us two could do on our own. And then I managed to get a permit for the cook and Fred’s sister and then they came back.

MATTHEW:

That’s a permit to be able to come back in?

KERRY:

Yes, because everyone was blocked out for three weeks, it took them to open the road up. Like we were doing 120 meals a night, and then we were doing lunch packs

FRED:

And breakfastses, and anything up to 200 hundred lunch packs we had to make. We wouldn’t have been able to handle it, to the public as well.

KERRY:

Yeah. We did have another lady, Marion, she got evacuated from Mallacoota by the Chinook, and somehow she ended up in Cann River, they landed her here, and she’d worked here before, she was an old-timer so she helped us out too. Then we had a CFA guy, he was peeling potatoes.

FRED:

Yeah some of them were good. I just looked around and next minute there’s a guy standing at the sink peeling potatoes. Oh I’m just helping you out. Thanks mate.

KERRY:

Then if we needed supplies they would drop them off at the DELWP office in Orbost, and the army would bring them out in their tanks.

FRED:

We were getting desperate at one stage, we couldn’t get food in and it was running out and running out. And we said to DELWP, unless you want to eat dim sims and chicken strips, you better try and help us out with food.

KERRY:

Get the truck in.

FRED:

Get the truck in, and they did.

KERRY:

So they’d escort it in.

HOST:

It’s true that Cann River didn’t suffer the same levels of physical damage as many other places.

But being cut off for so many weeks created plenty of stress.

Julie Mustard remembers some of the fallout.

JULIE:

And smokes! Oh my God, that got real big issue. None of them people had smokes. And you could imagine what that was like, so you had to have a secret squirrel, that was coming through the road blocks, which was the contractors. Yeah, I forgot about that, you just reminded me. So you had a secret squirrel, and then at one stage, the local police, I think it was him, ended up with some cigarettes brought into him or given to him, and he was doling them out, because it was very stressful for some people that had emotional trouble before the fire, and then when they couldn’t get their smokes it got bigger. Yeah, it was quite – I don’t smoke but my husband does. So he had to have a secret squirrel.

MATTHEW:

Did he have a regular supply?

JULIE:

Yeah he has a secret squirrel. But as far as getting the food in that didn’t happen.

KERRY:

Cigarettes.

FRED:

The town, the whole town. There was cigarettes getting brought in by helicopter, actually handing free packets of cigarettes out, to keep the locals calm.

KERRY:

I think the copper had some cigarettes too, at one stage.

FRED:

Handing them out to people

KERRY:

Handing them out, and you see people in the corner, hiding and lighting up a cigarette. People pounce on you.

FRED:

I got the forestry guy to get me a couple of packets of cigarettes and I made a big mistake, I opened the packet up at the school well next minute, it was like a swarm of bees coming at me. Can I have a cigarette?

HOST:

Marija Mrsc and her children stayed at the Bush Nurse centre.

Over the years that’s had sprinklers and other fire protection installed.

There were more peak fire days after that first front.

MARIJA:

So we stayed here at the centre, and the following week, we went, because the police force was pulled out for their safety, they were all pulled out. So all emergency services were pulled out, and there was a number of people evacuated already. I didn’t feel it was professionally wise for me to stay back, considering the people had stayed back, I was kind of thinking ok, there’s the potential there for problems, and the police is not here, so those couple of nights, Friday night and Saturday night, I left, and then I came back Sunday morning. I went out to New South and I came back Sunday morning, and that’s when our local police came back as well, on the Sunday morning so.

HOST:

The same as other communities all around the country, many pulled together and looked out for each other at the peak of the crisis.

MARIJA:

To see that people really cared and put so much effort. You know my kids were pulled aside and asked, have you had breakfast? Come over here we’ll make sure you get fed and all of that sort of stuff. It was very, it was really nice to see that people were really kind of working together and, sure, again, personalities, incidences, whatever, but all in all I thought it was very, it was a nice way to see the community come together and people that hadn’t spoken to each other in years that I was aware of, all of a sudden actually spoke to each other and went to deliver a meal or do something or whatever, which was really nice. It didn’t last very long mind you, but it was lovely, lovely to see.

HOST:

Meanwhile Gus McKinnon and his crew still had their hands full.

GUS:

I was up the valley, one day we were putting out the grass fires at the farms, Walkers’ farms, and got that under control and then come back into Cann River when it was coming out of the box forest like a bloody train, at a hundred mile an hour, jumped over the highway and got into the farm. Then we’re flat out, we’ve got water on, my grader turns up, you haven’t got time to cut the fences he’s going through the fences a hundred mile an hour and there’s fencing wire going everywhere. You’ve just got to put earth and tracks in to try and cut it off, yeah well we saved the valley again, it didn’t catch fire. We just went out and attacked it, yeah. Then we had a bit of a job for the next week, two weeks.

HOST:

Over those weeks, residents from the town and valley were scattered far and wide.

What that meant for the people involved, and how it played out, is for the next episode.

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.

View Details

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

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.

View Details

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

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.

View Details

The Black Summer fires threatened Buchan for weeks before they arrived. The town used the time to get as prepared as possible.

Speakers:

Kate Hodge, CFA volunteer

Anne Brewer, Buchan Bush Nurse

Suzanne Davies, former Neighbourhood House Coordinator

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.

HOST:

Hello, and welcome – this is the Three Towns podcast. I’m Matthew Abud.

It’s just about one year since the enormous Black Summer Fires.

This short series is about how three local communities in East Gippsland confronted and responded to those fires.

It’s about some of the things that make communities unique, and strong, and how a disaster like last summer, can bring this out.

For this first episode, let’s head up to Buchan, in the East Gippsland hills

So I’m standing above Buchan Valley in July, the middle of winter.

If you’d come up and stood here and looked here - it’s almost as if the fires didn’t happen.

The paddocks are green from winter rain, and hills roll into the distance.

Except you would have driven through kilometres and kilometres of burned forest to get up here.

And if you look around the hilltops, you can see skeletons of burned trees all across the skyline.

The regrowth is amazing. But the devastating impact is also everywhere, when you start to look.

Down below Buchan town is home to some 300 people. When you include the surrounding area that goes up to around 550.

Most people including me, know about the town and valley because of the famous Buchan Caves – it’s a favourite tourist destination.

There are farms all over the district – and it used to have a couple of timber mills, but they closed in recent years.

The main street is quiet. There’s a roadhouse, a general store, and the pub – most of the customers are contractors working on the post-bushfire cleanup.

Take a right and there’s the kindergarten, the Neighbourhood House, and the rec – or recreation reserve.

I’ve come to find out how different communities experienced the fire – which covers a lot of ground.

It includes how they prepared, how they responded on the day – and how they’re going now.

KATE:

Pretty much from early December it was always a question of not if the fire was going to come to us because we had four major spaces around us that had big fires and a huge amount of fire in the landscape. It was pretty much just a question of when, then.

HOST:

Kate Hodge is one of the first people I meet up with. She’s a member of the local CFA and the SES, as well as being on numerous local committees.

For around six weeks leading up to Christmas last year, Buchan was surrounded by fire, and they worked hard to get themselves organized.

One of the things I wanted to ask about, is what this preparation looked like.

It’s obvious to say that if a community is prepared, it has a much better chance to survive and recover – but what makes that work at a community level?

KATE:

DELWP and CFA had done a lot of work with earthmoving equipment to clear spaces and to try and make sure that in the town zones that there was as much fuel as possible pushed up and out of the road, with some varied success in that. But for the most part we had lots of mineral earth breaks which just helped us to get opportunities where the fire slowed.

We’d had a lot of practice runs and we’d done a lot of work getting ourselves to a point where we were as organized as we could be and when it did eventually arrive, most people were waiting.

HOST:

Buchan’s always lived with fire – even more so in the last couple of decades.

And with each fire that came through, the residents of the valley learned more about how to prepare and how to respond.

ANNE:

So if I think about it, my first major experience with fires was in either 1965 or 1968, I’m just not sure where it was. But the fire actually came from Mount Elizabeth down towards the town and it burnt the chook-house off the back of our house. So that was my first memory of fires here.

HOST:

Anne Brewer is the town’s Bush Nurse.

Her job means she has to pay attention to a lot more than just her own bushfire plan.

As the town’s learned from different fire seasons, the details of that job have changed over the years.

ANNE:

Now we worked really hard probably for about five years, we’ve actually targeted a lot of particularly the elderly or lesser-able people to actually make sure they’ve got fire plans. And to actually get them to think what the reality of that fire plan is. We’ve had table-top exercises, we’ve had all sorts of things. So it’s about having those discussions with them, How’s your fire plan going? Have you revisited it, have you checked what’s changed? Because initially when we did it they said Oh my neighbour will come and help and I said, Well you know, what about things like, if they fire’s coming they need to protect their own stuff? Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Oh well, their kids will help then. Well no, their kids aren’t here now. You know, so it’s talking and trying to come up with doable solutions. Because we’ve had a few fire events in a row, a lot of the elderly had realized, or the less able, had realized there was a value in perhaps relocating if the event was significant or if they were in the firing line, particularly those on outlying farms. And people were more prepared in their thought processes. I know we had one particular person who relocated probably a dozen times over that period. No belief that there was any danger for them, but was more than happy to go if it was going to make it easier for me not to have to worry about her. And that, you know, that’s a trust thing that you develop over time. And pleasingly this year, a lot of our less-able people were more than happy to leave. They needed a bit of a shove but they actually left. Which potentially, it saved lives.

HOST:

Kate Hodge also highlights the same thing – how people’s safety depended not just on physically fighting the fire, but on working together across the whole community.

KATE:

So I think there was very much a collective goal to get organized and make sure that you know, everybody had someone that was supporting them. There was also that need to make sure that we had everybody covered as far as who their buddy was going to be, who was going to check in on them, and that there was going to be that opportunity to support people in this space.

HOST:

These are the kinds of things that really jump out to me.

I think like a lot of us, I’m familiar with some of the measures a single household needs to take, to prepare for fire – we have our own fire plan at home.

But questions like ‘Who’s your fire buddy?’, or dialogues where people ask one another, ‘How will you react if things change in this way, or what about if they change that way?’

For me these give an insight into how a community like Buchan has adapted over many years.

It points to the level to which they all prepared not just as individuals, but as a community.

A big fire year was 2003, 17 years before last season’s Black Summer. Many people I talked to in Buchan, spoke about those fires as a marker, with a whole lot lessons learned.

SUZANNE:

I remember back in 2003 when we had seven weeks of being under siege, and it was coming, and it was going, depending on the way the winds were and the temperatures.

HOST:

That’s Suzanne Davies, who lives half an hour north of Buchan, in the hamlet of W Tree.

In 2003 she ran the Buchan Neighbourhood House – and back then, preparing a community for bushfire was very different from today.

SUZANNE:

There were no mobile phones. Not many people could even get the ABC radio. We didn’t have TV. The township had a little bit of TV but it was going wrong, you know there was always something wrong with it.

Because these fires were growing and growing, and because they’d come so close and then went the other way again, but of course they were going to other communities that we knew people there, so we were still worried about them. I started realising that we really needed the communication for people to make their own decisions on a daily basis, because things were chopping and changing all the time. So I thought, well W Tree actually had their own little phone tree, and I thought Well what a great idea. So I decided to set it up right across the district and that’s 12 communities, apart from Buchan, farming communities outlying.

We had group leaders – say if they were in town they would come to the Neighbourhood House, and that photocopier would nearly melt down over seven weeks of the information they would be handing to the people on their branch of the tree which was their street or a couple of streets that they’d take on. And the outlying areas, I managed to get fax machines, and we faxed that information, definitely once a day, sometimes twice, there was even a time when it was three times a day. And then they would get on the phone and they would ring right through. And that last person would have to ring back, and made sure that everyone was getting that information even if they weren’t home.

HOST:

For Suzanne, one of the biggest changes during the 2003 fires, was greater collaboration between agencies like the CFA, and local community resources like the Neighbourhood House where she worked.

SUZANNE:

It was through Craig Lapsley and a guy called David Emprey and they were both working at that stage in the CFA Communications Team in Glen Waverly, they’d come to Orbost. I don’t know how, it must have been the bush telegraph, they found out what we were doing, I never said anything, I was too busy. I got a phone call from David at first, saying that they were coming over with satellite phones from Telstra because Telstra was lending, loaning in the remote areas to people the satellite phones. And they’d heard about what we were doing there and could they pop in and I said Of course you can, love to see you. They thought what we were doing was a really good idea and they saw the back room said Could we have the CFA Communications Team here and I said Of course you can. Absolutely. So they did, they set up, their own. And then we had strike teams all around the Neighbourhood House.

We actually helped them, but they helped us, it was together because we had local knowledge. Virtually everybody that we knew, from Buchan, Murindal, W Tree Gelantipy, Seldom Seen, Black Mountain, out to Bete Bolong, out to Timbarra, Jilangool, Buchan south, all those communities. It was an extraordinary time under very difficult circumstances.

HOST:

Phone trees aren’t the main way things get done these days, with emergency apps and Facebook pages getting information out.

But that doesn’t make this story less relevant.

The point is that the experience everyone had, working together and getting to know each other, made the changes after 2003 more profound, and far reaching.

Those changes included demanding and getting proper local mobile phone coverage.

And they also meant increasing the role of community resources like the Neighbourhood House.

Here’s Anne Brewer again.

ANNE:

So through the fire preparedness stuff that came through those 03 fires there was a lot of changes. As a town we developed up in 2005 we had our first community bushfire plan, and we flicked a little bit of flood in there as well because we go from fire to flood to fire to flood. We’re waiting for the flood now because everything else has happened. But we did that as part of a combined thing within the town, so it involved a lot of agencies. We’ve had a lot of licks of fire at Buchan over that time, and we’ve had a lot of time where we’ve waited six to eight weeks being told you’re going to be burnt every day, and it hasn’t happened. And we were aware that complacency was starting to come in, like it’ll never come in, it’ll never come in. Some of that’s around the geography, a lot of that’s around the history. And if you look at fire behaviour, it’s always been said that the fire runs up the hill it doesn’t run down the hill, and we’re down. Doesn’t matter which angle you come from, we’re down. And potentially a lot of the fires through history have gone from one hill over to the other hill and missed the valley

HOST:

Anne says she also didn’t believe the town would be hit – but she lives right on the edge of the township.

So she wasn’t going to sit and wait, to find out if a big fire reached her or not.

ANNE:

My plan was never to stay if the fire was this side of Mount Elizabeth and uncontrolled, and I had a sense of when I would need to leave, which I certainly did that Monday morning, I just got up and went outside and came back in and said, I’m going. Now.

HOST:

Thanks for listening.

Next time, Buchan faces the fire – and the community connections are again key to defending the town.

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.

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Matthew Abud