Authors: Adrian Hyland
Kinglake-350 (2 page)
GIRLS AND HORSES IN THE FIRE
(Kinglake, 7 Feb 2009)
Nothing will come between them,
those girls and their horses;
not wind or rain, nor pillars of fire.
If a hand should flick a match
amongst leaves or trunks implode
with the weight of heat, or lightning
blast the wasted trees, still they’d run,
these girls, through conflagrations,
wreathed by flames and embers.
Girls who run towards horses in fire,
may you find your home in the equine stars:
Pegasus, Equuleus. Hush, sleep now.
Lisa Jacobson
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thousands of people were involved in the Black Saturday disaster; hundreds of heroic deeds were performed. In focusing on the actions of a handful of individuals, I have attempted to produce an account of the day that will stand as a tribute to them all.
We were lucky at first.
At the end of January 2009 the State of Victoria sweltered through three successive record-breaking days of 43 degrees-plus heat. In Melbourne the mercury climbed to 45.1 degrees Celsius, the third-hottest day on record. Birds fell from the sky, bitumen bubbled underfoot. The air conditioners roared from Werribee to Frankston, and sweaty citizens flocked to the beaches. And at first, apart from small outbreaks in bushland at Delburn and Bunyip State Park, the threat of fire remained latent.
But the long blast of heat, the culmination of twelve years of drought, was a critical factor in what followed. It gave the fuel in the forests that final nudge, drying it out, pushing it closer to ignition point. Even thick logs and rainforest gullies, which under normal conditions would not burn, were parched and ready to contribute their stored energy to a conflagration. A spark was all the bush would need.
There was a brief respite for the city of Melbourne itself at the start of February, as a sliver of cold air from the Southern Ocean drifted in and briefly cooled things down. But the synoptic set-up remained in place, hammering the rest of the state with one 40-plus day after another. Weather forecasters, scientists and fire chiefs were horrified at the potential disaster they saw building, and the warnings issued by the Bureau of Meteorology became increasingly strident.
On February 6, Premier John Brumby’s earnest features filled the Friday evening screens.
If you don’t need to go out, don’t go out…If you don’t need to travel, don’t travel. Don’t go on the roads…If you can stay at home, stay at home. If you’ve got relatives who are elderly, if you’ve got friends, if you’ve got neighbours, please call on them. Ring them…It’s going to be a terrible day.
A weather balloon released four hundred kilometres to the west in Mount Gambier at 4 am the next morning detected high-altitude winds blowing at eighty to a hundred kilometres per hour. It was an ominous indication that they would descend and lash Victoria later in the day.
Fire chief Russell Rees had the disasters of Black Friday (1939) and Ash Wednesday (1983) in mind when he compared the weather forecast with some of the ‘classic fire days’ of the state’s history and said, ‘The weather predicted is in fact worse. We are in uncharted territory.’
The next morning the
Age
carried the prescient headline:
The sun rises on our ‘worst day in history’.
Black Saturday. Our luck was about to run out.
Roger Wood rolls over, drifting up from the bottom of a deep blue dream. He groans. Somewhere outside there’s a bubble of voices, kids laughing, up and about at the crack of dawn. It feels that way to him anyhow; he worked until 2 am last night, got home in the small hours. He’s tempted to catch a little more shut-eye but then he remembers about today. Not a day to be lying in bed.
A screen door slams, a dog barks. He draws himself up, stretches, steps into the shower. When he comes out into the living room, still buttoning his police uniform, seven-year-old Darcy looks up from the couch, laughing. His arms are full of wriggling guinea pigs. ‘Dad…’
‘Morning, mate.’
‘Hey Dad, if we leave, I’m taking ’em with me, okay?’
Roger smiles at that. Last time they evacuated because of the weather, Darcy took the guineas with him and they had babies. Maybe he’s hoping it’ll happen again.
Jo, his wife, and nine-year-old Tiahn are at the table. Kasey, the eight-year-old, comes in from feeding the chooks. He joins the family for a bowl of cereal, adds a handful of strawberries from the garden. Jo’s been on the go for hours, battening down the hatches, watering, soaking, covering up, preparing the garden for what threatens to be a day from hell.
‘Should we feed the horses?’ asks Tiahn. At her age, horses are never far from her mind. The equine population on the property fluctuates depending on what old strays they’ve brought into the fold. There’s eight of them at the moment, ranging from a Shetland to a Clydesdale, and a pair of rescue pigs acquired from Edgar’s Mission.
He looks outside. ‘Nah, not yet.’ The wind is already bristling the paddocks, stirring angrily, whipping up the dust. ‘It’ll just blow away. We’ll feed ’em tonight.’ He looks towards the dam. The day’s going to be a shocker, and the fire-fighting tank has been out of water since the pump down there started playing up. He has to go to work soon; he won’t be here to help out if a fire comes.
He checks the clock. Time for a few quick repairs? Emphasis on the quick.
He steps out onto the veranda, pauses for a moment to look around. His home is an eight-hectare property on the outskirts of St Andrews, in the foothills of the Kinglake Ranges, about forty kilometres from the centre of Melbourne. He bought the farm twenty-five years ago, when he was only twenty-one. He and Jo raised their family here and you couldn’t imagine a better place to do it. The kids can run wild, feel the wind in their hair, the grass under their feet. Roger has always loved horses, and he’s passed that on to his kids: sometimes they spend all day galloping round the farm, taking long trail rides up through the surrounding hills. Birthday parties, family gatherings, he’ll hitch the trailer up to the tractor and take them on hay rides, laughter eddying in their wake.
Roger and Jo have been together for thirteen years. Good ones, but not without grief. Their first child, a boy named Jesse, was diagnosed with a malignant rhabdoid tumour at eleven months, and they watched over him helplessly until he died four and a half months later. Roger and Jo both know the value of their relationship, their family.
The three youngest go to school in Strathewen, nine or ten kilometres away. It isn’t the closest option, but they chose it because it’s a tight-knit little school, nestled in the bush and blessed with beautiful gardens and caring teachers; more of an extended family than a school. The oldest boy, Dylan, has just completed Year 11 at Eltham High. On weekends the family might wander down to the market, meet up with friends, maybe enjoy some Thai food, catch a bit of country music at the pub.
There’ll be no socialising today, though. Roger has to get to work, and in this weather there won’t be much of a market anyway. There won’t be much of anything except this withering bloody heat. The forecast is the worst he’s ever heard. The worst anybody has ever heard: temperatures in the mid-forties, ripping northerly winds, humidity barely registering.
Mid-forties? Can that be right? Coming on top of the three days over forty a week ago—and the twelve years of drought before that— it is a day to strike fear into the heart of anybody in rural Victoria.
Wood jumps into the four-wheel-drive and heads down to the dam. Starts up the pump, a Honda twin-impeller, which runs for a few seconds then dies. He tries again. Same result.
Damn. Fuel blockage. He’s got neither the time nor the tools to fix that right now. He can’t be late for work, not today. He drives back up to the house, finds Jo out on the veranda.
‘Get it going, Rodge?’
‘Sorry, hon; no time.’
She isn’t impressed; he knows that look. ‘I’ll try to nip down some time during the day, make sure you got water.’ He checks his watch. ‘Gotta go.’
He puts on his equipment belt, retrieves the Smith and Wesson .38 from the safe, slips it into its holster. He climbs aboard the Pajero and heads north-east towards Kinglake.
As Roger Wood drives up the thirteen-kilometre road that locals call The Windies (with a long
i
, because it winds) he finds his thoughts drifting towards fire. Naturally enough, since the day feels like it’s on fire already.
He thinks, as he sometimes does when making this ascent, what a bugger of a place it would be to get caught during a bushfire. The road is a death trap, literally: he’s seen a lot of death on it. It’s narrow, full of hairpin bends, often blocked by landslides and fallen trees. There’s almost nowhere you can overtake. You’ve got a sheer drop to your left, fifty, a hundred metres in places, an even steeper slope climbing away to your right. The vegetation is thick and varied—red box and peppermint gums on the lower slopes, towering mountain grey gums in the upper reaches. It would pump out an unbelievable amount of heat if it ever went up. Some of those trees are fifty metres tall; the radiant heat alone could kill you from hundreds of metres away.
The road is dangerous even without the added complication of fire. He’s attended a stack of accidents along its serpentine bends and narrow lengths. They had a weird one not long ago. A group of leathery motorcyclists roared up the hill en masse, raced through Kinglake, completed the great loop back down the Melba Highway. It wasn’t until they got back to their outer-suburban homes that they noticed their mate at the tail-end of the column was missing.
Somebody eventually spotted the missing bikie at the foot of a mountain grey some twenty metres from the road. God knows what speed he’d been doing, but he’d missed the turn, sailed through the air, collected the tree. Wood ended up sliding on his backside as he went to check the body. Stone cold, of course. So steep was the drop, they had to get the State Emergency Service to winch the poor bugger out.
Another time the Country Fire Authority attended a burning wreck and found a bloke dead in the driver’s seat. Tragic, but not particularly urgent; until somebody noticed that the hole in the windscreen looked man-made. They searched the scrub and found the passenger fifty metres away—still alive.
Today, however, Roger Wood completes the trip without incident and cruises into the main street.
Kinglake started out as a rough and ready timber, mining and farming community, named after Alexander Kinglake, an English author whose contributions to posterity are an out-of-print history of the Crimean War and a town he never saw. These days the majority of the population works off the mountain, making the long haul down The Windies every day. They’re drawn here by the cheap land and the beautiful environment. You can buy a cedar kit-home and put it on a big bush block, live a life you couldn’t buy for a million bucks in Melbourne: wake up and smell the eucalypts, listen to the kookaburras chortle on the setting sun. An ideal place to raise a family or see out your days.
It’s a town of frozen winters and log fires, of red-earth potato farms and pick-your-own berries. It’s a town where Aussie Rules football rules. The Whittlesea Country Music Festival is on this weekend. You can guarantee a lot of the locals will have made the thirty-kilometre drive down the mountain for it despite the heat— and despite their eclectic makeup: farmers and greenies, university lecturers and labourers, tradespeople and teachers, musicians and shop assistants. They have their little run-ins from time to time, but the differences are mostly balanced out by a powerful sense of community.
And the town has one thing going for it that is unique, something that doubtless contributes to that sense of community: the Kinglake National Park, 22,360 hectares of luminescent fern gullies and waterfalls, kilometre after kilometre of walking tracks and nature trails.
Take a tramp along those trails and chances are you’ll come across one of the subtle wonders of the bush: a ring of yabby holes that give away the location of an underground lake, an orb weaver suspended in mid-air, a currawong call that is in fact a lyrebird mimicking a currawong.
The vegetation is as rich a display of nature’s plenty as you’ll find on Earth. On the lower, more exposed slopes, red box and narrow-leafed peppermint gums predominate. On the more sheltered south- and east-facing slopes, magnificent stands of mountain ash up to seventy metres in height are common. There are specimens in the Wallaby Creek catchment that, at over ninety metres, are among the tallest trees in the world. The understorey varies enormously, with patches of bracken and blanket bush, musk-daisy, hazel pomaderris, blackwood and silver wattle.
The locals are proud of their forest and inspired by it. Many of them make their homes along its shadowy perimeters, and on any day of the week you see people—ordinary joes, dads home from work, kids at hand, mums with four-wheel-drive prams—just wandering around, soaking it up. You might get seventy observers on a freezing winter dawn for the annual lyrebird survey, hundreds of visitors on a Saturday in spring. The National Park is what makes the district a unique, peaceful place to live. When it’s not on fire.
Acting Sergeant Roger Wood pulls into the police station and opens the office. He’s on his own this shift, in charge of the police station and the town itself while his superior, Jon Ellks, is on leave. His radio call-sign is Kinglake-350. The date is Saturday, February 7, 2009.