Kinglake-350 (25 page)

BUSHFIRE BRAIN

When the sun rose on the Sunday from hell, the residents of the ranges crawled out of their shelters and hideaways, ash-covered and stunned. Bedraggled, staring out into a post-apocalyptic world.

All was black and smoking as far as the eye could see. No power, no water, no communications, no word of loved ones other than those within eyesight. Charred remains littered the earth: small birds, wallabies, power poles and cars; people. They commenced the nerve-shattering business of discovering who’d survived and who hadn’t.

All too often, the news was bad. There were 173 deaths overall, 120 of them from the Kilmore East fire. Of the 2000 homes destroyed, 1200 of them were in this region.

As the magnitude of the disaster sank in, outside help began to arrive. The CFA became the focal point of the relief effort, dishing up meals, dispensing emergency supplies, acting as first port of call for the incoming organisations: Red Cross, army, Centacare, Salvation Army. Politicians and pop stars, cricketers and camera crews, they came and went. Some stayed longer than others, some kept in touch afterwards.

And then there were the funerals. The professional advice was only to go to those of people you knew well, otherwise the accumulated burden became too heavy. But many residents found themselves turning up to a dozen or more heartbreaking ceremonies. Again and again, at churches and centres all over the region, the melancholy ritual was repeated: the flowers and photos, the treasured objects— footy jumpers, teddy bears, battered guitars—the weeping relatives and weak tea. The casket, or caskets; the long black cars.

People moved through it all in a state of shock.

Then, as the disaster receded, they set about rebuilding their lives. Some, maybe 40 percent, left the community. Whether or not that decision turned out to be wise varied enormously. Some said they felt like aliens down in the ’burbs and returned as often as they could; they missed the shared experience, the solidarity. Others were glad to be out of the place.

Demolition crews and insurance assessors moved in, builders and bureaucrats followed. The quality of the builders—variable at best—and the pedantry of the officials charged with issuing everything from building permits to lost documents became hot topics of conversation.

People were making life-changing decisions, but often they were in no state to do so. The experts called it post-traumatic stress; the locals had a more vivid expression: ‘bushfire brain’.

The world seemed disordered, adrift, not quite real. Residents were on edge, forgetful, insomniac, frustrated by minor obstacles. There were individuals who threw their belongings into the car and left the mountain, unable to face filling in another form.

Some turned to drink or drugs to ease the pain; the police found more and more of their time taken up with domestic violence and drink-driving.

The human desolation was mirrored in the devastation of the natural environment, which had been what drew people there in the first place. There was a general fear that the bush was beyond repair, that it would never recover its former glory. Even to an experienced professional like Tony Fitzgerald, the destruction was deeper than anything he’d ever imagined.

‘Fire like that,’ he says, ‘all bets were off. We weren’t sure what would come back, if anything. Our worry was that we’d be left with just scorched ground.’

The magnificent stands of mountain ash that had been his working day’s delight were obliterated, the massive trunks that remained staring out over the land like monuments to dead kings. The hundreds of hectares of the Everard block had formerly been covered with a thick storey of banksias—a pyrophiliac species if ever there was one. Normally in a fire their wafery seeds would fly out of the cones and waste no time re-establishing themselves in the ash bed. After Black Saturday Fitzgerald and botanist colleague Cam Beardsell were shocked to find the trees totally destroyed.

‘Even the cones were burnt,’ he says. ‘You’d find a blackened stump, thick as your thumb. That was it.’

After hours of searching, they came across a single tree that had survived through some quirk of physics or topography. Determined to hang on to any symbol of hope in those dark days, they immediately threw a protective barrier around it. Took cuttings, replanted them at the nursery.

But they were worried. There’d already been twelve years of drought. If the rain failed for one more year there would be unimaginable changes in the landscape. A Burnt Area Emergency Response team carried out a geomorphological study of the region and made a startling discovery: there’d been a shift in the very composition of the earth. The soil to the south side of the park, with its high clay content, had been burnt so deeply it was now glazed, like pottery fired in a kiln.

As Fitzgerald and his crews worked away in the charred landscape, they were chilled by the silence that lay upon it. The sounds that normally formed the soundtrack to their working day—the birdsong and the screeching insects, the thumping kangaroos—were gone.

The bigger birds might have fled before the flames, but the smaller species—the fragile wrens and robins, the treecreepers and silvereye—had been wiped out. Larger animals such as kangaroos would normally outrun a fire, but in this all-consuming blaze they had been trapped. He’d seen it on the day: they’d flee to what they assumed was an island of safety, only to find themselves overwhelmed as the fire swept in from every direction at once.

Stella and Allan Reid ran an animal sanctuary named Wildhaven, on the road to Kinglake. Stella, out on a CFA truck when the fire struck, watched from a distance as her life’s work—and her home, and very nearly her husband—were incinerated. Touring the property afterwards, she was devastated by what she found: ‘Hundreds and hundreds of animal bones: kangaroos, wallabies, possums, echidnas, their little teeth lying in the white ash. Between our home and Kinglake few survived, millions died.’

The rangers made spotlight walks, searching desperately for signs of life and came up with nothing. They found the bones of kangaroos wedged into wombat holes where they tried to shelter. They stared up into the scorched crowns, wondered how anything—any sugar glider or koala—could have survived.

Roger Wood was no exception to the general mood. In the weeks following the fire, he threw himself into the recovery operation with the slightly manic energy shown by all the emergency services personnel, a determination to do whatever they could to alleviate the despair. And there were moments of light amid the overwhelming blackness. He came across friends he’d feared were lost, was the occasional bearer of news that was good rather than bad, was able to find some satisfaction in putting his local knowledge to good use.

On one of his trips down the mountain, driving past the ruined house of his good friends Drew Barr and Angie O’Connor, he was amazed to spot Chaz, the dog they thought they’d lost. He was sitting faithfully by the photo album Drew had soaked as they fled. Roger arranged for the CFA to take the album and the dog down to St Andrews, and the photo of Angie’s joyful reunion with the family’s lost pet was flashed around the world.

Even that little incident had its downside, though. ‘I just about got killed trying to save that album,’ said Drew. ‘Then I opened it up and found that it was an old one of Angie’s—and the photos in there were mostly of her bloody ex-boyfriend!’

Between recovery work, funerals and the post-disaster tension in the town, it was a hectic time for Wood. But within a few days it became apparent that something was not quite right. What started out just after the fires as a nagging pain in his neck became, over the next few months, a searing agony that left him barely able to move. There were strange shooting pains up the length of his arms, too. He’d never had such problems before. The doctor suggested that the huge adrenaline overdose of Black Saturday would have had a lot to do with it.

A series of tests showed the pain in his arms to be carpal tunnel syndrome: no picnic, but curable with an operation. The neck was the real worry. The diagnosis was severe damage to the upper vertebrae, with bulging discs at C3 and C4. Prospects of recovery were reasonable, but there were no guarantees. There was every chance that his career was over, even that he’d end up in a wheelchair.

When he was given the news, Wood’s mind ran through the events of Black Saturday and zeroed in on the incident at the Kinglake West school: leaping the high cyclone-wire fence as the fire closed in, crash-landing on his back.

He was forced to take leave from the job that had defined him, uncertain whether he’d ever be able to go back.

As the days grew short and the winter wind came scything down the slopes around St Andrews, his situation grew progressively bleaker. This fit, powerful man who could spend all day breaking horses or splitting wood was laid so low he could barely lift a screwdriver, let alone an axe. He spent slow, frustrating hours staring out the window at the blackened slopes; taking the long walks the doctors had suggested might help the injury.

None of it did much good. By October he knew that surgery was his only chance. Even more frustrating than his personal situation was his inability to help the Kinglake community. Cameron Caine was on long-term leave as well. Now, more than ever, people needed to see a familiar figure in the uniform. They’d gone through the nightmare side by side; it seemed only right that they should go through the recovery together.

He could still drive. He and the family would often pile into the Pajero of an evening and drive up to Kinglake, share a meal with friends at one of the community venues that had sprung up after the fire. An essentially positive person with a strong family to support him, Roger Wood never succumbed to the depression that afflicted so many others in the wake of the fire. But his head was full of dark memories, haunting images. A counsellor told him he was suffering from post-traumatic stress. Its most potent manifestation was guilt.

‘Survivor guilt, I suppose you’d call it,’ he says; we’re talking in his living room, months after the fires. ‘Still can’t get it out of my brain, things we did that day. What we saw, keep going over it. Every decision I made. Made ’em on the run, had no choice; but you keep asking yourself, Did I do the right thing?’ He picks up his mug of tea and contemplates the far wall. ‘We did our best, me and Cam, but Jesus there were a lot of poor buggers didn’t make it.’

If there is a single emotion that runs like an electric current through the minds of just about everybody touched by Black Saturday, it is guilt. I interviewed dozens of survivors and almost all of them manifest it in some way; scratch the surface and it’s there. It’s like an infection that keeps breaking out.

One of the firefighters was moved to comment: ‘Geez, I lost my own house, just about lost me life. I know we saved a few people. Why the fuck do I feel so guilty?’

Some feel it because they survived and their friends didn’t. Some because the neighbours lost the house and they didn’t. Emergency workers feel guilty because so many people died: their primary responsibility was to save lives, ergo they must have failed. Parents feel guilty for putting their children through that terror. Many kids even feel guilty for not being able to help as their parents fought the fire. Some feel guilty because they stayed, others because they left late and were nearly killed. Just about everybody feels they should have been better prepared.

Dr Paul Valent, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, commented on the second anniversary of the fire:

Something major has happened that’s implanted in the brain. It’s like a big, dark gravitational force. Everything has imploded in there. It’s invisible but it’s got enormous energy. You can’t think about it, you can’t talk about it, and you don’t have words for it. It’s overwhelming.

Disaster survivors, he says, can

… disconnect parts of their minds: emotions, thoughts. But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole any more.