Leviathan (15 page)

It's not known exactly when the first human footprints were pressed into the soft muddy shores of the harbour. Chances are the ancestors of the Iora walked down through the steep-sided river valleys which became the upper reaches of Port Jackson and Broken Bay whilst they were still dry, forested hollows. The coastal plains on which they hunted and lived now sleep beneath the rolling swells of the Pacific, and any trace of the ancients' passing has long since been obliterated. Pressed by the rising seas and climate change, the Aborigines retreated and adapted where other species died off. Giant kangaroos and wallabies, many times larger than their present-day descendants, disappeared along with the fierce leopardlike
Thylacoleo carnifex
, a carnivorous relative of the possum, and the slow, hulking Diprotodon (think of it as a sort of long-necked rhinoceros wombat). Unlike their human competitors, the extinct marsupials relied on the incremental adjustments of evolution to fit them out for a rapidly changing world. The Aborigines however didn't need to wait a thousand generations to grow claws and fangs to tackle the likes of
Thylacoleo
. They didn't have to sprout a thick, furry pelt to keep out the cold. They could shape a spear or light a fire and change the world itself.

 

For James Cook, Australia was a ‘continent of smoke'. As the
Endeavour
sailed slowly up the eastern coast, both Cook and botanist Joseph Banks scratched frequent notes into their journals about the fires which burned on shore. Every day seemed to bring more of them, from the small twinkling campfires which appeared at dawn and dusk, to huge perplexing conflagrations which filled the sky with ash and embers. Fire, which they never seemed to lose sight of in the following months, was in part responsible for the careworn visage the continent turned towards the sailors. Banks wrote that the country, although ‘well enough cloth'd appear'd in some places bare'. It reminded him of the back of a hungry cow, ‘cover'd in general with long hair', but scraped clean by ‘accidental rubbs and knocks' wherever her scraggy hip bones had stuck out further than they should.

When they finally landed in Botany Bay, the English stepped into a land transformed. For thousands of years the Iora and their cousins had set the firestick to small patches of ground, to individual trees, to single gullies or hillsides to clear ground for easier travel and hunting, to kill vermin and to regenerate plant stocks for themselves and for the kangaroos which played such an important role in their economy. They used fire to limit the growth of rainforest, which was unusable to them. When the First Fleet's officers pushed out past the picket lines of their little settlement to explore the country beyond Sydney Cove, they found charred or smoking trees every kilometre or so. They recognised the hand of the natives but did not understand the extent of their influence. The firestick kept the forests clear of choking undergrowth and promoted plants which responded to fire as a natural part of their life cycle. When the Aborigines were driven away, this ecological regime, thousands of years in the making, was disastrously undermined.

Fuel loads were the problem. Fuel loads and human folly. It was many generations before the white man learned to imitate the firestick's effect by burning off small patches of land. Sir Thomas Mitchell, New South Wales's Surveyor-General in the 1830s and 1840s, illustrated the change when he wrote that without the ‘natives to burn the grass', thick forests of young trees had sprung up ‘where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment and see whole miles before him'. Those thick young forests, rather than being thinned by small, periodic burn-offs, grew even denser and more tangled. Leaves, branches and dead trunks compacted into a dry, incendiary carpet on the forest floor as lantana wound itself through the impenetrable undergrowth. Long hot summers baked every trace of moisture from the scrub, which intermittently exploded in vast apocalyptic firestorms. At first these wildfires were only a problem for the country folk who lived and worked within the mutating bush; but as the coastal cities sprawled into forested hinterlands, more and more people built their homes inside the doors of the furnace. Seventy-one of them died in Victoria in January 1939 when bushfires destroyed 1000 homes across the state. Another seventy-two perished in the Ash Wednesday blaze of 1983. In between, smaller catastrophes carried off the forgetful and unwary; sixteen in January of 1952, five in the Blue Mountains in December 1957, and another three fire-fighters and a hundred houses in October 1968.

Unfortunately the lamentations of the dead spoke only fitfully to the living. While the professional fire-fighters who routinely bore the brunt of summer's burning came to understand the bush and its demands, most who chose to live at the city's edge did not learn the lesson. In January 1994 the effects of two centuries of this folly was concentrated within the folds of a long, deep, riotously overgrown valley near the juncture of the Georges and Woronora Rivers in Sydney's southern suburbs. Just a few kilometres from the immense sweep of the Royal National Park, Como, Jannali and the neighbouring suburbs of Menai, Illawong and Bangor are a fine example of the deal Sydney has struck with the bushland at its edge. Here ridgetop development wraps sinuously around quiet river bends and along the scarps of plunging valleys. These valleys are themselves choked with matted scrub, their deepest reaches largely inaccessible. It is striking scenery, even stunning in the right light.

The morning of Saturday 8 January found these suburbs, found all of Sydney in fact ringed by fire. Hot dry winds had been streaming towards the coast from the dead centre for many days. Averaging twenty knots, gusting to forty, the breath of the desert parched everything it touched. The sun shone as a small red dot through thick roiling masses of smoke which rose from over two hundred fires around the state, many of them raging out of control and threatening to join together in a repeat of the disasters of 1939 and 1983. City dwellers, whose only usual contact with the annual cycle of calamity was through the news media, found themselves running through their own suburban streets as trees and houses exploded in flame. Roads were cut, ash fell on beaches, fire-fighters died and thousands fled. In the week before that Saturday most of the action had been played out across the city's north and in the mountains to the west. There were fires in the south, however, and hundreds of men and women fought them just as desperately, a little resentful at times of the attention paid to the suffering of the media's favourite demographic north of the Harbour Bridge.

A huge fire had broken out in the Royal National Park on Wednesday, quickly threatening the small townships of Maianbar and Bundeena on the shores of Port Hacking. About six o'clock the following evening, while the brigades were heavily committed in the national park, John Hay, a constable at the small roadside police station in Menai a few kilometres away saw fire break out in the scrub nearby and hurried over to stamp it out. At that time it was only three or four metres in diameter and the flames were crackling low to the ground. It was more than one man could handle, however, and it soon set off for the south-west, pushed along by strong winds and feeding hungrily on the scrub which is so common in that part of Sydney. That fire would grow and burn fiercely through the streets and back blocks of Menai, but by midnight the local bushfire brigade had it calmed down to a charred ground of smouldering tree stumps.

It flared again the next day as the wind picked up embers and dropped them all over the suburb. By three it was burning so ferociously in Menai's tangle of cul-de-sacs, dead-end streets and loop roads that fire-fighters had given up battling it directly and had shifted instead to the protection of life and property. Gale-force winds whipped twisters of fire high into the sky, walls of flame blew vertically over the roofs of houses and the scorching air was alight with flying debris. As dramatic as these scenes were, the worst was still to come, for this blaze was tearing over ground where the fire brigades and those home owners who elected to stay could still stand and fight. A few hundred metres away yawned the maze of deep valleys which had drawn so many residents to the area. The massive system of interlinked canyons, some kilometres across and hundreds of metres deep, was heavy with millions of tonnes of tinder-dry fuel which had been sitting, baking in the sun and high wind, waiting for a spark.

It should never have happened. It was not as though people hadn't been warned. Sutherland Council, the authority responsible, had filed away numerous letters from the local bushfire brigade about the ominous build-up in fuel loads since the late 1980s. Weather constraints, funding problems and resistance to indiscriminate burning from environmentalists combined with simple inertia to see the warnings ignored for five years. Across the river, in Como, in a yawning, steep-sided gorge known as the Glen Reserve, the situation was even more precarious.

Glen Reserve lies in a corridor running from the head of Bonnet Bay between a hilltop labyrinth of winding avenues (curiously, all named after American presidents) and a soaring, heavily wooded cliff face, above which sit Lincoln and Woronora Crescents. Like the valleys across the river, the Glen Reserve had not been cleared or backburned for a long time. Like them it had been flagged as a serious flashpoint for many years, this time by the NSW Fire Brigade rather than the volunteers of a local bushfire outfit. For years Sutherland Council had been filing correspondence from residents and fire-fighters requesting action to reduce the hazard in the reserve. No action was ever taken. One and half kilometres long and nearly three hundred metres wide, it had become, by January 1994, an enormous firepit. It sat at the mouth of a giant funnel formed by the canyons across the Woronora River. And when the conflagration which tore through those canyons finally spat a burning branch across the river over the heads of the men in the fireboat, it went up. Not like the fire which Constable Hay had tried to stamp out – slowly at first and building over a period of days. This one went up like a bomb.

The sort of bomb it resembled actually has a name: a fuel-air explosive device. These were developed by the Americans as a sort of poor man's nuclear warhead. Put simply, this device sprays an extremely flammable, superfine mist over a wide area, which it then ignites in one stroke. Nature conspired with about five years of half-witted bureaucratic docility to create a fuel-air explosive in the bushland below Lincoln and Woronora Crescents on the afternoon of 8 January. Besides the incredible tonnages of dry plant matter resting on the floor of the reserve, there were hundreds if not thousands of living gum trees. Of the many species which have adapted to the Aborigines' fire regime, the
eucalypti
are arguably the most successful. They have no lower branches to burn during smaller ground fires. Their base is protected by thick flame resistant bark. This shelters little buds which sprout like a bright green stocking after a larger fire, sustaining life while the eucalypt regrows its major limbs. In stronger fires long strips of bark conduct the flame quickly up to the forest canopy where the leaves exude a fine oily mist which explodes on contact with the flames, carrying the fire through the canopy in such a rush that most of the tree is left unscathed.

This inflammable mist lay heavily over the Glen Reserve as the Menai fire approached. However, it was a long, long fall from Lincoln Crescent to the floor of the reserve and many residents were out on their verandahs or walking the ridge line that Saturday afternoon, taking in the spectacular scenes, little worried by the time bomb lying at their feet. Not that they were completely sanguine. At one o'clock Alan Subkey, a fire brigade officer, arrived in Lincoln Crescent with a lighting truck and a brief to stand watch in case the Illawong fires should jump the river. A number of locals stopped to voice their fears to Subkey about such an eventuality but, with the Emergency Services' communication channels already heavily overloaded, he did not pass their concerns on to his superiors. He was relieved by another fireman, Tom Mood, about half an hour later. Mood parked in front of number 39 and while on lookout chatted with the two young girls who lived at that address, ten-year-old Catherine Dickin and her thirteen-year-old sister Kylie. About quarter past two Tom Mood was ordered down the hill to Jefferson Crescent where a fire had broken out, threatening a number of homes. As Mood and his partner drove away they saw no immediate danger to Lincoln Crescent and in that they were supported by Catherine and Kylie's dad, Richard. The Dickins watched TV during the afternoon and wandered out to the verandah occasionally. There they could see increasingly thick smoke billowing up from the Illawong fires, as well as a number of their neighbours, out on their own verandahs or walking the street, taking in the same view. None of them had been warned about the disaster which was about to engulf them. Nobody had been around to advise on evacuation plans or even the rudiments of preparing their homes for what was coming.

It was inevitable. In a submission to the coronial inquiry into the fire, one expert witness, Dr Edmund Potter, said that if ever there was a case for selective evacuation, Lincoln Crescent was it. He wondered how any responsible official with even ‘a smattering' of common sense could have failed to anticipate what would happen in the Glen Reserve. They did, sort of, which is why Subkey and Mood were sent to watch over it. But the Emergency Services' failing communication systems, combined with conflicting lines of authority, the extreme demands of the situation and the simple element of human frailty ensured that when tragedy did strike there were no assets in place to cope with it. Recognising the inevitable, however, did not require Dr Potter's twenty-twenty hindsight. At eleven that Saturday morning John Benson, a resident of Woronora Crescent and an off-duty fire officer of many years experience, had stood on the bluff high above the Glen Reserve watching the fires across the river. He was so sure the blaze would make it over the water that he rang his boss and requested to be placed back on duty. But, according to Potter, none of the authorities higher up the chain of command ‘was watchful and in readiness …'.