After the Fire

I’m calling this series of posts  After the Fire, although that’s not strictly true. The fires are still burning, and will continue to devour vast swathes of this country, probably for some months yet. For me, it’s a month since fire consumed much of my home town and I’m trying hard to untangle the maelstrom of disordered thoughts drumming inside my head, to make sense of the awfulness. Is such a reflection therapeutic? That remains to be seen. I just know that it’s something I need to do -  to set down some sort of record of my own experience of this life-changing event. Anyway, here goes...

After the Fire - Part 1

This time exactly a month ago I was on a plane home from Perth. I’d spent Christmas with my grown-up kids. As I boarded the flight in Perth, Mallacoota was foremost in my mind. Huge bushfires had been consuming the east coast of Australia for many weeks. A warning for all tourists to leave East Gippsland had been published the previous day. A notification came through, as I caught a ferry across the Swan River, that a fast-moving fire had begun at Wingan, and that the Princes Highway was closed. Too late to leave Mallacoota, it had said. The next day I began my journey “home”- to Mallacoota.

I changed flights in Melbourne under an apocalyptic sky. While I waited to board, the VicEmergency app on my phone beeped. The Wingan fire was expected to impact Mallacoota between 5-6pm. The Genoa-Mallacoota Road had been closed. Mallacoota, at the far end of that road, had been cut off. I sat alone at the airport, sweltering in failed air-con, crying helplessly.

My wonderful friend Jane collected me from Canberra airport with news I already knew: “You can’t go home tomorrow”.

My house is on the Genoa-Mallacoota Road, a couple of kilometres outside town. My next door neighbour sent me a text before she evacuated – what did I want her to do with my chooks? We decided putting them in the house would be best – a place of last resort. Thank you, neighbour – the fact that you even thought of Sybil and Tibbs while you were preparing to leave your own home still amazes me and makes me teary.

The next morning – New Years Eve – I woke early after a night of broken sleep, knowing that my friends and neighbours had probably slept far less, if at all. How the hell do you get to sleep when you know that a monstrous fire is heading straight for you, devouring everything in its path - and that there’s no escape?

The ABC coverage of events on the TV, up and down the south coast of NSW and across the border into East Gippsland, was terrifying, compelling viewing. The fire still hadn’t impacted Mallacoota, but it was bearing down on my home town as “thousands huddled on the beach”, ringed by firefighters determined to save lives first, and whatever they could save of my small, beautiful, remote town, nestled in the bushland by the sea, next.

The world knows how events unfolded, so I don’t need to repeat them. What I can tell you is how I felt, watching and listening to the voices of friends and neighbours being interviewed, hearing that the morning sky had turned blacker than night, that “the sirens just went off”,  that people were preparing to jump into the water if necessary.

There was a knot of anxiety in my chest. I found it hard to draw in a deep breath. I didn’t want to watch or listen, but I couldn’t not. I should’ve been there. I was glad not to be there. I was watching a bigger picture than those in Mallacoota were watching, but from a distance. All they knew was what was right in front of them and coming for them, what they could see and hear and smell and feel. I felt grateful, but oh so guilty for feeling grateful. My imagination will never be able to grasp the reality of that terror, but I can understand every little bit of the helplessness they felt.

What I had in common with those who were there was a sense that my world had changed forever. Like them, I didn’t know whether my house was still there. I was certain that my poor cats had been incinerated in the boarding kennels at Genoa, a beautiful bushland setting where I’d left them 8 days earlier. I imagined their final terrifying moments over and over, the loop playing in my head refusing to be shut off.

It was devastating.