After the Fire 6 - The Silence of the Bush

Near Betka Beach. 3 weeks post-fire. Smoke haze has hidden the ocean in the background

 The bush was never meant to be silent

The trill, squawk or chatter of birdsong, the buzz and twang of insects, the reptilian rustle in piles of leaves, the sudden thud thud and crackle of wallabies or roos fleeing through undergrowth – the bush is usually a noisy place. To walk through the bush with only the crunch of your own shoes and the sound of your own breath in your ears is an unsettling experience. It’s devastating to creep along silent trails that were once so familiar and that rang with life. 

Even worse - the trees, those solid, dependable guardians of the paths and trails, may be absent or unrecognisable. Familiar landmark trees have become unfamiliar, if they're there at all. Sometimes it’s worse, somehow, to recognise them - old friends unclothed, blackened, crippled or felled. That big tree out near the Pony Club – a Grey fantail scolded me once from a branch that is no longer there, and there I watched a pair of Spotted pardalotes harvesting lerps. That empty space overhead, near the water storage facility, is where a pair of Mistletoe birds enchanted me in the spring, and the Eagle Tree behind my house - a tall skeleton that provided an excellent lookout spot for raptors - has been completely obliterated. Gone without a trace.

It's not without a an eerie, pared-back beauty but it's not how it's supposed to be.

The stark black lines of a charcoaled melaleuca forest thrusting upwards from silvery ash-covered ground 

The bush, however, is full of surprises. The regrowth of vegetation is almost magical.  Buds and shoots are bursting through blackened bark. Insects are returning. The birds that eat insects are returning. With the birds comes the birdsong. It's happening, slowly but surely - resurrection in action.

Tree ferns sprouting on Genoa Road

Grass trees re-emerging

Epicormic buds sprout differently on different types of trees – some appear in random clumps, others like the even fuzz along the length of a man’s arm, so that they look a bit like large furry pipecleaners - and still others appear to encircle a trunk in a delicate spiral pattern.

When Banksia cones burn, the seed casings open like golden mouths to spit out the seeds of their rebirth.

Swathes of burnt bush add layers of colour across the landscape in broad strokes of umber, gold, rust, sepia and deep black. Burnt vegetation has more subtleties of colour than you can imagine, and I’m pretty sure there are more than fifty shades of brown.

The beautiful Betka River

The spicy smell of regenerating bush – that warm eucalyptus scent with just a hint of smoke behind it - is actually exquisite, especially if there’s a waft of morning dampness to give it a bit of tang.  It's enough to put a smile on anybody's face. 

After the Fire 5 – Stickybeaks, Show-ponies and Others

As always, this is personal opinion, and my way of trying to respond to and make sense of recent and current events - I make no claim to be representing the opinions of others in my community at this difficult time.

CAUTION:

 SHOUTING (and a bit of BLUE language ) AHEAD

This is a hard one to write, just over seven weeks into the year and just over seven weeks post-fire (seriously, is that all it is? It feels like forever!) People are flowing into town now that the roads are open. Some of them are caring, kind-hearted people with a genuine desire to help broken town economies try to recover by spending a few dollars here and there in places like Mallacoota. I applaud their efforts. This piece is not about them.  It’s about those who are combining what I will charitably try to believe is a desire to help with an opportunity for self-promotion – and those who are just insensitive fuckwits.

Here’s a tip. People are still raw. Many remain dazed and numb. Many are trying to process the loss of everything they own as they negotiate the bureaucratic minefield that faces people after a catastrophic event: a mountain of bewildering forms, government departments, charitable organisations, insurance companies (or the lack thereof), rules and regulations. Friendships and relationships are put under stress - boundaries shift, tempers flare, tears flow at odd times – nothing is as it was as the entire community tries to find its way again.

It is not the time for out-of-towners to cruise around in their cars taking videos of devastated people picking through the remains of their lives and homes.

It is not the time for out-of-towners (no matter HOW far they drove to get here) to inflict unasked-for hugs on locals. Remember the righteous outrage all over the country when our insensitive clod of a Prime Minister forced those people in Cobargo to shake his hand as the cameras rolled? I'll leave that thought there with no further comment.

It is not the time for thousands of out-of-towners who joined a “community” Facebook page to be whingeing and moaning about their holiday bookings, or pontificating about the way the caravan park ought to be operating (do you know what's involved in running an extremely large caravan park after a major disaster, or how many abandoned but gear-filled campsites there might still be, or how many of the staff there lost their own homes, you insensitive fuckwits?) or accusing locals of being sooks because nobody has responded to an online question they posed about the fishing or the fucking entrance, or about how the town’s recovery ought to be progressing right now. Loudmouthed armchair experts, all of them the centre of their own universes.

It’s not the time for out-of-towners to get themselves on the local radio, drop names and personal details about locals – details that are nobody’s business – and comment expertly that “Mallacoota’s definitely recovering, but it’s a bit slow”. FFS, it’s been SEVEN WEEKS! Over 100 homes were burnt to the ground, you idiot. This is a community in crisis and you waltz in here from Melbourne knowing NOTHING and judging EVERYTHING. HOW DARE YOU!

I also believe it’s not the time for fledgeling reality TV “stars” – 15-minute celebrities - to turn up on our doorstep, ostensibly to “help Mallacoota rebuild” - and stage a highly-publicised media opportunity at Betka beach - the same beach where our not-quite-fledgeling hoodie chicks are trying to survive despite the odds. Our Lions Club is quietly doing a splendid job of rebuilding much-loved infrastructure - with or without media "stars" elbowing their way into the spotlight.

The remains of the stairs at Bastion Beach after the fire. Oops! The Lions Club has since built a set of temporary stairs - thank you Mallacoota Lions!

Those images of people huddling on the foreshore, terrified for their lives; of the HMAS Choules anchored offshore to send in supplies or take out evacuees; of Chinooks at our airport – made picturesque Mallacoota media hot property – but it’s still a community of traumatised people at different points on their own personal paths to recovery, whether they lost their homes or not.

I have a message for every single one of those stickybeaks, show-ponies and others: it’s not about you! IT’S. NOT. ABOUT. YOU!

Am I being over-sensitive? I don't know - but if I am, I doubt that it's "over" enough to dilute the great fucking sea of insensitivity that I feel like I'm drowning in right now. 

God, I can’t write another word. My keyboard may not survive the pounding.

After the Fire 4 – Refugee

Like many other Mallacoota residents, I was not in Mallacoota when the monster fire hit. I viewed/listened to the horror from a distance, tears rolling and heart hammering, through the filters of mass media and social media. I usually make a point of staying home over the Christmas holiday period, so it was a stroke of extreme good fortune that I wasn’t huddled in the hall or on the foreshore with the rest of the terrified summer population.

My ordeal – and it was an ordeal, make no mistake – was to become, effectively, a refugee. My life, my home, my pets, my “happy place” – all of it is in Mallacoota – and all of a sudden I was locked out of it indefinitely.

I put something on Facebook that day, along the lines of

If anything good can possibly come out of this shit, I hope it’s an acknowledgement that it’s very easy for ordinary people to become refugees - there but for the grace of God etc etc - and this country ought to rethink its stance on refugees.

The Australian government bad-mouths, mis-labels and tortures asylum seekers. It lets them rot and die in offshore detention centres rather than giving them proper medical care. It calls them “illegals” when there’s nothing illegal about seeking asylum (and sheep-like, too many Australians adopt that “othering” attitude and language.) There’s a feeling that “these people” are trying to take something from us; jump an imaginary queue; take jobs from Australians (at the same time that they’re taking benefits from Australians(!)); a feeling that there must be something inherently wrong with these people, and it’s their fault they’re in the situation they’re in. They are somehow inferior, lesser, less worthy, less human than we are – and therefore the inhumane treatment meted out to them is ok. It’s no more than they deserve.

It’s a shameful indictment of Australia: the smug superiority, the government spin, the gullibility and easy inhumanity of far too many ordinary Australians who refuse to share their great good fortune with vulnerable, frightened, displaced people who just happen to not be Australians like them.

While the 2019/20 summer fires devoured their way through millions of hectares of eastern Australia, terrified people huddled terrified on beaches and in showgrounds and evacuation centres; numb people returned to the twisted ruins of their homes. They needed, expected, hoped for – and were shown – kindness and compassion. (Well, apart from those poor Cobargo people whose hands were forcibly shaken by the Prime Minister before, photo opportunity over, he turned his back on them and walked away).

I spent my refugee time with dear friends in Michelago (one of whom, ironically, is an ex-Port Hedland/Baxter detainee) and family in Yass. I felt cared for and welcomed – but even so, I was desperately sad, and keen to return to Mallacoota as soon as possible. I cried all over anybody who would give me a hug (thank you, lady at Yass Visitor Information Centre! Thank you random strangers who went out of their way to be kind and helpful.)

After a couple of very long and frustrating weeks I was able to return on one of the police-escorted convoys from Eden, and found my home town and my community completely changed. BUT – I was able to return home – and I had a home to return to. I am very very fortunate.

There’s a shitload of lessons we need to learn from this bushfire experience, and this is just one:

All it takes for an ordinary person to become a refugee is for their home to become so unsafe that staying there is life-threatening.

--Rising sea-levels, raging bushfires, falling bombs, overwhelming oppression/discrimination/violence sanctioned and systematised by governments.-- These things are not the exclusive province of "others" - brown or black or foreign people...

We cannot afford to be smug. We cannot afford to look the other way. What goes around, comes around. Rediscover your humanity, Australia - because the next wave of refugees and asylum seekers could be us.

After the Fire 3 - A tiny miracle

In the midst of the chaos, the bickering, the anger, the grief – a tiny flicker of light.

A couple of days after the New Year fire in Mallacoota, birds of all kinds began to wash up on the beaches. Here’s a link to one of the news stories about it. Not for the faint-hearted.

I’m so glad I wasn’t here to see that.

Last Saturday morning I went for my first beach walk with my friend Jenny. We walked  through the charred remains of bushland that surrounded Betka Beach…

…through evidence of heat so intense that it split and sliced rocks…

                     ...so intense that it shattered the men’s toilet and melted the paper holder.

And down on the beach we discovered a tiny miracle. Two tiny miracles, in fact, running gaily about on the beach with their devoted parents. Look closely!

(Photo by Leonie Daws. Used with permission)

Why is this so miraculous? Because the Hooded plover (Thinornis rubricollis) struggles each year to survive. Its declining numbers reflect its annual struggle to overcome overwhelming odds. It’s endangered. It’s a beach-nesting bird and its breeding season coincides with the height of our tourist season.  Vulnerable chicks are routinely trampled – often by dogs – or taken by predators. They lose their eggs in king tides and storms. They lay clutch after clutch after clutch, often futilely. Their pluck and perseverance are magnificent.

This year the horrifying fires cut short the tourist season. The beaches are almost deserted. Perhaps many of the Hoodies’ regular predators perished in the fires. But somehow during the fire – as the bush around them burned to ash, as the rocks split, as birds in their thousands perished from smoke or heat or exhaustion from their escape attempts – our little Hoodie parents sat steadfastly on the eggs that produced these chicks. Hunkered down in the sand, they must have been low enough to avoid the worst of the choking smoke, sheltered by the natural undulations of the sand.

My point here is that the Hooded plover is possibly one of Mallacoota’s most vulnerable creatures – and yet it survived this.

To me, it’s a symbol of great optimism against almost insurmountable odds. That’s something we all need at this awful time, as the hard slog of recovery begins.

After the Fire 2 - Ordinary Heroes

When catastrophe strikes, people’s reactions can surprise. We see the very best (and sometimes the worst) in people. I think everyone in Mallacoota will have stories about ordinary heroes. Here are mine:

My next door neighbours. One, who thought of my chooks’ safety before evacuating, lost her home. My neighbour on the other side fought alone to save our homes. Amazing courage and determination. I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of appropriate thank you gifts, but honestly, what material gift can ever truly be an adequate reflection of the gratitude I feel for the heroism of these lovely people?

I finished my last post with mention of my two cats. Basil and Pollywobble spent Christmas in the Genoa Boarding Kennels. I was due to collect them on the morning of 31 December on my way home. From my place of refuge outside Michelago I mourned their almost certain demise. About 36 hours later I got a phone call from Jacquie, one of the owners of the kennels.

“Do you want to talk to your pussycats? They’re not very happy with me after I shut them in a box within in a box while all the colours of hell rained down around us.”

I’ve cried a lot of tears over this terrible time. They flowed pretty freely just then, and still do every time I think about it. The Age published a story about a week later – here’s a link to it. 

I can’t imagine the courage it took for Ron and Jacquie to shut themselves, their own pets and their furry “guests” inside a modified shipping container as that monster fire approached. The heat, the smoke, the darkness and the freight-train roar…  The thought of it gives my claustrophobic self conniptions, even writing this – there’s that knot of anxiety again.

Mail Van David is another “ordinary” hero. Basil got his prescription cat-food because David retrieved it from the Post Office in Mallacoota and drove through a devastated landscape to deliver it to that bushland setting while I fretted in Yass.

The extraordinary kindness of one of our local police officers used a medication delivery run to the kennels to reunite me with Basil and Pollywobble a few days after my return. The road between Mallacoota and Genoa was still closed, as was the Highway (and the bush access road to the kennels, undoubtedly). I’m sorry carsick Basil pooped in your car as you drove him home. I wish I could say that Basil is sorry too, but he’s a cat and a curmudgeon and was possibly delighted with himself. Thank you thank you thank you (cue more tears).

Heroes are the ordinary people who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times, and I am so very grateful to have so many of those wonderful people in my life.