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.

Fifteen...

“A high school student who shot himself after taking his teacher and classmates hostage has died of his wounds at a Wisconsin hospital, authorities said.

“Samuel Hengel, 15, held 24 students and a teacher for nearly five hours at a high school in Marinette on Monday night (local time) before shooting himself as police were rushing into the classroom.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/01/3081754.htm

WTF? A 15 year-old kid? What on earth makes a 15 year old kid think that taking his class hostage is a sensible or viable thing to do? Why on earth would he do it? What was going through his head? At that age, with his life in front of him, what was awful enough to make him (a) create the hostage situation in the first place, and (b) decide that shooting himself was a good way out of it? Or what kind of weird-arse computer game, where nobody ever truly DIES, despite rivers of gore, did he think he was in the middle of?

I'm trying to come up with possible answers, and drawing a total blank. Obviously I'm thinking with a grown-up brain, and a relatively stable one at that.I keep asking myself the sort of questions that the news report hasn't answered:

Was he a good student? Was he failing? (because of course, most people would shoot up their school, their teacher, their classmates on the strength of a Fail grade, right?)
Was he bullied at school? At home?
What was his family like? (And how must they be suffering now?)
What did he do in his spare time?
What made him fucked up enough to do what he did? Because, make no mistake, he WAS fucked up. But so are lots of people. They don't all become potential mass-murderers though.

FIFTEEN years old... barely started on the Big Road of Life. Not old enough to vote, drink legally, have sex, have a driver's licence (well, not sure about Wisconsin...) but in any case - legally, still a child. A CHILD.

Jebus...

What on Earth is going on?

Every morning I scan the ABC Online news, and what I’m seeing just lately makes me wonder whether we are teetering on the brink of collapse. Is the end, as Armageddonists like to tell us, nigh? Is the downfall of our civilisation at hand?

I often ignore the grim ‘big’ news about wars, pirates, suicide bombers, political wrangles, terrorist trials, climate change and the global financial crisis. That’s the stuff of despair – or so I thought. All that is big stuff on the global stage – but closer to home I’m seeing individual horrors and tragedies that are unrelated to international relations; acts of evil perpetrated by ordinary people in small towns and suburbs, and ‘little’ people flouting the law because they feel the fulfilment of their desires is greater than the safety or security of society as a whole. Like those dickheads who smash bottles just for fun (see last Friday's rant).

It’s the little manifestations of evil that seem to point more and more to a breakdown of society. Like these:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/25/2753618.htm - Former bank boss jailed for hanging dog. (What kind of creep would do such a thing?)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/26/2753815.htm - Children shot while playing in park. (By a grown-up. The news didn’t say whether he knew the kids – but in any case, who uses little kids for target practice?)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/26/2753893.htm?section=justin – Teen girls spit, steal and punch in rampage. (16 and 17 years old…. Nice girls…)

The breakdown of society’s fabric – the crack in the veneer of civilisation – is it increasing, or just increasingly being reported? Criminals of both genders are getting younger, random acts of senseless violence seem to be multiplying, and humanity seems to be getting crazier at every level.

Stop the world, I want to get off!

Jesus in a cushion?

I'm sure to be in trouble for this one.... an AAP item I read today:

Thousands flocked to a Roman Catholic church on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion on Saturday after believers said they saw the "face of Christ" in the pleats of a church cushion.

Church officials limited access to the Jesus-Misericordieux church in eastern Saint-Andre's Cambuston district to a few minutes per visitor as traffic in the area ground to a halt.

Believers and curious onlookers pulled out cameras to take pictures of the cushion attached to the priest's chair.

Now... I'm sorry, I have some problems with this. I can remember a time (probably back in the 70's) when the younger generation (that was me back then) used to sew patches over the holes in our jeans. These days they just wear the holes with pride. But anyway... I can remember someone in the US made the news for having a patch of the US flag sewn onto the arse of their jeans. It was a sign of disrespect to the flag and the nation, said detractors.

But somehow, the face of Jesus where a priest puts his bum is seen as a "miracle", and not absolute blasphemy? I'm not the least bit religious these days, but even I was sort of shocked (amidst chuckles and chortles and poorly-suppressed giggles).

I know priests get a lot of bad press these days for behaving badly - and yet nobody has picked this up and run with it? And will I go to hell because I can't help seeing something very Monty Pythonesque in all of this? (MP's Life of Brian and the MP Contractual Obligation album song which began with the words Sit on my face and tell me that you love me are going round and round in my head at the moment, and I'm almost hysterical!)

To be fair, I don't know whether the cushion was one to be sat upon, leaned against or knelt upon - but still... is that any way to treat Jesus?

Shiver me timbers, change the lingo!

I'm thinking it's time we found a new word for 'pirate'. Somehow, every time I hear the word pirate I have images of Johnny Depp camping it up, or Captain Hook - or even that scoundrel Long John Silver. Parrots and wooden legs and eye-patches come to mind, aaaaaarh, they do.

It doesn't seem right. Storybook and Hollywood pirates are figures of fun and romance. Kids gleefully devour tales of pirates, and even relatively sensible grown-ups get a big bang out of stuff like International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Storybooks and Hollywood have turned callous cut-throats into lovable larrikins.

Pirates have been claimed by storytellers and film-makers, romanticised and given an overlay of folk-heroism that's at odds with what they really were - and more importantly, what they are today.

Ask the terrified refugees who left war-torn Vietnam behind in the '70s, to try and find a better life, and who were attacked by Malay pirates who robbed, raped and murdered without a second thought. Ask the crews of ships recently taken by pirates off Somalia what they think of the lawless thugs who've captured them, terrorised them and held them and their ships for ransom. I bet the lovable Jack Sparrow is the furthest thing from their minds.

But it's the first image I get when I hear yet another news story about pirates. Damn it, it's Hollywood's fault!

Pirates are very, very bad people, no doubt about it. That's why I think we need a better word for them; one that doesn't have a whole swag of likeable associations attached to it. One that doesn't make you feel like a wide-eyed kid snuggled under a doona while someone reads Peter Pan or Treasure Island to you.

There's nothing cartoonish or buffoonish about the real pirates of today. The amusing pirate caricature in my mind is just that - a caricature - and it's totally at odds with the terrifying and lawless skullduggery - the stuff of recent news stories - that the current crop of 'gentlemen of fortune' engage in.