Symphony
1Melbourne, Australia
11th February 2009
As the toll of Saturday’s bushfires has emerged, I’ve found myself reacting in a similar way to the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, where the constant re-running of footage clearly showing people dying in horrific circumstances caused me to recoil, and eventually shut down.
On Saturday as I monitored the steady ascension of the mercury to what was ultimately a record temperature for this part of the world, I had no idea of what was unfolding in the hills to the northeast of where I live. Because of the direction the wind was blowing, the massive column of smoke was being carried away from the city and out to sea.
On Saturday, the wind was really howling. As the day progressed, our tomato plants and other vegetables withered before our eyes, succumbing to the ferocious heat and constant battering they were receiving from the wind. The BOM had forecast heat and wind, and they were right. At that time, my main concern was the power supply. In the heat wave of the previous week, power supplies in our area had failed twice, and I didn’t want to be stuck in our house without air conditioning.
On Saturday, they were predicting a day similar to Ash Wednesday, an event stuck firmly in my memory when, in 1983, two huge dust storms marked the climax of a severe drought, the latter of them punctuated by a series of wildfires that scorched much of the state. I still remember seeing the sky turn a dirty brown, and the sun reduce to an orange disc. I still remember travelling through the areas around Terang that had been burnt out by the Framlingham fire, and then marvelling at the shaggy green carpet smothering the blackened sticks of the Otways almost a year later.
On Saturday, I was glad when the cool change came through in the late afternoon and the temperature plunged.
On Sunday, when I switched on the television to watch the first episode of Insiders for the year, I found footage of bushfire devastation. I wasn’t sure where it was, but I noticed the sharp smell of smoke and concluded there must’ve been at least some fires in those conditions. When Insiders started, the first segment of the show was devoted to the unfolding tragedy from Kinglake and Marysville.
On Sunday, I found myself riveted to news feeds, twitter and any other information sources, trying to get some sense of scale to the devastation. I was gob-smacked at the site of Marysville, all but wiped off the map, unable to match what I was seeing with the beautiful place we’d visited on a road trip in August.
On Sunday, there was talk of deaths, the numbers then were in the low double digits and starting to climb. When I saw footage of several cars knitted together on a road near Kinglake, I knew without being told, that people had died there. Images began to appear on the ABC website through the day, and the ferocity of the fires started to become all too apparent. The estimated death toll began to hockey-stick upwards and it became obvious we weren’t dealing with a regular summer fire event.
On Sunday, I was fixated with trying to learn more about what had happened.
On Monday, I went to work and found it was all people could talk about. Like me, they were still grasping the magnitude of it. There were pieces of the puzzle each of us had missed and the stories of the past day were told and retold. Maps were scrutinised and images examined. In each, you could see the efforts to comprehend, clutching at the stories of those who had survived the event and wondering how they could help.
On Monday, the news services were all in full swing. By now we knew where the fires had been and how quickly they’d moved. In an effort to give the story a shadow, the mainstream media swamped the airwaves with details of how the fires travelled at a ferocious rate. Images that will endure were relayed and re-broadcast. A lonely police vehicle driving through the ashen centre of Marysville, where piles of smouldering ruin marked where each house had been, and inevitably where bodies lay. Burnt out car shells in Kinglake that could’ve been transplanted from Baghdad or Gaza. The heroes and villains were emerging, and the dignity (or lack of) with which many meet their end was being laid bare.
On Monday, I felt I knew the where and the how, but not the why or what now.
On Tuesday, the dead told their stories. As the emergency services pushed further into the fire zones, and the death toll reached into triple figures, we began to hear about those who had been caught. The first was Brian Naylor and his wife, followed soon after by unknowns. A father who left his children at his in-laws to keep them safe while he defended their home, only to save the house but lose his children when the in-laws house was incinerated. I read a fire fighter’s description of finding the scorched remains of a boy in the ruins, his eyes wide open and how he had “the bluest of blue eyes”. I couldn’t help but think of the pain that child experienced as he left this world.
On Tuesday, I began to feel a little numb. I’d overloaded with the sorrow so many were feeling, and now I was starting to close it out — an emotional circuit breaker of sorts.
It’s Wednesday, and I want the flow of information, and the emotions that come with it to stop.
