The initial media coverage of the interim report by the Victorian Royal Commission on bushfires was discouraging. It focused on who was to blame. This culture of blame is destructive and, if indulged, will undermine the response to future fires.
Mercifully subsequent reporting on the Commission's thoughtful report has been much more detailed and reflective. It has focused on policies rather than on hunting down the guilty.
To seek to pillory people held responsible for the inadequacies in responding to the bushfires is destructive for two reasons. It distracts attention from the nature of the bushfires, and ensures that the agencies entrusted with the response to future bushfires will be ineffectual.
The reality, at once unpalatable and inescapable, of these bushfires was that they were lethal and uncontrollable. The combination of days of very high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity made them so. The stark warnings issued on the previous day acknowledged the terrible threat they posed.
On Black Saturday, the fires burned at will where the supercharged wind took them. Despite the limited success of firefighters to control some sections of the fire, houses, settlements and lives were lost or saved by changes of wind and the vagaries of fortune.
The reality was that this bushfire had the same relationship to the fires of previous years as did the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima to other bombing raids. Policies and nostrums designed for fires that spread and burned more slowly were as unavailing as the ordinary strategies for civil defence at Hiroshima.
Consequently the deficiencies of controllers and the defects of communication and organisation, while regrettable and costly, were ultimately irrelevant. Even the best of services would have been powerless in this bushfire.
The lesson to be taken from these bushfires is that in circumstances as extreme as those of Black Saturday there is no assured safety for those who live on the edge of bushland. They will be safe only if they are somewhere else when fire comes.
That is a harsh truth from which we would like to escape. That is why the urge to blame people is so dangerous. It enables us to imagine that if we find the right people to protect us, our houses and lives will be safe wherever we live. That is pernicious nonsense.
If that truth is accepted, the painstaking work of the Royal Commission will be invaluable in improving the procedures