Strange times
Fires and fears
The hill behind this house and all the grassland on the Farrer ridge is blackened. Our bit of the Canberra Nature Park will regenerate in time but those who live next to it and take their morning walk on it will never forget how close it came to being our destroyer.
‘Our fear’, the policeman at the end of my driveway told me, ‘is that this wind change will bring the fire back to you and that we will lose a significant number of houses in this street. Our advice is that you go now’. And leave a house that has been home for 20 years, a place of joy and tears, place of a
wedding, numerous celebrations, much good food and drink; of children growing and leaving; place of exam fever and excitement, of steady work, of an office and library that is still my joy.
We were lucky, every one of us in this street. Fire to back fences; fire into backyards but no significant damage. We walked on Farrer ridge the next morning, dozens of us. People who may merely have nodded on a morning walk, or previously offered a shy ‘g’day’ now talked of our common fear and
frustration in the fires.
Jesse, from lower down the street, was wide-eyed at the devastation we were all measuring. He and his Dad, he proudly told us, had opened the gates to try to help the poor kangaroos so disoriented they were bounding in terror into the fire. Jesse was pleased to see some kangaroos that morning sitting on the black soil, bewildered but safe. We told him he and his Dad had done a good job and the eight-year-old boy went away grinning.
Our morning paper told us that over 300 homes had been lost, and this was a shock because the ABC had told us the night before of dozens, then possibly 100 homes destroyed. And the figure would grow throughout the week until it reached 530. Aren’t the excited early figures in disasters like these usually scaled down as reality defeats hyperbole? Relentlessly our figures went up, further cause for worry and concern as we grieved for those who had lost everything.
It was the lightning strikes, we told anyone who asked for causes, and the dreadful drought, and one of our hottest days on record and winds that you wouldn’t believe. All these factors came together