The fire this time
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
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The bushfire debris descends from the night sky with a strangely graceful motion, as if swimming. Leaves and twigs settle softly on the grass, on the flowering plants, on the divided planks of the veranda. A strip of bark a metre long describes a slow spiral around the extended limbs of a weeping spruce before drifting down to the lawn. More charred debris arrives, appearing out of a haze the colour of Coke. I stand enchanted in the suffocating heat of the evening.
There's fire in the mountains and it's coming this way. If the fire reaches our town Anni and I may die. We have gambled on a predicted wind change, absurdly determined to remain loyal to the trees that surround our house. We're not sentimental about trees – we don't believe that they're home to dryads or earth spirits, or that they benefit from being embraced – but it seems wrong to run away while the trees remain staked by their roots. The oldest tree, the weeping spruce, is in its nineties and will burn like a torch if an ember touches it. What do we hope to achieve? If the wind stops the fire on the mountain slopes, the trees will survive without us. If the fire keeps coming, nothing we can do will save the trees, and nothing will save us.
The waiting, though, is pure poetry – the swimming debris, the motionless air, the silence, a patch of sky as bright as mango away to the north where the fire rages – but only because of all that we don't know. The town of Marysville, just over the mountains, has been incinerated – we don't know that. Many people up there had the life scorched from them in seconds as they ran from the towering tongues of flame, but we don't know that. The blast-furnace intensity of the heat at the fire front, capable of igniting a timber structure without the agency of raw flame – that's not the sort of thing we would believe, even if we'd been warned. ‘Listen,' says Anni, quietening the hiss of the hose in her hand so that I can hear what she can hear. It's the sound of nothing. The melded play of noises normal at this time of night, when birds sprint for home and dogs try out a few final recreational whines and cars on the Warburton Highway send a muted burr over the river and up the hillsides – gone. We grin at each other as people do when they recognise a moment that other, more easily alarmed folk would consider spooky. Because of all that we don't know, we think of ourselves as not easily alarmed.
A HELICOPTER BEATS its way east, and then another. All that we can see are the travelling haloes of
their lights. When the pulse of the helicopters dies away we revisit our response to that unnatural hush. Perhaps this is genuinely scary? When was the night ever this quiet? And for that matter, where are all our neighbours? Uneasy in a way we weren't five minutes earlier, Anni and I glance at the car in the driveway. If the fire comes we'll have to rely on a harum-scarum dash down the paved road to – to somewhere. To the river? Do people survive in rivers if the bush is burning above them, sitting on the pebble bed with only their heads above the water? Or do they expire like matches, blackened skulls lolling on unburnt bodies?
The cat agitates for a feed. We shrug off the anxiety. Within the house the radio is broadcasting a report from Whittlesea, not so far from Kinglake, where people have died and the charred remains of homes lie smouldering on roadsides. A young woman is interviewing a mother who escaped the inferno with her three children. The mother can barely control her distress, but everything she says is as gripping in its brevity as the verses of an ancient ballad. The fire came. She had two minutes in which to act. Flaming debris fell around her as she ran with her children. She saw horses sprinting in a paddock. A stranger stopped his car and bundled her and the children inside, then made the dash that saved them all. Thank God for that good man. When do we hear voices like this on the radio? When a correspondent is reporting from some hellhole across the seas and a mother is speaking of the massacre in her village. The fire in Kinglake and Marysville is what Kalashnikovs and mortar shells and implacable young men in combat camouflage are to lands more in the news than our own.
Reports come through of probable deaths at Marysville. Although what transpired there in the space of sixty minutes a few hours earlier is still being spoken of cautiously, it's clear enough that the final count of victims will be high. Anni and I return to the garden, damping down vegetation in a way that we are now aware will make not the slightest difference if the fire reaches out for Warburton. But the tranquillity of the night and its lulling influence persists, and I find myself gazing in reverie at the dark humps of the mountains across the river. I can distinguish a faint violet glow beyond the topmost trees. If I were to start walking due north and press on until within that light, I would be in Marysville. I project images of the Marysville I remember, the day-tripper destination where you would stop to admire the tall trees and wander about thinking in a Willy Wordsworth way of nature as the nurse of the soul, and call into a Bide-a-Wee bakery for a pink lamington and a takeaway latte. And then I think of the fire rearing from the kindling of the forest floor, throwing arms of flame into the oil-laden foliage, striding into the town like a living thing, a monster of appetite, limbs ablaze and red mouth roaring.