The fire this time - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
AT THREE IN THE morning, Anni and I take what we know and what we don't know and go to bed. We'll sleep in shifts. Anni opens Revolutionary Road at chapter one and when I next open my eyes, she's at page fifty. The normal morning show on the radio has given way to a service dedicated to the fires. The presenter accepts calls from people amplifying the message of an earlier caller: ‘Get out while the getting's good.' A man from Strathewen struggles to describe the speed of the fire that tore his town apart twelve hours ago – its ferocity, the intensity of the heat. A woman from Kinglake has made it to the evacuation centre at Whittlesea but is grieving for her husband, who she fears may have perished.
I stand on the veranda with the voices of fire victims and firefighters playing behind me. The sky is the muted blue seen in paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish townscapes. The birds have gone, all of them. Helicopters beat their way east. Alerts for residents of forty or more towns are being broadcast, including ours. A presenter announces that he can now confirm that Marysville has suffered the devastating impact of a firestorm. The death toll of a number of fires still raging appears likely to grow, he says, qualifying the message with professional caution: ‘Nothing is confirmed at this stage.'
One of the worst things happening anywhere on earth at this time is happening in broad patches of Victoria, and the voices that confirm this make it less likely than ever that I will head for safety. When the radio is playing in the morning I'm usually listening to stylised hyperbole, the patter of gossip, the laments of footballers caught pissing or rooting in public, torrents of complaint, clever lies. But now I'm listening to the terrible beauty of tales in which there is no exaggeration, no sentimentality. When a caller who has escaped the flames says ‘horror', it is horror; dread is dread; sorrow is sorrow. I'm absorbed by the way in which disaster restores the vigour of language, and by remaining within this horseshoe of fire I'm earning the right to be absorbed. This is the vernacular of Australian catastrophe, the remorseless bushfire, and its stories reveal much more about the wherewithal of the broad community than those of ill-advised young men clambering up cliffs on a Turkish peninsula.
So if Anni and I escape being withered to char by the closing fires, this is what I'll settle for: I stayed because the people in the fires spoke with such spare beauty of what they'd endured, and because a nong in a Big Brother T-shirt was shouting in the street, and because our trees would have been compelled to remain where they stood and become flame while I was drinking gin in fire-free Carlton.
SIX WEEKS AFTER THAT night of enchantment, dread and irrational conviction, Anni and I are driving over the black spur north of Healesville where the highway climbs to Dom Dom Saddle. Mountain ash flourishes here, conscientiously nurtured after the fires of 1939, the slender trunks as straight as pillars. Before the fires of February the forest was a collage of greens, intense at ground level where the ferns thrive, fading to a shimmery borage-coloured shade at the crowns of the ash. The ferns are gone now, leaving the bare earth exposed. The tree trunks are charred but the fawn husks of leaves, emptied of oil, still cling to twigs and boughs. And this is now a forest from which shadows have been banished in all their variety: the dappling of the forest floor; the deep caves of darkness in places where the light can't reach; the criss-crossing of shapes printed on the ground cover below. At first it seems as if the forest has been stripped of all nuance, but before long the austerity of the scene comes to seem less a diminishment of vigour and variety than the creation of a new beauty altogether. It's a cleaner and more disciplined expression that makes the lavish use of green in the remaining unburnt patches of forest seem superficial. It complements perfectly the pared-down narratives of the bushfire survivors, as if the chastened forest had experienced its own conversion to austerity from excess.
Over the weeks following the fires we watched and listened to a number of memorial services for the victims of the fires. All of them struggled to fit response to event. A concatenation of clichés is no less lowering to the spirits just because it purports to honour dead people. The language of tributes and memorials is a language of capitals, and probably cannot be other; heft and emphasis reliably complement gloom, at least. But to my mind, a finer memorial to the suffering of the bushfire victims would be the unrehearsed narratives of those who escaped the holocaust of February: I ran with the kids. I saw horses sprinting in the paddock. A man stopped his car and helped us in. Thank God for that good man. ♦