The language of catastrophe
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tom Griffiths
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Tom Griffiths’ biography and other articles by this writer
THERE are enough Black days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over - Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays - and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday. Yet we keep being taken unawares. There is something personal about fire, something frighteningly irrational and ultimately beyond our comprehension. It roars out of the bush and out of our nightmares. It makes its victims feel hunted down and its survivors toyed with. Why did the fire destroy the house next door and leave mine unscathed? As one bushfire survivor confessed: ‘I felt as if the fire knew me.' A book about the 2003 Canberra fires takes as its title a child's question: How did the fire know we lived here? The great international fire historian Stephen Pyne keeps telling us that fire ‘isn't listening to the rhetoric, the research, or the parliamentary resolutions. It doesn't feel our pain. It doesn't care. It just is.' Why does he need to reassure us of this?
The Black Saturday fires in Victoria, according to the fire ecologist Kevin Tolhurst, released energy equivalent to fifteen hundred times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath. There were relatively few injuries: the annihilation was total, and the day after brought an awful stillness and silence. The wind change was a killer, but if it had not arrived when it did the Kilmore East fire might have swept into the thickly vegetated suburbs of Melbourne's north-east.
Managers and scholars of bushfire have observed that our society experiences a heightened awareness of the danger of fire after a tragic event such as Black Saturday, but as the years pass complacency sets in and the memory of the horror dims. Yet there is another psychological pattern that is more troubling and that we can observe at work in the months immediately after a great fire. The forgetting of the recurrent power of nature is immediately and insidiously embedded in the ways we describe and respond to disaster. Our sympathy for the victims of bushfire, the surge of public financial support and the political imperative to rebuild as swiftly as possible conspire to constrain cultural adaptation. Such sacrifice of life cries out for meaning, and for a kind of unbending resolution in the face of nature. There is often an emotional need, as people return and rebuild, to deny the ‘naturalness' and therefore the inevitable recurrence of the event. Black Saturday, we quickly reassured ourselves, was ‘unique', ‘unprecedented', ‘unnatural' - and it was a ‘disaster'. We must never let it happen again! Culture can - and will - triumph over nature.
There is an irresistible tendency to use language that describes bushfire almost wholly in terms of tragedy and destruction. Not only do we talk in crisis language: we also use military metaphors and comparisons - partly because, in the face of an awesome natural force, they offer some comforting human agency. We refer to the authorities hunkered down in the Melbourne ‘war room'. We revere the heroism of the firefighters and compare them to Anzacs, linking the domestic fire front to the nation's grand narratives of overseas war. At the national memorial service to the victims of Black Saturday Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke of ‘a new army of heroes where the yellow helmet evokes the same reverence as the slouch hat of old'. We describe forests as destroyed, even if they are highly evolved to burn. We yearn to send out better technology to suppress the fire front. We bomb the flames with water. We talk of hitting the fires hard and hitting them fast. Arsonists are ‘terrorists'. The fires are ‘a threat to national security'.
But the military metaphors, however apt and enabling, make us believe that we can beat fire, somehow. They define heroism as staying and fighting. Leaving early, in such a culture, might be seen to be cowardly. At the memorial service many speakers, in honouring the dead and their heroism, were also unwittingly cornering another generation. ‘Courage,' Kevin Rudd declared, ‘is a firefighter standing before the gates of hell unflinching, unyielding with eyes of steel saying, "Here I stand, I can do no other."' Yet one of the triumphs of the Black Saturday tragedy was that not a single firefighter died on the day. In the face of that horror fire officers knew when to retreat. It must have been a shocking decision to make but it was the right one, or the death toll would have been much higher. We all have to learn better when to retreat - and we have to find a word other than ‘retreat'.
TASMANIA'S TERRIBLE DAY was a Black Tuesday. It was another 7 February fire, but in 1967. On that day a ‘fire hurricane', as survivors called it, stormed through the bushland of south-eastern Tasmania and invaded Hobart's suburbs, coming within two kilometres of the CBD. It caused what was then the largest loss of life and property on any single day in the history of settler Australia.
There had been good rains in the winter and spring of 1966, producing a profusion of growth in the forests and grasslands, and the rains were followed by very dry conditions in the late spring and summer. Drought was settling with a vengeance on southern Australia; the bush became brittle and parched. There was not a drop of rain in the first week of February 1967. On 3 February a high-pressure system moved across the state and off the eastern coast, and the northerly winds freshened. In country areas fires continued to be lit - ‘burning off' was a rural ritual. It was done casually, to bring on a green pick, or for clearing. Sometimes people, when seeing smoke on the horizon, would throw a match over their back fence, because a newly burnt home paddock was like a safety blanket. It was common before February 1967 to see spirals of smoke rising from the foothills of Hobart's mountainous skyline, and ‘no one worried about them too much.' Temperatures continued to climb and the winds strengthened.
On the morning of the 7th, the Hobart Mercury's headline declared: ‘Bush Fires Menacing State: Danger Today Could Be Critical'. By the time children were making their way to the first day of the school year it was already hot. As the fire scientist Phil Cheney told Moira Fahy in her film Black Tuesday (Bushfire CRC, 2005), the eighty-eight fires that had been burning for some time - the overwhelming majority of them deliberately lit - began to move about 10.30 am, and new ones sprang to life. From Hamilton and Bothwell in the midlands to the Channel in the south, 110 separate fires were licked into ferocity by the northerlies and many surged together by 3 pm. One fire suddenly penetrated Hobart's north and west. Communication was cut to northern Tasmania and mainland Australia, and three out of four local radio stations were put off the air. A Japanese fishing trawler approaching the port of Hobart that afternoon turned around in the Derwent estuary and headed for Melbourne instead, and the captain later reported that the whole coastline was aflame and he despaired of finding life and order remaining. Premier Eric Reece was in Sydney that day, representing Tasmania in an inter-parliamentary bowls tournament. While he was away, in five hours more than half a million acres and thirteen hundred homes were burnt, and sixty-two people died.
Fires of such scale and ferocity generate inquiries, and this was the case in Tasmania in 1967. One of the most useful responses came from the work of RL Wettenhall, a reader in political science at the University of Tasmania, who began researching and writing a detailed study of Black Tuesday, which was published in 1975 and called Bushfire Disaster: An Australian Community in Crisis. I have drawn some of my account of the fire from his book. Wettenhall positioned his academic inquiry in the field of ‘disaster studies', looking at overseas theories and examples, and then turning in detail to Australia and ultimately to his own backyard. And also to his front yard, for on 7 February he and his wife had evacuated their children and then fought side by side, successfully, to save their home. ‘Such warnings as we received in Hobart...were still not for us, not for city dwellers at least, though we conceded that a few in isolated country townships might well be endangered,' he wrote. ‘How surprised I was, and how ill-prepared, to find myself fighting fire that afternoon...in my own suburban front garden and backyard.'
Wettenhall, as a political scientist, was interested in the way his society had responded to the crisis, how its political and fire-fighting institutions had stood up to the test. ‘Very few of us in fact saw a fire brigade that day,' he recalled. ‘Hobart was grossly ill-prepared.'
Drawing on the international scholarly literature of disaster, Wettenhall argued that the most significant thing about disaster is not the suffering or loss, nor our capacity to recover from adversity, but rather the ‘extraordinary optimism, common to most people, that we ourselves will not be stricken; or that, if indeed disaster should strike, it will not recur'. The other insight that illuminated his case study of disaster was drawn from the American social scientist Kenneth Boulding, who observed that humans have always tended to regard disaster control as ‘a problem in engineering rather than in sociology'. So Wettenhall noted of Tasmania: ‘Though officialdom had taken some pains to analyse certain material elements in these [disaster] experiences and had thereby effected improvements in, for example, firefighting and flood-protection techniques and resources, the broader social issues had received scant attention.'
These, then, were the two insights that shaped Wettenhall's study: that people, through optimism and forgetfulness, generally fail to believe that disaster will recur, and that understanding the social origins and impact of disaster nearly always comes second to addressing its material or physical dimensions.
The history of bushfire is full of shocking recurrence - and of recurrent shock. The litany of Black days alone tells us that. Hobart had already experienced its very own Black Friday, as it was indeed called: Friday, 31 December 1897, in which similar areas to those ravaged by the 1967 fire burned, but in an era when the mountain valleys and slopes were less populated. Six people died, and dozens of houses and other buildings were destroyed. After one of fire's regular visits to the slopes of Mount Wellington, in March 1940 an old resident was reported in The Mercury as saying that fire had occurred in the same way twenty-five years before and twenty-five years before that, and in ‘twenty-five years hence the same thing would happen again'. As Wettenhall noted, ‘He was two years out in his prediction.' Fire, like flood, tends to revisit the same places. Vegetation, topography and climate conspire to invite it back, no matter what humans do.
But humans intersect with the physical and biological chemistries of fire in fundamental ways, and thus history combines with physics and ecology to produce a powerful natural-cultural amalgam. Hobart's Black Tuesday of 1967 had old and new cultural elements. It was a turning point, because it was perhaps the last fire of a kind that was typical of settler Australia and the first fire of a new type that has proliferated since. It was an old fire in the sense that it was deliberately lit - not maliciously, by arsonists, but carelessly, by rural settlers. In those days it was called ‘burning off'; these days we would call it criminal negligence. Most of the fires running that hot February morning had been lit and allowed to stay alight by farmers and graziers. This was the same scenario that had led to Victoria's Black Friday fires of 1939, which burned 1.4 million hectares and killed seventy-one people. Judge Leonard Stretton's shocking finding in his subsequent Royal Commission in 1939 was, ‘These fires were lit by the hand of man.'
On Black Tuesday, because of these traditions of rural burning, fire had roared into Hobart's suburbs. The bush had come to town. But the town had also come to the bush. This was the way in which Hobart's Black Tuesday was a new kind of fire in Australian history. It was the first big Australian fire to invade the expanding suburbs of a city. As Wettenhall put it, ‘no other Australian disaster had ever knocked so hard at the doors of an administrative capital - indeed, virtually put it out of action for a time.' The city had penetrated the bush, insinuating its suburbs among the gums. Tasmania's black day anticipated other dramatic fires of this growing urban interface with the bush: Ash Wednesday 1983, Sydney 1994, Canberra 2003 and Black Saturday 2009.
ROGER WETTENHALL'S IMPORTANT book set out to make sense of how he came to be fighting a fire hurricane in his suburban yard, and it was also an attempt to generate an Australian sociology of disaster. What kinds of writing and reflection have the 2009 fires so far produced?
It is three winters now since the Black Saturday bushfire brought its terror. In the last year soaking rains have inspired grass and forest growth that is both heartening and frightening. New houses have sprouted like lignotubers where their predecessors were gutted. Other homes - razed, flattened and cleared - are haunting absences. The Royal Commission, which cranked through 155 days of evidence, has finished and reported, and already its recommendations have dust on them. After the last summer of disasters - floods, cyclones and earthquakes - bushfire survivors are sharing their experience with new victims of nature's wilfulness. And from the ashes, from the regrowth and renewal, from the pain and the horror, there now comes some wisdom.
The most enduring wisdom forged by the Black Friday 1939 fire came in the form of Judge Leonard Stretton's Royal Commission Report. It was also the greatest literary legacy of that fire. There were no other published words about Black Friday that compared with the biblical power of Stretton's report. He described ‘balls of crackling fire' that ‘leaped from mountain peak to mountain peak': ‘for mile upon mile the former forest monarchs were laid in confusion, burnt, torn from the earth, and piled one upon another as matches strewn by a giant hand.' Of the innocence of Australians living and working deep in the bush in high summer, he declared: ‘They had not lived long enough.'
Judge Stretton's report was celebrated not only as a political statement but also as literature. For many years it was a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, and politicians and fire managers consulted it. In 2002-03, as the Alps burned, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks borrowed Stretton's 1939 report from the Parliamentary Library for his weekend reading. Bruce Esplin, head of the Victorian bushfire inquiry of 2003, said he could feel Judge Stretton looking over his shoulder. Stretton's words still resonate with poetic and political power: he was fearless.
Justice Bernard Teague's Royal Commission Report into the most recent Black Saturday fires is earnest and thorough but too careful and comprehensive to make memorable literature. It is becoming clear that Black Saturday is shaping a different and more diverse literary legacy. Black Friday 1939, followed so quickly by years of world war, did not generate any notable books, although it did induce lifelong trauma, become embedded in folklore and language, and seed political and bureaucratic reform. But Black Saturday 2009 is quickly germinating a forest of impressive writing: perceptive essays by John van Tiggelen, Robert Manne, Robert Hillman; Danielle Clode's A Future in Flames, Roger Franklin's Inferno, Peter Stanley's forthcoming Black Saturday at Steels Creek. And Adrian Hyland's Kinglake-350 and Karen Kissane's Worst of Days, two impressive books that focus on the Kilmore East fire and together offer a powerful portrait of how a disaster unfolds - and of its political and emotional aftermath.
Adrian Hyland's Kinglake-350 (Text Publishing, 2011) takes us into the world of the Kinglake Ranges as they are about to be consumed by the fire that is storming unheralded towards them. The story's main character is Acting Sergeant Roger Wood of the Kinglake Police, and his call sign is Kinglake-350. We follow him from dawn on 7 February; learn what he is doing, thinking and fearing; and feel the drama of Black Saturday explode around him. Through him we meet the people of Kinglake, and gain a visceral sense of the caprice and violence of a firestorm in the ash range. Adrian Hyland knows these people because he lives with them. This is superb non-fiction writing: dramatic, full of tension, deeply researched, true.
Karen Kissane's Worst of Days (Hachette, 2010), published before the Royal Commission into Black Saturday's final report, has its foundation in her work as the Melbourne Age's chief reporter on the commission. Like Hyland, Kissane structured her compelling narrative around selected individuals, but her book is also a piece of sustained investigative journalism. Daily immersion in the hearings and evidence of the Royal Commission is transmuted into history and literature with perspective and punch. She seems determined to find a voice that is stronger and tougher than the ‘disapproving puzzlement' and ‘neutral, non-condemnatory tones' of the commission's interim report. As Kissane puts it, ‘the commission's [interim] report reflected the evidence before it, in which so many emergency workers and bureaucrats using phrases right out of Sir Humphrey Appleby's mouth had smoothly declined to take responsibility for any failures: it was not their job, or they were working at a higher level, or their underlings should have told them if there was a problem.'