Kinglake-350 (16 page)

Pandemonium

So many people in the district have been going about their business, completely oblivious of what is coming at them. There are blokes in singlets lounging around the veranda of the pub, shoppers picking up a few last-minute items for a Saturday night barbeque, picnickers lazing by the creeks, girls out riding horses.

The lack of ‘situational awareness’ that firefighters speak of is about to come screaming back at them with a vengeance. Of the 173 Victorians to die in the several fires of Black Saturday, 120 of them perish in this one.

The tsunami pulses up the beetling slopes of the escarpment, whipping missiles in every direction. It rips great branches from the trees along the crest, transforms them into incendiaries that are sucked up into the whirlpool and fall to earth in places like the Yarra Valley, thirty kilometres away. Fire comes from all points of the compass.

For some, sitting in a darkened room with the TV and the air-con blasting, the first they know of the approaching conflagration is when the roof blows off or the veranda bursts into flame. At least one person that day learns for the first time that his house is on fire when he notices pink slurry dribbling down the wall—dropped by a helicopter trying to extinguish his burning roof.

Pandemonium breaks loose.

People make hideous, panic-struck mistakes. The CFA policy is to stay or go, but many attempt a fatal combination of the two. They stay for as long as they think they can, hoping to save the house, then bolt, suddenly deciding that an assemblage of steel and wood isn’t worth dying for. Cars barrel blindly through the smoke, T-bone each other: sometimes the occupants are knocked unconscious, others wish they had been as the fire rolls in at them.

Some make a run for god knows where and die on the side of the road, in gutters and cuttings, in ditches and driveways. Some bury themselves in creeks and dams, then in mud as the water evaporates, then dirt as the mud dries.

Particularly poignant are the stories of some of the newer arrivals to this country and the dozen or so people of other nationalities who will die today. Kinglake is not a particularly multicultural community, but like any contemporary Australian farming area, it has its share of migrants who have chosen to make it their home. And whereas native-born Australians are at least raised with some awareness of bushfires, these people must have wondered what kind of hell they’d stumbled into.

An Italian-born immigrant watches helplessly as his wife and two children die. A Vietnamese family who’ve only been in the country for a few weeks huddle in a house, terrified, bewildered, as the inferno rages around them. The Indian family Wood visited that morning, the Singhs, run for the safety of a broccoli patch as their house burns down, lie watching in disbelief as the inferno storms past.

Cattle bellow and panic, crush fencelines and become entangled in wire, are roasted alive. Horses bolt through blackened paddocks with rolling eyes and tails ablaze. Birds ignite in the air and arc to earth like comets. Sheets of corrugated iron go swinging on the wind like butcher’s knives. Gas bottles fall over: they absorb the heat, and when they eventually explode they shoot across the yard like torpedoes, take out the neighbours’ living room. A woman watches as a blood-red rose of melting glass blossoms in her window.

Artists, much given to little mud-brick cottages in the lyrebird bush, find themselves in a landscape on the rampage. Environmentalists die in it. Lovers’ hearts melt and flow into one another’s. At least one St Andrews hippy stands on the edge of the forest, arms open, eyes closed. Says later he’s seen God.

The fire is the great equaliser: rich and poor, old and young, famous and infamous, abled and not, greenies and rednecks: the distinctions disappear and they die in droves.

Luck always, always plays a part. Among the thousands of stories that emerge from the disaster, there are those of brilliantly prepared families who perish, of shambolic incompetents who ignore every rule in the book and walk away unscathed.

But the luck, like most luck, has its roots in knowledge. There are those who’ve always known about fire, who took it into consideration when building or buying their homes, who’ve carried out their preparations. But many more are newcomers, both to the region and the bush. They don’t know what preparations are.

None of this is to blame individuals. When the level of unprepared-ness is that high, it becomes a matter of culture. Ours is a society that has failed to come to terms with its environment, an environment that was always dangerous and is now becoming positively lethal, stretched to breaking point by the stresses of global warming.

Time and again, as the survivors came together in the ash-grey aftermath, you’d hear the phrase: ‘I don’t understand—I didn’t imagine it would be like that.’

Professor John Handmer, a disaster management expert at RMIT, conducted a detailed study and found that only 20 percent of those who died were well prepared, even though the definition of ‘well-prepared’ used in the study was minimal: a water supply and buckets and mops. Forty-four percent of the victims were aged, disabled or under twelve. Thirty percent were taken completely by surprise, despite the CFA warnings all week and the massive smoke plumes lowering over the region all afternoon.

Residents stand there stunned with their pathetic little mops and buckets in hand as a mountain of fire falls onto them. It sucks the moisture from mouths, the sweat from forearms, it desiccates tongues and throats, it would drive them out of their mind if they weren’t out of it already with fear.

Manna gums are screwed out of the ground, massive mountain ash snap and shatter. Candlebark fulfils its destiny. The Anglican and Catholic churches go to meet their maker, the Buddhist temple doesn’t. Bursts of flame shoot hundreds of metres into the air. One resident describes a paddock in front of him, some distance from the fire front, suddenly bursting into flame as if it has been touched with a sorcerer’s wand. He can only assume that a cloud of gas has descended upon the paddock and been ignited.

Some say the wind generated by the fire does as much damage as the fire itself: certainly the two work in terrifying tandem. The wind is whipping like a mad thing, up the gullies and over the ridgelines, through the trees. A shed roof turns up in an orchard a kilometre from its base.

Some residents have fire plans, but plans evaporate like puddles of water on this godforsaken day. They follow the official line: they fight outside for as long as they can stand it, pouncing on spot fires, pouring on the water, then gather up the family. Retreat indoors and wait for the radiant heat to die down. And wait. And wait.

They try the doors, whip away their fingers as the skin blisters and sticks to the handle. They watch in horror as the fiery tide probes their defences, finds little chinks and cracks in the armour— the rotting windowsill they’ve been meaning to repair, the crack in the joinery, the gap under the door—and sends the shock troops in: sparks and jets and tongues of light.

Some feel as if the fire is hunting them down, and in a sense they’re right, although it’s not so much them that the fire is searching for. It’s oxygen, of which the inside of your house—or your body—is a convenient reservoir. The fire needs the oxygen to sustain itself and will take every atom it can get.

Terrified residents hear the jerrycans explode, the cars go up, the gas bottles vent with ear-piercing screams. Above it all is the roar, that blood-curdling, heart-stopping
whomp
of the fire itself.

‘What the hell is that noise?’ somebody screams. In part, it’s the thrashing of wind-whipped branches and leaves, but it’s mainly trillions of individual plant cells crackling as they explode.

Only somebody who has lived through that dread-filled noise can begin to imagine what it’s like. It’s still kilometres away, but the air shakes and the trees shiver—the ground begins to vibrate. Cockroaches and ants scuttle for cover, disappear into cracks in the ground. Then it rips into your ear drums, your brain, into the depths of your being.

Soon the rooms fill up with smoke, the alarms go nuts, the kids and the dogs go mad, the walls bubble, the ceilings glow, red ribbons run along the cross beams, burst into open flame. You creep, crablike, to the door and by christ it’s still too hot out there and you wonder when it will be safe to go outside.

The realisation falls on you like a cold hand, the one cold thing in this black hell: it never will be safe outside, not for you. Your life— the regrets, the joys, the unfinished business, the chances half taken, the words of love unspoken, the precious pitter-patter of irrelevance— cavalcades through your head.

Time storms and the blood stands still as you huddle under the blanket and gaze at each other in disbelief. You watch their faces twist, their eyelids grip, their foreheads’ red reflected pain, you stroke their hair, you tell them it’ll be all right. And it will be. You kiss their devastated lips and pray that it will be quick

FIRE: AN ILLUMINATED HISTORY

Unholy Trinity

There are cultures in recorded history—the Ainu of Japan, the Slavs of Central Europe—who thought of fire as if it were a living being. In the Trobriand Islands, fire is born of a woman. In the Arrernte dreaming there is a myth with an even stronger resonance of the link between fire and life: first fire emerges from the genitals of a butchered male kangaroo. In the Vedic period of ancient India, the fire in the hearth was regarded as a witness, an eternal eye gazing out upon the comings and goings of the household, a source of memory and oracle. For the people of those worlds, fire was life.

Science would tell us that they weren’t far off the mark: if not actually living, fire is inextricably bound to life. The valence between the two is as critical as the gravity that holds the moon in place.

For its first billion years, Earth was a thin-skinned rocky body carving a lonely path through space, one of a number of satellites orbiting a minor star on an arm of a spiralling galaxy. There was no fire.

The planet was enveloped in a mixture of gases—nitrogen, oxygen, argon and others—whose proportions waxed and waned according to the convulsions of its molten interior. In the Carboniferous and Permian ages, the oxygen component climbed as high as 35 percent. It wasn’t until 150 million years ago that it stabilised to its present 21 percent. The reason for this change was the appearance of another phenomenon unknown anywhere but here: life.

The plants came first. Around 3.5 billion years ago, photosynthesising prokaryotes—a type of blue-green algae— appeared. Not a particularly auspicious beginning: they were so primitive they didn’t even have a cell nucleus. But it could be argued that they are still, at least in chronological terms, the most successful species. They hung around for a long time and evolved, eventually, into
Homo sapiens
.

The key to their influence was the fact that they absorbed carbon dioxide and pumped out oxygen. Initially they poured it into the surrounding ocean (creating, incidentally, the iron ore that drives today’s economy) and then into the atmosphere.

Aerobic photosynthesis appeared 1.3 billion years ago, aerobic respiration some 700 million years later. It wasn’t until as recently as 400 million years ago that the conditions which would allow sustained burning coalesced.

Like the Church, fire has its own holy trinity: in fire’s case, the elements are oxygen, fuel and ignition. The latter had always been there, but only in fits and starts, flashes and flares—the odd spark from a tumbling rock or burst of lava, a crack of lightning. But with the emergence of life and its by-products—oxygen in the atmosphere, fuel in the form of combustible biomass—the triangle was complete. The chemical reaction that we call fire became possible.

For we now know that fire is not a living being; it is not even matter. It is a manifestation of matter changing form, a chemical reaction between atmospheric oxygen and a fuel that has reached ignition temperature. (The ignition point will vary according to the material. Wood, for example, ignites at around 300 to 500 degrees Celsius, hay at 260 degrees.)

The first stage of the process is known as pyrolysis, which is the thermochemical decomposition of a fuel by the application of heat. Look at a sheet of paper thrown onto a camp fire: that initial crumple and twist, that creeping discoloration, is pyrolysis. Paper is basically cellulose, and the vegetation at the heart of the bushfire is composed primarily of cellulose too. As heat is applied, the material undergoes a change in its chemistry. The bonds that hold the cellulose molecules together are torn apart and gases are released. At around 260 degrees Celsius these gases combine with the oxygen in the air and give off heat and light. So pyrolysis releases gas from the fuel, and it is the combustion of these gases, rather than of the fuel itself, that produces visible incandescence, the eruption of heat and light we call flame.

Very quickly, in geological terms, after fire became possible it became more than that. It became essential. Fire was an informing principle for the evolution of the terrestrial biota. Sparked by lightning, it ranged across the continents, seeking out fuel, synthesising ecologies of every description.

Organisms adapted to this new regime or they perished. Their adaptive techniques varied. Some developed protective traits: banksias had succulent leaves to protect their reproductive organs, grasses stored the bulk of their biomass underground. Others— spinifex for example—used fire almost as an instrument of war, purging rival species, colonising, conquering.

Fire enriched, quickened, transformed, recycled. But it was still a random event. The biosphere had no means of deliberate ignition, no means of controlling that essential first spark. Until the emergence of one more fire species.

Somewhere on the plains of southern Africa, maybe half a million years ago, a member of the Hominidae family,
Homo erectus,
figured out how to light a fire.

From that moment, the cycle was complete; the fire triangle became organic. The biosphere had achieved mastery of the process: it organised spark as it did oxygen and fuel.

Just as humans made whole the cycle of fire, so did fire transform humans. There is a cave at Swartkrans in South Africa that dramatically illustrates this. Among the layers of fossil evidence uncovered there, three are of particular significance. In the first, the bones are those of hominids, scattered and torn so as to suggest they were eaten by predators. Then there is a layer of charcoal. In the final stratum, the bones are those of antelopes and warthogs, and they are burnt: cooked by the hominids. The tables have turned. Somewhere in the intervening period, around the time of that second, charcoal, layer our ancestors learned to control fire, and it had a transformative effect upon their relationship with their environment. It gave us a primacy from which we have never retreated.

Fire formed the world of early humans. It was used for every aspect of daily and nightly life. The hunt was a fire activity, from the rousing and herding of prey to the cooking of the catch. Fire stimulated the plants for which the first people foraged. It provided warmth and light, protection from the jostling spirits of the night, shelter from mosquitoes and snakes. Fire was at the heart of every technology, from the sharpening of spears to the preparation of ochre and wax, from pottery to primitive metallurgy. As Prometheus exclaimed, in giving fire to humanity he had ‘invented all the arts of man’.

The changed diet brought with it other effects, a feedback loop that enhanced humanity’s position in a fiercely competitive world. Palaeontologists speculate that cooking, for example, made possible a change in dentition and released the skull from having to brace the enormous muscle required to chew uncooked foods, thus allowing the skull to swell and the brain along with it.

Fire was power. It unleashed the magic in a lump of wood, a tuft of grass. Inevitably, it entered the inchoate religious life: as myths from India to the Tanami attest, the golden chain that linked humankind to the gods was a fuse.

With this new firepower, humans spread across the world. Wherever they went, our ancestors brought fire, expanding upon the pyric patterns already inherent in the land.

In Stephen Pyne’s words:

Fire and humanity pushed and pulled each other around the globe. They advanced together—spreading like flaming fronts, spotting into favourable sites, probing into marches, flaring amid thickets, smouldering amid peat, crackling through scrub, all as the fuels of environmental opportunity and the climate of culture allowed.

Sometime in the Holocene period—50,000 or 60,000 years ago— that global migration reached the northern shores of the continent that would come to be called Australia. And if early humans were fire creatures, the continent they had come across was their spiritual home. There was nowhere on Earth more primed, dried and ready to burn than the Great Southern Land.