OUT OF THE ASHES

It never ceases to amaze me how Nature’s restorative powers following a devastating bushfire defy what we think could be possible. My recent trip to the mainland showed me how, two years down the track from the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, the bush has regenerated and is once more lush and green.

Living in the Yarra Valley, my husband’s family have had their fair share of run ins with bushfires over the years, with a battle royal being waged by my brothers in law back in 1983 to save the family home as they were surrounded in the Ash Wednesday fires, and more recently in early 2009 with the Black Saturday fires.

Trips were constantly made back and forth in four locations in the Yarra and Latrobe Valleys as my brothers and sisters in law evacuated one day, returned the next, keeping vigil as the wind changed and doing it all again several times over. While all this was going on, my niece and her family were entrenched at their place in the Dandenong Ranges doing the same thing. All came through with houses intact but not without their share of dramas.

The family wedding I made the trip to the mainland for was held on one such property. My sister in law and her then partner were part way through construction of their new house on a beautiful bush property, and it was obvious as the fires approached they were right in the firing line. The crucial decision to stay and fight or go had to be made quickly. With all the man hours invested in the planning and construction, and with the framework completed, they decided to stay and protect what they’d built.

What followed is something I would never want to experience, and as for those who have endured the dramatic and often traumatic onslaught of any natural disaster, there is no way to understand the experience unless you’ve lived through it. Photos they emailed me after the event showed a totally blackened landscape, with the lone untouched skeleton of their house frame still standing just metres from what had been a wall of fire. Such was the heat, even the dirt was pulverized into black dust, and as everyone else in the immediate area had already evacuated, not a building from their block onwards escaped.

The enormity of the event is still evident, with dead trees throughout the bush standing sentinel like black statues. Even two years down the track the scars both to the landscape and those who live there will still take more time to fade, but to see what can rise out of the ashes, the regeneration which softens the brutality of what the fire consumed, is nothing short of a miracle.