Page 41 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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overnight when the wind blew up, contrary to his expectations that it would go out in a September frost.
It was one of those fire weather days when Jim hurtled down our gully in his Land Rover to tell us that the fire was just behind him. He and his wife had tried all morning to put it out and, having failed, they thought they had better tell us that our house was in danger. The fire weather wind had already blown down both our old and our new outhouses and we just had one old Peugeot 403 as transport. I grabbed nappies and my baby of six months and Fiona went to rescue the horses. We did not know what to do about the cow and the goats. The baby took priority over the animals and I thought I would drive the 11 kilometres or so down the mountain road to where Bob, my husband, was working. We had no phone, and the neighbour’s phone—the neighbour whose hand had lit the match—was out. Fire winds had brought down a tree, or several, and I had to wait while a farmer with a chainsaw, fortunately on the road at the same time, cleared them off the road. When I arrived, Bob jumped into our one car, donning his Country Fire Authority hat, leaving the baby and me at the farm where he had been working—no phones, no news, plenty of fear and anxiety, but safe.
It was the old question: stay or go. I had a baby to take care of, so I went. Fiona stayed, but she had no knowledge or equipment to protect our house. We were lucky. It was September. The fire burned to the edge of the bush, several hundred metres from the old house where we lived, evening fell and it snowed: danger over for the time being. That was not the last of my bushfire experiences, but I grew wiser in the ways of bush lore.
Consequently, in the days leading up to 18 January 2003 I was on tenterhooks, both about my place down in east Gippsland, which was surrounded by fire, and about Canberra, where the south-western side would soon be engulfed by fire. I imagine that if I had been a member then I would have been on the phone to the relevant minister’s adviser, annoying him, because when it comes to fire I err on the side of extreme caution.
The precautionary approach is intrinsic to Greens policy. Everything that I have heard and read, and that is now a great deal, indicates to me that the ACT government, the agency responsible for fire prevention and control and most Canberra residents, including those at the urban edges, which it had been recognised for at least a decade were at particular risk from bushfires, were, for whatever reasons, less prepared than Canberra residents expected of their government, their bureaucracies and their communities.
There had been no shortage of warnings. Several reports had indicated the potential in the ACT and its region for a widespread conflagration, and this was admitted by Gary Humphries when he was Minister for Police and Minister for Emergency Services in 1996. Perhaps prior to January 2003 the ACT was like Victoria before 75 people died and more than 2,000 homes were lost in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires of 16 February. Nothing focuses the attention like disaster and tragedy, and fire prevention and management techniques in Victoria have had over two decades to improve. The ACT had been lucky up until 2003; but this proved disastrous for the four victims and 500 households rendered homeless by the January fires.
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