I’ve almost forgotten what it was like, the last time I drove through Strathewen. It was early autumn, just a few weeks after Black Saturday. The hills were coated in the first green of the season. Cattle and sheep grazed on new pasture, picturesque against vineyards tumbling downhill. Old gums and fallen branches cluttered the roadside, obscuring my view ahead.
Around a bend, we crossed a thin black line into a landscape of destruction — crossed the looking glass into a parallel world. On one side the pastel hues of a rural idyll: on the other side monochromatic desolation. Rows of hills bristled with charred stubble like so many angrily jutting chins. Trees sucked bare of every branch, twig and leaf, leaving behind a forest of silent cenotaphs. Even the soil itself had burnt back to bare mineral earth. The thin protective carpet of leaves, twigs and humus had vanished, exposing clay and mudstone to the elements. Rain had fallen since the fires, carving deep scars down the gullies as if even the water fled this monstrosity. Dams dark and unreflective­—coated in a thick black sludge.
The only lightness came from the pale crumpled remains of houses—a twist of iron, the tumbled cream of mudbrick, white of concrete, mutations of plastic faded by the heat. Houses collapsed in on themselves. A surprisingly small pile of bones for what were once substantial structures. How fragile is the protection we erect between ourselves and the outside world, to leave so little behind?
Cars lay abandoned by the roadside, doors ajar, the fates of their occupants unknown. Dulled by the heat, the new wrecks are indistinguishable from ancient bodies unexpectedly exposed beneath the tangle of blackberries that once covered them.
The other bodies were gone—human and animal—the landscape quickly cleansed of its tragedy, but not quickly enough for those who saw it first, the images burnt more fiercely into their memories than the fire itself. Only the bright blue and white tape marked the place of death, flapping in the breeze, still trying to hold the line in a place where all the rules have been broken.
One hundred and seventy two people died on Black Saturday – an unprecedented death toll in a country with a calendar marked with a litany of fire tragedies. Black Thursday, 1851; Red Tuesday, 1898; Black Friday, 1939; Ash Wednesday, 1983. We are running out of days of the week.
Of the five major fires that raged across Victoria on the 7th of February 2009, the Kinglake–Marysville fires on the northern outskirts of Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest cities, was the most deadly. On the steep, densely forested slopes that rise from the plains into the hilly ranges, one hundred and fifty nine people died. Entire townships were all but destroyed; their communities fractured and broken.
The intersection of roads that marked the centre of Strathewen was laid bare, like an outback ghost town or the deserted remains of a failed subdivision. The school buildings had disappeared as if abducted by aliens, leaving only the deserted playground seemingly untouched. Here and there, a tree fern stood amidst the ruins of a life, spreading new fronds magnanimously oblivious to the destruction. At an abandoned gateway, a spurt of pink belladonna lilies burst irrepressibly from the ground, wondering where everyone had gone.
The stringybark trees were charred from top to bottom, where their thick fibrous bark candled in the flames, sending a red rain of embers drumming at the doors and windows of nearby houses. In the damper gullies the manna gums stood white and tall, their canopies turning golden red like a deciduous autumn forest. The tangled streamers of bark would have burnt fast and fierce, shedding long flaming fire brands into the air to fly south and east ahead of the fire front. But the trees themselves have not burnt. I wonder if they will recover, or if years of successive drought will have weakened their ability to withstand this latest assault.
Not all the trees have been so fortunate. Along the creek stands a row of stumps, their tops lying in perfect parallel to the north-east, as if a giant scythe had sliced them a metre or two above the ground. The wind has snapped them all, irrespective of age or size. Perhaps the same wind that fuelled the fire like bellows oxygenating its ferocity, or maybe it was the fire’s own breath sucked in a fearsome hiss between charcoaled teeth?
I knew one of the survivors who lives on this road. He had been involved in fire education for years, teaching people in how to prepare their properties, how to prepare themselves, what to expect and what not to expect. His well-maintained mudbrick home was surrounded by open garden and bare horse paddocks. He had sprinklers around the house under the eaves, a pump and plenty of water. The house sheltered them as the flames arrived, the ponies were brought in under the verandah and the horses should have been safe enough in the bare paddocks. There was no grass left to burn there.
But the pump failed and embers got under the unprotected ridge-capping of the roof. As the flames took hold, there was nothing the family could do but watch their house burn and save themselves. They sheltered around the house for as long as they could, before retreating to the sludge in the bottom of an old collapsed swimming pool. The horses died where they stood in the paddocks—not a burn or mark on them. They should have been safe but the wind from the gully metres away blew superheated air over everything, burning unprotected lungs. Radiant heat, not flames, is the killer. On Black Saturday, wind sent death stalking further ahead of the flames than anyone expected.
A successful fire plan all the same, he insisted. His face was clenched in the grimaced smile of trauma survivors. He’s right – they survived. But no one can predict the pain of collateral grief – the house, the pets, the livestock, the garden. 
I lived five minutes from Strathewen but I rarely went back there. I had no real reason to. Some of my friend’s children went to school here. They have friends who lived here. They have friends who died here. I feel like an intruder on their grief.
It was a year before I went back after the fire. A colleague came to visit from Norway. He studies birds, spends part of every summer in Australia on field work, before making his own annual migration back to the northern hemisphere. He wanted to see where the fires had been and to see if they had affected the bell miners he had been studying.
We drove back along the narrow dirt track crowded with the heavy old stags—the dead hollow trees beloved of possums and parrots. The fire has taken several of our colleagues, ecologists and zoologists, whose life and work intermingled with their love of nature and the bush. I didn’t know them personally, but we know their names, have read their work, have seen them speak. They were our companions in the virtual world of academia.
We opened the windows to listen for the unmistakeable calls of the bell miners. The tinkling chimes are a constant refrain wherever bell miners live, audible across valleys, as the resident clans fiercely assert their territorial possessions, reinforce their social bonds. Summer is breeding season. The birds should have been busy searching for food to feed their voracious, vocal young. But the valley was silent. There was no obvious reason for their departure. Their old territory had not been burnt. The fire was in the next valley. But the birds have gone anyway.
I was surprised, as we drove into the impact zone, at how little had changed since the last time I was here. There were fewer houses, less rubble. There were more for sale signs. People had been clearing up, moving out. The black earth had long since been cloaked in green and the trees had decked their branches with a fuzz of new leaves. But otherwise, the landscape was much the same—desolate and exposed, eroded and empty. A man repairing fences watched as we drove past. There were no new houses yet. Just the survivors standing alone among absent neighbours.
I wondered where the community had gone, scattered across the security of the suburbs, no longer bound together by geography. The school relocated, en masse, to another location, keeping their brood together and maintaining some concept of normality and routine in an abnormal and disjointed world. For the others, I wonder just how strong their neighbourly bonds were, what kept them together and what drove them apart.
Before the 7th of February 2009, I thought I understood the way that fire, climate and drought has created our distinctive environmental landscape. I loved the subtle ways in which our plants and animals have learnt to cope with fire. In the cool green cathedral of mountain ash, with their perpendicular trunks stretching three hundred feet high, it is hard to imagine the fiery death these trees must endure in order for their species to survive. Mountain ash are fire-dependent—without fierce forest fires once every few centuries, the forests would disappear, reverting back to the ancient rainforests that ruled here before fire took hold. Fire is the defining motif of Australian ecology. Everything seems to be either an adaptation to, a defence against or a retreat from, its almost ubiquitous presence.  
Fire has been a part of the Australian landscape, as for the Californian chapparal, the European heaths or the South African fynbos, for long before human history. The steadily drying climate adapted our trees to drought, pre-adapting many of them to withstand fire. Layers of charcoal deep underground reveal the waxing and waning of fires in sequence with climate and vegetation. Cool wet phases dominated by rainforest species intersperse hot dry periods promoting fire-tolerant eucalypts and acacias. Some forty, sixty, one hundred thousand years ago and the land dried significantly. The large forest-dwelling megafauna died out. Fires swept the country. And the first signs of humans appeared. Who can tell, at this distance, who or what caused which and when?
Where do we fit in this flammable ecosystem? Are we fire sensitive, like the cool temperate rainforests that shelter in gullies and river valleys? Can we become fire-adapted, able to survive fire and turn it to our advantage? Or are we fire-weeds, spreading and promoting the flames wherever we go? This is not about the ecology of fire, the evolution of our landscape. This is about the ecology of people in Australia. It is about our evolution: past, present and future.
We are fire-lovers. Our ancestors mastered the mystery of fire some two million years ago. We cook with it, hunt with it and clear land with it. We see by it, are warmed by it, and win wars with it. We do not, instinctively, fear fire. If anything we are fascinated by the mystery of this heat-driven self-perpetuating chain reaction that flickers so feebly and yet erupts so quickly into a beast of mass destruction.
Perhaps this is why our natural reaction to smoke, is not to flee, but to investigate the source, to find out what is burning, to see if it is a problem. Firefighters puzzle over this reaction. Even in a building rapidly filling with smoke, even with alarms ringing, people do not race panic-stricken to the exits. They line up to pay for their shopping, finish their beer at the bar, turn off their computer or look for their bag. They normalise the situation. Perhaps we have spent too many centuries lying beside campfires, the smoke and flames our protection from predators large and small? For centuries our homes centred on blackened hearths. Even today, those who live in the forest and farmlands live with smoke; smoke from controlled burns in reserves, from a neighbour’s burn-off, from the debris of the logged forest. We have learnt to ignore the warning signs. ‘She’ll be right’ can sometimes be fatal.
Friends of mine were in their swimming pool the day the fire came, the sound of children chattering and splashing strangely out of character in the hot, dry forest. Smoke drifted in and around them as it often does here. They knew there was a fire around, up in the hills, miles away. There often is. The smoke thickened, coalescing into charred embers which fell sizzling into the pool. The sky turned orange-bronze. The children kept playing, collecting the embers as they fell—a harmless curiosity. Someone went to check the internet, easing a niggling concern worrying at the back of their mind. But the fire was reported as miles away. There were no sirens, no warnings, no phone calls. It must be okay, it must be normal.
It wasn’t until they heard a dull roar like an approaching jet aircraft that the niggling concern exploded into full-scale alarm. They bundled the children into the car rushing down the narrow dirt track, straight into the flames and falling trees, narrowly escaping disaster. The fire swept past their house to the north, leaving it untouched on the very edge of the fireground.
On Black Saturday, people saw the great plume of angry yellow-black smoke billowing over their houses and all too often dismissed it as the smoke from somewhere else. They went back to their work and their everyday lives. Only when flames came out of the forest did many people react. When the flames came out of the forest, it was too late.
Why do people leave it so late to respond? Why do they discount the warning signs—the smoke, the embers, the heat and the wind—that firefighters think are so blindingly obvious. What is going on inside their heads?
The answer lies deep inside our brains. I remember an ultrasound from years ago, scanning down through my unborn daughter’s brain. The twin bumps of the neo-cortex emerged first, the complex structure that defines our species, the part of her brain which would flux and flow with electrical activity, comprising her thoughts and intellect. Further down and we reach the white bridge of the corpus callosum stretching its bundled fibres between the hemispheres, linking left with right. Further down and the thalamus and hypothalamus come into view—the seat of love and anger, fear and courage. The scan moved on too fast to see the small almond-shaped amygdala—our brain’s internal alarm bell—before descending into the realms of the old brain we share with other mammals, birds and even reptiles, the area which will control her every move, day and night.
We’re supposed to have two brains – left and right, but actually it’s the old and the new brains that are more interesting, each working seamlessly in parallel. The old brain feels hunger, fatigue and loneliness. The neo-cortex sifts through these mute waves of emotion that sweep up from below, converting them into rational explanations—food, bed and love. It calms, soothes and suppresses our emotional urges, like a trainer working with a flighty horse. It vetoes panic and overrules our gut reactions. It talks us out of them. But our clever thinking brain does not always get it right. Fear becomes love and loneliness becomes hunger.
It is our cortex that sees the smoke and searches for a rational explanation, something within our realm of experience, something that has happened before. Our cortex sends us out for more information, to confirm or deny its suspicions. It is cautious—a thinker—carefully weighing up the pros and cons, always conservative, always erring on the side of what is known, rather than what might be imagined. If smoke and fire are not within the realm of its experience, the cortex looks for another explanation; it normalises the world and sends us back about our everyday business.
The old brain is a doer, not a thinker. Its memories are not limited to this life but extend back into our evolutionary past, into times of feast and famine, through wars and predators. Most of the time it lies quietly, colouring our world with feeling. But under threat a very different beast emerges. When the amygdala senses a threat to life—a speeding bus, the sharp crack of a bullet, the approaching roar of a bushfire, it reacts faster than the thinking brain can track. The body reacts almost instantly, hormones surging into survival mode, blood drawn in to the vital organs, defensive white blood cells to the skin, hunger, fatigue and heat ignored, vision tunnelled down to the essentials. The cautious thinking cortex is shut out of the process. There is no time for thought or consideration, our mind and body work as one, following some ancient survival strategy which successfully protected us from predator or disaster. We prepare to fight, flee or hide.
The trouble is, you can’t fight a bushfire, you can only try to save things in its path. You can’t outrun a bushfire either. And there is no hiding. None of our instinctive survival responses are particularly useful in a bushfire. Bushfires are complicated. There is no easy answer. You can’t prepare for every conceivable situation and quite probably the bushfire you experience will be nothing like the one you were expecting. We need every bit of the clever, thinking part of our brain in a fire, just to survive. We need our thinking brain to recognise the danger and respond, not wait until fear takes over. We need to stay in charge.
It’s what is in your head that counts, not the circumstances you find yourself in. The psychology of fire is the psychology of fear — we are too busy thinking that we are going to die and not doing enough to stay alive. The key to survival is knowledge. Knowledge controls fear, gives our brain a pattern to follow, a template, a set of instructions about what to do in an emergency. We need knowledge in an emergency; we need it ground into our brains so that it becomes automatic. It is why we do fire drills, why the attendants on planes bore us to tears with safety demonstrations every time we fly. Because one day, we might just need to know and the more times we are told, the more likely it is that we will remember.
Knowing what to do is important. Training is important. Having a plan keeps us busy, on track and keeps fear at bay. Having a plan, practicing a drill is like writing a memo to your brain. When your old brain sees flames and wants to run, the neo-cortex can immediately issue a counter command—implement plan A, or B or C. It has instructions to hand. It doesn’t have to rummage through the backrooms of your mind, wondering what to do in the event of a fire. It gives the old brain a job and the fear subsides.
People who prepare for fires often say they didn’t have time to be afraid, that they were too busy. These people seem to manage better afterwards too, even when things went wrong, even when their losses were great. They remain in control of their world, not a victim of a merciless and wrathful nature.
After the fires we live with the consequences of our adrenalin-driven experience. In everyday life, we file our memories by significance. Our cortex carefully sifts through the photos in our mind, discarding the routine or uninteresting, placing the others in a carefully constructed scrapbook, meaningful only to the owner. It lays out the story of a holiday, a friendship or a life. We give our memories context to help us remember them. Emotional memories stand out. Strong emotions give us a tag to effortlessly drag out the memories that have affected us most, whether we want them or not.
In an emergency our brain is too busy keeping us alive to bother with filing. Images fly in and out without filtering, disappearing and leaving us with long dark blanknesses of time. Our old brain is not concerned with constructing neat stories from our experiences. But some things need to be remembered—this was bad, this could have killed you, this was dangerous and don’t you forget it. Our old brain plasters a handful of snapshots on the noticeboard of our mind, liberally decorated with flashing red arrows and warning signs. It only takes a smell or a sound to trigger these images, attended by the rush of terror, fear, loss or anger which lead to their creation. Lest we forget. If only we could.
After the fires reason and calm reassert themselves. Our cortex starts to clean up the mental mess that fear has left behind. It has only a handful of images to work with, but it opens the scrapbook anyway and begins the slow process of sorting them into order, putting them into place, reconstructing what happened in between. We gather information, joining together the vivid images with what someone else has said, filling in the blanks. We tell our stories, listen to others and use each other’s memories and experiences to make sense of our own. Having been deprived of information, cut off and isolated during the disaster, we crave information afterwards, seeking it out wherever it lurks, from everyone we speak to.
Months after the fires, my daughter’s teacher, who lived in one of the worst affected areas of the fire zone suddenly exclaimed mid-sentence, ‘Oh, I just don’t want to talk about fires anymore.’
Then she added, thoughtfully, ‘But I must need to, I suppose, because here I am, talking about it again.’
Recovery is slow. Some bonds are broken, never to be restored. New bonds are made, forged in adversity. Communities are reshaped, restructured and made anew, like a broken vase, lovingly glued back together, but never quite the same. It is a process that cannot be rushed.
I bumped into a friend at a petrol station. She lost her house and had since bought a new one. Her husband claimed he had spent more time choosing a magazine than the house they bought. She didn’t much like it.  A year after the fire, they still didn’t have any furniture. A problem with insurance?
‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t want new furniture. I want my old furniture back.’
It is no surprise that there were so few new houses in Strathewen, or the other towns, so many months after the fire. It takes time to rebuild a town. It takes longer to rebuild a community, a life torn apart by tragedy. In the meantime, new fire seasons approach every summer, bringing all the gut-tightening memories. Fears ignite my Facebook and Twitter feeds with every spotfire. There is no time for moving on. We can only hold our breaths and wait.
I wonder where the bell miners are? If they like their new home or if they are finding it difficult to carve out their own niche in a new place? They had lived in that valley for generations, raising their families, fighting with neighbours, squabbling with cousins, defending and caring for each other. Their clan had grown, fractured, split and regrown many times over the years. They filled the valley with the clanging song of their noisy lives. For so long after the fire, the valley was silent.
Perhaps by now, so many years later, they have come back, lured by the dense undergrowth that eventually regrew nearby. Things will never be the same—the scars remain—but a new order eventually establishes itself. The forest regrows, the animals return, the people carry on. And most of us have already forgotten.
Until the next time.