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Resilience…new foliage sprouts amongst
the devastation of the Black Saturday
bushfires near Kinglake, Victoria.
Image: courtesy of ANU Reporter

This month [February 2010] marks the first anniversary of the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. On 7 February 2009 a complex of fires burnt through hundreds of thousands of hectares, devastating many communities. Hundreds of people were injured and 173 died.

Steels Creek — a small settlement in the Yarra Valley, south of Kinglake — lost 10 community members on Black Saturday. As a way of recovering from the event, residents of Steels Creek approached environmental historian Professor Tom Griffiths from ANU to collaborate on a community history project. Griffiths invited a number of colleagues to take part in the project, including independent film producer Moira Fahy. She has made a number of documentaries on the impact of natural disasters, including a film on the Black Friday fires from 1939 and the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983. Fahy speaks to ANU Reporter about interviewing Steels Creek residents with the goal of creating a film about how people recover and rebuild their lives after suffering enormous trauma.

ANU Reporter: What did you know about Steels Creek before February 2009?

Moira Fahy: I hadn’t met anyone in Steels Creek prior to the February 7 fires. One thing I had done was travel extensively through regional Victoria, interviewing people for the 1939 Victoria bushfire documentary funded by the ABC and Film Victoria. That gave me an insight into regional Victoria and the people. I developed really strong relationships with a lot of those people and maintained those friendships through to today.

What happened in Steels Creek on 7 February 2009?

What we know from the firsthand accounts is that the fire that burned through Steels Creek came via Kinglake and Kinglake National Park and burnt along the ridge. Steels Creek is in a valley. [The fire] came along the ridge of the valley and started to move past Steels Creek and many people thought they were safe. But people had been killed when the fire came out of Kinglake National Park and moved into the ridges around Steels Creek. No one knew that at the time. A lot of the people in the basin of the valley were watching it travel across these ridges and thinking, ‘we’re safe — it’s going to go past us’. Then of course that deadly south-westerly change came in and swept it back over Steels Creek. That’s when a lot of people were in extreme danger for their lives and another four to five people died. For different people there were very different experiences. Some were running for their lives, jumping into cars at the last minute. For everyone there was this sense of there being no warning. Some were staying to defend their homes. Other people had got out early, by happenstance or instinct, and were watching the town burn from a distance. You have to remember that the fire that devastated Steels Creek occurred within one and a half hours.

How did the people in Steels Creek respond to the fires and why did they ask your team to help them construct a history of the event?

What happens in the first instance is there is a massive sense of shock and then a massive burst of adrenalin. So from those two things people are trying to make sense of what happened and trying to regain control. As part of that process of trying to regain control, Steels Creek community members Malcolm and Jane Calder invited Tom Griffiths [the project leader] to visit Steels Creek. They said we need some help and we want it to be constructive. Malcolm felt that the community could be torn apart quickly by what had happened. He wanted to do something that would pull the community together, that would remind them of what their community stood for, would help them reclaim the history they had lost, either personally through the trauma experienced as a result of the event or the loss of houses or the physical environment, the bushland that surrounded them. Something that would actually give them a chance to understand what happened to them and also be of value to other communities recovering from fires.

How did your team devise the project?

We visited Steels Creek together in May 2009. The key initiative was to keep the scope of the project very broad because we wanted to be highly consultative. We wanted the community to have a sense of control over it. In that time at Steels Creek … we met up with the community members and had a meeting where everyone talked about what they expected the project to be. But because it was so recently after the fires, that meeting became an example of how much everyone still needed to debrief. With my experience, producing and directing bushfire disaster documentaries, I was able to assess from that meeting who was capable of participating [in the film] and who wasn’t.

What kinds of common experiences have emerged in your interviews?

The first part interviews were conducted in May and everyone was still in adrenalin mode. What you were getting were high volume, energised responses. They would talk about what was happening now. Adrenalin inhibits your ability to think ahead. People said at first they were thinking from cup of tea to cup of tea, then from hour to hour, then day to day, week to week. They spoke of what was happening to them on that particular day, such as being irritated at having to fill out a form to get their ground cleared. But at the same time, the people I did think were going to hold it together became very emotional. They were reliving material that they hadn’t told anyone else about. It was really quite horrific what had occurred — some people died, others feared that they lost people close to them. It’s really different for all of them, but one thing they have in common is a raw, powerful emotion about every level of loss that they have experienced. I haven’t filmed anything like this before and am sometimes left speechless myself because there is not much I can say. What these people have to say on camera will speak for itself.

You’ve worked on a number of projects now about how natural disasters impact on people’s lives. What would you say is a common theme in the way people react to such events?

I’m very interested in how people recover from trauma, what they draw on in themselves to get through. How are they problem solving in their head? Who are they drawing on to give them assistance? Who are they blaming? Often there is a sense that there is a malevolence behind the event, behind the environment and what it’s done to them. For some people it feels so personal, that ‘something did this to me’. There is always this need to know why it happened to them, and who didn’t do something that could have made it different. Historically, in transcripts included in previous bushfire Royal Commissions and enquiries from 1939 to now, you can see themes occurring in the blame response to these natural disasters. Clearly, there are always lessons to be learned from these events but the fire agencies tend to be lauded in the first instance and then quickly demonised. They often look towards the fire agencies first, then the local and State governments’ role.

Are the participants from Steels Creek telling you that the interviews, and larger project, have been useful in the recovery process?

Going into this event I had a lot of reservations. We’ve never gone in to do this kind of work so soon after an event like this has occurred. To prepare I did a lot of work with trauma experts about what I should expect and what kinds of signs I should look out for. At the end of every interview I’d ask the person, ‘if you could choose a number between one and ten to measure the level of trauma you’re currently experiencing, what would it be?’ This allowed me to see how they were coping four months after the fires and how that level of trauma had increased or decreased since I last filmed them in the immediate aftermath of the fires.’ I’d also ask, ‘do you think this interview has been of value to you? Has it been harder for you or easier for you this time?’ I’d also ask, how are you feeling now that the interview is concluded?’ They all said they felt really drained and shattered after it, but they also said it was of extreme value and really helped them.

What does this project say about the process of recording history today?
Different people record history in different ways. Tom [Griffiths] put it so eloquently once again when he wrote the ‘about’ section for the 1939 Black Friday online documentary [see online at http://www.abc.net.au/blackfriday/misc/about.htm]. He said that many other historians had captured the ecological history or the industrial history, but very few had captured the emotional history. What has always interested me about history was the people: how they lived, what they felt. Tom is someone who writes history as poetry, it’s evocative. He brings to life the emotional history and environment so you get a sense of people living in that time. In this case, there is no option for it to be anything other than emotional because you’re going in and capturing people after one of the most significant traumatic events Australia has ever experienced.

Project Funding Appeal

Moira Fahy’s film about the fire in Steels Creek will be just one outcome of the collaborative community fire history project, which is a partnership between ANU and the National Museum of Australia (NMA). Project leader Professor Tom Griffiths from ANU and Dr Peter Stanley — Director of the Centre for Historical Research at the NMA and an adjunct at ANU — are also planning to produce a book called Black Saturday at Steels Creek, plus an illustrated publication and an online resource hosted by the NMA. The goal is that these resources will be readily available to the public as educational aids on the impact of bushfires and how people recover from them. PhD researcher and former resident of the Steels Creek region, Christine Hansen, will also contribute to the projects. So far funding for the work has come from ANU, the David Thomas Foundation, and Griffith’s donation of his prize money from the 2009 Alfred Deakin Essay prize. The project team are seeking further support to help produce and distribute the resources.