6 Months

It’s been 6 months to the day since that hellish day in February. And it was as close to hell as I care to be. I’ve written a very little about it, and debated writing about it tonight. Glancing at the few photos I sent to Flickr, the coldness in my spine said “Don’t even think about this anymore”.

But I have to.

On Black Saturday, my family stood in the paddock that faces the Kinglake Ranges and watched them burn with such speed there were no words. This wasn’t a fire, and it shouldn’t ever – EVER – be termed a Bushfire. It was a Fire Storm. It took no time at all to devour the Ranges. It ran ahead of itself in the crowns of trees. The soil, the goddamned DIRT burned.

We lost people. Everyone lost someone. Everyone here knows someone who was burned out. By the most incredible luck – and I mean incredible – the wind changed and my home wasn’t at risk. Others had the same luck, others had the exact opposite.

So now they talk of clearfelling the bush, and removing all the trees and the plants and turning it to grassland or parkland or developing it and my heart breaks. It shatters into a million pieces. People who lived through this, people who ran from the fires, who lost children and parents and friends to the storm, they have gone back to rebuild in the same place, because that’s where they love to be, because the bushland is their life and their passion.

The firestorm really did change everything, and very very few people understand something I saw with my own eyes – there wasn’t any way to be prepared for this storm. There was NOTHING anyone could do to save their houses, or in some cases, their lives. It didn’t behave like the bushfires of the past thousand years. It was new, it was something we’ve never seen before.

This is a bit stream of consciousness, I apologise. There’s a lot of raw emotion, and while the people of the fires are not so much in the news anymore, they are still living every single day with this nightmare. But they went back. Sure some didn’t. Some moved elsewhere and I don’t blame them a jot, but those that did – they understand that this is the Bush. This is what happens, and even with fuel reduction and backburning and god knows what else would have stopped this particular storm.

Those that we lost will be always missed. I don’t ever want to belittle or discount the horrors of the day. But I cannot stand the thought of bush destruction. I’m weird like that.