UNITED EFFORT
IT WAS the perfect firestorm. Of all the bushfires raging across southeastern Australia, the enormous blaze circling Victoria’s eastern tip was made to grab global attention.
By the time it hit Mallacoota in the last hours of 2019, the world was watching. It saw amazing scenes.
Thousands of stranded holiday-makers trapped by flames that the The New York Times said “turned the sky inky black, then blood red”. A mass rescue by sea and air that some compared with military retreats under fire. Armed forces called in to reinforce exhausted firefighters facing firegrounds the size of European countries. And for the cameras: tears and fears, kangaroos, koalas and kids.
It was The Towering Inferno meets Dunkirk with a touch of Jaws, except the monster terrorising the tourists wasn’t in the water in front. It was in the bush behind, deadlier than any shark.
In Christmas week, Mallacoota was swollen with the annual summer influx of holiday makers who ignored the risk of wildfire the way most of us do. Many must have driven through smoke to get there in time for the holiday from hell.
Now they are gone, shipped out by the defence forces by sea and air or taken out by convoy into New South Wales, where forest highways are better protected from fallen trees by routine clearing on both sides.
Mallacoota’s population has shrunk to a bare minimum. Left behind, cut off except for special deliveries of essentials, are a few hundred locals and dozens of emergency services people of all sorts, working together to restore roads and power to a vast area of still smouldering bush.
Some are still fighting flames that will threaten dozens of districts until autumn. It’s the same in at least four states, where fierce and sometimes fatal fires have scorched communities, farms and bushland in a huge arc from Kangaroo Island to southern Queensland.
The story of Mallacoota is in most ways their story, too. After the terror comes the tyranny of hard work and worry.
Now the adrenaline has worn off, the reality of the task ahead sinks in, especially for those who lost their homes and face the frustration and financial cost of finding somewhere to live while waiting to rebuild. More than 100 houses burned down in the district, adding to a national toll above 2000.
What Mallacoota didn’t lose was a life, and what a blessing that is. In other communities charred by fire this summer, as in other tragedies over the years, flames have brought death as well as destruction.
There’s shock and exhaustion in Mallacoota but relief still outweighs grief. You feel it as you walk around.
As a friend who lives there said thoughtfully on returning to his house after a tense 24 hours, “This isn’t Marysville”, referring, of course, to the Victorian town wiped out with terrible loss of life in the Black Saturday fires of 2009.
He sympathises with neighbours and friends who have lost homes and cars and caravans, but he points out such losses are relative, that Mallacoota has been wounded in an encounter that could have destroyed it.
People can joke about their plight as they get on with helping each other. Paul Preston, who runs the Beachcomber Caravan Park with his wife Debbie, is one of many. He and fellow Lions Club members have formed a stand-in garbage crew. There are no garbage trucks in town so they use a front-end loader to lift the trash into a borrowed tipper. Job done.
Paul points out the ruins of a mate’s house, garage and new car. Parked in front of the wreckage is an unregistered Commodore, complete with a $500 For Sale sign and totally untouched by the flames. Things like that have happened all over town.
Retired local policeman Mark “Trigger” Tregellas avoids heroism. He copped valour awards and a PTSD diagnosis after death-defying experiences in recent years, one involving a psychotic man trying to incinerate himself with petrol; the other rescuing a couple on a shipwrecked catamaran in a storm.
When the fire jumped from the bush onto their property, Tregellas and his wife Cate took their three daughters and frightened house guests to shelter on the foreshore. Next day he helped fight spot fires around town. It should have been easy but he found trouble again — an “empty” shed in which an old local identity, long dead, had stored ammunition, paint thinners and aerosol cans. When the bullets started exploding, “Trigger” bolted.
Every fire throws up stories, some more unlikely than others. The story of Patrick “Call me Patty” Boyle, the barefoot hunter who saves burned koalas, stands out. That’s why he is getting fan mail from Europe.
Like a lot of country people,
Patty hunts in his spare time. Unlike most, he does it barefooted, taking his chance with snakes, stakes and bullants. His theory is that it lets him move more silently and saves on boots. It clearly lets him get close to wildlife.
Since the fire, he has used local knowledge and bushcraft to rescue “12 or 13” burned koalas so far, plus a few kangaroo “joeys”. If the injured koalas are not on the ground and not too high up, Patty climbs the tree, encourages them down and gently wraps them in a blanket.
In shared adversity, rival factions find common ground. Those who opposed clearing a few trees on the western end of the Mallacoota airstrip to make it safer for aircraft are now happy to use supplies flown in and to see loved ones (and koalas) flown out.
They are lucky the town sewerage system is working.
AFTER THE TERROR COMES THE TYRANNY OF HARD WORK AND WORRY.
An enormous Mallacoota gum, one of only a few in existence, split and fell during the fire. Most of the trunk fell away from the sewerage pump station but one fork fell back across the building. It crumpled the roof and knocked out a wall but narrowly missed a vulnerable access valve into the pressurised main sewer pipe.
If the valve had been hit, it would have spurted a geyser of raw sewage 20 metres high, according to the extremely relieved engineer who runs the pump station. He pales at the thought of what it would have been like to have thousands of people and a broken sewer system before the evacuation.
The good luck ran out when the fire hit the district’s biggest employer and income earner, the Abalone Fishermen’s Cooperative, on the edge of town. Rules against clearing vegetation on the boundary meant the fire got too close and caught hold of the main abalone processing plant. Just a few metres either side of it, nondescript buildings of little value survived unscathed. As with all fires, a lottery.