AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES:
Four months after fire tore through the beautiful Clarence Valley, Susan Chenery finds a close-knit community offering each other hope and slowly healing and rebuilding together.
stories of hope and healing
They could hear the fire coming an hour before it arrived, “roaring like an aeroplane taking off,” says Bob Gorringe. “You can hear things exploding at other properties – gas bottles, trees – these loud bangs as it is coming up the valley on the other side of the hill.
It is loud, it is hot, it is dark.” With an 80kph wind behind it, 12km across the front and 120 metres high, the fire roared through the Clarence Valley in northern NSW, leapt across the Nymboida River and came straight for Bob’s house.
“Hell, it was hot. The wind is rushing in at about knee height to feed the fire. It tips you over – your legs are going one way and your body is going the other. It’s almost impossible to stand up.”
Realising they wouldn’t be able to defend the house, Bob, 60, who is ex-Air Force, and his wife, Narelle, had to get out fast. But the cars were stalling. “There was no air to run on. The fire followed us all the way.”
The next day, when he came back, Bob’s house had “vaporised”. All that was left of his contented life in this densely forested wilderness were brick stumps and a pile of tin. Months later, Narelle still wakes in the night unable to breathe, thinking there is smoke. She couldn’t return to look at the wreckage of her home. “She didn’t feel safe.”
There are still crashes in the night as dead, hollow trees fall.
Nymboida in the Clarence Valley, was a beautiful place – lush, fertile and green; the clear river, trees tangled in vines, gullies of rainforest teeming with birds and wildlife. It attracted people like Laena Stephenson, a marriage celebrant, who came to bring up her children in nature.
“When we came here, we were all young,” she says of the group of families who settled in the district 33 years ago. “We started our families together, had babies together. We helped each other build our houses.”
All that is left of Laena’s house are the remnants of walls, the twist of metal that was the television, broken crockery and a melted Rayburn wood stove in what was once the kitchen. It was a pretty mudbrick house, covered in climbing vines. She and her former husband had built it.
“I massaged every brick in that house, I hammered in every bit of that earth floor,” she remembers solemnly. “I dug rocks out of the ground with a crowbar. I couldn’t walk into that house without loving it.”
She keeps remembering things that are gone: “Oh, my grandfather’s banjo mandolin, oh this, oh that.”
One of her four daughters, Kaya Jongen, owned the house next door. That’s gone too, and Kaya is now living in a tent. “There were many beautiful owner-built homes in Nymboida,” Laena says sadly, “homes made of mudbrick, rock and timber – really beautiful bespoke houses.”
Now, for miles and miles, there are just burned, black, skeletal trees, sticks and scorched earth – an empty, desolate landscape. Twisted metal where 101 houses used to be. The fires roared through 51 per cent of the Clarence Valley, taking three million hectares. It’s deathly quiet now. There is no birdsong, no animals anywhere.
Laena can be philosophical about her house. “It’s only a house. It was a beautiful house but in the end, it is material things.” But she weeps
openly for the defenceless animals that were lost. “When I really break and feel it intensely, it is always to do with looking at nature, the wildlife, the flora and fauna who had no part in creating this situation and couldn’t get away from it, everything just screaming. One of the beautiful things about Nymboida was that we had incredible variety – a number of threatened species, wallabies, wallaroos, brush-tailed rockwallabies. Now people talk about seeing one animal – a possum or a pair of Eastern Greys [kangaroos]. Just seeing a firefly can make us happy. A team of wildlife people went around to the dams and watering holes taking food. And if it was eaten, they were so happy. But most of the time it wasn’t. I had leaf-tailed geckos in my house before the fire. Now I don’t know if I will ever see one again.”
Laena was lucky. Her current husband, Dave, had insured their house. He also built the shed that they now live in with donated furniture. And he helped defend the community-owned Camping and Canoeing Centre, which became the hub for recovery operations when the district’s shell-shocked people were left largely with just what they were standing up in. After the fire, they had no phone or internet for five weeks and no power for 10 days.
A month before the Nymboida fire, further north along the valley, the community of Ewingar had sheltered in the local hall from a “monster” of a fire that had surrounded the building leaving them unable to escape. The fires came three times to Ewingar.
Each time they had to evacuate.
“There were times when we thought the fire was contained, but then a month later, something would flare up. Without rain, it just doesn’t go out,” says Nadine Myers, 42.
“Everyone has been touched by the fires,” she says. “An elderly couple died [Gwenda Hyde, 68 and Robert Lindsey, 77]. A lot of people around here knew Gwenda. That was horrible. We were surprised more people weren’t killed with the intensity of the fire.”
Yet, in the midst of it all, Ewingar rallied. “We had periods where the fires were going crazy and we were feeding people at the hall, who had lost their homes or had been evacuated,” says Nadine. “We fed the RFS [Rural Fire Service] volunteers too. All these people came forward with big pots of food and bread and everything we needed. The Red Cross donated food and water. Our Two Hands, a local charity that works with people who are homeless, helped out. So did the Casino Golf Club. Shed of Hope has been building little sheds for people who have lost everything. People were amazing.”
Then, one evening, after a long day volunteering with the RFS, Nadine and her partner, Boris Sweeney, hatched a plan to hold a benefit concert. They made some inquiries and before they knew it, 20 bands had volunteered.
Rock singer Tex Perkins was the linchpin, says Nadine. Six weeks later, a weekend-long music festival was held at one of the few buildings still standing, the hall.
“It was just beautiful,” says Nadine, and it not only raised funds, it was healing. “A lot of our good friends and neighbours had been depressed for a long time. They’d been depressed about the drought already, and then the fire came and they lost a lot. But everyone’s cares were wiped away for that weekend. There were smiles just everywhere.”
Likewise, the Nymboida community has galvanised. “Officials started coming out, donations started coming in, my husband got a generator going for power,” Laena says. “We fed people at the canoe centre twice a day for a month and had emergency accommodation there. Mary, a registered nurse, came in every day. Other people who have experience with trauma came in to help.” Chef Scott
Gonzales cooked 700 meals in four weeks. People who didn’t have insurance were taken in by people who still had houses. “But what people need more than anything is to tell their stories,” says Laena.
When John Lillico from BlazeAid arrived, the valley was “just black everywhere. There was nothing here, absolutely nothing. It was like a moonscape, and the people were pretty downcast.”
BlazeAid’s mission is to rebuild farms and fences, but volunteers often spend almost as much time listening to locals’ stories. “There is so much emotion in these people,” says volunteer Danny Handcock. “We would sit down for a smoko up in Tenterfield and get up three hours later. All we did was listen.”
“You can tell when they’re stressed because they have no idea what to do,” says John. “That’s when we say, ‘Let’s have a cup of tea and by the way, why don’t we lock up that boundary over there?’ Once they see something happening, they’re into it.”
Khalsa Aid, a Sikh charity, also arrived in the district with a truckload of fodder for farm animals, and that lifted spirits.
For Bob, like so many, helping others has been healing. “Initially you go into shock. Then you realise the entire community is completely screwed. And what you can do is try to help the people around you. Even those who have survived the fire and have still got houses have no communications, electricity or running water. We put out a call to anybody with a chainsaw, generator or a water pump. We took them out to people so they could get on with their lives.”
When The Australian Women’s Weekly arrives, Bob is fixing old tools for the new tool library. “When you start building a house, the first thing you have to do is drop $10,000 at Bunnings. This will save people thousands of dollars that they haven’t got.”
After a car accident and a heart attack, Bob had been unable to work, so couldn’t insure his home, but he is determined to rebuild. “I’m an old man, but I’m going to give it a go.” For now, he is living at the canoeing centre in a donated caravan. Narelle is staying with friends.
Tommy Welham has been working on the recovery efforts and says the focus has shifted now “from first aid, food, water and emergency shelter to looking at how we can help people rebuild. We are working on a support programme where architects, builders, engineers can come in and help design houses, and get them through council. It’s a low socio-economic area where a lot of people don’t have savings. So we are looking into low-cost, fire-rated designs using green materials.”
The fires, says Laena, have strengthened in her a “deep-seated knowledge of what is important, and it isn’t a house. As we accounted for everybody, it took days. ‘Has anyone seen the hermit who lived up here? Oh yes, I have.’ Every time we accounted for another person, I thought, nobody has died and we won’t have to go to that next level of grief. I love this community.”
Laena believes that recovery comes “by working together, trying to be nice to each other… and communicating about what we can do, as a community, to remain living in this beautiful place.
“We need to make sure we’re ready next time and don’t lose lives – building into hills and cliffs, conserving water, stopping run-off, dealing with drought. I will plant trees, I will plant food. I will try to look after the environment with good land management techniques and more sustainable, environmentally friendly dams, so we can protect our houses.
“I see the recovery as being hyper-vigilant about how we deal with this very fragile landscape and how we help nature to heal. I don’t think Australia will ever be the same again. But we have to try to help it recover.”
And hope lies in the fuzz of green on the ground, and frills of leaves on the trunks of burned trees. The valley is slowly greening, but it will be years before it flourishes.