Expression important in disaster recovery
TEN years, almost to the day. The Pigeon Valley wildfire, New Zealand’s biggest since 1955, began on February 5. On ‘‘Black Saturday’’, February 7, 2009, the state of Victoria, Australia, was burning — 400 individual fires, destroying thousands of houses and killing nearly 200 people, fanned by temperatures up to 46.4degC, humidity as low as 2%, and winds reaching more than 100kmh, some of the fires ignited by poorly installed power lines brought down by the wind.
Last month, Grace Moore, of Otago University’s English and linguistics department, who was living in Melbourne then, gave a presentation at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, entitled ‘‘The Art of Recovery’’.
Dr Moore showed paintings by survivors of the fires, some produced in the immediate aftermath of the fires, some much later, which expressed the trauma suffered by the artists — a means of coming to terms with their trauma, and, in some cases, of recognising renewed life.
An especially poignant part of the presentation was a group of paintings done by the children attending a primary school in one of the towns devastated by fire — a spontaneous initiative of one of the school’s teachers.
Responding to a question from the audience, Dr Moore explained that similar initiatives had occurred in several other schools, and that the education authorities had picked up the idea and incorporated it into their planning for future fires. And future fires are inevitable — regular wildfires, which dispose of accumulating forest debris, are part of the ecology of Australia, and prevention of them was a factor in the scale of Black Saturday.
Closer to home, two teachers at Paparoa Street Primary School, Christchurch, have reported how the 7 to 8yearold children they teach produced drawings of how they felt during the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, as well as writing and talking about their experience: acknowledging their fear, but also increasing their confidence.
And the Education Review Office has noted the use of verbal and written retelling, drama, art, and play to help children evacuated from Christchurch to a Central Otago school to work through and come to terms with their experiences during the 2011 earthquakes.
No doubt the staff of Wakefield School (the oldest continuously functioning school in New Zealand, open since 1843) have been helping their pupils cope with the trauma of destruction and evacuation, perhaps, as in Victoria, using art as a means of expression.
New Zealand and Australia are very different, and regular wildfire isn’t the necessary ecological agent in New Zealand that it is in Australia. But the recent, still burning, Pigeon Valley fire, this week’s Maniototo lightningstrike fires, and the Christchurch Port Hills fire of 2017, are reminders that destructive and sometimes uncontrollable fires do occur in New Zealand.
There’s evidence that fires occurred in the South Island (presumably ignited by lightning or combustion of coal or lignite deposits) before human arrival.
There was much greater burning of forest in the 150 years following the arrival of Maori, and deliberate forest clearance by fire after European settlement.
With widespread planting of inflammable trees, such as Pinus varieties, and climate change causing worsening drought, wildfires will become more common and spread more extensively in New Zealand: an unpleasant coda to the country’s endemic risk of earthquakes.
Frequent assessment of school children’s achievements in the ‘‘Three Rs’’, under the National Standards introduced by the 2008 Nationalled government, reinforced the 19thcentury model of schools as trainers for industry, and forced those in poorer areas to narrow their focus in order to achieve the standards, at the expense of subjects providing broader preparation for life, such as the arts, technology, and physical education.
Is the Education Ministry, now released from the straitjacket of National Standards, working to build into curriculum requirements broader modes of expression as well as writing (which remains essential), such as art, drama, and dance, that may, as a bonus, help children work through community traumas?