How very, very sad and tragic for the residents of Marysville. I have fond memories of Marysville as it was a beautiful place to escape the hustle and bustle of Melbourne. Awful to think its been wiped out.

I too can attest to the beauty that was Marysville. I often used to ride a motorcycle out there, over the ‘Black Spur’ forest range, (a recovered victim of the 1939 fires), to Steavenson falls and Lake Mountain.

At the age of 23, I lost everything I owned to the Ash Wednesday fires in Cockatoo Vic. It felt like the end, but it does get better.

I can understand how those in the fire regions are feeling.

I was lucky though as my young family was with me at a wedding, while some of my neighbours and CFA colleagues perished.

My thoughts are with the families that have lost someone dear to them.

Out of the ashes will come a new community solidarity.

I’m asking ‘how did this happen?’ We know its getting hotter and drier in Southern Australia and we know it’s caused by CO2. We have a Ministry Of Climate Change staffed by public servants. Sadly the decisions have been made by economics and not science. I’m saddened but I’m also angry.

It is shocking to see how quickly our lives are destroyed, by losing all we have worked for. Certainly those who survive need to be stronger.

Rudd said he had been told the conditions were the worst since white settlement - has he paused to wonder why that might be? That perhaps the effects of climate change are really beginning to bite? That it might even be a good idea to take the scientific boffins seriously? How many more disasters and deaths will it take?

Friends, this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Summer is not over yet and our woodlands are bone dry. This is the future.

Interesting that the armed services have been called in to Victoria and Queensland to help with fires and floods.

For years we have been saying our greatest national security threat is climate change.  For decades we have sunk money into armed services for other pruposes.  There now needs to be a formal restructuring of the armed services so that from now on their key function is immediate deployment into crisis areas. Floods, fires, droughts, storms.

This should be considered their main constructive role, not an auxiliary function in the absence of real warfare.

The horrific bush fires in Victoria have for me revived the horrors of the 66 Tasmanian fires and i say to those who continually deny “global warming”  for Christ sake ! just shut the fuck up ! and reflect upon those who who have lost family,homes, pets and all their belongings, and give what you are able to the Salvation Army ! most especially clothes, bedding and what money can be spared.
            d.d.

What can you say?  Tony, I know these places too.  My mum tells me of her grandfather’s sister ‘Aunt Kate who was in Jindivic in the 39 fires, who had no eyebrows. ‘They had no one to help them in those days, they had to fight the fires themselves.’  After the war mum and dad went to live in one of those Dandenong towns, Belgrave, Sassafras, etc.  I have the feeling that for her the bush was like a sentence.  And she would walk the kids down in the morning to the school bus and the baby in the pusher to see the Puffng Billy.  My dad I remember telling me how on leave during the war, going up on the train and how you’d get off wherever you wanted - the train would be going that slow up the curves and slopes. 

Mate, I’ve been on it myself, the Puffing Billy, and remember sticking my head out the window, and feeling the grit of the smoke coming from it as it was blown back down along the carriages.  The big trestle bridges, straddling the curves of the gullies, made from timbers the length of which down here in Tas, we see less and less.  When I wrote bridges, I used the wrong word.  What I can see in my mind’s eye, is the raised sections of line, on ‘stilts’ going parallel to the contour of the gully going up/down the hill.

And in the eighties, Ash Wednesday and I had friends at Cockatoo and Bunyip/Tonimbuk.  the former were opposite a pine plantation, but somehow they got out, in the dark on the road and a burning tree across the road.  I’ve got a son and his family in Maffra, and they weren’t in trouble, but from a distance you don’t know do you?  You hear about a fire in the Bunyip state forest and you try and work out what that means, given the wind direction, or the next day or so, the radio says there are still major fires going, you hear Loy Yang and again think of the wind etc. 

I feel I’m among friends here.  Hi Maddie, nice to have met you on the Upper Floz support convoy.  Tony:  my friend’s name who was in Cockatoo when you were is Hamish Hill, he’s a woodworker.  His place went up.  He actually did ok out of it, he was insured and ended up being able to buy another nice place in the hills.  Salamander, I don’t think I know you, but hi, and it’s a fair call to think of climate change etc.  I think I’ve been talking around the point, that’s about as close as I could manage.

See you all later,
Garry.

Garry, I don’t remember Hamish,(I lived in First Avenue of Bailey’s Rd), but I suppose we may have shared similar friends,- degrees of seperation.
I would be suprised if many of us did not have a friend or acquaintance that was affected by the fires.

I whole heartedly agree with Don,(6), in supporting the Salvo’s. They have consistantly been there when needed. I cannot sing their praises enough.
With Cockatoo they appeared almost immediately and were incredibly helpful.

I was often startled at fire fronts, where they would turn up with food and beverage in the middle of the night, in awful conditions for firies.

Do give. It will be greatly appreaciated by those that have lost so much.

Yes, Cockatoo, in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne: I had an enjoyable time there for under a year in the 1950s, attending an all-in-one-room two-teacher school run by Mr and Mrs O’Leary, back in the days when children often didn’t know their parents’ first names, let alone their teachers’. Can still smell the aroma of cocoa warmed over an open fire on winter mornings, and remember running down to watch Puffing Billy, when it was a real working train, come through twice a week. Almost drowned wading across the creek near the old swimming pool, instead of using the bridge. (Got sympathy, accompanied by a telling-off and a good paddy- whack, on getting home soaked.)

I was working in PNG when the Ash Wednesday fires went through Cockatoo in 1983; the devastation made the front pages of the PNG Post-Courier, which in turn gave some of the US and UK staffers their first idea of the ferocity of an Australian bushfire. (A co-founder of TT was working in Port Moresby on the P-C at the time.)

Several questions need asking about this summer’s (2009) fires:

~  How well prepared and, maybe more importantly, how well co-ordinated, were bodies like the CFA and the SES?

~  Is it right, and safest, to still leave the decision on fight or flight to each home-owner?  Or, as in those parts of the US where wildfires are prevalent, should a statutory authority, say the police, have the power to order evacuation?

~  Should fire-prevention and fire-minimisation measures be made compulsory on home-owners in designated areas?  Should insurance premiums be graded to reflect this more specifically?

~  Do town- and building-planning regulations need tightening up to prevent homes being built in certain fire-prone regions? Or some hard-to-access areas?

~  How effective are the laws governing arson, and should penalties for attacks involving deaths be upgraded to murder or manslaughter? Should some features of the anti-terror laws be applied?

~  Should the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s authority be extended to include the whole urban area of Greater Melbourne? (At present, many of the outer suburban areas are covered by the rural-based Country Fire Authority; the MFB are fully professional fire-fighters, whereas the CFA relies largely on local volunteers, with some professional expertise available, and there is a rivalry, not always ‘healthy’, between them where their areas are contiguous -  think Scotland Yard coming in to solve a crime in a remote county, or mainlanders coming down to show us how it’s done.)

~  Were there enough fuel reduction burns? Do the various authorities properly co-ordinate their efforts?

~  How much, or how little, notice is taken of those with long experience in handling bushfires?

~  What is the over-arching ‘philosophy’ of those in charge, and of those with influence? 

~  Are those in charge channelling Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976)?

~  If so, should they be sent, without trial, to a Simpson Desert gulag?

Yes, it brings our own bushfire experiences back doesn’t it? We were so very fortunate in the ‘83 fires - living in Woodend - fire headed straight for us. I’ll never forget the sight and sound of it. It looked like a huge, powerful, pulsating ball of molten lava and it roared. The wind was furious too and full of ash. We were grabbing what we could from the house and putting it in a caravan that my husband had hooked up to the car. Pets already in the car waiting. Suddenly it all stopped - no wind, no sound. It was freaky. What happened then was dreadful because the changed direction took it to Macedon. All the firefighters were down our road though God knows how they could have handled that raging force. So we were spared but many of our friends in Macedon and Mount Macedon lost everything. Three perished and some others developed illnesses that I’m sure were triggered by the trauma of the whole thing. The aftermath of the fire can in some ways be worse and those poor people are going to need every support.
An amusing aside to our own experience was that we had put so much stuff in our caravan that the car couldn’t shift it!

I’ve lost two friends in these fires and possibly other members of their family who are missing. Having lived through a bushfire in Gippsland a few decades ago I decided I’d never live again in a Eucalyptus forest. Apart from the now obscene denial of global warming as part or full cause of this tragedy I’m utterly astonished at politicians promising to re-build communities IN EXACTLY THE SAME VULNERABLE LOCATIONS AS BEFORE. Excuse the screaming capitals but the future of these fires will only be worse so why on earth would anyone want to set themselves up for a repeat?

In a letter to the Mercury published Wed 18 Feb 09, “People in jeopardy”, Peter Bennett of Blackmans Bay recalled that Tasmania amalgamated its fire-fighting services in 1979 “when the poor relation that was the Rural Fire Service joined with its two senior partners” [Which were?].

Bennett claims that “fire management” then took second place to “fire suppression”, there being “an overt policy of discouraging brigades from fuel reduction burns”, partly because of “bad press with smoke”.

This leads to several specific, if tentative, conclusions:

(i)  rural and regional people need to be very wary of handing over to urban-based authorities areas where they have specific experience and expertise, and to be very wary of glib BS about ‘economies of scale’ [Was that ‘country hospitals’ I just heard?] and ‘the Computer Age’ [Computers can’t do surgery – yet];

(ii)  rural fire-fighting tactics, methods and priorities, although having much in common with what apply in city areas, should not totally be under the control of those with little or no experience in the bush; Victoria may, therefore, be right in maintaining its separate MFB and CFA fire-fighting organisations;

(iii)  regardless of (ii),  it is too easy for city-based and city-bound politicians and bureaucrats to lose interest in what is beyond the views from their safe and cosy government offices, although here those outside the capital have a better chance through stronger numbers in getting themselves heard;

(iv)  Bennett’s remark about “the poor relation that was the Rural Fire Service” hints not just of the usual city disregard for the bush, but perhaps of that widely-known governmental and bureaucratic technique of ‘malign neglect’: something is not wanted or not valued, and, starved of funds, it runs down into decrepitude, and then along comes a smug politician or bureaucrat with “Oh, look, this is such an eyesore / a danger to the public [Do I hear ‘Health & Safety’?]  -  we’ll just have to close it down / amalgamate it / re-structure it / privatise it”.  You know the drill. Prime examples: school buildings in almost any State education system; rail networks, esp. in NSW and Victoria.

(iv) it’d be interesting to hear from those who were alert in the late 1970s when fire services amalgamation was first proposed; how was this amalgamation sold?  A comparison might be with high school senior grades, Yrs 11 & 12: (the then) Matriculation Colleges were sold with all sorts of educational guff, some of which was actually true, but people at the time reckoned the real reason was that the State government was unwilling to spend what was needed for enabling local schools to take Yrs 11 & 12.

The other side of the remark in Comment 12, that “rural and regional people need to be very wary of handing over to urban-based authorities areas where they have specific experience and expertise”, is that inter-agency turf wars need to be minimised, preferably avoided, the sort portrayed in UK crime dramas such as Scotland Yard v the local county police, or in US ones of FBI v the local PD. You can get the same thing in the defence forces, anywhere where there is a shared responsiblity.

How is it minimised, though, without adding another layer of bureaucratic screen jockeys in safe and cosy offices?

In The Age of Fri 20 Feb 09, there are claims with hints of the pros v the amateurs -

http://www.theage.com.au/national/we-could-have-saved-bushfire-lives-frustrated-mfb-member-says-20090220-8d2g.html?page=-1