It was impossible not to listen to ABC local radio in the days immediately after the Canberra bushfires last January.
Despite the devastation of 18 January the city was seriously threatened for several days afterwards and residents needed to know where the danger points were and how the fire front was progressing. ABC programming consisted only of fire updates and stories.
Who will ever forget the nerve-jangling state of emergency alarm broadcast every 15 minutes or so, or the gradual dawning of the idea that this was serious indeed? Who will forget neighbours coming together to defend what they had always assumed was safe? Listening to a reporter at the emergency services headquarters, I heard real concern in her voice when she announced that even there they had lost power. It seemed like a war and it seemed for a while as if we were not winning.
The crisis passed, although we wouldn’t know it for a week or so. In those early days it was the stories on the radio that were spellbinding: the richest revelations of our community that I have experienced. It had started late on that first terrifying Saturday. Those of us still with power heard of people arriving at the evacuation centres with mattresses, pillows and blankets. Others brought food and drinks. Those not on firewatch or firefighting wanted to do something for the thousands of people pouring into the centres.
What the radio told us in the days after the fires was that this spirit
continued—the whole city was involved. The government opened a crisis
centre within days of the main fires as a place for counselling, information,
practical help. A worker there wondered on the radio, a few minutes after
opening, if a few flowers mightn’t brighten the place. ‘They’ll
be swamped’, I thought. Less than 15 minutes later the radio was
saying, ‘no more flowers, please; they have enough’.
That was how it was. A community united in sympathy, alarm, concern, at
one in the need to do something. Walking in the shopping centre at Woden,
closest to the worst affected suburbs, you could see these things on people’s
faces. And people stopping to talk, or just smiling encouragingly to an
older person looking a little lost or confused.
To compare the mood in Canberra then to the joy and friendship of Sydney during the Olympics might sound just plain silly but there was something to it. A sense of doing things for others and forgetting time and personal issues. People stopped strangers in the streets or walking on the reserves and said how it had been for them and could they help.
Some of us found tears welling in our eyes most unexpectedly. We liked each other and our community a lot in those days. We were proud of what the community had done. It was exactly right that we all shared the Canberran of the Year award in March. As a community we thoroughly deserved it. Tough for next year’s winner, though.
Could it last, we wondered, as the danger receded, and the blame game started. Soon enough, work, school and family issues came to the fore again. We gave money to the appeal for the victims. We celebrated the firies, the police, the emergency workers. We told our tales again and again and drove through the devastated suburbs in shock at what had been destroyed and in amazement at what had survived. And, as Australians will, we got on with our lives. Local radio resumed normal programming.
Some of course could not get on with their lives just yet, in rented accommodation with worries for money to rebuild and plans to draw up; with a sense of community fractured as they lived now suburbs away from their friends and connections. People felt bewilderment, some anger perhaps, and a sense of unfairness. Others, who were in the affected suburbs, but unharmed physically, experienced guilt that they were well off compared to their neighbours.
Government was alert to these issues, of course, and tried to help, as did the welfare agencies and the churches. But it was the people who still made the difference.
It all came together for me just the other day in a story of recovery. Bill Hyde is 86 years of age, his wife possibly a little younger (gallantly the Canberra Times didn’t say). They knew they were in strife when they saw their neighbour’s car explode. Bill drove them out of their fire-engulfed suburb, dodging and swerving among the power poles and trees, knowing that he would not see his house again.
He and his wife were in hospital for some time; the shock and smoke they had experienced would surely harm even much younger people. Yet they wanted to build again where once they had lived. ‘We’ve got good neighbours, we know the area and have everything we need here’, they said. But how long would rebuilding take? The community wanted them rehoused quickly so they could resume their lives with as little interruption as possible. Others might have longer to put down firm roots.
And so a partnership between government, neighbours, builders, charities, insurers even, ensured that the Hydes’ house had high priority. It was ready for them on 3 October 2003, less than nine months after the fires that had destroyed so much.
Destroyed, to be sure, but created, too. There is a confidence about Canberrans now that I did not sense before the fires. A real confidence in the underlying goodness of our community. It points to better times.
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