Melbourne - After the Fires
Greetings from St. Kilda, a bohemian beach suburb of Melbourne. We arrived yesterday afternoon, after the long (very long) drive from Sydney.
As I noted in my breakfast blog post from Manly (Sydney), when the fires first became big news, it seemed strange to be driving into the heart of a Page 1 disaster area. This feeling grew as we drove southwest, and listened to the live ABC radio broadcasts on location from the command posts near various fires.
We did not see any actual fires burning, but we did see a lot of mid-distance smoke in a few sites east of Melbourne. We drove through several spots along the highway where all of the vegetation had burned off. We also saw many ash-covered cars and trucks, and emergency vehicles racing off into the hills.
Most of our experience of the fires, though, has been listening to the radio, and (especially) reading the newspapers. The headlines of the local and national papers read: “Apocalypse Now,” and “Our Darkest Hour,” and “Our Most Tragic Losses.”. The stories are a mix of truly tragic -young kids killed saving their horses, families wiped out when their cars wouldn’t start- and feel good miracle rescues. The color photos and transcripts of emergency calls make the stories more poignant and real. 200 deaths feels like quite a lot when you are reading about dinner-party conversations last week, and frantic efforts to get into crawl spaces.
We have become familiar with the acronym “CFA,” which is the Country Fire Authority. In every story, the CFA firefighters are cast in the role of heroes. Invariably they are absolved explicitly of blame for not saving more people.
In all of the news coverage, and in interviews with survivors and distraught relatives, there is a strange obsession with figuring out which fires were deliberately set. “Bringing the mass-murdering arsonists to justice,” is how this theme is usually worded. The prime minister and the state premier and the special commissioner (a retired police chief) all pander to this ‘find the villains” sentiment. Fanning the flames, as it were.
My totally uninformed guess is that virtually all of the fires were natural or accidental. The combination of extreme dryness, extreme heat (~50 celsius, or ~125 Fahrenheit), strong winds, and too much underbrush. But we need villains, so the focus is on arsonists. Sad, but weird, but understandable.
In Melbourne itself, there is limited acknowledgment of the tragedy on the doorstep. Everyone is reading the same newspapers, and watching the same 24-hour news coverage, but life seems to be going along pretty much as normal.
Who am I to say what normal is, though? We just got here.
Each shop and restaurant suddenly has a can on the counter, collecting money for the relief effort. The waitstaff at the restaurant where we just had dinner is donating this week’s tips.
Adding to the strangeness, it is cold and cloudy in Melbourne. On Saturday, the temperature hit its highest level ever recorded, just under 50 degrees celsius (127 Fahrenheit). Today it was 16 celsius (61 Fahrenheit), and everyone was wearing jackets and boots. The wind was strong, as you might guess, and apparently this gave new life to many of the uncontrolled fires.
So, we are sitting amidst the aftermath of a tragic disaster, but it doesn’t feel that way. We have had a minor tragedy of our own, the early miscarriage of a surprise pregnancy, so we have been focused on India’s health, and on our emotions. We knew we were pregnant for exactly two days. More on that subject later. It has been a strange and sad week.