Two years ago

Two years ago I played for a wedding.  It was an unusual day, being in the high 40s and very windy until late in the afternoon.  The temperature was already well into the 30s when I left the house; arriving at the church was like stepping into the freezer display at Myers.

About twenty minutes before the service someone decided it would be better to open all the doors to ventilate the church.  Conditions in the organ gallery went from tolerable to disgusting in under ten minutes.  Even with fans going at full blast, the hot air being circulated in the building quickly won.

Halfway through the second hymn I noticed that the keys had become a bit slippery.  A dustcloth quickly revealed a lot of grit.  By the end of the postlude I had blackened fingertips.

The grit on the keyboard was ash blown in from the bushfires at the edge of the city.

Going home after the service was a surreal trip.  The sky was a filthy yellow, and the smell of burning eucalypt permeated everything.  The car nearly died twice; the shade hadn't lasted, so there was a lot of intense heat in the motor.  The roads were very quiet -- actually, the city as a whole seemed very subdued.

When the cool change came through at 5.00pm, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in under ten minutes.  When these things happen, I normally open up the house; with all the mess from the fires in the air this was out of the question.

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I grew up in a country town where our awareness of bushfire was embedded from primary school on.  We were taught the stop-drop-roll drill in grade prep.  Excursions to the local CFA depot were an annual fixture.  Even the cub-scouts had a special series of activities focusing on fire prevention, and dealing with getting caught in an emergency.

Oh, and we didn't have "fire events" like we do now.  Rather, we had blazes, massive fires and bloody disasters.  And you didn't want to get caught up in any of them.  A "fire event" sounds a bit too tidy and sanitized for what a bushfire really is.

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Two years on, and the various places where the fires struck on Black Saturday show signs of regeneration.  Marysville is being rebuilt.  Trees are showing signs of regrowth.  Roads and services have been restored, and houses destroyed by the fires are gradually being replaced.  People are emerging from the trauma, but restoring the emotional fabric does take longer than fixing the physical surroundings.

The body politic has done its healing, too.  The Royal Commission analyzed the events of the day, with its report buried in the same way previous reports have been disposed of.  The Labour government of John Brumby is gone.  But the thread of the Royal Commission report runs through as a point of continuity.  Aspects of the findings have found their way into policy as a kind of talisman -- there more for talk than action.  This is also why we now have 'scientific' cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park.

I'll stop before this turns the ugly corner into rant territory...