Smoke and sirens

Last Monday I went outside to plant a kangaroo paw underneath the old red box that grows so close to our veranda that it worries me. I love that old tree and it doesn't look as though it would land on the house if it burnt and fell, but with a strong southerly wind it could.

As I stepped outside I smelled smoke and my body tensed before my brain could tell me it was just the smoke from our stove. There is friendly fire and there is wildfire, but my nose couldn't distinguish for a moment and pictures of Bushfire Saturday are always ready to surface.




Later that day I was sitting sipping my tea and preparing to add to this blog when a siren started nearby. I was outside sniffing the air and looking around by the time Kerrin had come downstairs to do the same. Together we listened and decided it was in Cathedral Lane. Was it a fire or police siren, or maybe an ambulance?

The sound went on and on, going further and further up Cathedral Lane maybe. Police sirens don't go on and on like that unless there is traffic. Ambulances don't. It must have been a fire truck. No sign of smoke and the siren had stopped. We asked the neighbours later but no-one else heard it and no-one knew what it was about. One of life's unsolved mysteries.

Evidence of fire is still everywhere around in the affected areas, even in the brilliance of the grass. In our home paddock there is a clear line where Kerrin stopped the fire, but now the burnt half is a vibrant deep emerald green, whilst the unburnt half is just average autumn yellow green.



A lot of the dead trees have been bulldozed out along the roads now, so where there was thick bush there is now an occasional blackened tree. More and more often though, on the jet black arms of a dead looking tree, are spectacular clusters of green shoots sometimes running the whole length of a branch as the tree begins its recovery process.



I carry my camera everywhere and we often stop so I can leap eagerly out and catch the latest spectacular show of green. Each week the colors of the trees and land are changing and I'm keen to keep a record of how it unfolds. It's hard to believe just a couple of weeks ago our land still looked black from highway to mountain.



I started this post a week ago and just couldn't keep writing. Perhaps it was the meeting I attended at Marysville golf and bowls club, sitting in the shade of the old tree, listening to how things are being managed and knowing that a lot of the people around me have lost so much. It seemed wrong to come back here and celebrate new growth even though watching nature spring back is so hopeful.



I haven't driven into Marysville, it would seem intrusive when residents have only been in for a short time themselves. Everyone I've met who had to go in - cfa and wildlife rescue people - say it is hard to be there with so much devastation around and so many lives lost. One resident I spoke to, whose house is still standing (!!!) said it looks like a bomb hit, flattening all the buildings and leaving rubble.

I came back to Taggerty blessing the fact that we have a house to go to in between clearing up all the debris, and that we are both alive. I still look at all the burn around us and the patch of green behind us and find it hard to understand why our house survived.

One of the scary stories Kerrin tells is when, in the middle of the fires, when 70,000 eucalypts were filled with raging fire on our western boundary and embers were falling everywhere, the fire pump ran out of fuel. It's behind the house, away from the bush, but we have found embers there too.

Kerrin just got on with filling the pump with petrol, praying no embers fell near him as he worked. He took the risk and it worked. Last week, out under the old gum tree, I found a patch of burn we hadn't noticed before. Perhaps 20cm in diameter, it must have been where an ember fell and kept burning, maybe burning itself out and maybe going out from the spray of the sprinklers nearby.

Today we got going on the fences again. Equipped with gloves, pliers, wire cutters and a small jemmy, we started at separate ends of the same fence and met somewhere in the middle, sweaty and tired. I finished with a roll of reasonable wire for later use, and a lot of scrap wire that will go to the tip next week as the skip up at the store has been taken away.

Kerrin has been measuring so we can order corrugated iron to put around the house under the veranda. We finally settled on that as the best solution to the problem of leaf litter collecting underneath. We'll be much better prepared next time and no that isn't being pessimistic, just realistic. Global warming and Victoria add up to more bushfires but let's hope we never experience anything like this year's fires again.

At the end of the day we all chilled out a bit in the orchard. Kerrin and the dogs took advantage of my new compost bins to take a break.