Thursday 23 January 1997
Contact with the beauty and the terror
By MARTIN FLANAGAN
The morning after the fires, the Dandenongs were shrouded in a thick, low, milky white cloud.
Approaching Ferntree Gully, I saw a huge charred hole, ringed with scorched foliage, on the side of the hill above the town. Hills are big, but this gave you the sense that what went through here on Tuesday was even bigger. This is not a new sensation. When Melbourne had its first experience of wild bushfires (remembered as Black Thursday) in 1851, some residents of the young settlement thought the Great Day of Wrath had arrived.
The bush on the Olinda Road, where the fire had been through, was grey and smoky. Some of the thinner trees were as black as burnt matches. Other, larger trees - mountain gums - had toppled and fallen; despite the drizzle, their hollowed-out trunks still held a fierce orange heat. And, everywhere, there was the smell of bushfires - burnt eucalypt.
Here and there were the anomalies bushfires leave in their wake. A sign forbidding pushbikes and dogs from entering a national park and, behind it, the thin grey skeleton of a forest. Later, on One Tree Hill Road, I saw a yellow plastic sticker affixed to a letter box advertising a safety house for children. Behind the letter box there was no house, just two brick walls and a pile of warped corrugated iron.
The cloud became thicker the higher into the mountains you climbed. There were also more fire engines with names that read like a roll-call of rural Victoria: Yarrambat, Menzies Creek, South Morang, Emerald, Wattle Creek. Some passed with lights flashing and sirens blaring. A man in the Sassafras general store said he had been told they were going to Mansfield, but he didn't know if that meant Mansfield Road or Mansfield the town. One of the most frightening aspects of being caught in a bushfire is realising how little you know.
From Sassafras I drove to One Tree Hill Road, near where the deaths occurred, passing Sherbrooke Forest. Arthur Streeton came to this area to paint, drawn by the majesty of the tall trees. Not for the first time I recalled Dorothea Mackellar's oft-quoted line about ``the beauty and the terror'' of this land in which we live.
It was raining heavily by the time I reached the police roadblock, big drops falling in profusion. A woman journalist I knew stood cold and drenched where 24 hours earlier she had stood in smoke and insanely hot winds. I walked past Seabreeze Avenue (again, one of those strange anomalies bushfires expose) to investigate another of the fire's fronts.
A young woman was walking towards me with a child, a small girl of three or four with a towel around her head to protect her from the rain. The mother was talking to her in a low soothing voice and maybe she didn't realise the truth of what she was saying. ``We can sleep well tonight. We can rest easily tonight. We can sleep well until next time''.
