The fury of the fire

Bushfire. It's an Australian fear, an Australian nightmare in red and orange. David Elias explains the behavior of the Hill tribes.

THE Dandenongs have their own smells. In the forests after rain, the scent of eucalyptus makes the mountain air incomparably clear and fresh. In the autumn, there is the almost narcotic aroma of burning gum leaves as locals clean up their ample gardens and roast chestnuts straight from the trees.

On the Mountain Highway where Tobruk Avenue veers to the left and begins its steep climb towards One Tree Hill there is the smell that nobody likes, the bitter stench of incinerated undergrowth, charcoaled tree trunks and the earth scorched black. It is the stink of the bushfire that killed the young couple, Graham and Jennifer Lindroth and their next door neighbor Genevieve Erin.

Along the twisting sealed roads through Ferny Creek and Sassafras the distance from the summit at One Tree Hill to this corner on the Mountain Highway is about seven kilometres. As the crow flies the two are barely 700 metres apart.

Four days ago as the uncomfortable north wind gathered strength a sick, twisted individual stood at this spot and torched the dry scrub. It was callous in the extreme, the site selection calculated to do the maximum damage.

On a tinder dry day such as Tuesday was, a fire will assuredly spring to life and stretch upwards towards the small centre of population just beyond the summit gathering pace with every second. The steeper the hill the faster it will go and there is no steeper spot than the rise from Tobruk Avenue to One Tree Hill and no stretch of timbered scrub more difficult to get at once the inferno has started on its destructive way.

I know this because I have been at this exact spot before. On a similar day several summers ago the fire sirens echoed across the Dandenongs. Then a resident of Sassafras and a volunteer firefighter, I travelled on the back of our water-filled fire truck down Mountain Highway, too busy starting up pump motors and preparing hoses to notice the sharp twists in the road or any sense of being buffeted.

On that afternoon all the local brigades got to Tobruk Avenue in time to get the fire under control before there was any real damage. But it was only one of several deliberately lit fires in the Dandenongs that long hot summer that kept us on the go until we were all exhausted and in a mood to lynch anyone caught on the roadside with a box of matches.

In another fire I well remember we battled our way through Hughes Street, a ridge-top road between Tremont and Upwey and then watched in dismay as the flames edged towards a fire crew trapped in an inaccessible gully not many metres below, their truck broken-down and empty of water.

They were lucky. The fire at the last minute turned and they were saved unlike the 11 firefighters from Narre Warren and Panton Hill incinerated along a similar gully at Beaconsfield on Ash Wednesday.

Yesterday I returned to Hughes Street and found to within metres the same areas had burned just as had all the same sections of slope in the Dandenong Ranges National Park from the spot where the firebug had set his fifth blaze of the day at the corner of Wilbundry Avenue, Ferntree Gully.

The black earth and scorched trees indicated an eastward but upward path through the National Park behind Upper Ferntree Gully railway station. Where the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road climbs up sharply from the Burwood Highway through the Devils Elbow to Tremont the firefront jumped the road three times and found the top of the ridge where it could threaten the whole of Upwey, Tecoma and Belgrave.

The arsonist had clearly tried to torch the entire west face of the Dandenongs' main ridge, the face that most of Melbourne can see from their suburban streets, and it will take a lot to persuade me that he did not have an intimate knowledge of the terrain, especially the fire tracks, and the behavior of past fires and the danger he was putting people in.

For the thousands who live in the hills it is particularly disconcerting to think that he or she might be one of their own. Why would anybody want to destroy such beauty?

For volunteer firefighters the prospect of suspicion falling on one of them is unbearable. Could a young firefighter possibly be that impatient for a piece of the action?

Mr Alan Marks, regional fire officer, grew aggressively defensive at the very idea of it and instantly some past anger at the media was rekindled. ``A few years ago police charged a Metropolitan Fire Brigade member who had only recently moved to Selby. The media said a Selby fireman had been charged with arson. At the time I was captain of the Selby brigade and everybody was asking me about it when I didn't even know the man. In the end they couldn't prove a thing against him but the media said he was a Selby fireman.''

This week, as friends, neighbors and others across the hills, mourned the loss of the three victims there was another frequently asked question. Why live in an area that has been often described as one of the most fire hazardous places on Earth?

The answer is always the same. ``It's so beautiful,'' they all say. Many then add: ``It's a great place to bring up kids.''

For his 50th birthday Ted Greenwood packed out the since demolished Hideaway Restaurant in the middle of the Sassafras township. The guests, mostly locals from Ferny Creek and Sassafras, were asked not to bring presents but to select for him a small piece of leftover cloth for a coat of many colors.

Mr Greenwood, for many years a successful author of children's books, told his guests that each of them had in one way or another proved their strength of character. His invitation was his way of expressing his respect and his gratitude for making the community what it was.

There were people there from all walks of life from artists to artisans, lecturers to laborers. Looking round at them it was easy to see what he was talking about. They were the people who had fought for the place, had stuck their necks out, even risked jobs and careers, to oppose councils and governments and the money that sought to bulldoze trees and develop cluster housing.

They had striven to protect the small Sassafras and Ferny Creek schools from educational rationalists who advocated their closure. They had struggled to find ways to keep their teenage children in the hills and out of trouble.

And they had argued among themselves for what seemed an eternity over the relative merits of native and introduced vegetation in their piece of heaven on Earth. There were conservationists among them but not all of them were greenies and there were builders there who were not altogether anti-environment.

It's easy to see why Mr Greenwood and his wife, Lorraine, love the place so much and have never seriously considered moving out. They set up home in Hilton Road, Ferny Creek, in the early 1960s and can remember vividly the fires of 1962 and 1968 and Ash Wednesday in February 1983.

Their house is set back from the road on a big and sloping allotment so typical of the Dandenongs. Outside the sunroom they have used the contours to build a large deck that reveals a breathtaking view of the entire eastern side of Melbourne.

On a clear day the city skyscrapers are clearly visible, as are the shapes of Mount Macedon and much of Port Phillip Bay. The foreground shows the encroachment of the suburbs while the middle distance makes up a silent picture of where most of suburbia lives on postage stamps. At night the whole scene glitters.

Reminded of his long past birthday speech Ted Greenwood said the hills people had not changed. ``They are fiercely independent. They don't have the corporate desires of city people but there are still plenty of local organisations to join which they do and give strong support.''

Nothing appears to have changed during my years of absence from the hills. The Uniting Church congregation and the Freemasons, whose lodge was tucked away somewhere near Olinda, were supposed to share most of the power and influence but the lines were often too blurred to accurately pinpoint whose agenda was prevailing.

Both seemed to be pulling the strings at the fire station and occasionally one could sense an input from the Belgrave Rotarians. Meanwhile, the Horticultural Society ran flower shows that helped put the district on the tourist map and for the socially ambitious there was the tennis club.

Mrs Greenwood, as a former long-term principal of the Sassafras Kindergarten, watched generations of pre-schoolers grow up under the tall gums where children could still roam. She said that more than the average had become high achievers. Many university graduates and even a Rhodes scholar had gone from the kinder to the two primary schools where numbers always seemed to teeter along the fine line that determined mandatory closure.

A good many of the more successful students had also remained in the state system, riding Bus No.1 to Upwey High. They had since chosen interesting and often imaginative careers.

``The Ferny Creek people seemed to be the more upwardly mobile,'' said Mrs Greenwood. ``They were more into material things, nice houses and good jobs. The Sassafras people were more interested in intellectual pursuits and less concerned with money and cars.''

She said that the people in Olinda were different again and further over Mount Dandenong and Kalorama attracted other types.

All were, of course, seeking a lifestyle that gave them more room to breathe and more space for their children. The hills have always attracted newcomers looking for the beauty they offer but there are many old families who seem to have been there forever, know no other their community organisations like the Horners and the Schaubles and the Clarksons.

Uppermost among these was the dynastic Storrie family who arrived with the bullock teams, ran the first taxis and saw the place develop from the horse-drawn era to the present. Their wives ran the corner store in Sassafras while the men worked the garage and built houses.

Brian Storrie, 62, and head of the line since his uncle Stan died six years ago, runs the Sassafras garage in much the same way as his father did. Here you won't find any modern diagnostic equipment but you will meet the most friendly and discreet individual who was born with a talent for fine tuning cars by ear.

He has never lived anywhere else except in the house behind his garage. ``I did once think about moving when I was 40 but the thought soon passed,'' he said.

Richard Cromb was the 17-year-old apprentice to local plumber, Colin Clarkson, when I moved into the district. The Sassafras Ferny Creek Fire Brigade never had a keener young fireman or a more useful man on the maintenance of things like pumps, pipes and hoses.

He moved away for a couple of years to Mount Buller for a change of mountain air but came back because ``It's just so good here''. He still works for Colin Clarkson and he's still with the fire brigade to which he says he's virtually married. He's been captain for seven years and was the man in charge at the local level on Tuesday, which he says was probably the worst day of his life. ``As far as I was concerned it was worse than Ash Wednesday because it was on my patch and people died here,'' he said as he climbed aboard his fire truck to continue the tedious and potentially grim job of checking every house in the district against his street-by-street records just to make sure there are no more bodies lying around.

The Greenwood's daughter, Meredith, moved away when she grew up and met her husband, Peter Rendell. ``We lived in North Melbourne and West Melbourne and Kensington and went out to restaurants every night in Carlton and Richmond and the city.

``When the three children came along we had to think about it all over again. There had been the Coode Island fire and Kensington Primary School was evacuated twice because of fumes. We decided there really was no other place like the Dandenongs where the kids could have a big yard and get dirty in the mud.''

It's as if she never left. She is president of the Ferny Creek School Council, worrying about the level of enrolments. ``We would have had 200 for the first time ever next week but the homes of nine families were destroyed on Tuesday. They all say they are coming back but we will just have to wait and see,'' she said.

The enrolment figure was stunning because it reflected the amount of development that has taken place on One Tree Hill. It was always considered the most fire-prone of all the little pockets of development, yet it was where the newcomers have continued to settle and build up-market homes.

``I've always maintained that nobody ever left the hills because they were afraid of fires,'' said Ted Greenwood. ``It's the rotten winters that drive them out.''