By KATH GANNAWAY
FOR historian and author Dr Peter Stanley writing living history has weighed heavily.
His book Black Saturday at Steels Creek will be launched at the township on Saturday 11 May.
“I knew the book would be read by hundreds of people who lived through that experience, and all having had different experiences, so I felt their scrutiny and expectations very much weighing upon me,” he said of ‘Black Saturday at Steels Creek’.
It has been a three-year journey for Dr Stanley, and for the many members of the Steels Creek community whose lives were changed on Saturday, 7 February, 2009, and whose experiences are documented in the book.
A professor of history at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, and author of 25 books, Dr Stanley said it was the first time he had written a history of an event which sourced the information from people who actually lived through the event, and who had close family or community attachments to those who did not survive.
Ten of the 173 people who died in the Black Saturday bushfires died in Steels Creek.
Dr Stanley said the project was an emotional undertaking.
“Much like other books you get involved in the writing, but these weren’t just people you read about, they are people I’ve met and it was certainly more emotional,” he said.
With almost nothing written down, and reliance on people’s memories of a horrendously traumatic event, the research was also not as clear-cut, he said.
“There were gaps and the only way you could fill that gap was by asking people what had happened in their own words,” Dr Stanley said.
Black Saturday at Steels Creek is the most detailed account of any one community to come out of Black Saturday and it deals with that singularly terrifying night, the community attachments to the valley and each other, and how they survived in the immediate and longer aftermath.
Steels Creek community member Malcolm Calder said the book was an important work; a record of what actually happens during a crisis situation.
“This is a book that is not only important for the people of Steels Creek, but for other rural communities in Australia to understand what happens,” he said.
Black Saturday at Steels Creek is part of the collaboration under the Victorian Bushfire Project which saw environmental historian Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen’s book Living With Fire released last year and a film by Moira Fahy about the emotional aftermath of the fire for three families due to be released soon.
The launch which will take place at Steels Creek Community Centre at 11am with a morning tea and books available. Members of the public are welcome to attend.
