By FORMER MAIL EDITOR GARRY HOWE
IT IS not so much Black Saturday that remains etched in the memory, more Surreal Sunday and the days and weeks that followed back in February 2009.
Saturday was far from normal and a lot of the day was spent driving around the area of the Bunyip Ridge outbreak east of Pakenham and covering the evacuation of the elderly from nursing homes to safer accommodation at the Kooweerup Hospital.
Most people who went to bed that night were unaware of the events about to unfold to the north – around Kinglake and Marysville. Sadly, even those communities were largely unaware of the approaching firestorm.
I awoke that Surreal Sunday to a phone call from my chief of staff Narelle Coulter, who oversaw our Mail stable of papers based out of the Dandenongs and Yarra Ranges.
“I think you better turn on the ABC,” she said.
The first image as the television kicked in was overhead vision of what had been Marysville.
It was straight into the office, where reporters and photographers were called in to action, and we didn’t leave until 12 hours later.
Unfortunately, our senior reporter in Healesville had just left for a holiday with her sisters in Port Douglas.
Young reporter Melissa Meehan (now Mail editor) was covering her patch and when I rang Mel with instructions to hit the road she was already halfway there.
Mel quickly immersed herself in the story and lived it in the weeks that followed. She broke down a couple of times under the emotional weight of what she heard and saw.
The Healesville office – evacuated two or three times that week – became a bit of a refuge. People would pop in unannounced to share their story of survival, or to ask if the paper had heard whether so-and-so had made it through.
Kath couldn’t stand being away from her community when it was hurting so much and cut her holiday short to come back home to lend a hand.
In the months that followed the Mail, led by Narelle and Kath, undertook to profile each of the fire brigades in the area. Some of the firies spoke freely, others refused to talk. No doubt some stories are still untold, even five years later.
A decision was made to open the papers up and ignore the normal revenue parameters to provide enough space to reflect the needs and wants of the community in its time of need.
A light plane was hired at Lilydale airport on the Sunday to allow Narelle and photographer Meagan Rogers to survey the devastation from above. The headline of Narelle’s evocative piece read: “From the heavens, it looks like hell’.
The photo accompanying that piece was of a single house, which had remarkably remained intact amid a landscape of scorched earth around Steels Creek. It later won photographer Stewart Chambers a press photography award.
Unfortunately, the light plane didn’t go well. Meagan was violently ill only minutes into the flight and it had to turn around, so we sent Stewart up in a helicopter the following day, when he nailed the Steels Creek shot. (Meagan later confessed that she was in the early stage of pregnancy, but couldn’t say anything at the time).
A few other images stick in my mind.
Reporter Jade Lawton, who hailed from Healesville, raced back on the Sunday to check on her horses and snapped an image of a dazed and devastated neighbor, which wound up on the front of that week’s Mountain Views Mail. Unfortunately, the poor neighbor was abused when walking down the street by someone affronted by the fact that she had made the front page when she had only lost a few fences and others had lost homes and lives. Hardly fair, but it did underline how the emotions were swirling in the badly affected areas.
The images depicting the other side of human nature stick with me most – like Kath’s photo of four fire-fighters, who took time out to visit a florist and buy flowers for their partners for Valentine’s Day.
But the most poignant was one snapped by the CFA’s own Keith Pakenham. Someone had nailed a piece of corrugated iron to a tree and crudely painted on it the words ‘Thanks CFA’ and Keith had the presence fire off a frame or two.
That summed up a lot about Black Saturday for me.
It was due recognition to the fire-fighters, some of whom went through hell, both on the day and in the aftermath, and it also showed the character and spirit of the fire victims, who had gone through that same hell and yet were still gracious enough to say thanks.
