On 16 February 1983, over 180 fires swept through Victoria, destroying the property and livelihoods of thousands of people.
Ash Wednesday was an event of mass destruction that is still taking its toll 42 years later.
On 7 February 2009, 173 lives were lost to the Black Saturday bushfires. Homes and livelihoods were destroyed and the trauma accompanying such devastation remains a constant battle in the lives of those impacted by the event.
While the loss of property and death tolls star in the headlines when it comes to major bushfire events, the concept of ongoing social recovery tends to lurk in the background.
Clinical psychologist and consultant for disaster recovery to the Victorian Government Dr Rob Gordon noted it took a long time before trauma conditions and the need for their treatment were recognised.
“I first got in, I was a psychologist at a children’s hospital and then when Ash Wednesday occurred, I was asked to go out with a team and support parents, families and children after the trauma there and really at that stage, I realised that nobody knew what we should be doing and that the understanding of trauma in 1983 was very primitive,” he said.
“As more bushfires occurred, I had the opportunity to build up an area of understanding. In the meantime, all the research started, PTSD was diagnosed and the whole area started to get going.“
The idea of trauma has come a long way since 1983.
Dr Gordon said, “The idea of trauma was much more associated with a single or a discrete kind of impactful event disrupting a person’s life and making them very frightened. But we’ve since learned that that’s very important, but it’s the context in which that happens, the relationships, the sense of control in life and the stability of the habits and security of the environment that are very important for allowing someone to recover from trauma.”
“And in relation to disasters, there is the trauma of the threat of the terrible things that happen on the day. And when we talk about that, we have to remember that it’s not just what happens that is important. It’s what I think is going to happen to me that is often the trauma in natural disasters,” he said.
Now it is understood that often, people won’t start to deal with their trauma for years.
Dr Gordon said, “When you work with people who maybe come for help in the second year, you realise that they are really just trying to come to grips with how their world has been changed by this traumatic event.”
“They have been trying to live their lives and do what’s required to get their families in a stable state, particularly if they have to rebuild their house and argue with insurance companies, so it is quite common that people only start processing trauma in the second year.
“It is very important for them to have that support and then for the services to be aware that the real demand is going to surface months or years down the track.”
According to Dr Gordon, emotional responses to bushfire disasters tend to diverge from the typical clinical psychology conditions of anxiety and depression and instead manifest as loss, grief, trauma and disruption.
“Loss is an important thing to consider in disasters. The worst thing, of course, is losing loved ones but they also lose heirlooms and mementos and precious things like wedding presents and photographs if their house were to burn down and these things are not just objects,” he said.
“These things hold history and history gives us identity. People often have this feeling that they’ve been stripped bare when they’ve lost all of this stuff and it takes a while to build that back up again so that work with loss is a very important part because they may have lost their friends and neighbours who’ve moved out of the area and their sense of community.“
Although both grief and trauma reactions accompany loss and oscillate with each other, they are disparate responses.
Dr Gordon said, “Trauma occurs when something terrible has happened and might happen again. Grief is when someone has lost something and can’t get it back.”
The fourth reaction associated with bushfire events is disruption.
“The disruption of the pattern of life can be having to live in temporary accommodation and not knowing where you are going to be next. This leads to people having to focus on the next few moments rather than the long term and when they’ve done that for six months or two years, often when they eventually move into their new house, they just don’t feel right. They’ve lost their bearings and this is something that they can only start to address when they’ve got their life stabilised again,” Dr Gordon said.
An essential step in recovering from bushfire disasters is thinking back and making sense of what happened during the event.
Dr Gordon said, “When you are in a state of danger and threat, you go into a kind of tunnel vision of survival but later when you think back, there are gaps in how events unfolded. It is very important that people can get good information about what happened and why.”
“People need to know why the fire brigade weren’t there, why they didn’t get warnings and which way the wind came. This information gives people a sense of control,” he said.
Another important step in the recovery process is talking about experiences.
“It’s only when we try to explain something to somebody else that we have to take what is in our memory as a strong set of images and emotions and lay them out in words to make sense of them,” Dr Gordon said.
“Those communities that start meeting regularly, having meals together and talking together, slowly move through their trauma together as a group. People who are isolated or don’t want to attend gatherings or feel too worried about getting upset tend not to move on.“
Conversing with and reacting to the trauma and emotions of other people who have been involved in a bushfire event can be difficult to navigate. Dr Gordon said, “If people start crying as they tell you something sad, you don’t need to be uncomfortable. You just need to offer them tissues and keep listening.”
Asking questions can also be helpful to victims of fire events, as these questions can build on the victims’ clarity and understanding of the events they witnessed.
“If you are patient and kind, non-judgemental and accepting, you will find that you will be able to really help people,” Dr Gordon said.
It is also very important for people in recovery to feel supported by and connected to their community, as well as be able to meet together and talk about what happened. The promotion and support of the formation of community groups can aid in facilitating this discussion among victims.
Suggesting a three to four year timeframe for creating opportunities for the community to engage with and support people in recovery, Dr Gordon said, “Councils can do this by facilitating and making sure there are places where people can meet, maybe giving them a little bit of funding for food, as food brings people together.”
“In those regular meetings, people will talk, share experience, support each other, solve problems and generally process the experience and they’ll get a great sense of value from being in their community,” he said.
“Bringing community together is essential and promoting community events of various sorts, such as pamper days, shared meals, creating art, or having sessions on helping to rebuild fences or something, are all ways of doing this. People often come out the other end saying they feel much more a part of the community than they ever did before such events, and we know that this is very good for mental and physical health.”
Further, Dr Gordon suggested that one of the best things for councils and communities to do is to “make sure that there are opportunities for agencies such as emergency services to have meetings when things are settled down where everyone can describe what they know and what they tried to do and why it happened the way it did and then to allow people to ask questions.”
Ensuring that community support, financial counselling and health services are made readily available to victims down the track are also recommendations of Dr Gordon’s.
He noted that there is much more acceptance of mental health today.
“It’s the unexpressed emotion that is tucked away and shut down that causes problems,” Dr Gordon said.
“You don’t have to have had a serious mental illness to need help.
“It is also important to recognise that people will recover at their own rate.”
Graham Simpson was a captain of the Cockatoo CFA when the Ash Wednesday fires occurred.
“I’d come home from work and I could see the smoke on the way. There was no fire in Cockatoo at the time, but up the hill you could see the smoke that was over the other side of Cardinia Reservoir, which was the fire coming through from Belgrave South,” Mr Simpson said.
“One of our trucks had been dispatched to go down there and help them and they ended up at Upper Beaconsfield.“
Mr Simpson received a call to go out to a small fire on the side of the road.
“We had a little truck that only had 180 litres of water because our other truck had gone to Upper Beaconsfield,” Mr Simpson said.
“We started working on the little fire and I looked across the road and I could see smoke coming up from the Wrights Forest. I went off to investigate and it was burning quite fiercely so I called a truck in but they said they were out of water, and had to fill up first.
“By the time they came into the forest, there was no way we had enough water to stop it, so we had to retreat out.”
The fire in the Wright forest had burned up to the top of the hill, and was threatening some houses.
“Our truck at Upper Beaconsfield had heard me on the radio and asked to be released, and they returned to Cockatoo pretty much when the wind change came through,” Mr Simpson said.
“I was in my car and I heard on my radio that the wind change had hit Frankston and I thought, oh, gee, it’s moving.
“By the time the guy finished saying that it had hit Frankston, the next boy said, the wind change had hit Cranbourne.“
Mr Simpson recounted that some of the CFA team thought that the wind change would miss Cockatoo.
“I didn’t believe them. I knew it would go straight down the hill and straight through Cockatoo so we headed down the hill to see what we could do in the town but it was total chaos,” he said.
“Everyone was trying to get out of town and when I was in the Wrights Forest, the police helicopter had flown over and had broadcast something. Probably told everyone to evacuate.
“I put my red helmet on and the night just kept going on. We were just chasing fire after fire and there were houses burning down everywhere.“
Equipped with just a small and large truck due to the other trucks being committed to other fires across the state, Mr Simpson and the CFA team did what they could with what they had.
“There was nothing we could do. We didn’t have much,” he said.
“If I had to go back, though, I wouldn’t change anything.
“I had very limited resources, and there’s nothing I could have done any differently. I live with that. I live with the fact that I did what I could with what I had.”
Mr Simpson had one wall of his house severely burnt when his neighbours burnt down. He considers himself lucky that the only damage was that, and the loss of an above-ground swimming pool and a cubby house for his children.
Following the Ash Wednesday fires, many people from the Cockatoo community were left homeless and lived in caravans while waiting to rebuild.
The community banded together, providing showers, food, clothing and even helping to reconstruct fences, houses and other buildings that had been lost in the fire.
“People rebuilt, they lived in their caravans on their bit of land as long as they could. We’d organise showers and a laundry and that sort of thing down here,” Mr Simpson said.
“Fortunately, it was easy to get a permit to rebuild a house then, as opposed to after Black Saturday. People are still struggling to get through a permit to build a house, which is very, very sad.“
Trauma from the fire wracked the community.
Mr Simpson said, “Some people didn’t cope very well at all. Some marriages broke up and a lot of people moved out. They said they were never going back to Cockatoo.”
As for the long-term effects, it wasn’t until two years after the fires that the PTSD struck Mr Simpson.
“I was building a deck out the back of my place and I was trying to get a piece of wood to fit. Each time I cut a bit more off, it still wouldn’t fit. And I just broke down and cried. It wasn’t anything to do with a bit of wood,” he said.
“It was the fact that everything had caught up because after two years we’d had the coronial enquiry and all that sort of stuff. And I openly admit that it does catch up with you eventually. I’m pretty much over it because I use talking to the school kids at the education centre as a release.“
The Ash Wednesday Bushfire Education Centre lies in Cockatoo and serves to remind the community and anyone who chooses to visit about what happened on Ash Wednesday.
“The Centre serves many roles for the community. A lot of people need to come and have a look and get it out of their system. And so if it just serves that purpose, it can take a lot of pressure off a person,” Mr Simpson said.
“One lady came in and she was there in Cockatoo on Ash Wednesday. When she found the centre, she broke down and cried. It was a good release for her,” he said.
“She then became one of our weekend volunteers so it was good.
“The council was originally going to demolish the Education Centre and return it to parkland but the Cockatoo community fought hard to keep it.
“The community rose up against the Council and convinced them to put the Learning Centre on the heritage list for its cultural significance to the state of Victoria because people sheltered there on Ash Wednesday.
“Men, women, children, dogs, cats, goats, their pets from the fire so it has a history of being used as a refuge,” Mr Simpson said.
The Ash Wednesday Bushfire Education Centre is open on Sundays from 11am to 3pm and remains an important, historical site for the Cockatoo and broader community.
There are resources available if you are suffering or have suffered from a natural disaster.
For community services and aid visit: redcross.org.au/emergencies/resources/
For a Trauma and Disaster recovery toolkit, visit: knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/recovery-helpful-resources/
For supportive resources for disaster recovery, go to: yarraranges.vic.gov.au/Our-services/Climate-and-environment/Emergencies/Supportive-resources-for-disaster-recovery-webinars-videos
For information on how to support recovery workers, go to: vic.gov.au/community-recovery-stories
