Last week I had the opportunity to visit some of the people who had been affected by Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. As always, these sorts of visits leave me in a reflective mood. This time I was particularly struck by the disparity between the perspectives of those directly affected by a disaster and those who sit outside it.

It is now over a full year since the bushfires raged and it is fair to say that for most Victorians and other Australians, they are now history. The intense sympathy and enthusiasm to do something to help in the aftermath has dissipated. In its place is a sense that the tragedy is behind us. Outbreaks of blame are the only aspect of the catastrophe still given real media attention.

The drive up the mountain from Whittlesea towards Kinglake was my first reminder of the reality that this event is far from over.

The road follows a ridge and on both sides the evidence of the bushfires stretches across the valleys. Many of the trees are showing incredible resilience, with shoots of green now covering their trunks. The regrowth is remarkable given how deeply blackened and charred the trees were fourteen months ago. Nevertheless, nature has years of work ahead before these forests will resemble anything close to what they used to.

The stories I heard demonstrated that the community, also, is a long way off full recovery.

An older couple who lost their home are only now in the early stages of re-building. Promises that the red tape would be rolled up in order to fast track these projects have proved empty. In the meantime, they live crammed into a tiny flat generously donated for their use. They are not bitter, not by any means, but the hurt of what they went through, and continue to go through, clearly lingers.

Another person has lost his business, a victim of increasing costs, a drastically depleted customer base and, ironically, lost revenue due to the generous donations which were made in the fires’ aftermath. Again, there was no crying poor here. The only real disappointment was recognition that it’s going to be hard to rebuild the community if the businesses that serve that community die out.

A different perspective came from a family who lost very little on Black Saturday but were very much caught up in the fires and fought long and hard to save their home. Their biggest struggle has been the tendency of the wider community (those outside the fire zones) to shrug off their experience: “You didn’t lose your home … you must be okay” is the gist of it.

That last story captured a poorly recognised but very important aspect of this situation. We love to simplify – and often to oversimplify – complex situations in order to make sense of them. And while this might make us feel more comfortable about them, make it easier for us to deal with them, it is a disservice to those who bear their brunt.

Society (with a lot of help from the media) has divided the Black Saturday affected population into the classic two groups: winners and losers. Those who lived in the fire affected areas are sorted like mail into one of these two boxes: if you lost a loved one or your home, you are a loser; if you didn’t lose your house or a loved one, you are a winner.

Reality wasn’t, and isn’t, that easy. The trauma of being caught up in the bushfires at the time, often spending days out of contact and without power or water. The trauma of seeing truly horrible sights afterwards, and of knowing of many people who did die. The trauma of losing your job without notice and with little prospect of finding another one. All these things happened to people who, in an oversimplified world, were the ‘winners’ of Black Saturday. For them, as with the so-called ‘losers’, the pain goes on.

Like the forests, these communities have enormous resilience. They will come back. What the rest of us need to remember is that it will take a long, long time.

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Tagged as: black saturday, bushfires, Media, resilience, simplicity, victoria