On losing everything
An account of losing a house to bushfire (shortlisted in the Australian Book Review's 2024 Calibre Essay Prize)
On New Year’s Eve 2019, I, like so many others, lost my house in the Black Summer bushfires. This was one of the most intense bushfire seasons on record in Australia, burning an estimated 24 million hectares (60 million acres), destroying about 3000 buildings and killing 34 people directly and probably another 400 due to complications associated with smoke inhalation, along with at least a billion animals, probably many more. The fires damaged the ozone layer, causing the highest temperatures in the stratosphere in 30 years.
Australia’s science organisation, CSIRO, stated that Black Summer forms part of a trend of worsening fire weather and ever-larger forest areas burned by fires. CSIRO also found Australia’s fire season is lengthening, moving out of spring and summer into autumn and winter. This was certainly evident in 2019; in my neck of the woods, fires burned from winter onwards. The air quality that year was appalling.
The following piece of writing – ‘Guide to losing your house in a bushfire’ – was shortlisted in the Australian Book Review’s 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. I am publishing it here to mark the five year anniversary of the fires.
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Guide to losing your house in a bushfire
1. Don’t be so naive.
Perhaps you live in a town and the town is girt not by bush but by farmland – acres of paddocks, black and white cows. Dairy country. Perhaps the Princes Highway runs north-south on the town’s western flank. It’s not exactly remote. You might think your bushfire risk is low. You might think the town is easily defensible from a fire approaching from the northwest, for example. There’s the highway it would have to jump. There’s a buffer-zone of paddocks.
Don’t be so naive.
See those swathes of dead trees along the ridge – patches of brown amid the grey-green? There’s been no rain for so long that hardened, drought-resistant eucalypts are dying in the forests. Brown grass. Brown trees. The ground hard and hydrophobic. Leaves crackle as you walk through. It only needs one tiny spark.
2. Watch for signs, monitor apps etc.
The signs may be veiled at first. If you’ve already endured a month of smoke and beige skies, it might not be immediately obvious that there is new smoke, new risk. Therefore, monitor the appropriate apps or websites. Watch the small red fire symbols begin their march across the map and, though they may seem abstract, know what they represent: a churning inferno consuming thousands of hectares of already drought-stressed bush. Birds and wallabies and lizards are streaming away in terror.
There will be other less abstract signs. Hear that pretty plinking on the roof? Burnt leaves are raining over your town like tickertape.
3. A change of wind direction is not necessarily good news.
Perhaps the wind, which is pushing the fire towards you, abruptly changes direction and appears to go the other way. Do not celebrate. It is only that the fire has become so big and powerful that it is sucking oxygen towards it and creating a backdraught.
Now is the time to pack the car.
4. Do not fill the car with camping gear.
Perhaps you imagine that when you evacuate to the coast, you’ll be camping alongside a bunch of daze-eyed holidaymakers from Canberra who have been caught up in the unfolding disaster. Perhaps you imagine therefore that you should pack camping gear.
Do not pack camping gear. Or at least, be strategic. Pack the tent and the twenty-litre water reservoir but don’t pack piles of bedding, pillows and sleeping bags.
You’re about to lose everything. For goodness’ sake, there’s limited space. Pack the things you can’t replace. It’s hot. No one needs a sleeping bag.
You will probably grab the photo albums but you’ll grab the wrong ones – the ones with digital back-ups. Get the old film ones in the shed. Otherwise, you’ll lose every photograph of yourself up until iPhones were invented and when your child asks, ‘Did you have long hair when you were my age, Mum?’ you won’t have a single photo to show. They won’t be able to see what you looked like in a school uniform with dimples and no front teeth.
There are other things to pack that might not be obvious. Your favourite red home-knit jumper. Musical instruments. A few favourite toys. Diaries and sketchbooks. The drawings your daughter did when she was little and still drew people with bird feet. That beautiful handmade Persian rug. Bloody pack the rug. You are really going to regret losing that rug.
5. Should you wake the kids up now? Yes, you should.
If the fire arrives in the middle of the night, get up and get dressed. Consider dressing in clothes you will actually want to keep afterwards – not the weird cut-off jeans and stained, stretched t-shirt.
Pick the kids out of their beds. Their lovely warm sleeping bodies will flop against you as you carry them to the car, though soon they will wake. Maybe you expect them to fuss and cry – if they are only five and two, for example – but they won’t. They’ll sit in their car seats, quiet and watchful, as you pack the last few things.
Text your friends in the next street to let them know you’re leaving. They will write back: ‘Us too.’
Both of you will lose your homes within the next few hours.
6. Look back. You won’t see it again.
There will be a moment when you close your front door for the last time. Look properly. You are never going to live that life again. You will never again open that kitchen cupboard that sticks or fill that kettle or sit in that lovely, upholstered chair with the fruit pattern. Those pot plants along the window are all going to be incinerated. The Christmas tree. Your books. The piano. The piles of old National Geographics. The oak table with carved lion’s feet that your in-laws brought with them when they moved to Australia from the States. The suitcase containing your university essays and the only copy of your honours thesis (not a big loss, if you’re honest).
Observe the friendliness of that scene of ordinary life. Puzzle pieces and train tracks and tricycles. Soon it will be ash.
You will never again own CDs or a CD player!
Close the front door. Close the car door. Say something bright and reassuring to the kids.
As you pull out of town, you may find that the fire has jumped the highway at certain places and this will determine which direction to take. If the fire has jumped the highway to the south, turn north.
As you drive, you will see the fire front from the car – frills of yellow across the hills. The kids will look out the windows, goggle-eyed.
Halfway to the coast, you or your partner might remember something you’ve forgotten.
‘What?’ you will say. ‘What did we forget?’
Your partner will sigh. He left that big container of fruit salad in the fridge.
7. Don’t believe everything you hear.
The next day – after arriving at a friend’s house at three in the morning and sleeping in her granny flat – you may receive an emergency text message telling you to move towards the water. It is not enough to be in a coastal town (Bermagui, for example). All of you, including your friend, need to get closer to the ocean. Your friend will go away to pack. For some reason, the sun hasn’t risen. As you leave, you may see the next-door neighbour hosing down her veranda, behind her a hot, black sky.
Park next to the marina – that way you will be near the water but still in a central location close to the showground and the surf club where people are congregating.
Though it’s seven thirty in the morning in the middle of summer, it remains dark and lights are on through the town. The showground is crammed with utes1 and trailers and tents. There is a red glow to the west.
At the surf club, people will make piles of sandwiches and pour cordial into plastic cups. Now and then, there will be announcements to the crowd gathered on the grass outside. A person standing on a milk crate holding a clipboard will inform you that: the roads west and south are closed, though the road north remains open. However, the towns north (Narooma, for example) are equally overcrowded and people are urged to stay put if they can.
Every second person you pass will be someone you know. And though phone reception is patchy, people will begin to report the most outrageous things. The school in the next town (Cobargo, for example) is gone. So is the preschool. The pub might’ve been lost. Later, you will find out that all this information is false.
It will be harder to get information about your own smaller town. At some point, you will hear that firefighters have fallen back to the town’s fire shed to take cover.
In the crowds at the surf club, you spot the wife of the couple that runs the General Store and Post Office in your town. Her husband has stayed to defend and she is in contact with him. You ask if he’s alright. Yes, he’s alright but it’s been very touch and go. You ask if she knows what houses have been lost. ‘I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news,’ she says.
She knows, you will think. She knows about our house.
8. People around you may behave strangely.
During the morning’s unnatural darkness, you might decide to go to the supermarket to pick up some snacks for the kids. You will come upon a scene of apocalyptic panic. Outside it’s dark but inside the store is garishly lit and clogged with people. Some shelves will already be bare. The bottled water will sell out first, then the bread – you will pick up one of the last loaves.
A harried store manager will be heard over the intercom asking people not to panic and not to buy more than they need so that the store can serve as many people as possible.
The lady at the check-out will cry as she rings up your items. The fire is, as you speak, bearing down on her home (in Coolagolite, for example). Her husband is there trying to save their property and protect their animals.
With roads closed and people unable to leave, a siege mentality will descend. Soon the petrol stations will run out of fuel. Phone and internet will drop in and out. There will be blackouts.
If all of this is happening on New Year’s Eve, as well it might, the police will intervene to stop venues from selling alcohol. People are acting strangely, are packed in closely together – the town is hosting many more people than expected – and there is only a small country police force available to keep order. This will be a major inconvenience because later, when you find out you’ve lost everything, you’re really going to feel like a drink.
9. A friend will call. Be stoic. They have bad news.
Once the morning darkness subsides the light will be eerily orange and the air brown. In the middle of the day, you will be standing by the surf club waiting for an update from the man with the clipboard and your phone will ring.
Leave your kids with your partner and walk a small distance away. Block your other ear with a finger.
The person calling is a friend – a seventy-year-old from your town who swears like a sailor and doesn’t suffer fools. ‘Sweetheart,’ she says gently, ‘your house is gone.’ She knows which of your neighbours’ houses are also gone. She says your friends in the next street – the ones who evacuated at the same time you did – have lost their house too. She doesn’t have their phone number. It’s okay, you say. You’ll let them know.
Return to your partner. He stands holding your two-year-old with your five-year-old wrapped around his leg. Next to him stands another of your neighbours who, you happen to know from your phone call just now, has also lost their house.
The man with the clipboard stands on the milkcrate, addressing the assembled people.
In the middle of that crowd under a beige pall of bushfire smoke, tell your partner that your house is gone.
‘Gone?’ your partner will say quietly as if the two of you are in a very close, very private room.
Nod. Tears will rush to your eyes but try to overcome them. You don’t want to scare the kids.
Tell your neighbour that you’re so sorry but you think their house is gone too. Hug them. Stand together and feel how the earth has roared forward on its axis and your lives are irrevocably changed. Life at every moment is momentous and yet ordinary. Your house has burnt down and yet here you are, standing on a patch of grass, in your ordinary clothes, holding the hand of one of your children, just like you did a hundred times before.
While the phones are working, call your friend in the next street.
You may feel that it’s best to first tell your friend that you yourself have lost your house just so they know they’re not alone. Do not do this. Your friend will begin lavishing you with concern and compassion only for you to be forced, clumsily, to interrupt their kindnesses to tell them that they have suffered the same fate. No. Better to lead with the important information. Their house is gone. You’re so sorry. But you thought they would want to know.
10. You may not be able to get back to see your house, but your brother just might.
When certain roads reopen, you will be able to leave the coastal town for a larger town inland (Bega, for example) where you can stay in a hotel and have a shower and where the kids can watch cartoons for a bit.
Your car now contains all your earthly possessions. All your clothes smell of smoke. Phones have been down and so you may not know that your brother, an ABC2 cameraman based in Canberra, has been sent down to cover the fires. He’s been searching for you in evacuation centres. It’s he who will see the smouldering ruins of your house first. Residents are not being permitted back into the town just yet but your brother, as Press, is allowed to enter. He is dressed in bright yellow fire gear with MEDIA in red letters on the back along with the ABC symbol. He’ll get out of his vehicle and stand on the verge, looking at the spot your house once stood.
Before the fires, there stood a weatherboard cottage with a bullnosed veranda, perched on ironbark stumps. It was 130 years old and heritage listed. (The Council will write to you in a few weeks to tell you your house has been removed from the Heritage Register on account of it not existing anymore.) All those years it weathered the elements and sheltered generations of people only for you to carelessly let it burn down on your watch. One of the first inhabitants of the house – over a century ago – was a bootmaker and on one occasion you dug up an old, pitted iron boot mould when gardening. (Your neighbour two doors up, who lives on the site of the old blacksmith, digs up horseshoes whenever she gardens.)
Now, your brother will see only a twist of roofing iron and the burnt out remains of your partner’s ute. (You probably should have evacuated in two cars but you were scared and didn’t want to be separated.) The chimney is the only thing still standing. One of your brother’s colleagues will take a photograph of him at that moment – looking over the devastation – a photograph you will next see in the Washington Post.
Your brother will take his own photos and they will be your first glimpse of what remains. He will finally catch up with you at one of the evacuation centres. He will hug you crying and you will cry too and say, ‘Is it bad?’ What exactly are you asking? Your brother’s seen it. He’s crying. Yes, it’s bad.
Your five-year-old will ask her uncle: ‘Did your house burn down too?’
11. If there continues to be fire risk, consider seeking refuge in a big city.
If more hot days are forecast, consider leaving for a larger city (Sydney, say).
When you arrive, the sun will be shining and the sky will be so very blue – in a way you haven’t seen for a long time. Although you have washed since the fires, you will feel indescribably grotty as you cruise down King Street in Newtown and see all the fashionable city people passing on the footpath. Perhaps, against advice, you evacuated in the weird cut-off jeans and stained, stretched t-shirt. Perhaps you are still wearing those clothes.
Deliver the kids to their Granny. Take a walk with your partner and stretch your legs. Make some odd purchases. A new pair of shorts for your partner. Some socks. Stand on the footpath feeling dazed and unsure about what to buy. You’ve lost everything. Where to start?
You may be overwhelmed by a feeling of dislocation. Not long ago you were in a supermarket in an end-times situation. Now you’re in an urban shopping district holding a crisp paper shopping bag. When buying the shorts, the sales assistant will ask if you want to join their loyalty program. ‘No, thanks,’ you will say. ‘We’re not from here.’
‘Oh, where are you from?’
You tell her. You wait for a look of horror and concern to dawn on her face. You wait for her to ask if you’re alright.
‘Oh, lovely!’ she will reply.
12. People will be kind to you.
The most astonishing part of this experience will be the kindness of others. It rushes to envelop you. Stuff starts arriving at the place you’ve decamped to in the city. Toys. Children’s clothes. A doll’s house with a hundred bucks stuffed in its little door. While your partner is out taking the kids to the pool and you are home alone, a stranger will drop off a bag of toiletries and some second-hand clothes. She’s a friend of a friend of a friend. You burst into tears. Somehow, it’s not the loss of the house that causes the most emotional upheaval. It’s the kindness of friends and strangers. It’s so specifically directed at you as if you matter.
Later, when you’re back from the city, back in your town, you will arrive at the house you’ve hastily rented to find cutlery in the drawers, towels in the bathroom, lamps and pot plants and rugs and crockery and saucepans stacked up by the front door by friends. Someone will drop off a washing machine. Another person you don’t know will drop off a second-hand lawnmower and will mow your lawns while they’re at it. People will drop off supermarket vouchers, hardware store vouchers, homemade patchwork quilts. A box of fancy linen clothing still with tags on will arrive from a shop in the Northern Rivers – somehow addressed to you even though you don’t know the sender. When you buy a bunch of foam mattresses at the furniture store in a nearby town, the sales assistant will guess your circumstances and give you a discount. When your car breaks down, the mechanic will charge you for materials but not labour. A person in Melbourne configures her website of second-hand clothes for bushfire-affected people – when you ‘add to cart,’ the clothes show up free and arrive a week later. People give money. They are so generous.
This will be your overriding experience of losing a house to bushfire. People will be kind and try to help.
13. It’s ok if you can’t thank everyone.
That tidal wave of kindness may result in feelings of inadequacy or gracelessness. You may have trouble keeping track of who’s given you what. You may become debilitated with feelings of guilt and unworthiness. Don’t these people know you’re the same flawed person you were before the fires? Don’t they know you don’t deserve this ridiculous outpouring of love? There are so many people you haven’t thanked. It makes you sick. You’re a terrible person. People will think you’re terrible. They’ll think you’re ungrateful.
No, they won’t. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t thank everyone. Stop being so conscientious and allow people to help you get back on your feet.
14. You will lose your privacy.
Now that you have lost a home, everyone will know this about you. You will become better known in your community because of this fact. People you hardly know will ask invasive questions about your personal finances. Did you have insurance? How much money did you get? Are you renting now or did you buy? What will you do with your block? And so on. You haven’t found a polite way to rebuff them. They are concerned for you, which is nice. You just don’t want to tell them all that stuff.
At the supermarket, now and then you will see a person you haven’t seen since the fires. For you, it’s an ordinary visit to the shops; for them, a momentous occasion in which you will be called upon to perform your victimhood and satisfy their curiosity. They are well-intentioned but you just want to buy your milk and go home.
In such circumstances, it is fine to hide in the pet food aisle until the coast is clear.
On other occasions you will have the opposite reaction. You will feel a strong desire to tell people you hardly know about this thing that has happened to you. A month after the fires, perhaps you attend a meeting in Melbourne for work. You arrive wearing borrowed office clothes. At the start, attendees go around the room introducing themselves and when it gets to you, you have a powerful urge to announce to the room that you just lost your house in the fires! For real! How crazy is that! You don’t, but it takes all of your self-control not to. The same thing happens at a meeting in Canberra. You are in a room full of suits. People take their seats holding eco coffee cups, talking quietly. ‘Do you know that my life has been totally upended?’ you want to say. Instead, you say your name, your role in the project. It passes to the next person.
Others who’ve also lost their houses understand. You can talk to them about it. You’re all going through this strange experience together.
Some will find the loss of privacy frustrating. The firefighter who refused to shake Prime Minister Morrison’s hand lives on the other side of town. He’s miffed that his grouchy face has been splashed across the news. He tells you that he went out of his way to avoid making a scene. When Morrison arrived at the fire shed, he withdrew to a backroom but then Morrison came out the back and tried to shake his hand (he kept his arms locked across his chest resulting in the Prime Minister awkwardly shaking his elbow). And now, he says, incredulous, his frowning face has even been spliced into the Media Watch opening credits.
Oh dear, you think. The cameraman was probably my brother.
15. Try not to lose your house right before a global pandemic.
Life will move on, possibly before you’re ready for it to. Your daughter will start kindergarten, standing tall in the school uniform you saved from the fires. Your son will start preschool.
And then the next calamity will hit – a global pandemic, perhaps – and people will forget about the fires, even while you keep living with the aftereffects. The helpful rhythm and normalcy of schooling will stop as schools close and states lock down. Your child’s kindergarten teacher will call to check in about the worksheets she’s sent home and will cry on the phone. These poor kids, she will say. They’ve been through so much.
16. You may find that you drink a little more than is recommended.
It’s understandable but it probably won’t help.
17. It may take time to feel anything about it.
Other than a few tears with your brother and with the stranger who dropped off toiletries and second-hand clothing, you may struggle to contact any sort of emotion about what happened. It was just stuff you lost, after all. Others suffered actual trauma. They nearly died defending their homes. They lost family members. In the scheme of things, you got off lightly.
Perhaps you adopt an attitude of pragmatism – signing leases, meeting the insurer, replacing furniture, establishing new routines – and this feels like a good solid mental posture with which to confront life. There are your children to think about, after all. Hold it together for them. Be cheerful. Wash the clothes. Make the dinners. Pack the school lunches. Ordinary activities will give your lives a character of steadiness which rocks you upright when you stumble.
It might take a year or more, but eventually your brain will allow a sliver of emotion to trickle through and before you know it, it’s a torrent. Perhaps the trickle and the torrent arrive on a meditation retreat – a free retreat offered to women in the area who lost houses in the fire. Over a weekend in a peaceful bush setting, someone will cook healthy, hearty meals for you. Another person will give gentle yoga classes. And there will be a chance to talk about your experiences in an environment in which you are totally understood.
During that retreat you may find that you are unable to stop crying. As soon as one of the women starts talking about the fires, you begin silently leaking tears. One woman, a seventy-year-old in bright scarves, talks about losing her connection to place. She’s got no anchor suddenly. She doesn’t really know where to go. You cry. Another, a single woman in her fifties, talks about the deep fatigue inherent in trying to rebuild alone. You cry. The meditation teacher may ask at various points if you want to share something with the group. You do want to, but any time you open your mouth you start crying. It’s something to do with the little girl inside you feeling deeply hurt – a childish, weepy feeling of: ‘It was just so unfair what happened to me.’
Possibly, you will say nothing for nearly the whole weekend, just cry and listen. But on the drive home, you will feel lighter. A wonderful catharsis has taken place.
18. The world is still there for you.
The rain will come and the rivers will fill up again. At night, you will hear the thrumming, chirping and ticking of insects and frogs. Trees will put out frills of green growth all up and down their blackened trunks and thickets of black wattle will spring up. Each morning the sun will throw its clean rays onto your pillow. Be easy. You are safe in the world.
19. I’m sorry this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.
It is only left for me to say: I’m so sorry this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.
Maybe, there is, lodged in you, the obstinate belief that you brought this upon yourself in some way, that it was only a matter of time before the universe delivered this karmic blow in payment for your cumulative failures and wickedness. Don’t believe it. It was just random bad luck. You didn’t deserve it. You are a worthwhile person and you didn’t deserve it.
Utility vehicle, aka pickup truck.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation – the public broadcaster; equivalent to the BBC in the UK.