and now it is Mount Buffalo in the air
I can taste it
I’m currently working to bring to life a collection of Bushfire poetry called Devil in the Wind – stories and voices – arising from our disastrous Black Saturday fires of 2009. February 2019 will see the 10th year commemoration. I’ll talk and write more about that in the weeks leading up to April/May 2019, when I hope to have final proofs in my hands and be ready to go with it.
Victoria (Australia) has always had hot fires, though, and before the 2009 firestorm we had a very severe fire season 2003.
My parents told me, and I saw for myself when I visited the town from Melbourne where I was living at the time, that in the evenings they could see the flames rising up over the hills of the Beechworth Gorge each night. Far too close to home.
from the house on Last Street
you can see naked flame
glowing crown-like across tree-tops
red-licking toward sky
bedevilled crimson
The smoke was thick enough to affect breathing, and between the heat and anxiety emanating from the threat, the township (and surrounds) became a very anxious locality.
Hundreds of firefighters and their implements – great big red trucks and water carriers, and lord only knows what equipment, all descended on the township and its surrounds.
Imagine, if you can, the task of feeding, in shifts, hundreds of men either just returning or just about to attend the front lines of a firefight.
Accommodation.
Sanitary facilities.
Fuel.
A logistical wonder, and yet it is achieved anew every time there is a call out.
My first bushfire inspired poems were written in reaction to those 2003 fires, tinged by the worry that comes with being at a distance from the action, while loved ones and everything that is familiar, are under threat.
my childhood
is on fire
In the weeks leading up to April finalization of the Devil in the Wind collection, I’m planning to post the poems and chat a little about the circumstances and my experiences leading to what was written.
There is only a handful of poems, so the series will be time-limited.
Please feel free to join in a little conversation, and share your own experiences, if you wish.
~
#1 Victoria a-flame
and now it is Mount Buffalo in the air
I can taste it
Victoria is an inferno and the remnants
from an acreage devoured
have shrouded the city
like a foul smelling blanket
that is the remnant of land
of all that is good
gone
black and dying
and in the town where I grew
the hills and valleys are alight
from the house on Last Street
you can see naked flame
glowing crown-like across tree-tops
red-licking toward sky
bedeviled crimson
embers on the rise
float closer
maybe near enough to singe
the cricket pitch
where Zim Evans batted
while I bowled
and I don’t think
it can ever be
the way it was
my childhood
is on fire
it is in the taste
of my air
~
What an awful time…
Isn’t it, though.
At the present moment it is our forest paradise – Tasmania – that is burning uncontrollably. Next week it could be us, again.
“My childhood is on fire”
I remember thinking the same thing on that day in 2009. Before that day it was just the area I grew up in so many years before, the bush that taught me lessons city kids would never know, but on the day it was exactly as those words say. I lost so little compared to many people on that day but it still changed so much.
Yep. I think of us as having a kind of PTSD (in Victoria) from the Black Saturday fires
It’s definitely a PTSD and it varies so much between different people. Some of the strongest men I know, guys who shaped my early life have fallen apart since that weekend.
and still do. A lot of folk very fragile.
Your poem gave me shivers, Frank, which is quite contrary given the heat inferno of the time. I have a photo taken at the time of the Canberra 2003 bushfires. It is of a two small boys playing in their neighbour’s driveway with a toy helicopter with a bucket they had made hooked up underneath. The sky glowed red in the background. We were packing our car at the time. Just in case. It was pre-digital, so I will have to investigate my albums to see if I can find it.
The trauma of it all weighs heavily over our city. There were no fire trucks to come to people’s rescue. It must be twice as bad for the people of Beechworth given subsequent events.
Tracy, I remember seeing tv footage of the driven flames and embers from the Canberra fires. I’ve never been so shaken/scared by an image as I was watching those pics. The ferocity was extraordinary.
Tough country, this.
I remember these times vividly. Smoke for weeks on end. Embers falling on our work cars, barely able to breathe some days. And the exhaustion from ongoing stress, and hypoxia.
We live in a beautiful, but often dangerous landscape…….
They were dreadful days, Zita. Not made any better by knowing there were worse to come.
Thank you for reading and commenting.