Robert (Vin) Smith (QM 1956-60)
We just received the news today that the last of the remaining bush fires on the New South Wales coast south of Sydney has been finally extinguished. The huge Currawan fire was just one of several mega fires that have been burning through huge areas of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, with smaller ones in Tasmania and Western Australia – some of them since last September.
Bushfires have always been part of life in Australia – some of them really bad ones – but never before has there been anything as fierce and prolonged as this. It’s what an increasing number of people have been warning us of for years as the climate patterns have been noticeably changing; but the advice has fallen on the deaf ears of the present government, which is more concerned with bringing the budget back into surplus through investment in coal mining, and slowing down the commitments made by earlier governments to reducing greenhouse gases.
However, there is now a general feeling that the wake-up call has been heard and even our recalcitrant government is working overtime to address the whole issue of natural disasters that exceed those of the past and the changes in the climate that are exacerbating them. So, maybe something good may emerge – but at a huge cost.
But talking about good out of bad, the response of people everywhere has been amazing. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS), like similar services in other states, has thousands of trained volunteer firefighters, who turned out in force to fight the fires – many of them using their holiday entitlements or taking unpaid leave from their jobs. They were backed up by members of the State Emergency Service (SES), another organisation with thousands of trained volunteers.
The SES is the principal combat agency for storm, flood and tsunami type disasters, but also provides a whole range of other services including working with the Rural Fire Service with logistics, communications and the clearing of dangerous trees and foliage following the fires (more people are killed and injured in bushfires by falling trees and branches than by fire and smoke).
I’ve been a chaplain for the SES since 2002 and was deployed to the Currawan fire to provide pastoral and critical incident support. Driving south from Sydney to connect with the SES crew from the town of Ulladulla, my companion and I were the last people to get through before the highway was closed behind us and all traffic heading north was stopped. We got to our destination just as the crew returned to their base after supporting firefighters trying to protect another isolated community, only to learn that their own township of Conjola had been devastated by the fire, some of them losing their own properties.
That evening we had an exciting ride home. The highway was lined with hundreds of stationary vehicles, mostly holiday makers who’d been told to leave and head north to Sydney away from the encroaching blazes, only to get caught between the southern fire and a developing one further to the north. We were able to join a small convoy of RFS and SES vehicles that were allowed to proceed. But then we nearly got caught when the fire jumped the highway and began to blaze on both sides of the road. It was all over in a couple of minutes but a bit worrying when smoke obliterated the sight of the vehicle in front and the flames were just a few metres away on both sides.
But the good news is that the fires have now been extinguished by torrential rains that have brought floods to the parched earth. This means that those volunteers from the SES are out again doing the thing they are primarily trained to do, while being supported by the RFS volunteers who now help with logistics and communications. God bless them all!
Dorothea McKellar really did speak for all of us when she wrote her well-loved poem My Country more than a century ago:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!
Robert (Vin) Smith. QMGS 1956-1960.