Black Saturday at Steels Creek

Scribe Publications

BLACK SATURDAY AT STEELS CREEK

Dr Peter Stanley is a professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He has published twenty-five books, mainly on Australian military social history, such as Tarakan, Quinn’s Post, and Men of Mont St Quentin (also published by Scribe). In 2011, he jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History for his 2010 book Bad Characters: sex, crime, mutiny, murder, and the Australian Imperial Force. He wrote Black Saturday at Steels Creek as head of the Research Centre at the National Museum of Australia, in partnership with the Australian National University’s Centre for Environmental History, and with the people of Steels Creek.

For the people of Steels Creek,

in memory of those who died on 7 February 2009

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Email: info@scribepub.com.au

First published by Scribe 2013

Copyright © Peter Stanley 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Maps drawn by Jennifer Sheehan

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Stanley, Peter, 1956-

Black Saturday at Steels Creek / Peter Stanley.

9781922072283 (e-book.)

1. Black Saturday bushfires, 2009. 2. Wildfires–Social aspects–Victoria–Steels Creek. 3. Forest fires–Social aspects–Victoria–Steels Creek. 4. Disaster relief–Victoria–Steels Creek. 5. Steels Creek (Vic.)–Social life and customs.

363.379099453

scribepublications.com.au

CONTENTS

Foreword by Andrew Chapman

Introduction

Prologue: Blackwood Hill, 7 February 2009: 5.00 p.m.

Part One: Steels Creek

Chapter 1 Their Valley

Chapter 2 The Way It Was

Chapter 3 Fire-Ready

Part Two: Black Saturday

Chapter 4 The ‘Kilmore’ Fire

Chapter 5 Westerly

Chapter 6 Go

Chapter 7 South-Westerly

Part Three: Aftermath

Chapter 8 Days Later

Chapter 9 Weeks Later

Chapter 10 Months Later

Epilogue: Fire and an Australian community

Sources

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

It is the end of another hot summer’s day at Steels Creek. The blustery north wind has died down and the ground is starting to cool; amid the still-strong scent of green leaves, the smell of newly cut hay drifts across the brown lawn. It is a perfect evening, and, as I cast my eyes around, looking beyond our fence line, I can distinguish only a few dead trees — legacy of the ferocity of Black Saturday.

It has been four years since that dreadful day. We have rebuilt our house, and, after two years of good rains, the garden is flourishing.

We — the people of Steels Creek — love life in our valley, and the strength of our community is a reflection of this. Through film nights, art classes, a sewing group, the gardening and tennis clubs, and a local market day, all community needs are met. Community news and events are reported on through The Jolly Thing, the local news sheet, which I edit.

I first met Peter Stanley some five months after Black Saturday. We had a long chat over coffee, at which time he outlined his plan for this book. He asked many questions about the day and its aftermath; I was immediately struck by his concerned manner and his lack of interest in a quick outcome. Peter wished to draw all the facts together and bring sense to the disorder — not an easy task.

This book captures the essence of what drew our small but diverse community together before the fires and what has solidified our bonds in the rebuilding process. Peter’s well-known ability as a war historian has helped him to skilfully weave order out of the chaos of Black Saturday. He has done this with tactful patience and polite perseverance with regard to those who wanted their stories told. Peter’s book is a compelling and detailed account of an event that could have wiped the community of Steels Creek off the map.

It was a great privilege to read drafts of this book and to see the finished product coming together. Peter circulated several drafts among the community to ensure facts were correct; his regular updates on the book’s progress were printed in The Jolly Thing.

Bushfire is an ever-present force that at some time affects many country communities across our sunburnt land, and, while this is our community’s story, it could be another’s in the future. I was humbled and honoured to be asked to write this foreword, and I hope that all Australians get as much from Peter’s intricate narrative as I did.

Andrew Chapman

Editor, The Jolly Thing

INTRODUCTION

This book tells the story of how fire came to a small Victorian community on an extremely hot summer’s afternoon in February 2009. While the fires that engulfed Victoria on that day have since been eclipsed in memory, to some extent, by other tragic events — cyclones in Queensland, floods in Queensland and Victoria, and widespread bushfires across Australia in 2013 — they remain the most destructive bushfires in Australia’s history. The story of what happened in February 2009 is important for all of us. Fire is a part of the natural history of the continent we call home — which means that, while these fires were exceptional, they were not unique. They have come before, and they will come again. Australians, especially, need to understand how to live with fire. As the earth’s climate changes, bushfires such as Black Saturday’s are sure to become more, rather than less, likely.

As Australians, we also need to understand better how we do — and can — live together. At a time of rapid change — climatic, economic, demographic, technological, political, and, above all, social — the ways in which we live together are coming under both stress and scrutiny. With more people living in cities (or, rather, suburbs), the consequences of rapid or dramatic change can often be seen in alienation, crime, and the loss of what is variously called social cohesion, capital, or harmony. The answer to the question ‘How can we live together?’ is often the catch-all word ‘community’. But what does ‘community’ mean?

Black Saturday at Steels Creek connects these two themes. It explores the dual questions, ‘How can we live with fire?’ and ‘How can we live together?’ The result is a book about fire and an Australian community.

I have checked drafts of this book with as many Steels Creek people as possible, and have invited them to comment on and correct my text, but ultimately it expresses my judgements about what happened. While I have been able to corroborate or confirm many details, the ‘sources’ that I relied on were, in fact, exactly the people who turned out to have been most confused about what happened and when. Because the story is theirs, I have often looked to them for guidance in capturing the reality of their experiences. In that sense, this book is very much a partnership between us. However, while I have been able to correlate various bits of evidence, from mobile-phone records, to digital-camera data, to simple recollections of time, I have had to take a more tentative view of times of certain events than the people of Steels Creek would have liked.

Having listened to the people of Steels Creek in the course of writing this book, and having checked my narrative with those who know best, I am now confident that we can all stand by this account of what happened on that terrible day now known as Black Saturday.

PROLOGUE

BLACKWOOD HILL,

7 FEBRUARY 2009: 5.00 P.M.

From Blackwood Hill — a knoll rising on the eastern bank of Steels Creek, the exact geographical centre of the valley — Malcolm and James Calder watch flames rolling down the slopes of Yarra Ridge, less than two kilometres away to the west. Malcolm is a retired botanist who lives in Steels Creek with his wife Jane, also a botanist. His son, James, a self-taught photographer and winemaker, grows grapes on the slopes of Blackwood Hill. They know this land intimately, although they have never known a drought such as the one that has gradually strangled the valley over the past several years. Or a day so hot. Or a fire as fierce as the one they are watching anxiously on the ridge beyond the creek.

Jane Calder and her daughter-in-law, Morgan, leave their adjoining houses. As they have planned, they will take James and Morgan’s three children to seek shelter in the town of Yarra Glen. Possible safety is ten kilometres distant, along roads increasingly choked by smoke — they will not know if their way is blocked until they come to a fallen tree. They drive off into thickening clouds of smoke. No one knows what the day will bring. Malcolm and James remain to face the fire alone.

At about 5.00 p.m. — no one can be sure of precise times that evening — James says, ‘The wind’s changed.’ Malcolm feels the change as ‘a blast from the south’. This wind brings flame up the length of the valley. It fans the ember falls driving from the west into a series of fire fronts that sear the valley floor and race north for the hills, travelling hundreds of metres in just a few minutes. Malcolm and James cannot see beyond the trees on their southern boundary, but they feel the smoke thicken. Soon they see flames, as fire sweeps onto their land. A spot fire on a hillside to the south starts a grassfire that the freshening wind drives towards the Calders’ place, passing the dam from which they draw their water. Through the smoke, Malcolm can see his neighbour’s sheds in flames, and James notices the big neighbouring winery of Roundstone burning, hit by a huge front as the wind changes. Malcolm and James wish each other luck and separate to take up positions on opposite sides of their adjoining houses.

For several hours they fight the fire desperately, neither knowing if the other is safe, or even alive, and both fearing the worst. When the fire front burns most fiercely, they seek shelter separately — Malcolm in his cedar-wood house; James in his vineyard, fearful that his house will ignite in the radiant heat. Gas bottles explode, bushes by a wall smoulder, and a downpipe melts in the fierce heat radiating off the fire that roars around their buildings. James and Malcolm each emerge, beating out glowing embers before fire takes hold; eventually they catch sight of each other through the smoke and flame. As is to happen so often that day, electric-powered pumps fail, the water-supply dribbles to nothing, and then the petrol-powered pump dies, aflame. Malcolm and James use buckets (sluicing water from the fish pond) and anything to hand to beat, bury, and douse outbreaks all over. They lose their sheds and James’s winery, but, by about eight o’clock, they realise that the storm has passed.

James and Malcolm survive Black Saturday. They are luckier than others — some of them cherished neighbours — in Steels Creek. But this experience will stay with them, and the valley’s other bushfire survivors, forever.

PART ONE

STEELS CREEK

Steels Creek is not a very large slice of Australia. Within the space of a few hundred metres, this land takes us on a compressed journey through the history of post-settlement Australia. We go from bushland that has been virtually untouched since settlement, across paddocks that have served to fatten cattle and sheep, over a creek that has given up gold as well as water, and past the vineyards that exemplify the indulgent economy of the post-industrial rural–urban fringe.

Located beyond the Melbourne metropolitan area, this valley lies outside the mainstream of modern Australian life. Its community seems like an ideal of — or even an aberration in — Australia today. It is commonplace among commentators on Australian society to bemoan developments and changes which signal that Australia as a whole seems to be a very different place from Steels Creek. Australia as a nation is large, with most people living in cities and their suburbs; Steels Creek is rural in setting, even if a proportion of its people commute to work in Melbourne.

Steels Creek is small, and, although its two-hundred-odd people are scattered thinly over twenty square kilometres, many know the names of most of their neighbours. While Australian society as a whole sustains weak communal bonds — fewer than one-fifth of Australians are active members of an organisation, and even fewer are involved in more than one — Steels Creek massively exceeds the average. It offers its people a choice of about a dozen local interest groups, making them between three and six times more active than the average.

Is Steels Creek so exceptional that its story should be treated as a curiosity? Is it irrelevant? I would argue that it is, in fact, a microcosm not of Australia as it is, but of the country as it might be. Steels Creek offers a model for how many Australians would like to lead their lives. The people of Steels Creek have been able (mainly because they are old enough, wealthy enough, or sufficiently motivated or fortunate) to make a life in a beautiful part of rural Victoria, close enough to commute to Melbourne if they need to, but far enough away and with enough space to enjoy the benefits of the tree-change experience. They live in a place where they can know their neighbours if they choose to, and that at its best is healthy, life affirming, and socially nourishing.

Before we look at the day of fire that devastated the valley and its people, we need to understand it and them. How did this place come to be as it was?

CHAPTER ONE

THEIR VALLEY

From a distance, Steels Creek takes on the typical blue-grey haze of the Australian bush, but, as you approach, the trees become clearer individually. Residents will point out manna gum on the creek lines, stringybark or peppermint gum in the lower hills, tea-tree on the slopes of Brock Spur, and grey gum and even some mountain ash in the adjoining Kinglake National Park. The landscape itself tells a story. Above the former school, now the community centre, were pine trees self-sown from a pine windbreak at ‘Rose Glen’, home of the valley’s oldest surviving buildings.

Steels Creek’s topography is easy to grasp. On the left, or west, lies Yarra Ridge; further west, the Kinglake National Park. On the right, or east, is Brock Spur (named after a mining family in the late nineteenth century), which becomes a series of hillocks — the Pinnacles — marking the valley’s eastern edge. Linking the two ridges at the valley’s northern end is a horseshoe of high knolls. In the valley, midway between Yarra Ridge and Brock Spur, the creek that gives its name to the place meanders more or less due south towards the Yarra River.

Steels Creek occupies an area of only about two kilometres east to west by about ten kilometres north to south. It is a small area, a tiny fraction of the three hundred and ninety-five thousand hectares burned out by the bushfires that started on Black Saturday as a whole, but the valley’s topography is surprisingly varied. Trees line the creeks and cover the hills with bush. The valley is full of houses; vegetable gardens; vineyards; and paddocks for cattle, horses, goats, and even alpacas, with agricultural buildings dotting the landscape.

The community that experienced the 2009 fire here is only the latest of several to have inhabited this place. The first, of course, were the Woiwurrung, who lived in the ranges and flats for tens of thousands of years. They called Yarra Ridge ‘Wyenondable’, meaning something like ‘fiery hills’ — a name so justifiable as to need no emphasis. Europeans arrived in the vast, open stringybark forest bordering the Yarra in the eighteen-thirties, selecting, clearing, fencing, and stocking huge ‘head-stations’, of which the homestead of Yering (now a winery, restaurant, and up-market wedding venue) is a reminder. Gulf Station extended from the outskirts of the township established above the Yarra flats (named, somewhat unimaginatively, Yarra Flats) and extended by the early eighteen-sixties as far north as the present Pinnacle Lane.

With the arrival of the railway in 1888, the little township of Yarra Flats became the grander Yarra Glen, although there is no glen close by, unless perhaps it is the valley of Steels Creek. The railway changed Steels Creek’s economy, in what it could take and bring. It opened the valley to dairying for the Melbourne market, a phase lasting another eighty years or so, and it brought from Melbourne weekend visitors to start the valley’s tradition of opening guesthouses. By the early twentieth century, a community of timber cutters and miners and their families lived in the valley’s gullies and hillsides, with a related community of smallholders on the flats. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, a further wave of demographic change overlaid and largely displaced that older agricultural community; they became the people who constituted Steels Creek’s inhabitants in 2009.

European migrants planted vineyards on the slopes above the Yarra in the eighteen-forties, although the vineyards that are today a mainstay of the Yarra Valley’s gourmet tourism industry are a more recent development. In the eighteen-nineties, the larger stations were cut up and selectors moved into the valley, clearing smallholdings and venturing into the adjoining hills to quarry, mine, and cut timber. Once, a dozen sawmills logged the mountain ash and grey gum on the slopes of the ridges, but the mills were burned and the millers driven out altogether by the 1939 bushfires.

Although Steels Creek has no real centre today, it once had the several institutions that marked a township in rural Australia: a shop, post office, school, church, and pub; a cricket team and an off-and-on tennis club. Except for the school-turned-community-centre and the tennis club, all have gone, banished by the iron dictates of the car-based economy. In the mid-nineteen-forties, the valley had about thirty-four houses, many of which were lost over the following decades as small farmers moved out. Vera Adams, a long-serving teacher at the primary school, noticed the old home sites, identifiable from ‘the clumps of straggling fruit trees and the persistence of bulbs bursting into renewed life every spring’. Their inhabitants, Vera remembered, had often been ‘good community people’ — a Steels Creek tradition even then, it seems.

The decisive shift in the valley’s complexion seems to have stemmed from the Melba Highway replacing