Beauty and the Beast of Living in the Bush

Beauty and the Beast

OF LIVING IN THE BUSH

BY LLOYD GORMAN

FEBRUARY’S HORROR BUSHFIRES ON THE FRINGES OF PERTH WERE ON AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE FOR THE METROPOLITAN REGION. THE TOWERING PLUMES OF SMOKE RESEMBLED THE SPEWINGS OF AN ANGRY VOLCANO AND WERE VISIBLE FROM ACROSS THE CITY. THE WESTERN HORIZON AND SKYLINE OF THE CITY WAS CROWDED WITH THE SMOKE AND HAZE STEAMING FROM THE RAGING INFERNO WHILE FAR FLUNG SUBURBS EXPERIENCED SNOWLIKE SPRINKLINGS OF ASH CARRIED ON THE WIND. AND ALL THE TIME A HIGHLY VISIBLE FLEET OF HELITAKS AND FIRE FIGHTING AIRCRAFT RELENTLESSY ATTACKED AND BOMBARDED THE BLAZES FROM DUSK TO DAWN, DAY AFTER DAY.

It was an extraordinary thing to witness from a distance, but thousands of residents in the affected areas suddenly found themselves engulfed by danger. Originally from Waterford but long term Gidgegannup couple Charlie and Joan Walsh Smith were amongst the thousands of people* forced to suddenly flee their homes and properties. Several bush fire fighters were injured as they battled the flames and searing conditions. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, eighty six houses were consumed and charred to a crisp. The husband and wife team of sculptors were amongst the lucky ones not to lose their homes but that may well be in no small part because they knew a terrible time like this was inevitable. Fred Rea caught up with Charlie to find out more about their brush with danger and how they prepared for it. “Seven houses on adjacent properties very close to us on our western and eastern sides were lost,” Charlie said. “Ninety per cent of our property was burned but if you were sitting in my house looking out the window – everything looks absolutely like a normal paddock, but just a short distance to the right or left is utter devastation, with trees by the thousands gone like matchsticks.” Even though they and their Reen Road property – which is also home to their studio and workshops – were as well prepped for an emergency as possible, they were caught by surprise when the moment came. “It started on the Monday in the afternoon and I thought it was too far away to bother us because we live 40km away, we had no idea the fire would stretch for 40km and in the end the fire front was 142km wide – the biggest one ever seen here,” he said. They had to leave at short notice but they put their bushfire plan into action. “We set up here in 1986 and bought this wonderful 150 acres of bush property which only had a tin shed on it at the time, so that’s what we moved into,” he said. “The first thing that became obvious to us was

Left: Images from the February fires that engulfed huge sections of Western Australia. Right: Charlie with one of his scultpures that survived

the fire. Photos Charlie Smith

that a major bushfire had been through it before. I found metal on the property that had melted, so you go into these situations with your eyes wide open and with an understanding that there was a risk living in a place as lovely as this. So we started researching, and you must remember that we were newly arrived from Ireland, so it was all new to us and the technical ramifications of living in the bush and the potential for this lifestyle side by side with this terror we have just experienced. There was a hollow area in front of the shed and it just seemed from the start that if we were going to live in this wonderful setting that we would need to be independent of power and have a back up water supply so the first thing we did was build a dam.” Joan found a copy of Joan Webster’s The Complete Bushfire Safety Book, first published in the same year Charlie and Joan came to Western Australia and which is still considered to be the bible of its genre even today. “We studied this and it became our bible and as a result we set about creating a system which would hopefully protect us in the worst eventuality,” he added. “You need your own electricity, which is a big generator, your own water supply and a system that can deliver water to suppress bushfires around you.” They worked hard and invested heavily to get the highest Bushfire Alert Level (BAL) possible in order to protect their lives and livelihoods. As the creators of numerous national memorials – including one to the Australian Army in Canberra, HMAS Sydney II in Geraldton and Denham in WA – as well as a large number of public artworks, Charlie said they had an ongoing responsibility to be able to preserve and restore their creations into the future should the need arise. “Building on that top bushfire ranking we made sure that everything we did here was taking into account the fact that at some stage or another one of these bushfires would come roaring through, and after 34 years it did,” he said. “We installed fire suppression systems in all our buildings, and over the years as artists dealing with large scale public artworks and memorials it wasn’t just our house we were dealing with, we had our studios and we have six separate buildings here and they all had to be protected. We built a concrete box underneath our design studio which we use to store all our hard drives and photographs, paperwork and everything to do with memorials and artworks in a fire proof box.” They may have been new to Western Australia but Charlie and Joan were quick to learn the lessons of those with experience and knowledge. Charlie recalls being at a BBQ in the house of their friend John Collie, an engineer who helps them with their large art projects, about thirty years ago. “There was some conversation about a major fire and there were some guys there talking about their experience in the bush fire brigade and a situation in somewhere like Sawyers Valley. The whole place was devastated and these guys were actually running into the fire and when they came to the top of a hill and looked down at the valley which was completely burnt and there was one house standing in the middle of it all, and even the grass on the lawn was untouched, because it was covered in sprinklers. That must have been a subconscious thought in my mind all the time and it really comes down to one simple fact if its wet it won’t burn.”

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With six separate structures on their property they installed 17 fire suppression sprinklers – each one covering a 10 metre zone – around the buildings. “According to calculations done by an engineer, we sprayed some five million litres of water over the course of five days going 24 hours a day,” Charlie added. He has developed a theory about the shape of the area that was burnt and those areas that escaped the damage that he plans to test with an expert. “If you look at the fire map you can see a cut out area there, which is unburnt. I want to talk to a scientist or someone in the CSIRO to see if we threw so much moisture into the air that it created a micro-climate that went beyond the footprint of our dwelling and studios and beyond.” Certainly the sprinklers did the job they were designed to do. As well as dousing the all the buildings in a blanket of water and protecting their contents, they also kept all the creatures inside a large aviary they had built for rescue animals and unwanted pets alive. Charlie also discovered that if provided an oasis for local wildlife. “I’ll never forget on the Tuesday when I drove up the driveway the sprinklers were going strong and when I got to the back door of the house there were all these kangaroos all over the place, soaked to the skin, I could see the droplets all over them and they were all standing there just looking at me, they weren’t going anywhere,” he laughed. When he drove into Gidgegannup to pick up feed and stock for the animals and birds in their care, Charlie experienced one of the upsides of being in a crisis situation. “When I went to pay they wouldn’t take any money, they said they were inundated with money from people to help feed wildlife.” The homes he knows were lost to the bushfire did not have a sprinkler system in place and Charlie is convinced property owners should have them in place, and be encouraged to install them. “It should be mandatory for people to put them in,” said Charlie. “For years we had been trying to get the insurance companies to give us some kind of rebate for the amount of time, effort and money we put into the fire suppression system. Just think about it – 86 houses lost, which means insurance companies are paying out an incredible amount of money. But if they gave incentives and rebates for people to put in fire suppression systems then they wouldn’t have to be paying out these millions and millions of dollars, its a no brainer. There is a message here, the lifestyle of living in the natural bush in the hills outside Perth are absolutely incredible, the Kangaroos and wildlife and all the rest of it but there is this other obverse side to the coin that you have to be very aware of that it can change in an instant and you are suddenly facing a monster.” As Charlie chatted with a firie in the days following the tense action the fatigued fighter told him: “If I had seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse coming out of that I wouldn’t have been surprised”. Charlie believes the use of the big tanker aircraft were vital to beating the fires but he also paid tribute to the bravery of those men and women who stare danger in the face for the good of the community. “We are thrilled to have survived of course,” he added. “I have to say the volunteer bush fire fighters are unbelievable people. They just work themselves to exhaustion on twelve hour shifts, night and day and running into the midsts of the most unbelievable infernos you can imagine they were coming into our property with bulldozers and heavy equipment they did that all night, and the next night, its just incredible.”

Above: The kangaroos that took up shelter on Charlie’s property. Left: Image from DFES showing the area burnt (black lines) and the Smith’s property (blue marker)

*Longford man Oliver McNerney and his wife Stella also had to flee their Bullsbrook home because of the fires. Oliver said it was a very scary experience but they are thankful their property was not damaged. Oliver has a regular Saturday slot (3pm5pm) on local community station VCA 88.5FM.