EMERGENCIES
SCARS RUN DEEP: THE HEALING PROCESS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRES MICHAEL ESPOSITO The summer of 2019-20 was a black parade of devastating bushfires that raged across Australia, with several parts of South Australia, particularly Kangaroo Island, decimated by the horrific blazes. In this story, The Bulletin speaks to three South Australian lawyers who were all caught up in the Adelaide Hills fires. They all suffered losses but were lucky the consequences weren’t worse. Here they recount their experience of the Cudlee Creek fire and the community’s slow road to recovery in the middle of a pandemic.
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ost South Australians would remember the 20th of December 2019. It was so suffocatingly hot that, at 46C, it set a new record for SA, and then, in a wild mood swing, the sky opened up and pelted the State with a drenching downpour. As the last Friday before Christmas, many people were sweltering through endof-year work parties, but for family lawyer Lisa Gough, it was “the worst Christmas party ever”. Lisa was on her way to her firm’s Christmas party when news emerged that the Cudlee Creek fire was out of control and heading for Woodside. At first she was not concerned that her small farm property would be in the fire’s path, but as she kept her eye on the CFS website it soon became apparent that her colleague’s house near Woodside was under threat. The fire tore through the property, destroying most of
8 THE BULLETIN September 2020
the stock, sheds and fences, but sparing the house. Lisa spent several anxious hours monitoring the news and waiting for word from her husband, before finally getting a call from her husband telling her that the fire had gone through their property and burnt large parts of their farm, but the house and the cattle were saved. Lisa is acutely aware that she is one of the lucky ones. The blackened earth that still characterises parts of the Adelaide Hills serves as a constant reminder that a number of people lost far more. But what was so heartbreaking for Lisa was seeing the wholesale destruction of the area she called home, an idyllic hillscape turned to ash. Karen Stanley, who lives on a 50-acre farm with her husband and three children, spent most of that fateful day not knowing if her husband had survived the fire, and
spoke of the collective grief that is felt by the community after such a tragic event. “I have friends and neighbours who lost everything,” Karen, a traffic and criminal lawyer, said. “There is survivor guilt because we still have the house, shared sadness with our friends who lost more than we did, community grief at the losses, and trauma of those who stayed to defend. I know kids in my children’s school classes who couldn’t evacuate in time and had to fight the fire on their property. It’s all a great big mess.” Recovering from such a harrowing ordeal, in both a practical and psychological sense, is a long and arduous road. “There is a public perception that people are quickly rebuilding, but that is far from reality,” Karen said. “Most of us are still cleaning up the mess. The first rains this year brought landslides on our property because there was no vegetation to hold the topsoil in place. The trees that didn’t fall during the fires are now falling with the rain and damp soil, so we are doing constant clean-up work.” “There is just so much to do. We need to rebuild sheds and fences and get feed for the stock. There is no feed around because so much pasture was lost. We can’t get contractors to do our fencing or spraying or re-pasturing. We are doing it all ourselves. We have had friends come up and help with work on the land which has been amazingly kind and generous.” While Karen considers herself extremely lucky to have escaped a far worse
