Bushfires spark green shoots of solidarity

The bushfire crisis that swept Australia over summer was a shocking wake up call for all of us. Clearly, the impacts of climate change are here now and our political leaders remain inept and unprepared in the face of the crisis. As National President Alison Barnes has remarked in her Advocate column, all of us knew someone – friends, family or neighbours – affected by the fires. The loss of life, destruction of country and loss of animals was heartbreaking and shocking. A number of NTEU members were directly impacted and sadly some lost homes and property. When the National Office returned to work early this year, General Secretary Matt McGowan and staff were eager to reach out to members and offer whatever support and advice we could, given the scale of the crisis. In addition to providing members with advice about working when air quality was hazardous (and our rights not to work), the Union announced the creation of NTEU Emergency Grants of up to $1000 to assist those members worst affected. We also offered to waive membership fees for up to 3 months for people suffering financial hardship. Several members took up this offer and the Union was able to distribute much needed funds to those most acutely affected. The union movement has always been about supporting each other when times are tough and the conversations we had with folks who had been on the frontline and in need of assistance were moving. We know that the climate crisis is not going away. We know that climate change exacerbates the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, like bushfires. In that context, we are aware that the creation of NTEU Emergency Grants and fee waivers for members are, whilst a worthwhile initiative in the immediate term, not sufficient to deal with the scale of the ongoing climate crisis. Climate justice strategy With a view to tackling that crisis, the NTEU is currently working to finalise our comprehensive climate justice strategy, consistent with what members voted for at National Council via the Climate Emergency motion and the UniSuper: Fossil Fuel Divestment motions. We are working on a strategy aimed at shifting our money, shifting our workplaces and shifting our politics away from the climate crisis and towards climate justice. We are working with MarketForces to ensure members retirement savings are not supercharging climate change through supporting fossil fuel companies. We will continue to build solidarity with the School Strike 4 Climate movement, inspired by Greta Thunberg and our own Australian high school students, as preparations for the next Climate Strike on May 15 take shape.

We hope that all members can join with young people on the street on this day, so please put this date in your diary. We are hoping to set up a live, online video-call with the high school movement leaders so that NTEU members can hear directly from these young people about how we can work together.

Finally, we will be working within the Australian union movement nationally to encourage other unions to support a just transition, or a Green New Deal, for workers and union members.

Despite the tragic loss and the fear and the anxiety we all experienced through the bushfires over summer, we are hopeful that the green shoots of solidarity will continue to flower as we work together for climate justice in 2020. ◆

Jake Wishart, Communications Organiser (Digital) More about NTEU Emergency Grants and bushfire relief at nteu.org.au/emergency_grants

Children, bushfire and climate change

In November 2008, I sat around a table at Warrandyte Primary School with a small group of 10-year-old students. I was interviewing them for my doctoral research on children’s knowledge of vulnerability and resilience to bushfire in south-eastern Australia. The children told me what they loved about their beautiful bush suburb on the edge of the city: the trees, the river, the wildlife, and all the great places to play and explore. They also told me about the extreme bushfire risk. 'It’s going to be a really bad bushfire season', one of them said. 'It’s been a really long drought and the bush around here is really dry. Everything could go up. Just like that'. They all agreed that everyone needed to get prepared before summer arrived. A few months later, on 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires razed dozens of communities around Victoria: 173 people were killed, including 24 children. Hundreds of people were injured. Over 2000 homes were destroyed. Natural ecosystems were devastated. Everything went up. Just like that.

Dr Briony Towers, RMIT University

Children know things Warrandyte was spared the devastation of Black Saturday. The fire was just 15 minutes away from that densely vegetated, heavily populated suburb when a south-westerly wind change pushed it in the other direction towards Kinglake. When it arrived there it took 38 lives and destroyed over 500 homes. Tess Pollock, then a 15-year-old student at Kinglake High School, survived the firestorm. With no time to evacuate, Tess and her mother dressed in old jeans and jumpers and placed buckets of water around the outside of the house. As embers began to rain down, they used mops to extinguish the spot fires. When the fire front arrived, they went inside to shelter from the radiant heat. After the front had passed, they lay together in the middle of the lounge room. Exhausted, but alive. A little later that evening, fire roared through the idyllic rural township of Strathewen, taking 27 lives and destroying nearly every building, including the local primary school. When the fire began impacting on Strathewen, 8-year-old April was at home with her father and her younger siblings. It was too late to evacuate. While her father actively defended the property, April stayed inside the house and took care of the other children. She kept them close and sang nursery rhymes to help them stay calm. Her little sister Scarlett was just a baby at the time. She doesn’t remember the fire, but she is highly aware of the trauma and grief it wrought on her community. At just 11-years-old, she has become a powerful advocate for children’s bushfire education. Appearing on ABC News late last year, she said 'Adults don’t generally listen to kids. So, if we can tell them what we can learn from a young age, we can continue that through our life. It’s good for kids to know how to act and how to react if something like that comes through again, and I really hope it won’t'.

Children are not passive victims In the aftermath of Black Saturday, the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission made a formal recommendation for bushfire education to be included in the National Curriculum. Their final report lamented that similar recommendations had been made in nearly every formal inquiry since 1939, but none of them had ever been properly implemented. This time around, however, the topic of bushfire was incorporated into the National Curriculum for Grade 5 Geography, and state-based fire agencies set about developing education materials to support implementation of this new curriculum content. By this stage I had completed my doctoral research and we used the findings to help ensure that children’s ways of knowing were being accommodated. School-based evaluations of those new materials and programs revealed further insights into how children understand and relate to bushfire hazards and disasters. When comparing outcomes across programs, it became increasingly clear that the most effective bushfire education involves children as genuine participants in their own learning. While its important to provide children with credible, trustworthy information about bushfire planning and preparedness, the best outcomes are achieved when we encourage children to critically analyse bushfire risk in their own local context and support them to develop their own risk reduction strategies. Children often have profound insights into the bushfire risks that exist in their households and communities. Their family might be renting which can restrict opportunities for structural mitigation and vegetation management. A member of their household might have a disability or a chronic illness, which makes leaving early on a ‘Code Red’ fire danger day a challenge. Maybe they don’t have an internet connection at home or the local mobile phone network is unreliable, making it difficult to receive or disseminate warnings. Children are experts in their own lives Over the last several years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time in school communities where children’s knowledge, experience and expertise are prioritised throughout bushfire education process. At Anglesea Primary School on Victoria’s Surf Coast, the children collaborate with the CFA, local forest fire managers and other community members to enhance the township bushfire emergency management plan. The children also lead the design of community education workshops, which they deliver at public events and other schools. At Strathewen Primary School, students produce Claymation films and books on a whole range of topics, from the local Indigenous fire history of the area to the fire danger rating system. While the children receive a lot of support and guidance from their local brigade and the wider community, they drive the process and make the decisions. These ‘child-led’ approaches not only exert a positive influence on bushfire knowledge and awareness in children’s

households, they lead to increased levels of household planning and preparedness and increased household capacity to respond to a bushfire event.

Children have agency At Harkaway Primary School on Melbourne’s peri-urban fringe, the children have been engaging in problem-based learning for bushfire safety. They choose a problem of local relevance, investigate it in detail (often by interviewing subject matter experts), and then share their newly acquired knowledge and expertise with other children via interactive presentations, films, websites, and workshops. The pedagogy is quite simple, but the children’s projects are often highly sophisticated. Last term, one group of students wanted to know if a bushfire could impact on their neighbourhood. In the absence of a child-friendly assessment tool, they developed their own by combining information from the Victorian Government ‘Mapshare Vic’ website, Google maps and CSIRO bushfire scientists. Then they set up a consultancy desk in the library and provided 'pro bono advice' about levels of potential bushfire exposure to their very appreciative classmates.

Children have really good ideas Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change and wondering how Australian children are coping with the terrifying notion that this summer’s unprecedented bushfires are a sign of life to come. Bushfire education for children has never explicitly addressed the issue of climate change or the impact it will have [is having] on the frequency and severity of bushfires in Australia. Amongst the hundreds of children I’ve interviewed about bushfire over the years, there has never been any mention of climate change. I suspect this is about to change.

During the bushfire crisis, children and young people from School Strike 4 Climate have been raising money for bushfire affected communities, organising solidarity vigils, and rallying outside Scott Morrison’s Kirribilli mansion. They have stood alongside First Nations peoples, disaster survivors, health workers and other concerned citizens to demand stronger action on climate change. When I saw them on the news, I remembered that the Australian school strike movement was founded by some Year 8 students in Castlemaine who had become deeply concerned about climate-fuelled catastrophic bushfires. Children know things. ◆