Disasters in Australia and New Zealand

Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe

Scott McKinnon, Margaret Cook, Scott McKinnon, Margaret Cook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811543814
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811543821
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

Disasters in Australia and New Zealand brings together a collection of essays on the history of disasters in both countries. Leading experts provide a timely interrogation of long-held assumptions about the impacts of bushfires, floods, cyclones and earthquakes, exploring the blurred line between nature and culture, asking what are the anthropogenic causes of 'natural' disasters? How have disasters been remembered or forgotten? And how have societies over generations responded to or understood disaster? As climate change escalates disaster risk in Australia, New Zealand and around the world, these questions have assumed greater urgency. This unique collection poses a challenge to learn from past experiences and to implement behavioural and policy change. Rich in oral history and archival research, Disasters in Australia and New Zealand offers practical and illuminating insights that will appeal to historians and disaster scholars across multiple disciplines.

Part ILessons from Past Disasters

© The Author(s) 2020

S. McKinnon, M. Cook (eds.)Disasters in Australia and New Zealandhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4382-1_2

Begin Abstract

“Best Forgotten”: Black Saturday’s Difficult Stories

Peg Fraser¹

(1)

Museums Victoria, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Peg Fraser

End Abstract

It is, perhaps, a little absurd to begin a history with the words “Best forgotten”. This is especially true of disaster history, where there is an additional impetus to remembering in the hope that we can learn something from the past to help predict, prevent or mitigate future fatal events.

Black Saturday, 9 February 2009, was one such disaster: a catastrophic bushfire that swept through the state of Victoria, Australia, killing 173 people (Fig. 1). In a series of important essays published in the years after Black Saturday, Tom Griffiths¹ evoked the memory of Judge Leonard Stretton, whose report on fatal bushfires in 1939 is the foundation for bushfire studies in Australia. In what has become the most quoted line from the report—“They had not lived long enough”—Stretton summed up an essential problem of European occupation of the Australian continent: our failure to learn and remember.²

Fig. 1

Map indicating key locations in Victoria

Griffiths argued that Stretton’s remark was still relevant, referring to not only the disjuncture between the human life span and the cycle of catastrophic fires but also to the failure of a young, impatient settler colonial culture with only 200 years of living on this continent to understand the rhythm and rules of life here. Millennia of Indigenous land management through both agriculture and controlled burning were ignored, dismissed or destroyed.³ Griffiths tracked the “language of forgetting”, with its use of terms such as “unprecedented” and “unnatural”, and the danger that future fires will also take people by surprise.⁴

I agree with the need to record experiences through disasters such as catastrophic bushfire. As a historian I am committed to the documentation and analysis of difficult material—I have worked with minority groups, with refugees, with child migrants and most of all with bushfire survivors⁵—but as an oral historian who works with intimate personal stories, frequently of a distressing nature, I worry about the complexities and issues of documenting challenging material.

This chapter is a discussion of the craft of oral history in times of disaster, a personal reflection on some of the ethical and methodological questions encountered while working with the Victorian Bushfires Collection at Museums Victoria. What stories do we share with the public and what do we leave untold? How do we balance competing interests in public education, community rebuilding and personal recovery? How do we deal with counter-histories, unintended revelations or conflicting accounts? And are there some stories that are just too difficult to tell? Perhaps it is true that, in the words of one narrator, “some things are best forgotten”.

Black Saturday

It is now just over ten years since the fires of Black Saturday. Bushfires began in mid-January 2009, after ten years of drought and in the middle of the hottest summer then on record. Saturday 7 February was the most destructive day as uncontrolled fire swept through vast tracts of bushland, obliterated small towns and threatened the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The scale of the disaster unfolded over the following days: 173 people killed; more than 2000 homes destroyed; 78 communities affected; 430,000 hectares of land burnt; more than 8000 livestock and domestic animals lost and untold numbers of native wildlife killed.⁶ These were the most fatal fires in Australia’s history.

Black Saturday was the latest in a long line of catastrophic bushfires documented since the early years of the colony of Victoria. Bushfire—an Australian word for a phenomenon known elsewhere in the world as wildfire—is one of the defining features of life in southeastern Australia. Stephen Pyne, an international authority on wildfire, calls Australia “the fire continent” and says that the southeastern part of the country is one of three places on earth where fire has shaped and continues to dominate the relationship between people and the environment.⁷ With the effects of climate change, longer and more severe droughts and our changing settlement patterns, bushfires will only become more frequent and more destructive.

The Victorian Bushfires Collection

Soon after Black Saturday, Museums Victoria established the Victorian Bushfires Collection to preserve objects and oral histories connected to the State’s history of bushfire. The museum is the state collection for Victoria and includes Indigenous Studies, natural history, social history and technology. The new bushfires collection fit in well with many existing collecting interests, including rural life and sustainable futures. It also follows an international trend to begin oral history projects in the wake of disaster, both man-made and natural.⁸

In 2010 the museum started a targeted project with the aim of expanding its collection of bushfire-related objects, documents, images and oral histories. They assigned two curators, Rebecca Carland and me, to work with Liza Dale-Hallett, the senior curator of Sustainable Futures and founding curator of the Bushfires Collection. Our goal was to document, as far as possible within the limited time frame, the many faces of this event: the fire itself; the emergency response; the aftermath; the recovery efforts, and the ongoing challenges.

Liza continued her state-wide sampling of bushfire experiences, from the western districts to the northeast of the state. She covered as broad a geography and range of experience as possible: farmers and tree-changers; long-time residents and newcomers; emergency personnel and community leaders; people who had survived the fires and the relatives of those who had not. She also collected an extraordinary array of bushfire-related objects, from a seven-metre brick chimney to a pile of ash that had once been someone’s tax records.

Bec focussed on linking Black Saturday to the museum’s existing collections, mining the rich resources of artefacts, specimens and documents to develop connections that enhance our understanding of bushfire as a force that has long shaped our natural and social history, from deep time up to the present day.

While Liza and Bec were looking at the big picture of bushfire, I was interested in microhistory. I wanted to go deeply into one small place, to collect different stories and different perspectives of the same event, and to try to understand the variety and complexity of people’s response to bushfire. That desire led me to Strathewen, a settlement of just 200 people on the northeast outskirts of Melbourne, that was hard-hit on Black Saturday. In one afternoon, more than 10 per cent of its population died and 80 per cent of its buildings were destroyed. In a remarkable display of generosity, 25 people—residents, former residents, bereaved relatives and relief workers—agreed to in-depth interviews, sometimes a series of interviews, that addressed not only the day of the fire but a wide range of personal experiences and attitudes. This was at a time when many of them were still attempting to rebuild, from almost nothing, the entire structure of their lives and I continue to be grateful to all the narrators for taking part. After our collecting project finished at the end of 2010, I continued working with Strathewen survivors as a Museums Victoria research associate and a PhD candidate at Monash University. The results were published in 2018,⁹ but the work is ongoing.

The Oral History Interviews

All the interviews offered valuable first-person accounts, insights into not just the physical experience of surviving a major bushfire but also the practical, emotional and social impacts of the event. They are all ‘difficult’ stories, in that they contain distressing material, but many of them also raised difficult questions for us as curators. Museums Victoria had oral history guidelines developed for existing collections, but none of those earlier projects had contained the same level of intensity or emotional impact.

The interviews were semi-structured, allowing narrators to determine what would be discussed, and included life before and after Black Saturday. In preliminary meetings I discussed with each person what was and was not ‘on the table’; years after the fires, some people were still not ready to talk about that day. I also brought up the emotional effects of being interviewed and some strategies for coping with that, as well as the narrator’s rights with regard to use of the material. In some cases, I had to advise on the legal risks of making certain statements in an interview that would become a public (if not publicly available) document.

It seemed like every day we encountered new problems that had to be solved and it quickly became clear how important it was to be working in a team. We shared the emotional and practical challenges of working with bushfire survivors; consultation, debriefing and black humour were essential. We were aware of the impact of the material on curators, collection managers and conservators. The museum’s offer of psychological counselling for curators was extended to our transcriber and to other members of staff who listened to the material. Many were Victorians who had personal connections to Black Saturday or earlier bushfires.

Part of our mission was to make the stories of survivors available to the public through Collections Online,¹⁰ so from the beginning there was a built-in mandate to publish narratives as well as objects. This meant our work would quickly become part of the public domain. We set up new protocols for the accession, storage, transcription and access of the sensitive and sometimes disturbing material. These protocols were expanded and updated as new, unanticipated challenges arose.

The bushfire curators collected a wide range of stories, across different narrators and experiences but also with the same narrators across time. Stories changed as intervening time and events altered the narrator’s interpretation. One narrator noted that her reactions to Strathewen moved in the years after Black Saturday, from anger at the actions of other residents to acknowledging that everyone was finding their own path through their grief. I realised that the permanent records of the interviews in the museum’s collection had to be understood as documents at a point in time and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part I. Lessons from Past Disasters
• Part II. Human Understandings of Disaster
• Part III. Legacies of the Past
• Back Matter