The Walkley Foundation an Alliance Initiative

The bushfires that quickly became known as Black Saturday happened on February 7, 2009, which in today’s media-marinated world seems a lifetime away. Since then there have been other disasters: Cyclone Yasi, floods in Queensland and Victoria, and earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan.

So, no need to look in the rear-view mirror; nothing more to see here? We’re over Black Saturday, aren’t we? No. Many people in communities seared by the
fires aren’t over it and many Victorians, after two milder summers, have sunk back into apathy about bushfire safety messages.

Yet apathy is your least likely response to reading Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake-350. Like John Bryson’s reinvestigation of Lindy Chamberlain’s trial and Paul Toohey’s account of Bradley Murdoch’s murder of Peter Falconio, this will be the book that in years to come is read by anyone wanting to understand Black Saturday.

Adrian Hyland is a novelist (Diamond Dove and Gunshot Road) who, for many years, lived and worked among Indigenous people in the Northern Territory. He brings time and a novelist’s sensibility to examining the bushfires. Instead of focusing on survivors, he makes Roger Wood, the police officer on duty in Kinglake, the character through which we see, hear and smell the fires that ravaged the state.

It is an inspired choice, and not simply because Wood and fellow officer Cameron Caine won Victoria Police’s valour award for leading a convoy of 50 people out of Kinglake to safety. Through Wood, we see just how little, and also just how much, a country cop can do to protect the community in such a cataclysmic event.

Wood takes out his phone again. The reception might be better in Whittlesea. He punches the number, another attempt to call home. For the first time all night, it’s answered. ”Oh Rodge…” Jo’s voice is drawn, weary. Enormously relieved. “I’ve been so worried about you. Been trying to call you all night.”

“Same here. Worried you were dead.” He blinks back tears. “Kids OK?”

“They’re fine.”

He slumps forward in the seat: the long-held tension slackens like a cut rope, and he’s suddenly aware of the terror he’s been struggling with for so many hours.

“It was that wind that saved us.” Jo is still talking. “It was only seconds away when it turned around.”

He is struck by the irony of that. The southerly buster that diverted the fire from St Andrews and saved his own family had driven it up the escarpment to
wipe out Kinglake.

“‘When are you coming home, Rodge? Everything’s still on fire down here.”

“‘Soon honey,” he says. A wrenching need to be there. “Not just yet.”

“How’s Kinglake?”

“Pretty much wiped out.”

A brief silence. “You do what you have to, Roger.”

“Love you.”

“Yes.”

This passage captures Wood’s experience: his twin loyalties to family and community and the enormity of what he endured. It provides a glimpse of the fire’s toll on him, physically and emotionally. Deeply affecting though the narrative is, Hyland is also determined to explain the context of events, whether it’s the science of fire or the organisation of the Country Fire Authority (CFA).

His comments on former CFA chief Russell Rees are sharp and measured and should – but probably won’t – give pause to those pundits for whom nuance is a dirty word.

Hyland lives on the foothills of the Kinglake Ranges and agrees errors – many of them – were made by authorities on Black Saturday, but says “there were few headlines about people’s lack of preparedness”. He cites the commission testimony from bushfire researcher John Handmer. Some people “were in denial of the fire threat to the last, purposefully ignoring – in some cases, mocking – the advice of friends, relatives or agencies.”

Hyland’s most disturbing argument is that fires as severe as Black Saturday are likely to occur again unless we address the causes. He cites CSIRO research predicting the doubling of extreme high-fire danger days in Melbourne by 2050. But despite the many advances in science and communications, the royal commission into Black Saturday had to cover much of the same ground as the Stretton Inquiry after the 1939 Black Friday fires, 70 years before.

Hyland concludes: “Our failure to engage with fire is a failure of our culture. The lesson of how to live with our environment has yet to sink into our bones.” We isolate ourselves, ‘‘building barriers of plastic and steel between ourselves and the real world.”

This failure is epitomised in the bitter, bogged debate on pricing carbon, even though scientists say global warming will lead to a rise in extreme weather events. Better understanding of how Indigenous peoples maintained their relationship with fire over thousands of years would be a good starting point, Hyland says.

Future editions of Kinglake-350 would benefit from an index, a separate chronology, fuller end notes (at present it is not clear why some information is end-noted while other important statements go unsourced) and maps that give a clearer sense of where the book’s protagonists went during the bushfires.

No question, though: this is an outstanding book. It should be read by anyone wanting to reconnect with their fellow citizens’ experiences amid a truly appalling disaster, by anyone frustrated with the news media’s pin-the-tail-on-the-villain approach to reporting the royal commission, and anyone worried about what we need to do to reduce the likelihood of future Black Saturday-scale bushfires. That should be all of us.

Kinglake-350 by Adrian Hyland, published by Text Publishing, RRP $32.95.

Matthew Ricketson is professor of journalism at the University of Canberra.

This review was first published in The Age