03 | Shooting the Past | All Tragic to the Moon

Clare Wright unravels the dramatic story within a family photograph that takes us to the searing heart of an Australian summer tragedy: bushfire.

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  A pig gets shot and this nearly starts a war. A pastry shop gets trashed, war. A football match turns ugly, also war? Hey there, I'm Mark Fennell. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are taking on history's most absurd conflicts. Four episodes, four wars, and we called it This Stupid War.

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  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past, where each week a different photograph helps us dive deep into Australian history.

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  At first blush, the photograph that's been sent to me by an ABC RN listener, looks like any old picture you'd pluck from a cherished family album. The quality is poor, its sepia tones rough and grainy. In the foreground, a girl sits on a pony, smiling for the camera. She's a healthy looking lass, a teenager. Her hair is cropped in a boyish 1920s cut. Over her shoulder is slung a large leather satchel. She holds the reins with confidence. But it's what's going on behind the girl on the pony that really captures my attention, creating an eerie cognitive dissonance between the ostensibly happy snap and its disquieting location.

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  In the background, a series of charred tree trunks protrude from the scorched earth, like blackened stalagmites. The closer I look, the more of these burnt shafts I can see. There's not one or two big trees decimated in their prime, but a whole forest, a forest interrupted. Rising beside the ravaged trunks is what looks to be a brand new weatherboard cottage. What was once bush is now ash. It's not exactly an idyllic scene. So why does the girl on the pony look so happy?

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  The woman in the photograph is my grandmother, or was my grandmother, Millie. She was born here in 1913, so there's over 100 years of connection to this land here.

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  I'm sitting in the one time schoolyard in Fumina, in the hills of East Gippsland in Victoria, right near the spot where this photograph was taken. Fumina was once a thriving township, but is now just a cluster of houses. I'm with Anne Kilner, the woman who sent me the photo. We've got the photo in front of us, and Anne is keen to tell me about her great grandparents, Herb and Kate Rankin, and her grandmother, Millie.

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  She had an indomitable spirit, an incredibly strong woman, a very strong woman, as I think more women needed to be in those days. But she had the most incredible sense of humour. And so some of the memories I have, knowing Millie was, and my grandfather Jim, they were incredibly kind hearted people. But she was very strong minded and she, she knew what was right and what was wrong. And you know, if your, if your opinion didn't fit with her worldview, you certainly knew about it. She didn't have to say anything and you knew you were in trouble.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Just the look in her eye?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Just the look in her eye, yeah.

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  Can I ask you what you see when you look at this photograph?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I see Millie, my grandmother, she would have been 14 at that point, sitting on her pony as she's about to start her first job as male contractor for the community. She's looking pretty happy and she's got a 1920s hairstyle. And so here she is, sitting on the pony with her male satchel over her shoulder, next to her newly built house after the 26 bushfires. And in the background are the burnt out stumps of the, of the evidence of the 1926 bushfires. I was really intrigued when I first saw this photo of Millie on the horse and the,

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  and the burnt out tree stumps behind. And so I did ask her about that, but she'd also written down her memories and so had her brother Jack, and they were in different spots at the time the fire came through.

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  So can you tell me that story?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Where their house was, there was land cleared around it, but not a great deal. There was still a lot of tall timbers and you know, there had been a lot of fallen trees, you know, as well. So there was a lot of timber around the area. Jack had said that there was so much timber from one end of the settlement to the other that you could walk on the timbers without putting your feet on the ground. Where Millie's family lived, you know, they could keep an eye out for smoke, but you know, they probably weren't that experienced with fires at that point. And so Jack and Herb, my great grandfather, were at the house. And Jack writes that, that his father was coolly smoking a pipe on the back step.

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  And you know, their, their plan was with one of the neighbours to try and save the house. So that was a decision that they'd made. Kate Rankin decided that that wasn't safe enough, that she would take the younger children, Millie and Harry, and there was a, a young lady who was visiting with a baby, to the paddock with a tub of water and some woolen blankets and shelter in the paddock. So the paddock was probably the clearest spot in Fumina at that point. As the fire approached, it was night and the reflections of the fire was what made them realise that it was very close. And so throughout the night, one of the neighbours, Mr Mitchell, just basically while

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  they sheltered under the wet blankets, he would be running around stomping out cinders, really. And Millie also said that, you know, the fire would shoot limbs off trees, you know, it seemed to be miles away and they'd just land. And so they'd have to stomp on, you know, any of these little sparks that came up.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  It's been so terrifying for little children.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think the, the woman with the baby just had to keep wetting the baby's lips, you know, with the water throughout the night. Meanwhile, Bert and Jim and Jack were trying to save the house when they realised they weren't going to, they were going to lose the house. So the only patch that was nearby was the veggie patch. They ran to the cabbage patch and were just basically ducking between falling trees. And there was one tree that fell between them and they didn't even hear it fall. It was the noise of the fire and everything going on was just so immense.

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  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  After that fire, because really, you know, my great grandfather had been here for 20 years and that had been his livelihood, you know, and poverty was just extreme.

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  It's the edge of the depression.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Yes. So, you know, options weren't good. The fire relief was pretty good though, you know, so the community rallied. The good people of Sandringham in Melbourne had, had, had said that they would take the families down for a holiday. So they went to Sandringham or to Hampton for a beach holiday for three weeks and were given 15 shillings, which was an absolute fortune.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Because this was still summer, of course, the fires went during February, I think.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. So Millie would have, would have turned 13 on her holiday. Meanwhile, the fire relief gave some money to rebuild, so Herb came back and rebuilt. And the house in the photo is the rebuilt house. Post office and the school were rebuilt by June, July, I think, the following year. Yeah, so Millie went back to school and, you know, a few months and then finished school and took on, took over the mail run.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  So how long did Millie have the mail run for?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  She had the mail run for about three years. She stopped that when my would be grandfather came in to help Herb build the roads. And he was a very handsome Irishman on a motorbike. His name was Jim Gilsonan. She was 15, I think, when they met.

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  And when did they get married?

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  They got married in 1930. Millie and Jim, when they got married, they lived in the house of a man called Ben Rowley.

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  Here in Fumina?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Here in Fumina. So he had a two room shack. So he said they could live in his house and he'd stay on the veranda as she did his cooking and cleaning. Mum would have been born there until the 32 bushfires came out and wiped out Ben Rowley's house.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  So Millie had now survived two bushfires, 1926, when her family home was burnt down, and now 1932, when her own home was burnt down, leaving her and her little children homeless. And still they decided to stay?

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Yes, again, again, I think it's about poverty really, and choices were very limited. And the fact that they'd put so much work into, you know, into the place. They were always very conscious of the risk of fire though.

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  So tell me what you know about the, the Black Friday bushfires of 1939 and how they affected Fumina?

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Devastated the whole, the whole community, the whole district around here. Just after the 32 bushfires, a man who they called an angel in disguise appeared and he said to my grandfather, look, I think that spring would be good for making mud bricks. And the two men made a bunch of mud bricks and built the cottage that they lived in for the next however many years. And that cottage was the only building that survived the 1939 bushfires and the people who were in it. And Jim and Jack, Millie's brother, took it in turns to take buckets of water out

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  and just would crawl out on their hands and knees around the house to kind of put out any sparks or, you know, flying timber or whatever, wet the windows and the doors and so on. And so that went on for hours and hours and hours throughout most of the day. And they hadn't realised that with one of them going in or out, that a cow had come into the cottage. And it's only a little two room cottage, so they had to try and get the cow out. And the cow stood alongside the cottage and survived. It was the only animal, I think, that survived that fire.

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  Thirty-nine around here.

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  There were thirteen people on Friday the thirteenth who died. They were always concerned about bushfires, but this was where they lived and, you know, there'd been an investment of so much blood, sweat and tears here. It wouldn't have been an easy thing to have left. My grandfather did worry a lot though, and so some years later, he wanted to leave before the next fire came. And so that's when they moved down to Mount Evelyn.

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  And so what, what year did Millie and Jim leave?

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  I think they left around forty-six.

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  And how many kids did they have by then?

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  They had six.

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  So it's a shame, you know, that, um, this beautiful country, I mean, looking at it now, you think how beautiful it is, but, you know, it was probably not the right country to open up. And I don't know that, that, you know, the land management people of the day would have understood. And certainly, you know, clearing was what they needed to do in terms of, uh, making a living. But whether it was the kind of environment they should have been living in or not, perhaps not.

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  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past on ABC RN.

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  William Howard, in one of the visitors to the colony in eighteen fifty-five, talked about this fire scattering race of rude men, as he observed them. In other words, they were willful with fire. And you could travel along the train in the Yarra Valley in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in an ordinary summer day, you would see many fires. People had come to live with fire without realising quite what the capacity of these forests were on certain days.

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  Environmental historian Professor Tom Griffiths from the ANU has written extensively about the mountain ash forests of East Gippsland. I've come to ask him about why the country around Firminah was so vulnerable to bushfire. But first, what does Tom, with his trained eye, see in Anne Kellner's family photo?

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  I see the background landscape, these dead spars of trees that are monuments, if you like, to an earlier fire. I'm guessing to nineteen nineteen, maybe nineteen hundred and six. And they're still there. And they're there as sort of totem poles, if you like, for what's happening in this place, which is we are making farms out of the forest. But I also see pride in this young woman's face. And I think this is part of the charm of this photograph. The thing that is most beloved in this photograph, I think, it's not the brand new house, which has been built obviously since one of the fires.

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  It's not the landscape in the background, it's not even the horse. It is the satchel over her shoulder that attracts my attention. It looks quite glossy and I presume that's the male bag. And I think her pride comes from her role in the community as a teenager, fulfilling an honoured role, a really, an important role. And I guess I say this, my first job was as a postie. And in, in the digital age, we have to remember, there's a sacred trust in carrying the post. And I see that there in that photo so beautifully, that this scarred, ravaged landscape in the background, yet there is a kind of a pride in civilisation being declared here.

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  And the post is a sacred symbol of that. So I, it is, it is a beautiful photograph.

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  What would you say the impact of humans on Australian forest ecology has been?

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  The first Australians who arrived over sixty-five thousand years ago changed the vegetation on this continent. So in terms of understanding bushfire, we have to go back that far. We have to go back into the deep past of the continent and try and understand the way in which Aboriginal people reshaped the forests in this country. And so when Europeans arrived, they had, they encountered a managed landscape, a cultivated land, a cultural landscape. It took them a long time to realise that, of course. But when those invaders first ventured into the forests that we're talking about today, the, the forests in the rugged mountain ranges of Victoria, they were venturing into forests,

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  some forests, which even Aboriginal people would have been wary of, particularly in high summer, after long droughts. They would have used fire sticks to manage those forests and to keep open pathways through them, to keep their edges under control. But they also would have known that these were dangerous forests in summer. And when a fire was bearing down on them, they had nowhere to go.

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  So if these mountain ash forests are designed to burn every couple of hundred years, why did we get a situation where there was a fire in the Firminah region in nineteen twenty-six, and again in nineteen thirty-two, and then again in nineteen thirty-nine?

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  Because Europeans introduced these new sources of ignition. And so we have a forest which has a life cycle of four or five hundred years, that's how long the mountain ash lives, being managed, in inverted commas, by puny humans with life cycles of maybe eighty years. And if that mismatch, I think, explains to some extent the bother that we got into early in the twentieth century in these forests. Because European settlers were attracted to the forests because it seemed to be perhaps rich soil that was producing these tall trees, these magnificent forests.

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  And they, in order to gain possession of some land, in order to become a settler, a farmer, it was clear what they had to do. Settlers had to clear in order to own the land.

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  By legislation?

• 17:14Speaker 04

  By legislation. There were crown bailiffs travelling around, monitoring improvements. And that very word of improvement suggests that the land was somehow deficient and it had to be improved. It had to be improved by clearing above all, by the establishment of a residence, by enclosure, fencing, by cultivation. And so settlers are driven by the legislative requirements to clear the land. And the way they did that in these great forests is with the alliance of the axe, fire and the plough. So you would cut as many trees as you could, you would ringbark the big trees so that

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  they would die and dry, and you would nick the medium-sized ones. And you would wait for the most ferociously hot and fatal day of the summer to let it burn and you would get it burning. And so there was a theatrical fight with the forests in these, this region. And it was, the height of that ritual was the great burn every summer. And so that produces the cleared landscape in quite dramatically, but it's also a landscape which is full of ringbarked and dead stumps and spars. Dorothea McKellar in her poem, My Country, she talks about her love of the sunburnt

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  country and a land of droughts and flooding rains. But she also talks about these ringbarked forests all tragic to the moon. And she's writing in the early twentieth century about a landscape that settlers were, it was the background to all their lives. It was, we see it when we look at these photos, it, it looks ugly and it was ugly. It was a landscape in transition, it was a landscape that was damaged and wounded and hurt by the settler invasion.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  But you're also suggesting that essentially these government regulations were forcing people to dig their own graves?

• 19:18Speaker 04

  They were, they're forcing them onto land blocks that were too small and where the soil wasn't as good as they had hoped. And where really the farming was, was very difficult. And the forest fought back, they fought the forest, but the forest fought back. And the thing about fire, of course, is those forests are beautifully evolved to fire.

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  Huge tracts of the state of Victoria have been swept by flame in the most damaging bushfire in its history. Driven before a fifty mile an hour gale, it swept across the dry acres, consuming everything in its path. Flying high over this terrible bushfire in the Blue Mountains' New South Wales, it is possible to feel the heat's effect on our plane, one thousand feet above it. And among those long hours, an epic story of heroism is written, as volunteers fight the demon that's in danger's lives and property.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  So what happened is that an escalating rhythm of intense firestorms began from the late 19th century and escalated through the early 20th century. The 1926 fire comes after 1898, 1906, 1919, and it's followed by 1932, 1939, and we know it's followed by 1962, 1983, 2009. You know, they're just naming the big firestorms. And I'm very keen that we use this word firestorm because bushfires happen every year, all the time. You can't live in a eucalypt forest without bushfires happening every summer. But firestorms are something peculiar, and they tend to happen in these areas that we're

• 20:53Speaker 06

  talking about around Firmine, where there are mountain ash forests that conspire to create that very firestorm in order to regenerate.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  So at what point did humans realise that their own behaviour was having an effect on the environment and creating these firestorms?

• 21:08Speaker 06

  1939, that was Black Friday, and there was a royal commission. And Judge Leonard Stretton was a magnificent royal commissioner who really spoke very clearly and powerfully. Indeed, his report, his royal commission report, would you believe it, was prescribed for English literature in schools for many years because it is so beautifully and powerfully written. And it was that royal commission that really made Australians think, oh my goodness, do you know, we are implicated. And the finding of that royal commission can be summarised in a single sentence. And he put it, the judge put it all alone, single sentence paragraph, "These fires were

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  lit by the hand of man." Now, what that means is that they were not fires that were wholly natural. Of course, they're embedded in the ecological rhythms of a place. But, you know, settlers had exaggerated this natural rhythm into a kind of intensity that not only destroyed them, but also ultimately destroyed the forests. Because if you burn these forests too often, then they don't have time for the saplings to seed. And you destroy the whole forest and its possibility of future. So it's this intensity and frequency of fire that settlers changed. That's what they brought in that was a new regime.

• 22:35Speaker 06

  People had come to live with fire without realising quite what the capacity of these forests were on certain days. So Judge Stretton is calling that out. He is, in a way, indicting a whole society. He says this is a case of state suicide.

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  So is there a solution? Or is tragedy inevitable if Australians want to live surrounded by the bush? Can we learn from history? Or can science save us from ourselves? I put these questions to fire ecologist Associate Professor Kevin Tollhurst from the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

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  We become our own worst enemy in a sense, thinking that we can have such control over it. We need to work with it, not to control it. There's a difference in philosophy.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Kevin, as a fire ecologist, as a scientist, when you look at this photograph, what is it that you see?

• 23:35Speaker 06

  Well, the first thing that strikes me is that this is a fire-ravaged landscape. So it's had multiple fires in quick succession, which hasn't allowed it to recover. From a fire point of view, I see that this is a landscape that has been subjected to too many fires, almost certainly at the hand of man. The humans that have moved into this landscape have used fire as a tool, but they haven't really understood how it's affecting the landscape. So I see a misunderstood fire landscape when I look at this photograph.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  The Gippsland forests of Victoria are swept with smoke and raging flame. Some of the worst bushfires that Australia has ever experienced. January 1962 was hot and dry, and on Sunday the 14th, the Dandenongs and Central Highlands literally exploded into the state's worst bushfire in 23 years. This is a very, very sad morning for many people. The fires in South Australia and in Victoria are certainly amongst the worst in Australia's history, and maybe the worst.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  What we should be trying to do really is live in harmony with that fire, understand it and use it. And we can learn a lot from the Aboriginal people, the indigenous people, in their use of fire.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so what are we left with? Is it risk management? Is it behavioural modification?

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Risk management, I think, is a currency that we can use. So one of the reasons in my professional career why I developed a risk management model and some tools to do risk management is that we're not trying to convert everything into dollars. To understand risk, we need to know what are the values and assets we're trying to maintain. Some of those values and assets are going to be species, some of them might be ecosystems, some of them might be water, they might be soil nutrient values. It may be commercial value, it may be timber, it may be aesthetic values in terms of landscape and recreational.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  I'm interested that you haven't included human life in that list.

• 25:34Speaker 06

  Oh, you'll get there eventually. The thing, the trouble is you can never get away from the human life question, and we are always going to protect ourselves. So it almost goes without saying, I suppose. But human life won't exist unless you have an environment that supports it. But who's going to look after the bush? So we can and should be looking at the broader landscape and the longer time periods, which in a way, the Aboriginal people, again, I'll come back to the Aboriginal people, did, I guess politically, we've run into increasing problems that the long-term vision often is not there in government because the government priority is more of a two- to three-year option.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  So what happens often after a bushfire disaster is the government will come in and throw millions of dollars into the recovery process, which basically takes the responsibility away from the individual, which moves us away from being smarter and more self-reliant and better connected to the environment that we live in. We think we can basically do what we like without consequence because there's some backup in the background.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  So are you suggesting that the problem isn't that people live in these fire-prone areas, but they need to live in those areas in a more intelligent way?

• 26:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've met people who live in environments that I would never live in because the bushfire risk is too high. But they've done things about the building of their house, about the vegetation around their property, so that if a bushfire comes through, the impact will be relatively minimal. So they've dealt to live with that environment, and they'll accept being burnt out if that so happens because they love that environment so much that they'll accept that at the occasional bushfire. And for most people, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, and if you're really unlucky, it might be twice-in-a-lifetime sort of experience that you have when a large bushfire comes through. So people can live in that environment, but there are others who want to live in that

• 27:39Speaker 06

  environment and not take the responsibilities.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  And how does it make you feel looking at this photo now, particularly sitting here, smack bang in the middle of the landscape that Millie was sitting on there?

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've got a strange feeling, I suppose, because I wonder at their courage and their resilience. I think, you know, look at this beautiful country, and I just wonder how you could survive something like that and then stay and stay and stay.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  My thanks to guests Anne Kilner, Professor Tom Griffiths, and Associate Professor Kevin Tollhurst. And don't forget that to view the photograph from today's episode, you can head over to ABC Listen. Shooting the Past is an ABC Radio National production, recorded on unceded war-undary land.

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