TRANSCRIPT
"There's embers falling from the sky, as you can see you can't really see anything. So the firies are here filling up at the lake. Good on them, god bless them. And as for my car I can't even find it in the dark, that's how dark it is. It's really scary."
Five years ago, the summer before COVID reached Australia, the country was experiencing one of the most destructive bushfires in recorded history.
Before the end of that summer, the fires had killed 33 people, destroyed more than 3,000 homes, and burnt an area of land only slightly smaller the United Kingdom.
In this three-part series from SBS, we take a look back at two communities impacted by the fires that summer, and how in the face of disaster, they banded together to get back up.
"And so lucky enough, I'm here to tell the tale. It was an outstanding event and it's on so many levels, just even the noise that it made and such sonic definition and percussion that you are feeling, the explosions of trees exploding over 500 yards over there and you are feeling it resonating in your sternum."
The Black Summer bushfires of 2019 to 2020 started well before that Summer arrived.
2019 was Australia's driest year on record, it was also, at the time, the hottest.
By September of that year, fires in South Australia and southern Queensland marked only the beginning of what was to come.
"Around 80 fires are raging across Queensland. Since the fires started last week, at least 17 houses have been destroyed in the state. The fires, damaging more than 80 structures in total. "
Australia is no stranger to bushfires, they're an integral part of the landscape here, always have been.
But before that summer had even started, it was clear this was going to be no ordinary bushfire season.
During the fires that burned that year, more than 60,000 people were evacuated and over 7,500 were displaced.
By late November, every state and territory in Australia was on fire.
NEWSREADER: “As multiple bush fires roar along the east coast, the scorched earth confirming this was no ordinary blaze. it was a firestorm."
VOX: "Have a look. it's right here and when I was standing here, hosing look, my hair's all singed and yeah, was right here. But look, it's that high barn down on me it was like an inferno, it was like the apocalypse night it was like hell on earth."
The town of Mallacoota, in the far north east of Victoria, is home to fewer than 1,500 people.
In summer, that number can swell to nearly 10,000.
In the days leading up Christmas that year, several small fires were already burning across East Gippsland.
By Boxing Day, Victorian authorities were urging people to reconsider their holiday plans.
Within hours of that warning, lightning struck bush near Wingan River, starting a fire about 30 kilometres from Mallacoota.
On the 29th, Emergency Services in Victoria told those in East Gippsland, it was their last chance to leave.
"It's time that you left. We're coming out with this advice now, we want to give people time to leave East Gippsland now. So if you're, if you're camping, if you're in a holiday home. It's time, if you've put in place a plan in relation to what you might do, because you've been warned before now in relation to the conditions in East Gippsland, it's time to leave this afternoon."
The fire that started at Wingan River would eventually consume Mallacoota.
By this time, Mallacoota and the surrounding regions were already full of tourists; they didn't know it yet, but the window to leave was already firmly shut.
"I think it was the Monday afternoon, they had a community meeting in town saying, well, it's coming. We're hoping for a wind change, but if there's no wind change, it's coming. So of course, everybody left that meeting and came home and did everything they could to prepare."
Jann Gilbert, a Marine Biologist from Mallacoota, lost everything that summer.
On New Years Eve, around 4000 people were directed to the Mallacoota Wharf, as embers and soot filled the sky.
Five years on from the fires, she says the scale of loss in Mallacoota could have been avoided if the warning signs weren't ignored.
"I turned all of the sprinklers on, just wet down everything, closed all the doors. I mean, it didn't make any difference, I thought. That's why it really annoys me when governments say to you, be prepared. Well, we were, what were you doing? What were you doing? Actually? And they're still doing nothing. they'll do the same thing again. They won't bother saving anyone's houses."
The Mallacoota Caravan Park is full of tourists at that time of year.
Jann says that if the council had just agreed to close the park when they knew how dangerous the conditions were, things could have gone very differently.
"Yeah. So they knew four days before they could have actually said, no, it's too risky. We're closing the camp park, you've got until Sunday to get out. And then we might've actually had our houses, And they will do the same thing again because we are just a cash cow here. They don't care about people who live here."
For Mary O'Malley and Larry Gray, two documentary makers living in Mallacoota, that summer was their first since moving back down from Sydney.
"Well, I forget when we got the block. We had this block for a while and then we were in transition. Basically. We were selling our house in Sydney and we'd come down here for Christmas starting the build down here. And we bought my son and his six or seven friends, I can't remember. We became the Mallacoota nine. Yeah. They all came down to celebrate our first Christmas here, and within two days the fire swept through. So we had one car and nine people to evacuate."
As the fire approached Mallacoota on New Years Eve, everyone in the area was given the same direction, get to the wharf, now.
For the first time in Victoria's history, a state of disaster is declared.
"Police wanted everyone and SES wanted, and the Firies all wanted us in one place basically. So Big Hall, as it's called, that's the biggest hall in Mallacoota, was basically reserved for older people and young children. So the rest of us just went down to the wharf. I didn't want to be inside anyway, even though I knew it was going to be smoky."
Jann had only been living in Mallacoota for a year at this point, she'd spent the entirety of it renovating her place.
In fact she'd only finished the renovation on December 20, just 11 days before the fire came through.
Having done offshore fire training before, Jann says she knew her house couldn't be saved.
"That's why I knew I couldn't stay and defend my house because there's just no way I had that sort of equipment. And luckily I wasn't, because what destroyed my house was there were two holiday rentals next door, two units, one at the front and one at the back, and nobody turned the gas bottles off in the front unit. And so they basically exploded a fireball straight through the eastern side of my house, and that's where the hose is. So I actually would've been standing on that side of the house."
That night Mallacoota made the news worldwide.
VOICE 1: "Tonight, these apocalyptic scenes happening across Australia."
VOICE 2: "A week long, state of emergency declared this morning in parts of Australia."
VOICE 3: "A massive wildfire rolled towards the town of Mallacoota, four thousand people fled towards the beach."
VOICE 4: "Stranded by the seaside. Thousands of tourists and locals are being held hostage by raging wildfire in the town of Mallacoota."
VOICE 5: "Stranded here completely cut off since Sunday. When a fire storm turned Mallacoota into a hellscape."
You might remember the photos, thousands of people gathered on a tiny wharf, the sky a deep hazy red as fires raged towards the town.
Trapped for hours in temperatures reaching 49 degrees, daybreak never arrived that day.
The fire just got closer and closer.
"Now the fire fronts come through. Everyone's safe and sound. Got the girls and the dogs up the front, got supplies, but I hope everyone's [BLEEP] just [BLEEP] the [BLEEP] houses man get into the water. It's [BLEEP] chaos."
With a plume of smoke over 14 kilometres into the sky and flames reaching over 30 metres tall, scenes from that day are rightly described as other worldly.
Larry and Mary, as well as the seven teenagers and one dog they were taking care of, spent that night at the wharf, unsure of what was coming.
"The sound of the roars getting louder and louder. And then the sky was changing to orange. And then it went kind of a dark red and went to bed, woke up because we had a caravan and got woke up and it was glowing. Something was glowing really weird, like on Mars or something. Opened up the curtains and it was as red as you could possibly find a red anything. And it was, look at that. And it was like, we're another planet for a while. And the noise was getting louder and then it went black, just like it was the darkest, you could put your hand into ink and bring it down, could see nothing. It was everywhere. I dropped the phone on the ground, I couldn't even find it. And that was daylight. That was daylight there. That's 11:00 in the day day, and then we could hear the screaming of animals making noises and burning and explosions coming, and people thinking, what the f's going to go on? Yeah."
The Wingan River fire didn't take long to reach the coast, traveling over 20 kilometres in six hours, there really wasn't any time for proper preparations.
"No one ever got to even see the beaches. They just come down here and it was as fires were coming and roaring this way and it sounded like a bombs going off. It really sounded like it was a war. But what it was, it was lightning created by its own weather it was creating systems and explosions and getting louder and closer. And then, yeah, so that was at first stage, it was like that. And we're just getting ready, getting our stuff off the block and get it out of here. Get it down to the beach. We're not going to burn down there."
As the fire front passed through, Mallacoota was isolated from the rest of the world.
With 4,000 people crammed along the wharf, a shortage of food and drinkable water loomed over the stranded group.
"It was really hard because we had nowhere proper to evacuate. We were ill prepared. We didn't have proper clothing, we didn't have anywhere to go. So we ended up down by the water. Larry knew this spot that he thought was the safest place to be down on the lake. And we ended up there with, on this tiny little jetty, all of us in a row sitting really uncomfortably, no proper clothing on, no long sleeves. I think one of the group had an allergy to cold water and the other one to jellyfish, because our plan was to jump in the water."
About two hours north of Mallacoota is the town of Cobargo.
Home to around 760 people, farmers, musicians and artists mostly, the small town is built around a single main street.
In 2019, it was burnt to the ground.
Jamie Robinson lives on the outskirts of Cobargo.
After moving to the area in 2015, he'd just finished building his house, nestled on a hill in the bushland around 20 minutes out of town.
Two weeks after finishing the build, Jamie got a text telling him to leave his property.
"I was in a position at the time where I couldn't leave the block through a car not working, and I'd only just finished the place over where the caravan is. At that little house I built there. I finished two weeks before the fires come through. Unfortunately, the water tank that I've got down here had a water pump that was going up to there, but the loss of pressure over such a distance, I was only getting about three meters worth of spray from what was a garden hose at the time. So it was almost an exercise in futility, even trying to prep."
Later that evening, when the fire breached the mountain tops near Jamie's property, it took him a while to realise exactly how intense the flames were.
"It got to about midnight and well, earlier on that evening it'd been raining embers for hours. I'd changed shirts many times, lots of little second degree burns over the back, top of the back and the shoulders and what have you, and where I first physically saw it, yeah, it would've been about six, seven o'clock and it was way to the West and I thought it was actually the sun dropping behind a mountain, and I went up 15 minutes later and it's like, oh no, that mountain's now more on fire. That's fire, not sunset. It wasn't until probably about two o'clock when the fire crested the mountains opposite me and from those hilltops there, the flames were going to 130 to 150 feet in height and they were just launching with invisible hands fireballs the size of my Hilux, just well ahead of it."
In 2003, Jamie was in Canberra when the territory experienced its most destructive bushfires on record.
He lost both his place of work and his rental home in that fire, but he survived.
This time, Jamie says he knew he couldn't outrun it, making what he thought at the time could be his last calls to loved ones.
"Two o'clock rolled around and I knew that I was in trouble. I sort of had this bad feeling and I don't know this deep, real deep alarm bell happening in me and it's like, all right, I'm sensing this viscerally. I'm not going to have much of a chance here at midnight. I phoned a friend who was in Bermi and I'm looking out across the hills and I'm talking to him and it's like, all right, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Two o'clock, come around. I started phoning family up. It was over this hill. It was coming down into my valley. It wasn't looking pretty. And so let a few people know just that I love you and making sure that those were the words and the last words that I said were ones of love. I don't know. I knew I wasn't outrunning it."
"We retired down here 10 years ago. We decided we didn't know anybody, so we decided to hit the ground running in terms of getting to know people and becoming part of the community. So as I said, my husband joined the Firies. I joined a couple of art groups and so forth. So we became part of the community pretty quickly. And this is such a beautiful community that we were welcomed immediately, not because we're so special, but because the community is so special. And so we felt very much a part of the community when the fires came."
Chris Walters and her husband had been in Cobargo for about five years when the fire hit.
"For days and days and days prior, it was really smoky. And when you went down the beach, which we did quite often, there were black leaves on the sand was, we knew that Armageddon was just around the corner, but we didn't know to what degree it was going to hit our own community. And we soon found out. "
She says she was lucky to be able to evacuate that day, she knew not everyone had that opportunity.
"So I evacuated along with many others to Bermagui as directed by the RFS notifications on our phones. A lot of people were not able to do that because they had livestock and stuff. So they came here to the showground, but I only had the dog in the car, so I went to Bermagui. At that time, the fire had hit in west of the town in the farmland and so forth. And then it was coming closer and closer and closer to the town and the main street. It then did burn the main street. So at that time I was not really aware of that because I was in Bui and my husband was on the fire ground, so he couldn't really communicate with me. He was just a bit busy. "
Four people died in Cobargo that Summer, two died in Mallacoota.
As Australians across the country welcomed in the new year, those in the line of fire weren't sure they would ever see their home again, or even if they'd make it through the night.
Back in Mallacoota, the Australian Defence Force were called to action in an unprecedented rescue mission.
Navy ships from across Australia headed to the Mallacoota Wharf, as fire closed in on the thousands trapped ashore.
Mary O'Malley says it didn't feel real.
"So there were town meetings and everyone was congregating around the main hall and you put your name down if you wanted to be evacuated. So we had no choice. You had no where to, all the young people. We had to get 'em home. And so we put our names down and it was like wartime. You had to get in a queue and they had all these pieces of paper around the wall, and you had to find out if your name was on there for the ship. It was a really long queue. So I said to my son's friend who was much taller than me, just go and peer over the heads of other people. And he did. And we were on there."
On January 3rd, over 1,000 people in Mallacoota were evacuated on a navy ships as vessels carrying food, water and fuel made their way to the wharf.
The HMAS Choules, capable of carrying up to 1000 passengers, but only really designed for 700, would have to make multiple trips to evacuate everyone.
"They were just so good, so reassuring, so generous. They just said, look, this is not going to be comfortable. We've had to put this together very quickly. There's a thousand of you. And they've got food together in that short space of time. They've got enough food to feed a thousand of us. But there weren't beds or anything, So we chose to stay on the pet deck with all these great big jeeps and things. And That was kind of wild. But I didn't mind that because at least they had a bit more of a sense of space than some of the narrow corridors. You just found a bench or wherever you could sleep on the ground. You bed down. Some lucky ones got gym mats and whatever to sleep on."
LARRY: "There were dogs, there were howling, there were birds, there were cats. Yeah like Noah's Ark. And amongst all this army equipment, it was really weird, but it was good."
The pair say they'll never forget the generosity they were shown that day.
"It was sort of, the feeling was, oh you survived so, moving on! Yeah I get it, unless you've been through something like that. It's really, really hard to appreciate. So yeah, within a few days, this was, again, a miracle organization. So I think the call went out on New Year's Eve to the Navy to come and help Mallacoota. So people abandoned their holiday plans and Oh, I get emotional talking about it. Actually, even after all this time, excuse me, I just gather myself. But anyway, within 16 hours or something, they had a crew and they were on their way down here and they were incredible. "
While many took the long journey out of Mallacoota to Melbourne that day, Jann Gilbert decided to stay.
She knew she wanted to be there to see what was left, and what was lost.
"I had people I didn't even know were offering me, do you need a jumper? Do you need one of the paramedics? Her house burnt down. She'd been working that night. So she literally only had her uniform. That was it. And the undies she was wearing. So it was like, yeah. I mean, the community pulled together pretty quickly and they got stuff happening, which is why I do really small communities. They're only a reflection of larger ones."
Back in Cobargo, there was no major rescue mission on the way for Jamie.
"I was quite calm with what I thought was coming. Omi, my beautiful puppy dog, she sensed to my calm, so she wasn't flighty or skittish and we weren't out running it. And it was about five minutes after I finished saying goodbye to a few select people, my friend in Bermi rang back and said, look man, I just haven't been able to get to sleep. What's going on? I said, dude, if you can get here, you've probably got about half an hour before this thing has consumed me and the dog. We are not outrunning this. So he got out here in record time and he got out of the car for about five minutes and he was looking, by that time it had crest gone down from the top of the hill and that was just trees on fire and bits and stuff exploding, and it was on its way up into the valley up here. And we hung out for about five minutes. I thought I wasn't going to get out, so I didn't prep a bag or anything like that. Last minute dash, I chucked a couple of T-shirts, a handful of undies and a pair of socks in my passport and wallet in a bag. Made sure I grabbed Omi's medication for ticks and worms and stuff and got out of there."
Jamie says that while he can't say for certain what would have happened, he's pretty sure his friend saved his life that night.
As the residents of places like Cobargo and Mallacoota finally returned to their properties, they were hit with the full scale of what had been.
As well as the loss of human life and homes, an estimated 3 billion animals died in the fires that summer.
For many, like Mary and Larry, the silence that followed the fires was particularly jarring.
"It was just such a big disaster, not from point of just us, the animals. This was just, it sounded like another planet you on. Normally it's just noise of birds and kookaburras and all that sort of stuff. It had all got just gone in one day. Just dead birds by the millions on the beaches just washed up animals dead everywhere. So that was really hard. You come here to live amongst all that nature and suddenly it's not even a leaf."
Mallacoota, usually a place full of life, with endless greenery and wildlife surrounding the town, was at that moment a shell of its former self.
"And the darkness, I wasn't prepared for that. But also, no one talks about the sounds of a fire or the lack of sound afterwards. Because That's deeply disturbing. I remember Larry and I went down to Tip Beach And there was not a shred left. It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off. There was this ghostly sun, orange sun in the sky, black stumps of tea tree and not one sound. Not a burden of an insect. And that eerie silence is."
For Jann, the frustration of that summer lingers.
"Nothing, there was absolutely nothing left. There was nothing across the road. There was nothing for hundreds of kilometers that way along the coast. And the same up that way was just, yeah, the extent of it was just mind boggling. It really was. It was. Yeah. And they'll let it happen all over again. Nothing has changed."
In Cobargo, it wasn't just homes destroyed in the blaze, the fire had torn through the main street, leaving residents not only without crucial services but also leaving many without their jobs.
For Chris, the drive back into town was devastating.
"Heartbreaking. I cried the whole way, just absolutely heartbreaking because our beautiful, the Bega Valley is so beautiful when it's green, particularly, it's a little bit dry at the moment, but it's such a beautiful area. And to see it just all blackened and all the trees just burned and it was literally, as far as I could see, was just black. The ground was just black, where normally it would be green grass. It was just horrific. It was really horrible. And knowing that as a result of that, all the animals, the wildlife as well as the farm animals had all been either killed, displaced, or terrible things had happened. So yeah, it was pretty full on."
Jamie Robinson is still rebuilding his house, living in a caravan next to the construction site, he says that despite everything he lost in that fire, he was able to find some hope in what remained.
"The poles that you see around the house, I concreted them in separately about 18 months before the fires. And miraculously, the two things that did make it out here were the big-ass water tank and these 28 poles. Everything else up at that point was like 48 whatever, years of life collections, interests, hobbies, tools, whatever, just gone and made irrelevant in a moment. So when I finally come back here and it's like, oh, poles still there, well that's a bit of hope. So yeah, it's been a thing of an exercise of goodwill and I mean that literally trying to will things into existence and when those moments in the just mundane realm present themselves, it's like, all right, well I'm going to make the most of this opportunity."
In the five years since the Black Summer bushfires, many of those affected say little has changed in terms of national preparedness for climate disasters.
Shortly after the fires came under control, the COVID 19 pandemic struck, and at a time when support was needed most for regional communities, the world as we knew it shut down.
In the next episode, communities return home after the fires, I talk to residents about how many smaller towns relied on each other to rebuild and regroup, and how many felt that was the only option they had.
