40 years on

I think Prospect Hill’s built heritage and heritage stories helped residents to recover from the bushfires. Our little bushfire display that’s there in the museum: it’s helping people. Because when we did that display … we all vented our feelings. We thought they were all buried and gone. But we vented them again.  Glenys Usher, Prospect Hill: Memories of a Burned Village.

Firestorm

The severe drought over eastern Australia in 1982 led to tinder dry conditions throughout the grasslands and forests of southeastern Australia. On 16 February 1983, near-gale force northerly winds, and temperatures well over 40°C drove huge fires (many started by arsonists) across Victoria and southeastern South Australia (Figure 16). Seventy-five people died (47 in Victoria, 28 in South Australia), and nearly 2,500 houses were destroyed. The worst affected areas were Victoria's Dandenong Ranges and the Macedon area, and South Australia's Mt Lofty Ranges, all scenic areas with considerable residential populations. Forests in southeastern South Australia and Victoria's Otway Ranges were incinerated. Most deaths occurred in the hour following the cool change, when strong, gusty westerly winds turned long, narrow corridors of flame into wide fronts. The enquiry that followed led to many changes in fire weather briefing procedures, most notably the provision for regular updates on the progress of wind changes.  --- Federation and Meteorology

For Lindsay Gibson the 16 February started in Prospect Hill, 51 kilometres south of Adelaide. Up in the Hills the locals knew the conditions were treacherous. Some kept their children home from school. Others headed into town to work or to do chores.

That morning Lindsay let a neighbour move their dairy cows onto his property; he had green grass that would, in the event of fire, keep the animals safe. Then he headed into town to see the dentist.

Late morning, at a property on McLaren Flat the wind was strong enough to sway the overhead electrical wires. They made contact, and they arced. That fire was reported at 11.30am, it was the first fire of the day reported and within hours hundreds or reports were coming in from both South Australia and Victoria.

As the fires spread men in Adelaide received frantic calls from their families up in the Adelaide Hills asking them to come home and fight the fire, as was the convention then. By 3pm fires across both states were extreme. With gale force of between 90 and 100 km/h the fires were moving; spreading. What had seemed containable, was no longer.

Years later, remembering the day of the fire in Prospect Hill, Joyce Smart would recount her harrowing race to save her livestock. She managed through the smoke and noise to call her herd to her and to keep them safe at one spot on the property:

The flames were about eight foot high, just going across this paddock. I got in there…I called [the cows] and they started running down this hill where the flames were – running through the flames to me...they were holding their heads right up in the air…trying to – [keep] out of the flames…

Lindsay’s property abuts the Prospect Hill Historical Museum. Both properties are at the centre of the little town, as even today the local post office shares space with the Museum. The Museum proper is a legacy project begun by Mr. Keith John Griggs, the last member of the Griggs family to live on the property and the person who started the museum.

When Lindsay heard word of the fires, he drove back up the hill. After checking his property, he headed over to the Museum where he saw smoke coming out from under the roof space. Seeing it was on fire, he flagged down a CFS fire truck coming up the hill towards the Museum.  Captain of the Blackfellow's Creek Brigade, Graeme Usher, was able to climb into the crawl space in the roof, drag up the water and in so doing save the building.

Across the Hills others were less lucky as homes were lost. In Prospect Hill the community lost homes, lives, and cherished community spaces, including the library and the CWA hall. Sadly the CWA Hall would not be rebuilt.

On 20 December 2019 a large pine tree fell on high voltage conductors, the conductors came into contact with a wire fence and the ground. The fire that started came to be the called Cudlee Creek Fire and would cause:

The 23,000-hectare blaze, which destroyed 98 homes and damaged hundreds of other buildings and vehicles, also claimed one life with the body of a man found in his burnt-out home in the small town of Charleston.  – Australian Associated Press 23:58 10 March 2021, updated 01:27 11 March 2021

One of the towns affected was Lobethal, another Adelaide Hills community, and one time centre of wool processing.

Melinda Rankin is the Director of Fabrik Arts & Heritage, Lobethal. Fabrik’s home then, and now, is the Onkaparinga Woollen Mill, the largest of the former wool processing buildings. After fires raged through the Hills, Fabrik opened its exhibition space to the community as a place of respite.

The Mill was a place where small groups of people, including children, could rest, do crafts, and most importantly share their stories. When we asked Melinda what her community needed, she said ‘they needed to tell the story’.

And so they’re not just about being a bushfire victim, but they’re actually a creative individual human being that can immerse in something and make something new. – Melinda Rankin

At Lobethal and Prospect Hill, communities see their museums as kinds of memory boxes, as necessary places. For not only preserving memories and objects, but for building individual and collective wellbeing.

Betrayed by nature

For Adelaide, and the Adelaide Hills in particular, the 2019–20 fires, including Cudlee Creek bushfires, were devastating.

In part because we want to believe in the idea of a 'once in a generation' fires, even if that time, if it ever existed, has already passed. When the fires come in quicker succession, as human beings we struggle to keep up, and the trauma compounds as we collectively negotiate fear and loss.

When discussing the 2019-20 fires, I asked Melinda what the Lobethal community felt like in the aftermath.

She said some people expressed they felt ‘betrayed’ by nature and ‘lost their sense of safety’.  She said some shared they had ‘stopped trusting the place’. The fire didn’t just burn thick bushland but, destroyed green vineyards and open paddocks. It threatened townships and industrial areas and was held back only by the efforts of firefighters.

When interviewed for Prospect Hill: Memories of a Burned Village, Blackfellows Creek resident Graeme Usher said of the 1983 fire:

The fire itself broke all existing fire behaviour knowledge that we knew at the time. We had never even imagined the intensity of it.

One of the most challenging aspects of climate change is that it requires us to imagine the already unimaginable somehow getting worse, more frequent, more dangerous, more destructive and more likely to happen where we live. Evidence of this is found in a study in 2020, which predicted that without change the number of fires will continue to expand into the future:

Insurance data showed 99% of homes destroyed or damaged last bushfire season were located on or within 500 metres of land declared as bushfire prone, and 74% were built before the introduction of the national bushfires construction standard.

Climate change risk analysis company XDI estimated there are more than 380,000 properties across Australia at high risk from natural hazards, the inquiry was told.

Up to a million Australian homes in bushfire-prone areas have little or no fire protection | Bushfires | The Guardian

In part our imaginations fail us because we have an agreed upon notion of catastrophic fire frequency. We prefer to imagine these fires in terms of ‘once in a generation’, ‘once in a lifetime’, about every 25-30 years or at a stretch 50 years. Sadly, this is likely no longer the case.

Better bedfellows

Melinda Rankin and Fabrik have delivered models where art, history and storytelling come together to service a community in terms of both care and resilience. Is it possible to include science into this heady mix? For instance, in the case of fire, traditional cool burning as practiced for millennia by the First Nations peoples.

Is it possible to harness the urgency of the scientific climate change narrative and traditional land practices and use them to consider the role the History Trust and museums play in terms of how we care for history and community in times of disaster?

Continuity of Care

In Prospect Hill: Memories of a Burned Village the authors write:

… editing these stories, we were particularly struck by the way in which the community chose to look backwards in order to move forwards. This was not done apprehensively, but in a way that respected the past and the events that shaped it. In a sense, the community took solace in its history and used its social identity as a rallying point to rebuild their lives.

Museums across the state offer their communities places to reflect and remember, they offer new audiences and community members a way into the community through its history and its memories.

As such, museums help communities build resilience. The care and upkeep of collections is both expensive and labour intensive, and can be stressful for community and volunteer based groups, without the added pressure of a natural disaster.

As we have seen this summer museums are under increasing pressure due to natural disaster. As the History Trust looks to the future we embrace the need to work with our network of museums to imagine and support all of our futures – or we will look backwards in order to move forwards.