The blue hills are burning. The fine eucalyptus mist, a thin sheer veil that contributes to the hills’ blueness, has disappeared. In its place is a heavy grey curtain, the colour of gloom, stretched from end to end across the wide valley. It constricts the throat, catches the breath and makes breathing a laboured exercise.
It is hard to believe there are people behind that thick grey pall, but indeed there are: every one of them enacting a part in the unfolding tragedy, directed by Mother Nature herself. Momentarily, a breeze shifts the curtain and one sees them: the long licking orange tongues climbing higher with fiery ambition. From time to time a helicopter — a pathetic but brave dragonfly at best — flies into the smoke cloud, positions itself and then empties its watery contents over the flames. The world may be made up of three-parts water but in this combat here — a war between two primary elements — H2O is in a total mismatch with fire.
It’s hard to believe that around 10 km away, Sydney is enjoying a picture perfect day. In the hills, however, the smoke screen has virtually blocked out the sun, making it look not at all like that fiery ball in the sky but a friendly low-glow sodium bulb.
The road looking down on the thick forested valley is crowded: with people, with vehicles. The press has arrived to film the lights and the action with their cameras. Television reporters, neat in their painted-on masks and dressed more for a party than a fire, are conducting interviews, consulting with their producers before doing quick stand-up reports on the situation. Like fishermen at sea, the reporters too are angling: for the human story. And they’ve got those by the bucket load. It is a trifle surreal to watch two reporters from rival channels that ordinarily fight tooth and nail over the ratings standing together, sharing notes, checking their facts before going ‘live’ about the unfolding story of loss.
For it is not only trees that are going up in flames in the valley. The fire, ever intrusive by nature and fanned in its venture by gentle winds, is stealing stealthily up towards inhabited areas. One young woman is weeping. Her father, unlike the rest of the family, is refusing to leave his home. He wants to stay on the premises and fight to the end. Another man and his wife tell the cameras that they have been through two or three forest fires before but nothing like this. They’ve left everything behind — except for an album of old family pictures — and are hoping for the best. The firefighters who have been battling the blazes for more than 24 hours walk by in a state of exhaustion, putting one foot determinedly before the other. One of them lies down in his uniform and helmet, and throws his arms above his head in a gesture that could be total rest or abject surrender. Then he picks himself up as the voice of duty beckons in his ear.
A sense of camaraderie and bonding is on display. Everybody is sad and wistfully philosophical but everybody is, in a manner of speaking, in the same boat. Reports can never be entirely accurate. Sometimes there’s a feel that the weather will help, that the wind will stop blowing so the firemen could deal with a more static enemy not one that is twisting, bending and swooshing off in another direction.
In the morning, an elderly couple who have spent the night away from their home like a lot of others decide to venture over and check it out. When they arrive they find the glass smashed — by humans, not fire — and everything valuable looted, including seven thousand dollars in cash. Civility, it appears, has permission to disappear behind the grey curtain. In the midst of tragedy, barbarism in true bereft-of-morals spirit enters sneakily off stage. Why must human drama eternally be one of camaraderie versus mistrust?
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
