Five years after the black summer fires, photographer and Mallacoota resident Rachel Mounsey revisits those who lost their homes and much more
By Rachel Mounsey
On New Year’s Eve on Karbeethong hill, Don Ashby is sitting on the veranda step when the music dims, the fairy lights fade and the orange glow creeps in with the smell of smoke. It plays out again. What would he do differently, he asks himself. He thinks he’d stay around the house longer. Actually, he probably wouldn’t leave. Last time, he went across town to help out some friends he thought would be in the firing line. Turns out, they were OK and his house burned. Now he think’s he’d stay close on his side of town, where it all burned to cinders, where the bush is close, where he could support those around him.
The day after the house burned down he set up the relief centre at the hall. Would he do that again? Maybe … but where? Even after five years, the hall is still half-renovated and the rooms are pretty small. Where would everyone go? And the tourists? There seem to be more of them this year. The cars, caravans, boats bumper-to-bumper on the only road leading out of town are vivid in his mind.
The evacuations by sea and air – would that need to be done all over again?
And once the smoke dispersed there were the psychologists. Some people thought it was too soon. It might have been helpful for others, but it wasn’t for him. It was his grief, his community and they were doing what needed to be done.
He wrote his way through the chapters of recovery, drafting poems, “although not for therapy”. Just honest words penned throughout the cleanups, Covid, regrowth, rebuilds, restarts. He kept going until finally there was a book: When The Fire Comes By, with Yolande Oakley’s pictures.
“When my house burned down, I was in total shock, but I comforted myself with the knowing that these were just things that were gone. Not a person. It wasn’t the same as losing a life.”
Natalie Handsjuk’s daughter, Phoebe, had always wanted a little cottage by the sea. When she died unexpectedly in 2010 at age 24, Natalie built Phoebe Cottage in her honour. “When the fires burned it down, I was reminded yet again, that anything I attach myself to can be lost in a moment.”
“[But] no matter how big the loss, I have always found gold somewhere in it; gold in the people who have supported me – many I had never met before – gold in the strength I found in myself to keep going, gold in my ability to rebuild my life … It’s always there if I look for it.
“I decided I had to rebuild something in the space of what was gone.
“My new Phoenix Cottage is beautiful and a lot of love went into making it. I poured my heart and soul into it, and during that process, I moved on from my life as it had been.”
Phoenix Cottage is for sale. Handsjuk has returned to a cherished place of her childhood in the central highlands, where she’s started a new chapter living on her grandmother’s property.
“Mallacoota will always be my heart-home. I look forward to coming back and enjoying it for the natural wonder it is and to see my precious friends.”
Justin Brady was going OK. He didn’t think he was too fire-affected. Then came the lockdowns.
During Covid, a few of those who had lost houses moved into the caravan park along the town’s foreshore. It was midwinter, when the waves rolled into his dreams, turning them into fiery nightmares.
“It freaked me out because I’d come out of a deep sleep thinking, ‘What’s that roar? Is that a fire?’ I’d be really wired.”
One morning after one of those restless nights, he met a couple of older women at the lookout on the far side of the park. And although it was lockdown, they got chatting. That became a daily morning ritual. He’d stroll up to the lookout, his cuppa in one hand and his mandolin in the other. “I’d play a bit of music for them and we’d have a laugh and a chinwag. It was probably a way of me trying to connect to some sort of normality.”
He heard about a community disaster trauma session held by clinical psychologist Dr Robert Gordon, which he says was really valuable.
“There was a lot about grief and that was really powerful for me to hear. He helped me to understand what happens after a scenario like a fire. It helped me to get a grip on where my mind was at and where it was going.”
The burned landscape in Mallacoota
Two days before new year, Brady is sitting in the rustic ramshackle camp kitchen of his terraced block.
The bush has bounced back pleasingly considering the black eerie scene he came home to five years ago. “Back then there was no sound of the wind going through the trees, no bird song, there was nothing … It was just eerie,” he says.
Over time the animals started coming back too. First it was the lyrebirds, then the koalas, then goannas.
Five years later the JB Shack hasn’t been rebuilt. “That’ll come,” he says. “I got to a point where I just had to let go of being in a hurry.”
“It’s when everything is finished that, you know, you start to have those long, quiet nights where you’re thinking about … well … what was it that just happened?”
Gary Proctor thinks about his life before the fire, almost three decades spent living with Nngaanyatjarra people in the Western Desert.
He thinks about 20 years of paintings and 150 years of family photographs burnt to nothing. But they weren’t nothing. Even reduced to ashes, there was still something there, materially different in the ashes but the container of something. They were memory in all that they held of the past, just in a changed state.
He remembers the day he got down on his hands and knees in that sea of ashes, brush in one hand, pan in the other, sweeping as he went. Not to find things, but to give time for whatever had happened there to resolve itself. It was then, moving forward through the ashes, leaving the trail of the past to reconcile behind him, that he found her, his small bronze statue of Guanyin, the Chinese bodhisattva of compassion. He smiles in awe at the memory. She was only about 10cm high and against all odds she’d survived the fire. Proof, he says, that if you look for blessings you’ll often find them – but you need to look.
In the years since the fires, Christy Bryar spent New Year’s Eve surrounded by friends at her Gipsy Point property. At midnight she usually marked the occasion with a toast and an excited promise that next year’s dancefloor would be in the new house.
This year she decided to mark it quietly with no promises. “I couldn’t face saying, ‘I’m going to be in my house next year’ again. Without a house it is difficult to move on. The fires continue to be part of our everyday existence. Everything around us is a reminder and we feel stuck in a holding pattern. Five years on, we are still talking about the fires every day and having to explain every day why we aren’t in our house yet. People move on at different rates but until we have a home, we can’t put the fires in the past.”
Brooke Robinson’s new house still smells new, looks new and feels new. “It doesn’t really feel like mine. It’s not the same house that I walked out of that day, it just doesn’t have the same feeling.”
Even before the embers began to fall, Robinson had a feeling. “We knew the fire was going to be big because it was just that dry. And we’d been waiting and waiting for it to come for a couple of years,” she says. She grabbed what people told her to grab – “your photos and insurance papers” – threw them in the boot of the car and headed to the wharf. Halfway down Betka Road, when the smoke haze was setting in, she thought about turning back. “But … you can’t take everything,” she told herself and kept going. “We just had to get out on the lake.”
A few weeks after the fires, sifting through the ashes, she found an old bracelet. She placed it in the boot of the car, on top of the other stuff. It’s all been there ever since. “I threw it on the pile and thought, ‘I’ll deal with that later.’
“I just went straight back to work – I had to earn money, I had to build a house. Zac was 16, I had to put a roof over our heads.” They have moved four times over the past five years. Now she sometimes finds her self sitting in her car, with her things, unable to work out where she’s supposed to be.
Over Christmas, she finally started to unpack the car. So far she’s taken out a couple of things, one of which is a framed photo board. But the most significant photo is on her phone, taken on the day she bought the house. Standing in front of the old house, beaming with pride, her arms are wrapped around her young sons, Zac and Tyson. “That was 14 years ago. I was a single mum, working two jobs: cleaning fish guts at the abalone coop and pouring beer at the pub.
“I worked so bloody hard and that’s why it’s been so hard to lose.
“People might think you’ve moved on, but it never stops. You need to be surrounded by your people and memories, like your kids’ first handprints, their baby tags, their baby books. That’s what makes a home. And when that’s gone, it just can’t be replaced – it’s just not that simple.”
