Living through Victoria’s new climate reality

A Victorian bushfire shows climate change is no longer abstract, writes Doctor Rosemary Sorensen.

Hearing the WARN signal on your phone, looking up out the window and seeing smoke rising into the 43-degree sky – everything you’ve heard and read suddenly becomes reality and you need to take action.

We live in Barkers Creek, just south of Harcourt, one of Victoria’s small towns that burned down on Friday 9 January. The first one started very close to us, that’s when we saw the smoke but thankfully we couldn’t see the flames. We could see the smoke moving ahead of us towards Harcourt as it covered the grass, bushes and trees. The wind was blowing hard and strong so it was impossible to know if we were directly in the air or not.

We had sort of recovered that morning because the fire rating was “catastrophic.” You won’t make any puns with a word like that. A few cats were put in crates and three chickens (I know this is ridiculous) were put in cardboard boxes. Our adorable children – the rescued roosters I wrote about here – had to stay.

Even when we set out towards a road we thought was some distance away from the fire, the wind seemed to be pushing it away from us. We passed CFA and police teams who came to tell us to evacuate.

This was around 3 in the afternoon. The larger town of Castlemaine lies about five kilometers south of Harcourt, and the question was whether winds had driven the fire towards it. We were in Castlemaine and monitoring the progress of the fire on two fronts. The wind apparently shifted from west to east, pushing the fire back into Harcourt and taking dozens of homes and other buildings with it. He then climbed Mount Alexander/Leanganuk, destroying the communications towers, which are still burning as I write this almost a week later.

Let’s see…what can I tell you? The standard comment at this stage is how great the community is. And frankly, I’m amazed at some people’s reactions. It seems that in times like these there are people who can miraculously respond with resilience and sacrifice. There is a man who lives at the junction of our road and goes directly to Harcourt, he took action, put out fires on the spot, kept in touch with CFA day and night.

This was and still is a daily state of alarm. The phone is constantly ringing with new flare-ups. One of them took off recently on Sunday, and in what seemed like minutes, the water-bombing helicopter was overhead, drawing water from the large dam behind us, roaring toward the epidemic. If someone hadn’t been near that spot to see the smoke, let’s say we were back in the car with the cats and bulls, about to leave.

We don’t need anything here. We had no electricity for four days and were ready to face a few more days when Powercor got us started again. We are in the tank water and when the alarm went off a local water carrier was literally heading back our way from the road where the fire started, using unsealed roads to return on Sunday. I’m now trying to do a small campaign to get the local water authority and district council to improve the water access pipes used by delivery trucks. There are only three in the whole area and none in Harcourt, so this needs to be fixed.

I look out the window and it’s a peaceful summer day. A bit hazy towards Harcourt. And then the phone rings, warning us not only of an exacerbation in the emergency zone, but also of hell’s bells! – also to “very dangerous storm”.

I feel a little apologetic just talking about it, because for now we’re unharmed at our home, while just down the road someone no longer has a home. The local postman moved into emergency shelter as their home was still standing, but the tanks, fences and outbuildings are no longer there. I take the back road to go into town because the devastation is too much for my emotions and I cry.

Here’s the good: The CFA units united in Harcourt are amazing. Powercor and Coliban Water did a good job. Residents who have set up help centres; the kind of people you want and need in a community.

There’s a slightly unpleasant tickle to disasters, the kind of people who get excited by all the chaos. This ranges from nutters who try to tour Harcourt even on a Saturday, to well-intentioned people who want to donate their old clothes to someone who’s lost a lot.

And there are people like me who are very close to the worst but have been little affected so far. It seems wrong to even say how scary it is.

We live in a beautiful place, but things have changed since we came here. Climate change means this is the new normal, so we need to understand what needs to be done and take action. If anyone says “yes but” and makes a biased comment about the state of the environment and refuses to recognize our government’s pathetic lack of action in mitigating the disaster, please tell them to shut up. We are still here and yes we are lucky. But none of us are safe anymore, and it doesn’t take a cloud of fire outside your front window for you to realize that. Continue to demand that our foolish governments take immediate action by every means they can to prevent this situation from getting worse.