Bronwyn Adcock won the 2022 Walkley Book Award for Currowan, her extraordinary moment-by-moment account of the mega fire that ripped through the South Coast. At November's True Story festival, Bronwyn delivered an exclusive, specially commissioned keynote address, speaking about the tensions that have arisen as affected communities strive for recovery and resilience, and the lessons we can learn from that tragedy.
Thanks to Bronwyn for sharing the transcript of her speech with the True Story team.
AFTERBURN, 18 November 2023
I’d like to start today by reading out the final few lines from my book, Currowan. These lines I think, are a good starting point for where we are today.
But before I do, I’ll give you some context for how these final words came into being. Which is also something of a confession.
They were written sometime around midnight, just hours before the absolute, final deadline for the book to be finished. The publication date had been set, orders with booksellers placed, publicity underway, yet I still hadn’t finished the final chapter.
Every morning, I was drip feeding my editor piece by piece what I had written the night before. And quite reasonably, the tone of her emails was shifting from one of gentle encouragement to more of a “what the hell” vibe.
Coming from a background in journalism, I’d always imagined being an author would be a somewhat more serene experience; sitting at a writing desk, soft-filtered light coming through a window, days on end to ponder over paragraphs, and then limitless time to retire into a comfortable chair to read and re-read before it was ready.
But writing Currowan was nothing like that.
Bits and pieces started during the fires, random rambles written on the back of a shopping list while waiting at a roadblock; or notes on my phone while sitting in my car at a sports oval, watching black smoke engulf the area further south where my house was.
Once the main fire emergency was over, I wrote at the kitchen tables of the various temporary houses we lived in, surrounded by the boxes from when we evacuated, or sometimes – just to get some space – I’d charge my laptop, pack food and a lamp, and venture up through the burnt forests to our house, which was still standing, but without power or water.
I’d sit and write in a house that still smelled of smoke and was strewn with fire hoses, trying not to flinch every time I heard another tree fall or a billow of smoke come up from the forests. Even once the repairs were done and we moved back in, and I was working from a newly constructed shed, it was hard to find a sense of steadiness.
The story I was writing followed the path of the Currowan fire and had a number of distinct threads: the stories of the people and communities it impacted, my own fire experience, and then of course the main character, the fire itself.
Accurately collecting the stories of fire survivors was time-consuming and more often than not, deeply sad. I’d interview people outside the ruins of their house, or squeezed into a caravan that was now their home, soon learning that these were stories that could not be forced.
It could take many hours of talking, dancing around the topic, until people were ready. Some would get right to the heart of it, but timelines and sequences were hard to decipher. A person could recount in fine detail, minute by minute, parts of their fire day, but then tell me they had no recollection of how they went from standing outside their burning home, to suddenly being in an evacuation centre five kilometres away.
I recognised this as trauma. And I saw it in myself. The sections of the book that were more directly about my own experience, I constantly put off dealing with. Just writing, “I’ll come back to this later” in those chapters.
Writing about the fire itself though, was fascinating, yet horrifying. To understand its nature, why it behaved the way it did, I delved into the science of fire, which of course led me into the climate science, which explained how the heating of our planet was contributing to more extreme fires more often - fires that were behaving in once unimaginable ways.
It was a lot, getting this book over the line.
The problem I was wrestling with though, over those final days, was not just about a fast approaching deadline. It was how to end this story.
As a reader myself, I understood that all stories need some kind of resolution, a closure.
But in this case, I felt that if I left the reader thinking that there was a real end to this story, then I would be being untruthful.
While the Currowan fire may be done, we were really just at the beginning. So this is what I came up with, that night in mid 2021.
To stay sane, I try to focus on the small leaps forward. Like the way the first boobook owl since the fires has recently returned to our property, sitting unmoving on a low branch outside my studio, pivoting his head to watch me as I walk up the hill at night.
But mostly, I just think, what have we done?
What have we done?
I’ve continued to think about this ever since..
And as we sit here today, close to the end of a year that’s almost certain to be the world’s hottest on record, with Australia on the cusp of yet another dangerous bushfire season, I think about it even more.
I also have another question at the forefront of my mind.
Last month I was overseas, when a number of fires broke out on the south coast – in areas that had been impacted by the Currowan fire just three and a half years ago.
I was getting alerts on my phone from the Hazards Near Me App – what used to be the Fires Near Me App – which had the south coast set as my watch zone, followed by a string of group text messages.
The neighbourhood WhatsApp group we set up back in 2019 came back to life, with people sharing information about where they thought the fire was.
Even though I was thousands of kilometres away, it was like being transported back in time and place. During the Currowan fire I had an exchange with a friend who was sitting in her car outside her house as a fire approached, two small kids strapped in the back, not sure which direction was safe to drive. Now, I was talking to the same friend again about her possible next steps - this time packing and being ready to head to the beach if needed.
It seemed too much – to be back there already.
But we are. Which makes me ask, how do we live with this?
“What have we done?” And “How do we live with this?”
I’ll start with the second question. Because I think the first one is a lot more confronting and I don’t want any of you getting up and leaving just yet.
When I was writing Currowan, I did come across one community that had already grappled with the question of “how do we live” with this. But they were the exception.
One of the dominant themes of the book – and of that entire fire season right through Australia – was the blindsiding.
The blindsiding of governments and agencies, that had been so swept along in a false political debate about whether climate change was real or not, that they failed to adequately prepare for this new era of more extreme fires.
This lack of preparation meant there were simply not enough planes, fire-trucks or fire-fighters to go around.
Some of the most harrowing stories I came across in the course of writing the book were of those caught in this gap.
The senior volunteer firefighter, whose job it was to dispatch fire trucks, breaking down in tears inside his control van at a showground, because he was getting desperate calls for help but had left to send.
The father who made repeated calls to triple zero to report that his son was trapped inside a burning house, his life was in danger, only to be told by the operator:
“He’s not the only one. I’m sorry, but this is an ongoing fire and there’s a lot of this going on.”
Everyone was caught off-guard by how fires were behaving in this new, climate changed world.
Under the old rules of the game, fires didn’t run hard at night. It used to be that the cooler temperatures and higher humidity would feed moisture into the vegetation, enough to still or at least slow a blaze.
But on the last day of 2019, the Currowan fire started its run towards the towns of Mogo, Malua Bay and Batemans Bay just after midnight. Which meant by dawn, people in Mogo were tumbling out of bed with flames at their doorsteps, with those in Malua Bay and Batemans bay not far behind – leaving a handful of local fires crew trying to stop entire streets burning down while waiting for strike teams sent from hundreds of kilometres away.
Some individuals were well prepared for the fire season, spending months prior to the fires readying their properties. Many more took heed of the repeated official warnings once it was underway, taking actions that undoubtedly saved their lives.
Communities did react to the fires with incredible speed and cohesion. Volunteers banding together to distribute food to be handed over at roadblocks or to be delivered to isolated communities via boat - pubs and civic centres turned into last minute evacuation centres.
But on the whole, I think communities were caught off guard.
It is notable that on the last day of 2019, with uncontrolled fires burning up and down the south coast and warnings that worse was to come, every caravan park in the area was overflowing with holiday makers - intent on having a summer holiday, even in an active fire zone. Incredibly fortunately, this didn’t result in loss of life, but it did necessitate one of the largest mass evacuations in the state's history - lasting many days and further stretching already scarce resources.
It is not a question of blame, perhaps more an illustration of a collective cognitive dissonance.
The exception to all of this, was the community of Kangaroo Valley.
By the time the Currowan fire came thundering into the valley on the 4th of January 2020, the community had been preparing for over a year, building a community-led bushfire resilience plan.
It was a process sparked by a conversation between the captain of the local RFS and a local policeman, back in 2018.
Both men had first-hand experience with fire and were worried about what the growing drought would mean for future fire seasons. The policeman had seen the very worst of what could happen; back in 2009 he’d been sent into the town of Marysville, in Victoria, to recover 34 bodies from the town after the deadly Black Saturday fires.
In this conversation, he asked the RFS captain – “How ready is our community for fire?”
The fire captain, a local electrician named Mike Gorman, realised the answer was that they were not, and he began spearheading an effort to change that.
I only came across the story of this community preparation after the Currowan fire, when I was writing the book. I was fascinated by the concept, not only because it seemed to make so much sense, but because when put to the test, it worked.
The Currowan fire arrived in Kangaroo Valley late in the afternoon, on the strength of a pyrocumulonimbus. A fire storm. It turned sunlight into pitch black in an instant and swept through a vast area in the western, semi-rural part of the valley in a matter of hours. Around 40 homes were destroyed. But remarkably, given the speed and scale of the fire – no lives were lost.
This area that was hit had no external fire-fighting resources. The valley’s two local fire trucks had remained in the village in case they were needed there. A strike team of firefighters from outside the area only arrived later that night, once the fire front had passed.
Two key things happened in the lead up to the fire.
One was the establishment of the Kangaroo Valley Community Bushfire Committee. This committee held public meetings, raising awareness about potential for a dangerous fire season, and distributing detailed information about how to prepare a property. Often just simple and cheap things, like plugging up small gaps around windows and the roof where embers could enter.
The other thing that was set up was a network of smaller, neighbourhood groups - often made up of just a dozen houses in a semi-rural area, each with an appointed coordinator - that all sat under the umbrella of the Kangaroo Valley Bushfire Ready Neighbourhoods Network. These groups collected lists of who lived in their area, contact details, maps of where the houses were located and locations of all the static water supplies.
The RFS also played a major role in preparing the valley. A week before the fire arrived, senior RFS personnel came to town and held a public meeting – very clearly warning that a harrowing fire was coming, and if people weren’t physically and mentally prepared they should leave and leave early.
But Mike Gorman went one step further. Acting in his capacity as a member of the community committee, not as a member of the RFS, he held a number of smaller meetings, often just a few people, house to house. He reiterated the message that the valley was sure to burn, and told people not to expect to see a fire truck. But if people said they were planning to stay, he looked at their fire plans and properties and gave them frank, granular advice on whether their plans stacked up – laying out in detail the dire consequences of getting it wrong.
Mike told me that while his aim was never to convince anyone to leave or stay – after listening to him, a number of households did decide that their original decision to stay and defend was not sound, and that they would now leave early instead.
The decision whether to stay or go is the most important part of any fire plan. Leaving early is without doubt the safest option - but there has always been, and always will be, a cohort of people who want to stay and defend their property.
There is a real danger zone in being undecided, or planning to stay and defend, but realising too late you’ve made the wrong choice.
A major study of all bushfire deaths in Australia, covering 1900 to 2007, showed that the most common thing people were doing at their time of death was late evacuation.
Last year, the University of Wollongong published a piece of research examining the community-led response to the Currowan fire in Kangaroo Valley.
It had a couple of startling findings:
- One, was that the proportion of households who were undecided about whether to leave, or stay and defend prior to the arrival of the Currowan fire, was significantly lower than for other fires.
- Another, was that many households who had always planned to stay and defend against a fire, changed their minds well ahead of time, to leave early.
In other words, this was a community that made good decisions.
The university research attributed this to a number of factors, including that people knew ahead of time the fire was coming, and that senior RFS personnel had visited the valley with clear warnings a week out.
It also pointed to the activities of the community-led neighbourhood groups as playing a major role in this good decision making.
There was another important thing that happened on the night of the fire itself.
The neighbourhood groups had updated their contact lists and maps to include details of who was staying and who was leaving, and when the first strike team of trucks from outside the area arrived once the fire front had passed, Mike Gorman handed over this information to the strike team.
Now, I never spoke to the head of this particular strike team – but I imagine turning up at night, into an unfamiliar, semi rural area that's just been blasted by fire, this kind of intelligence would be incredibly useful.
I spoke to lots of RFS volunteers over the course of writing this book... and one of the challenges they spoke of was being in an area, particularly a regional area where houses are far flung, and having to decide which house to go to first. Saving life is always a priority, but how are you to know which houses are empty and which could have someone trapped inside?
An interface between a well-organised community and firefighting agencies has the potential to be an incredibly valuable resource.
As the University of Wollongong study noted; “Since local RFS volunteers and other emergency personnel are extremely busy with vital preparations to respond to a disaster at such times, they are very unlikely to have the significant time and resources necessary to collect this information themselves.”
The curious thing I discovered about this Kangaroo Valley story though, was that when the community group was being put together, it was not supported by the Shoalhaven RFS bureaucracy.
Not only did they not cooperate, but they actively disapproved – to the point where Mike Gorman stepped down as RFS Captain, taking on the role of Deputy, to try and defuse the tensions that were being created amongst volunteers in the brigade.
This disapproval seemed to stem from a sense of nervousness about the idea of a community taking their safety into their own hands – a fear of what could go wrong, if it wasn’t left to the experts.
Since the Currowan fire, a number of other communities across the south coast have also started to look at the question of “how do we live with this”.
Some have been explicitly fire and resilience focused, like a small group formed in a semi-rural area north of Milton, that has created a community fire response network, broken down into seven micro hubs of 10 to 15 properties, they’ve built maps, shared sample fire plans for landowners who want to stay and defend, and organised a bulk buy of fire preparedness equipment.
Others, like the Manyana Matters group, have formed initially around environmental protection, then expanded into things like a community garden, and connecting with local First Nations people to share knowledge about practices like cultural burning.
A number of community forums have been held, brainstorming ideas about how to build community resilience. The Australian Red Cross has been active, sharing information about their model of community-led resilience teams that grew out of disaster recovery work following widespread flooding from Tropical Cyclone Debbie in 2017.
But it has been piecemeal. And small.
The conclusions of the Wollongong University study ... which were that the community-led initiatives in Kangaroo Valley were “instrumental in increasing the bushfire resilience of the community”... and that “This suggests they have potential as good models for other high-risk communities” have certainly not been widely taken on.
I think there’s a range of reasons for why this is.
It is the case that there is still some antipathy coming from the RFS bureaucracy at a local level towards community members wanting to organise around fire resilience, outside of the structures of the RFS.
But this has certainly not blocked or stopped any community organising. Like in the case of Kangaroo Valley, if a community wants to organise, they will.
More to the point I think, is that there is little evidence that governments or agencies in Australia are proactively taking steps to facilitate genuine, robust community led responses to natural disasters.
This is not a new idea.
The Royal Commission into the 2009 Black Saturday fires that killed 173 people recommended more community-based bushfire planning
More recently, the NSW Inquiry into the devastating floods on the north coast and Lismore in 2022 recommended a community-based first responder program.
This came after it was recognised that community members, the so-called tinnie army – people in boats – rescued scores of people during the floods when emergency services were overwhelmed.
I understand that this is not a simple proposition – getting communities involved in their own safety.
There is lots to consider. There is value – particularly at the height of a natural disaster – in having a single voice in control of safety messages. If thousands of people need to evacuate quickly, it needs to be clear. Multiple messages and actions could create confusion and increase risks.
There’s also logistical, legal and liability issues to consider.
Particularly when it comes to first-response, some community-led groups operate with starkly different safety protocols to government agencies.
Take the cubies for example, the men with cubes of water on the back of their farm utes who saved countless lives and houses during the Currowan fire.
One told me: ‘My protocol is, if there are people out there in the line of fire and they need a hand, you don’t just stand there,’ ...‘While there is a chance and while there are people in there with a heartbeat, you don’t leave them behind.’
He also described to me how when he came across one burning house he took out his chainsaw to cut off the burning section to save the rest of the house.
It worked, he saved the house, but it's hard to see how this could be accommodated in the safety manual of a fire fighting agency.
But it doesn't have to be.
All we are talking about is an interface. An interface between government agencies, and well-organised, well-informed communities who are ready to take some agency over their own safety.
This shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge, in fact, it can't be.
Because climate change has got ahead of us – specifically, ahead of the capacity of government and its agencies to respond fully to every natural disaster. We saw this during the Black Summer fires over 2019-2020, we saw it during the floods in Lismore in 2022, and we will see it again.
Communities still need help and support from government when a natural disaster hits – but government also needs us.
Another explanation for why there hasn’t been widespread development of community-led resilience responses I think is to do with us - as community members.
I spoke recently to one person who’s been involved in trying to get some of these things going on the South Coast, and he said to me:
“It’s difficult for people to grasp that they have control. That there is lots of low hanging fruit, they can do.”
To me, this speaks to the relative luxury of our lives to date. We’ve been a wealthy country, and while it hasn’t been the case for everyone – many have been left behind – for most of us, we turn on our taps and water comes out. We call triple zero, and help arrives.
We’re not aware of our own agency.
But I also think, particularly on the South Coast and in the communities that were impacted by the Currowan fire, people are still tired.
The scale of the trauma I saw when I was writing the book was enormous. I have never seen so many men weep.
One of the things I noticed, not as a writer but as a member of the community, was that for a long time afterwards people still wanted to talk about their fire stories. In the supermarket, outside the school gates, at barbecues – the fire would invariably come up.
I see this is a healthy response, the exchange of shared stories, but it is also a sign that the events of 2019-2020 are still close to the surface.
It still happens now. Not nearly as often as the first two years, but it is there.
This is not unusual. A couple of years ago, a major investigation was published into the long-term impacts of Victoria’s deadly Black Saturday fires – showing what a long tail these disasters have.
It found that ten years after the fires, only one-third of people in highly impacted communities felt like their community had mostly or fully recovered.
A decade on, 22% of people in these highly impacted communities reported symptoms consistent with a diagnosable mental health disorder — more than twice the levels in low-impacted communities.
And critically, a sense of community cohesion was lower in these high-impact communities, compared to other communities.
The problem this presents is that with natural disasters becoming more extreme and happening more frequently, the time for recovery is going to become shorter and shorter.
That the relatively small spate of fires on the south coast and far south coast last month impacted people who had been hit by fires just three years before, is a case in point.
Communities need help, not just to recover, but to organise and build resilience.
As I saw in the aftermath of the Currowan fire, in some of the worst impacted areas, expecting a broken community to self-organise is a massive ask. As anyone who has ever done any volunteering work knows, it requires a degree of energy, effort and experience – ingredients not always present in the aftermath of a major traumatic event.
I saw some community recovery efforts falter, ostensibly over issues like where donated money should go or who should make decisions, but really - because these were traumatised people trying to tackle a task for which they had no model and little experience.
One practical solution I think would be having a permanent, paid community resilience coordinator in every single community. A position that could both enable individual, place-based solutions – but also make sure lessons and ideas were shared across networks of communities. Someone who could work on that interface between communities and government agencies, and who is always there – not rolled in and out every time there is a natural disaster.
We urgently need new ways of doing things. We do not have the luxury of time. Governments and communities alike must confront the fact that climate change has changed the rules of the game.
Which brings me back to the question I started with, “what have we done”.
According to the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking in New York a couple of months ago, what we have done – and this is a direct quote – is that “humanity has opened the gates of hell”.
This is not hyperbole. He was speaking about the year just gone, where nearly every continent on the planet has experienced some kind of extreme weather event.
China set a new national temperature record of 52.2°C; in Argentina and Chile, temperatures soared above 30°C in the middle of winter.
Canada had its worst fire season on record. 6500 individual blazes, burning through 18.5 million hectares - with toxic smoke from these fires blanketing parts of the United States, leading to multiple states issuing health alerts.
There was one day in mid-June, when the US was being hit by both smoke from Canada and its own extreme heatwave - when there were 127 million people under air quality alerts, and 79 million more under heat alerts.
Antarctica saw record low ice levels.
And in South Asia, record-breaking monsoon rains brought deadly floods to north India and Pakistan.
I could go on.
There is currently a live debate going on in the scientific community about whether it is still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
1.5 is the global threshold that has been set to try and prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change.
However, there is now a scientific opinion that the earth’s climate is more sensitive to human-caused changes that was previously understood, and so global heating is accelerating meaning we are likely to bust through the 1.5 threshold sometime this decade.
In the words of one of the eminent scientists who is putting forward this view, we are risking a world “less tolerable to humanity,”,
Even now, at 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, there are signs we have already pushed our planet too far.
A scientific paper published last month said that rapid melting of the West Antarctic ice shelf could already be inevitable – no matter how much carbon emissions are cut.
If – or rather, when – it melts completely, sea levels could rise by up to five metres. In a world where more than a third of the global population lives within 100 kilometres of the coast.
If we were being completely honest with ourselves, and truly confronting the question of what have we done, right now there would be emergency alarms sounding in every town, city, local council, and state and federal parliament.
We would not be tolerating government's continuing to wave through new coal, oil and gas projects that are set to make the problem worse. We would not be listening to the greenwash of the gas industry, as it tries to pivot itself from being a fossil fuel polluter to somehow an essential component of the energy transition.
We would be having less conversations about how hard and expensive it is to make the energy transition – and more about what it will cost us if we don't take this road.
The reason I chose to start today at the end of my book, with those words, “what have we done”, is because I think confronting this question head on is key to unlocking what needs to happen now, in our communities and in our governments.
When I started writing Currowan, I had in my mind's-eye that as well as being a story about a particular place and time, I wanted it to also have a more universal meaning. A story with relevance for anyone who is going to have to live in a climate changed world – which is all of us.