There we were, carrying on with our new expat life in Holland, when a radio newsflash came on about Australia. Catastrophic bushfires were devouring their way through the Blue Mountains and had arrived in Blaxland - at our place!
I was seven years of age.
| Enkhuizen |
| A Dutch Forest |
| 30 Kuipersjijk-still has blue doors! |
Dad worked at the Draka Polva plastics factory. I was at primary school immersed in Dutch literacy. Mum and my younger sister were alone on Coopers Dike (Kuipersdijk), when they heard the radio announcement.
“O mijn God”, Mum dared to exclaim because Oma wasn’t there, or she would have clipped Mum around the ears with a pair of clogs. Dad and I both came home for lunch about then. “Bloody Hell” said Dad, forcing down some pork fat on pumpernickel while Mum told us everything she’d heard. Fretting Dad went back to the Polva and I returned to school. Mum took my sister to Oma’s house, a few doors away on the same street, from where she called the local newspaper to see if they had any more information about the bushfire.
Suddenly, Mum, and our house on 40 Koala Rd Blaxland, was front-page news, or some page news, in what Mum thinks was the Noordhollands Dagblad. The story went like this:
Elly Campbell De Wit : “Is our bungalow in Australia also burnt down?
We are very busy with our paper to get a telex through to Blaxland in Australia. But without success. Wait, Wait, Wait, is all we can do. Our nerves are being eaten up. A shopping centre, a block of flats and 150 houses have been totally annihilated. How are the friends and family of the Campbell De Wit family, who are now in Enkhuizen? Has somebody died? Has their own beautiful bungalow gone up in flames? What has happened to the English immigrants who leased their house?
Of course they are here, 13,000 miles away from it and of course, for Elly Campbell De Wit, she’s happy about that. Because her parents don’t have to nervously sit here wondering how Elly, her Australian husband, and her two children, are. And Elly’s parents are very happy that she is not in Australia with her two children too, so that they don’t have to wait night and day to learn that the family was burnt to death in the night while they were sleeping!
Three Weeks
But still…. there is uncertainty, wondering what is happening, and what could happen.
Their best friend lost his life on the 6th of November, taken by the fire. But don’t think these fires are today or yesterday news. They’ve been burning for three weeks. Three volunteer fire fighters have already died, and yesterday another victim fell that could also be a friend of theirs. “You still don’t know anything?” asks Elly. “Could you ring the paper again to see if they’ve received the telex and if they know the name of the victim”?
When Elly was listening to the 11am radio program called ‘Vitamin for Workers’ she heard the news that the shopping centre and a pub in Blaxland burnt down. It flashed through her mind, “What about our bungalow? Oh no! Could our bungalow be burnt too?” That’s why she rang us in the hope we might know more. Their home is just three minutes away from the incinerated shops and around their home is bush, bush, and more bush. Along the big long road from Sydney to Blaxland there was also nothing but bush, bush, bush. They should have chopped it all down long ago with such a threat of fire!
The fire can eat away, eat away, and eat away. But no-one can run away. Oh, what is happening there? Elly told her husband Cass about the fire when he came back from his job at the Polva. Cass told us, “Although I look like an Arab, I am Australian” as he illustrated how far their house is from the hotel and the shopping center. He cannot believe the house is still there. Were they insured? “Yes we are”, says Elly. “But the brand new furniture isn’t”. Elly can hear her father say, “How can you be so stupid to insure your house and not your furniture!” Anyway, Cass has to go back to work, and daughter Petra of 7, to school. Elly couldn’t stay alone in their house with her youngest daughter of nearly four. “Let’s go to Oma’s and sit near the telephone and wait for more news. Let’s ring the paper again and see if they know anything. Maybe they have a name". Elly tells her daughter.
Wait, wait ,wait: 13, 000 miles away
It’s nearly night in the Blue Mountains and the poor people there are afraid to go to sleep. This week Elly had a letter from her friend that the bushfire was so bad they couldn’t breath properly because of all the smoke, and she’s sitting there with her 6 children! And now in the dark, Elly wonders how her brothers are, “We haven’t heard from them either”. John is in Sydney. Gus is safely 30 miles away in Sydney in Avalon, on the beach. They can always go in the water!
Fear
Every time the phone rings, fear goes through the heart of Mother De Wit and her daughter Elly. But no, still no news. It’s very difficult to get a connection. Wait again. Little Jenny tells me very seriously that her house in Australia has burnt down. She already sings St Nicholas songs, in broken Dutch, but talks your ear off. We talk about all the family who had immigrated, how Mr De Wit has been to Australia and Canada, and how Oma’s bother with his 15 children went to Canada, and other brothers went to British Columbia and to Australia, and how her son Hans, travelled all around the world and could be in Vietnam by now.
Elly asks how the London to Sydney Car Rally was going. “Did you know that we did the same trek eight years ago?” Elly says. “We had to talk together in a little car. It was a terrible trip of 13,000 miles through the most barbaric States. Snow in Turkey. It was February. It took two months to do the trip”. Mrs. De Wit gave a comprehensive description of the journey. Cass wrote it. He loves writing. He even has a manuscript of 7,000 words.
News
If only we could have news. If only we could have news. Now we are crying out for news but the only thing we hear is that the situation in the bush in NSW is very serious. There in the Blue Mountains, in Blaxland, fate is being decided. Where the mountains would be is fiery red of ten meter high flames rushing through 16 miles long. It is night now and NSW is hell red. Waiting again. Further waiting on news. It doesn’t matter anymore. It might come in the morning. But the people wouldn’t be sleeping and 13,000 powerless and dispirited miles away, Elly and Cass Campbell are asking themselves, how are their friends? And how is their house?
Translation by: Mum
The photo shows our home on its ¾ acre block with some towering inflammable gums clearly ‘threatening’ our ‘bungalow’ (a fibro and asbestos on brick, house), and our stretch Chevrolet in the foreground, which Dad had to sell to buy his ticket to Holland because Opa would only buy passage on the Oriana for his daughter and grandchildren. There is an insert of my sister looking at Mum who is gazing off into the horizon, not looking terribly worried. Probably because she didn’t want to live in the Blue Mountains anyway. We had this cosy old house on Kuipersdijk that Opa bought for us. And next year we would go to England. If our house burnt down - it looks like she is thinking - maybe she could stay in London where she was living quite happily before Dad found her, snatched her away to Australia, and shelved her in the bush?
Thirty-one fires had swept through the mountains since we left. But this particular fire that was now ravaging Blaxland, was the one that seared itself into Blue Mountains bushfire history for being one of the worstin it’s living memory.
It was through the Dutch newspapers that we learnt that Dad's closest friend, Greg Lee Eley, husband of Dawn, father of David and Melisssa, along with two experienced volunteer fire fighters, Peter John Hawkins, and Faulconbridge Brigade Captain, Tom Chalmers, were facing the last moments of their lives. They had gone off to conduct a back-burn at the Blue Grotto in Whitecross at Winmalee, to try and stop the fire from moving up the Mountains. Greg was on his first Warrimoo Bush Brigade sortie since he became a volunteer firey. As the men were back burning, a sudden wind change flying at 100 kilometres an hour turned the fire around on them. They had no chance.
Dad and Greg saw each other every day, because they worked together at Eric Andersons. And they drank together. Our families were always at each other homes. Greg and Dawn’s children were like cousins to my sister and I.
After the deaths of Greg, Tom and John, Blue Mountains fire fighters lined the verges of the Great Western Highway at Warrimoo holding donation buckets to support Dawn and the widows of David and Peter. GeoffMacManus, veteran and awarded volunteer fire fighter who was on Greg’s crew recalled, “I don’t think anyone drove past us without giving us something.”There is a now plaque in honor of the three men on a renamed service street, Eley Hawkins Drive, where the Warrimoo Fire Brigade Station is.
The loss of Greg was as soldered into my childhood memories as the 1968 bushfire was in the annals of Blue Mountains experience, even though I wasn’t there.
It took another two weeks to conquer the fire. More than 9,300 hectares of bushland was turned to charcoal. Our house was spared: not a single barb on a Cymbopogon refractus (grass) or a single oily eucalypt leaf from our happily still alive and lofty blue gums were so much as tinged. But 40 other homes in Blaxland were burnt to the ground, and another 30 carbonised in the flames further afield.
Ten years later and the fires tore though the mountains again, the intensity of which hadn’t been seen since 1968. I am now 15 years old and back in Blaxland. We were in the middle of the 1972-1981 drought and it was suffocatingly, heat-wave hot. Hundreds of fire fighters worked 24 hour rotating shift to contain the fires. No-one died this time, but those who remembered the 1968 fires were getting ready to evacuate.
On December 5, 1976, I wrote in my diaries, “there's bushfires all over the place. It's really bad. The Taylor's have packed everything. That’s going a bit far. Yesterday their motorcross burnt down and Mr Taylor's bike too. So they’re out of a job”. The following summer fires raged again and I wrote “there are really bad bush fires at Sun Valley and Blaxland and boy was it made to look bad – 3 houses down in Blaxland, 5 in Sun Valley - and the only one that was burnt down besides heaps of bush was a shed. Oh well…… Worked this morning. I was slightly late because the bush fires held up the trains…. When I got up this morning I could hardly breathe. The whole house was full of smoke and you couldn’t see two feet in front of you.”.
On December 5, 1976, I wrote in my diaries, “there's bushfires all over the place. It's really bad. The Taylor's have packed everything. That’s going a bit far. Yesterday their motorcross burnt down and Mr Taylor's bike too. So they’re out of a job”. The following summer fires raged again and I wrote “there are really bad bush fires at Sun Valley and Blaxland and boy was it made to look bad – 3 houses down in Blaxland, 5 in Sun Valley - and the only one that was burnt down besides heaps of bush was a shed. Oh well…… Worked this morning. I was slightly late because the bush fires held up the trains…. When I got up this morning I could hardly breathe. The whole house was full of smoke and you couldn’t see two feet in front of you.”.
Actually, 15 year old self, sixty five thousand hectares burnt in 1976 when the Taylor's were wisely packing to get out, and the following summer, it was a bit more than 8 houses that were lost: 49 buildings and 54,000 hectares went up in smoke.
There wasn’t much local communication about bushfires in those days. A fire might well have been sweeping up Koala Road to burn us in our beds while we were sleeping. If it was, I woke up just in time, fumbled my way through the smoke to the station, and got on a train to go Christmas shopping.
Bushfires are the downside of living in this UNESCO listed World Heritage National Park, as it is living anywhere else near our rapidly disappearing bushland, so full of inflammable eucalyptus trees. Every part of the eucalypt is bloating with aromatic, volatile oil. It throws off its bark like a snake sheds it’s skin, and drops a leafy, crusty, nutty, crackly, bonfire that blankets the bush floor just waiting for blistering heat to bring its latent oil to a ‘just right’ temperate so it can release it’s flammable gas and project a fireball. It doesn’t take much for the Mountains to turn into a towering inferno with some forests and their 300-year-old trees soaring 65 meters into the sky, especially as they are on steep slopes that are mostly impossible to reach to put out.
Scientist wonder whether eucalypts became fuel filled as a means of reproduction - because they require occasional burns to regenerate - or if they are some sort of villainous domineering tree that evolved to burn as a weapon to scare off competitive trees that cant survive a bushfire. Whichever it is, the Eucalypt is the great hegemon of the Aussie forest. And it has enlisted some allies in other native flora that also like it hot to spread their seed around.
| A Eucalyptus bushfire |
A type of addiction to fire is central to the ecology of Australia.
Aborigines used fire to clear tracks and herd animals - and possibly to keep an eye on some of the most deadliest snakes in the world which tend to lurk in long grass. No doubt some unlucky Aborigines fell in the way of a turning wind now and then, but it was the arrival of Europeans and our ongoing human expansion across Australia that has really put us head to head with our forests. While lightening will sometimes strike up a bushfire, most of the time its things we do, or have built, that start them, like the accidental ignitions caused by faulty power poles, flying sparks from welding, grinding, machinery, campfires, agricultural clearing, and dropped cigarettes and matches, back burning, and illegal burning in tips. Then there are criminal arsonists, pyromaniacs and mindless teenagers who start a fire for a laugh. A few kilometres from our house in Blaxland we dumped and burnt what little waste we produced back then in our local surface tip. One day, someone’s smoldering garbage turned the tip into the 1957 bushfire that ripped from the Blaxland tip to Mt Riverview.
Our self-inflicted bush fires have taken the lives of 800 people in Australia since 1851, costing around $1.6 billion in property damage.
