Edd gets a puppy and Josh breaks his arm

27.5.2009 The weather has changed. It is definitely damp and there has been a little of that rare stuff …rain. We should be jumping for joy. I am sure all the plant are, but with the wet comes mud and we have started excavating shed sites so I expect a lot of mud. I have no right to complain with so much of the country up north having such bad floods.

On Sunday Edd’s new dog arrived. Delivered to our door by his breeders who have very kindly given him to us. He was pretty frightened when he arrived and had been sick in the car but he has settled down fast. The people who stayed here the weekend of the fires found him for us and arranged everything. Edd has called him Jana (rhyming with Banner), which apparently is a Cornish way of saying John! He is a black and tan kelpie and a very solid little chap with a very long tail.
Edd says he often sees ghosts of our dogs that died in the fires who work around the place with him. I have seen no ghosts and still miss the dogs terribly. I do not feel ready for a new dog myself yet but it is good that Edd does because he is working on the farm every day now and has time to spend putting the work in that a puppy needs. I have been quite surprised so far at Jana, who behaves well over night and is trying hard to fit in.

My main task this week has been catching up with our accounts and getting in Tax statements. We have endless bits of paper that have to be sorted in to some form of order. It is quite horrific having to spend so much on new household things. We lost everything from sauce pans to furniture so are continually discovering new bits we can’t function with out. Friends have been very good; Jane even brought me over a thimble this week in a bag of other sewing goodies. I discovered I needed one when I had to sew up the baby clothes I have been knitting.

I have also brought tools to tile the shower room. Edd has lined the donga porch with cement sheet around the shower unit so it is ready for finishing now. We have hung up a small bathroom cupboard and will make a tiny shelf for the men to put a mug of hot water for shaving on. We have to use the kitchen sink as a basin as space is tight.

Down at the old house site I have begun working on my destroyed garden beds. They look so much better when the soil is raked of rubbish and dug over. I am laying broken bricks as a cobbled path round the drainage ponds at the back of the toilet. I fancy covering the old swimming pool with ferro cement. It would repair the damaged liner and burnt walls back to a useful condition and make a stronger pool in the long term.
I am studying ferro cement construction on the Internet every time I get a spare moment and am intrigued with the possibilities. I do wish I was younger and stronger but perhaps it is just a matter of working out an approach.

Our latest problem is that Josh fell off a ladder at work and broke his right arm. He spent most of Friday sat in Dandedong hospital waiting for attention and we picked him up in the evening after he had been given an anaesthetic and had the arm set. He is pretty fed up about things but is really not feeling well enough even to try going back to work yet. He even found walking round the super market hard yesterday. I am taking him for a check up tomorrow and if all is well he is going to visit his friends in Townesville and spend a few days somewhere easier to live while he recovers. He left Townesville in a very depressed state and I hope it will be good for him to put old issues to rest. He has now got his degree and has got over his broken heart so he may see it differently.

Steels Creek was one of the areas badly affected by the bush fires. Even now, three months on, many areas show no signs of recovery. Bare, burnt, tree trunks stand silent on grey ground devoid of any visible life. The social structure of our community is in turmoil slowly groping towards a new pattern. Individuals show their stress in the loudness or intensity of their speech whenever the fire is discussed.
For Edd, Josh and I most of our immediate problems have been dealt with and it is time to look back and learn from our experiences. We have had enormous help from everyone to reach this point and send a special thank you to all our Permaculture friends who have given us such wonderful help and support.
With time to reflect I can now see that our land also continued to support us. We had a fire plan that was part of a larger disaster plan and although we lost our buildings the essence of the disaster plan worked well. I can see now that a fire plan needs to be in two parts. Firstly there is the part we all know which is about preparing the property, and being ready to shelter and then put out spot fires.

The second part is the one you need if the conditions make saving buildings impossible and it is your life you need to protect. The particular weather conditions that produce killer fires can now be identified and we need a warning system so that those with no fire safe place can leave in safety. I have friends and neighbours who died because they knew their properties were well set up and that it was possible to defend them. Our dogs died taking shelter for a short time in the house.
We lost all our buildings but luckily had a plan B for survival that worked fine.

We had seven paying guests staying that Saturday,
We were very worried that when they did get them leave they had left it too late. They all survived, but by the time we had looked after them the roar of the fire drowned everything as it poured down the hillside in a sheer cliff face of flames. We just had time to call the animals to a safe area, start the fire pump and get a few items to the safety of the cellar.
At the base of the forest covered hills the fire split. The first flame front to reach us used the road reserve and attacked from the South. It was so fast and intense that the gas cylinders at the cottage exploded sending shrapnel in all directions and the steel brewery and concrete cottage were blown apart. Neighbours said the fire sucked the oxygen from their fire pumps, rendering them useless. Ours worked well until the fuel ran out. There was an underground pipeline from the dam that remained serviceable.
Unfortunately our house was large and two stories high. With just two people it was not possible to extinguish all the firebombs and with in a short time we realized that we had lost that battle. The fire walls had protected us from most of the radiant heat but when the main front passed we withdrew to the bare paddock with our animals, which the flames had already crossed.

Now here is the good bit. In the cellar we had all our camping equipment, a store of tinned food, orange juice and water and our most important documents for insurance purposes. We had beds in there but as a polyhouse had survived we used that to camp in for the next few days. I had some spare clothes and coats in the cellar but in future I will also have spare boots. The soles burnt off the pair I was wearing.
In the polyhouse we had tomatoes and capsicums. There were still potatoes in the vegetable garden and some zucchinis that were protected by the corrugated garden fence. The apple orchard survived well, chooks had cleared down to bare earth around the trees and some still had fruit even though their leaves had been scorched off. It is now possible to see that most of the fruit trees survived. . Our larger olives and citrus trees are showing signs of recovery; trunk size seems the main factor.

By saving the animals we still had fresh milk. Once help arrived we gave away or sold about half our animals because we had too many to feed and too many to fit into the yards we had built from salvaged materials. I can see that if a different sort of disaster had resulted in no help arriving we could have eaten the excess animals. As it was we had a high meat diet in the following days because it was easier to prepare and eat without facilities to wash anything. We spent five years working in the desert with the Warlpiri people and we used what we had learnt from them to avoid health problems.

Three months on, rocket, lettuces, mustards, Chinese vegetables and silver beet have self-seeded. Underground crops like spuds, garlic and asparagus are still Ok and many of the common herbs have come back. We have now got a very serviceable kitchen set up and can move gratefully back to a European diet.
Some chickens found a safe place and have now started laying. We have too many roosters but I expect we will eat them at some stage. There is an abundance of firewood and we have some water left in tanks. The concrete tank that was not partially underground was damaged and leaks but the large one seems fine.

It is extremely reassuring to know that despite the devastation of the whole area we had enough resources to keep our selves alive on our own property if no help had arrived. This is surely part of what Permaculture is really about.

A summary of survival strategies.
It seems that chance and local geography govern individual cases of property survival. Wood sheds and our polyhouse survived when solidly built mud brick home did not. But the following facts seem important where the fire hit worst.

1 You need somewhere at least partially underground. Or a group of people and a building surrounded by bare earth with no vegetation anywhere near.
2 Gas systems are a problem. In bad conditions they can cause solidly built houses ,even mud brick ,to explode.
3 Do not rely on pumps of any kind.
4 Store food, water, clothes, shoes, camping gear etc. in a cellar or dug out close but separate from the house with important documents.
5 If you can last three months you can have time to grow new food crops.
6 Prepare for fire attack from all directions, there is no safe side.
7 Mulching trees does not reduce their survival chances.
8 Find out how much your house would cost to rebuild and insure for that amount. Do not take the insurance companies estimate as a guide. It takes a huge fight to get them to pay out but it can be won.
9 A house in a bushfire has better chance of survival if enough sensible adults work to defend it. A house in a fire storm may not survive what ever is done.
10 Skylights are likely to let fire into a house.
11 We must have a new category of fire above the total fire day that can be used when the conditions for killer fires are expected. This should signal immediate action of fire plans and force non –residents to leave the area.
12 If a fire is approaching sirens should be sounded in all possible ways. At this point no one should attempt to leave unless it is to a close by safer property.
13 Owning animals and having ways to maximise their survival ensures ones own chance of surviving total disaster. I had worked out that whatever disaster happened from terrorist attack to weather events the chances of the forest igniting were pretty high. We always have the paddock around the large dam grazed right down for this purpose. On other occasions when we have had more warning we put all the vehicles in the bare paddock as well as stock.

things get better

3.May 2009
A beautiful sunny day after a frosty night. Thank goodness we are now living in the double donga classroom. We have quite a comfortable little home that feels spacious and light. Next week the plumber is coming and we are having the gas stove , shower , kitchen sink and hot water connected up. Last week Gary , Edd and Josh worked hard and completed the building of a veranda deck . They put in a new entry door from the deck and got a water tank organised on a stand with new gutters going into it all ready for rain . ( if we ever get any).

The new door has no gaps round it and the indoor fly population has decreased fantastically. Well, it is either that or the cold weather that has brought about the change. It was pretty awful before so that each night we swatted for several hours before we could relax.

Today people from Permaculture Melborne groups have come for a working B and we are getting lots of much needed help. People are so wonderful. Three people from another accommodation business came and picked up all the broken glass at the brewery site which was an dreadful job.
Today the men are concentrating on the vineyard. Before we can let animals in there to graze we have to move all the wires which is a long trying task. We have not even got the boundary fences repaired yet so all the animals are still being hand fed in pens. We had to build a new pen for the sheep as their first pen had got too muddy.

Plants continue to appear. Old friends regenerating and suspicious new things that have sprung from who knows where. The pumpkins and zuchinnis took a bit of a hit from the frost this week but the silverbeat and asparagus are growing strongly now. Strangely the flowers that came on the apple trees have developed into tiny apples and great joy, my mulberry trees are recovering. I greave for the big oak by the drive and my honey loccut trees, they still look very dead.

I am still struggling with he insurance. This can take up hours each week and is very stressful. Basically we have to prove that our house cost us the money we paid insurance for. The independent estimation we got is not enough for them. It would not surprise me if when this is all over people unite for a class action against they companies for the stress and hours of work and delays they have caused. I am so worried about my daughter and her husband. They lost the brewery and their income in the fires but their house was OK. If the insurance company holds them up too long they could loose their house now to the banks !

We had a really reassuring meeting with our local council who at this stage seem all out to be helpful. They are happy with our plans to build in the centre of the paddock and to put up shed roofs first to harvest rain. Al is preparing plans for the sheds and the council says they can be passed in as little as two weeks. We must collect rain incase the drought continues next year.

It is so lucky that our son Al is an architect and has worked on sustainable buildings with the council before. I have often wished my sons were plumbers or electrictions but now I realise that given the right circumstances an architect is probably better ! We have worked out that if Edd and I join Al and family and watch his sons play soccer on Saturdays we can kill to birds at the same time by combining it with a planning meeting.