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.