Kinglake

Consider the power of fire and water - utterly different on the ground, but similarly affecting life and property.

 The awful results of natural disasters appear on screens and websites in millions of homes across Britain nearly every year. However, rarely do the fires, floods and earthquakes blitzing Australians, Californians, Italians, Japanese and Chinese stay in the British memory for long, if at all. Yet not all termed ‘natural’ may be as they seem.

For Victorians in Australia Black Saturday means fire, terror, death, and loss. Families in Kinglake, north east of Melbourne, still recall the hours of horror during the bushfires of 7^th February 2009. A hundred and twenty people of the township lost their lives animals did too. This remains the worst day ever for loss of life in the state of Victoria. Across the state the death toll reached 173; over 2,000 homes were burnt down with 3,500 buildings destroyed in all. Horses, cattle and sheep  - often the entire livelihoods of farmers – perished.

In the same year, residents of Cockermouth in Cumbria experienced their own catastrophe on 20^th November when overflowing rivers, the Cocker and the Derwent, met in a maelstrom and engulfed the town. A policeman lost his life. The dreadful waters changed livelihoods forever.

I first visited Kinglake two years after the fires. Properties had been re-built; the unglamorous and short main street fronted a handful of shops. We gave some business to the one coffee shop but there were ghosts about. Where were all the regulars? Many had quit the town, leaving with their remaining possessions to start a new life elsewhere. Across the hillsides as far as the eye could see stood the blackened and twisted stems of eucalyptus trees.

 

Visiting Cockermouth this year I saw the bridges had been replaced; bookshop, butcher and café look prosperous (despite further floods and evacuations in 2015). Kinglake now has a supermarket, a petrol station and an air of purposeful, if not prosperous, commerce. The same hills around the settlement still reveal the skeletons of eucalypts in every direction, mournful even in their regeneration. Here is a landscape that is not far removed from images of the Somme one hundred years ago. Only those who lived in King Lake in 2009 can guess how the terror they faced compared with that of the Victorians at Mouquet Farm and Pozieres in Picardy a hundred years ago.

So today it is credible that first time visitors to the two towns may ask: ‘did these disasters really happen or are they your nightmare?’

But here’s the thing. Not all those Victorian bushfires were ‘natural’ disasters. Can you believe that some were and still are started deliberately? The same applies to the 2016 Californian forest fires. Did you see that last month’s earthquake in Accumoli in central Italy flattened houses that were inadequately designed due to the corrupt practices of architects, planners and builders?

When I walk the streets of Kinglake and Cockermouth I wonder if twenty first century man is sane when living in, and managing, the landscape. We wage war across it and in the process contaminate it for years; some (idiotic or criminal or both) torch the forests; some English (planners, builders and politicians) deliberately build houses on flood plains and Italian (ditto) on the earth’s fissures. And now in September 2016 we read that the much-in-the-spotlight National Trust want to play around with the Lake District landscape by diverting a river. Is this wise? Every year the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of Australia and the US seems greater.

My story about Kinglake has a happy ending. When helpers went into the community later in February 2009 amongst the charred farms was found a wandering Welsh pony. A vet from our son’s town of Woodend, helping deal with the sick and homeless animals, brought Bob home after nobody in Kinglake claimed him. Bob is now the loved companion of our grandson.

If you would like to share your experiences of any of the landscapes discussed in these blogs please record them in the Comments section.