Communist Party of Australia

The bushfire catastrophe in Victoria provoked a number of media types, the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien among them, to loudly question the wisdom of NSW and Victorian fire authorities’ advice to residents to “leave early, if you are going to leave”, otherwise “prepare your property then stay and defend it”.

The negative comments from the bourgeois media were prompted, of course, by the number of people who were trapped in their cars trying to flee at the last minute. And there can be no doubt that if they had evacuated much earlier, hours earlier, the loss of life would have been a lot less.

But it is also clear from the survivors’ accounts that no one anticipated the speed and the ferocity of the Victorian fires. As someone who lives in the bush, in a house surrounded on three sides by trees two or three times the height of the house, I am acutely aware of the danger posed by bushfires.

The media pundits were none too subtly advocating a policy of enforced mass evacuations in advance of any and every fire threat. And of course that would certainly reduce the number of potential human casualties. But the glib mantra “homes can be replaced – lives cannot” is simply inadequate for this question.

Some readers will remember the fires about thirty years ago when the NSW Police Minister panicked and declared that “we will lose 1,000 homes”. He had the police close major road and rail arteries, trapping hundreds of people in their cars on the Central Coast for over a week.

People who left work to return to their partners and children in case the fire came to their street were turned back by police, although the fire was not yet actually at their street, and when they persisted in attempts to join their families they were arrested and even handcuffed!

Such heavy-handed policing was unquestionably counter-productive. Up our way, people sneaked behind the police roadblocks to attend to stock and in one area to water and feed the animals penned in a wildlife refuge, all of whom would have died of thirst if it had not been for these law-breaking amateur “blockade runners”.

I was reminded of those times when watching a woman on a television news clip from Victoria beseeching a young copper to let her family through to their property to check on their stock. They had already lost their house in the fires, and were understandably anxious to save what they could of their surviving animals, if any.

Her property like many others had been declared a “crime scene”, however, and although she argued her case cogently (“we’ve already lost our home – do you want us to lose what little stock we have left as well?”), she was up against the military mindset and the copper merely answered “I’m sorry, I have my orders”.

The Rural Fire Service in NSW, like its Victorian counterpart, is opposed to the enforced evacuation of residents, believing instead that people should have the right to decide whether they are going to leave or fight. And there are sound reasons for such a policy.

A few years ago when fire ravaged the Ridgeway between Tuggerah Lakes and Gosford, it was very noticeable that the houses that were saved were the ones that were defended by residents while the ones that were lost were predominantly those belonging to absentee owners resident in Sydney.

It stands to reason that residents know where to locate swimming pools, dams and water tanks, how to gain ready access to their properties, and what assets should have priority for rescuing or protecting.

Evacuating people en masse simply leaves too much undefended, placing a huge additional burden on the bushfire brigades and dooming a vast number of extra people to the catastrophic loss of everything they owned.

I worked in a business that was burnt out once. That was not my personal loss, and yet it was traumatic enough. To lose your home, all your possessions, your children’s toys, your books, your mementos and keepsakes – everything, would be calamitous, utterly devastating.

If staying and defending can prevent that, it should be the preferred policy of most people. And yet, there is the problem posed by the type of lightning fast fires that fell upon the unfortunate people in Victoria.

I was struck by the ingenuity of one family who fled down the paddock when the fire reached their house, heading for the creek. The creek they knew was dry, but they carried wet bed-sheets with them and they went feet-first down the wombat burrows in the creek bank, pulling the sheets in on top of themselves.

They survived, which raises the question: why don’t Australian bush homes have fire-proof cellars?

American farm dwellings have storm cellars in which to shelter from tornadoes; why can’t we have dugouts in which to shelter from bushfires? They do not have to be very big or elaborately equipped since they would be used only for very short periods at the height of a blaze.

Surely governments funds can be allocated for research into developing such a safe shelter which can then be mandated into the design of new rural dwellings without adding hugely to the cost of construction. In-roof water tanks with spray fittings and generator-driven pumps are already mandated for some houses in heavily timbered areas.

However, so long as houses are built as a for-profit industry rather than to satisfy human needs, the widespread construction of fire-proof housing will remain a dream, a dream that will have to await the advent of socialism before it can be realised.

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