Life after Black Saturday: 'I'd never go back and I'd advise anyone, don't go'
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Gary Hughes had a distinct experience of Black Saturday, as both a reporter and a victim. The journalist won awards for his coverage of the disaster, but struggled with the way the media treated people who had lost everything. He speaks to Jane Cowan in part six of her series revisiting those affected by the bushfires.
Being a survivor of something like Black Saturday can sometimes feel like inhabiting a shadowland. At a certain point people stop wanting to hear that you're suffering.
You had insurance, didn't you? Didn't you just win $500 million in a class action?
"People do expect you to have moved on, and the media expects you to have moved on," Gary Hughes says.
"I mean, I can remember even after the first week I was doing an interview and I was sort of told, could I be a bit positive and uplifting because we'd had a lot of victims and a lot of tragedy.
"The media cycle, I guess, expected victims after a week to move on and to be talking about the future and being positive and rebuilding and of course that was the last thing you actually felt.
"Some people, a lot of people, are still sympathetic but a lot of people just sort of shrug. So you internalise a lot of it, apart from when you're with fellow survivors, and that's really the only time now when you can talk openly and honestly about what's going on in your life and how you're coping."
Call it compassion fatigue, call it forgetting. Either way, Black Saturday has become almost a secret that Gary and his wife carry around, an internal burden.
His life bears little resemblance to the one he was leading before Black Saturday.
For a start, almost everything the couple owns is second-hand, much of it scavenged from op shops. Material things just don't have the importance they once did.
It was as they sat watching their house in St Andrews burn that the couple decided it was time to give up the bush. But it has a been a slow letting go.
"I'm a little further down the road than I was, but I don't think the road will ever finish.
"People talk about how things will get better but every individual's case, it's a different rate of getting better — if it does get better."
Life after Black Saturday
Immediately after the fires, the couple stayed in an apartment in Preston and then moved to Reservoir, where they now live in cheek-by-jowl suburbia.
They only sold their land in St Andrews last year, severing the last tie. Even that didn't help.
"It would be nice to say it enabled us to move on. But in actual fact, we moved but not necessarily moved on."
They had settled in St Andrews in 1985, raising their daughter on the hilltop with views looking back to Melbourne. It was magical.
There were winter mornings when you'd wake up surrounded by fog lying in the valleys below, kangaroos grazing around the house. There was an echidna that one of the dogs would follow around. Kookaburras.
Giving up the bush has been like losing an old friend.
"In no way would I say it's part of the healing process. It's part of the forgetting process. In a way yes, I'm coping — I'm fine. But your definition of fine changes after a thing like Black Saturday. I mean you do get those daily flashbacks."
Gary was named Australian Journalist of the Year for his coverage of Black Saturday in The Australian.
But after seeing out the royal commission, he left journalism and hasn't returned. In the days after the fire swept through, he found himself torn in two directions.
One scene sticks in his mind. Gary was working, one of a group of reporters waiting at a roadblock near Kinglake, when locals drove past in their half melted 4WDs.
"They were hurling all sorts of abuse at the media, spitting out the windows and calling us every name under the sun and telling us to go away in no uncertain terms.
"And there I was, a member of the media on one side and on the other side I could identify, and wanted to climb in the car and hurl abuse at the media. It was a real tearing apart of emotions.
"Afterwards I thought about that. I thought about the role journalists perform, whether what we do is fair on the victims of trauma. And I guess my conclusion was that in a lot of the cases, it's not fair.
"I think I just came to the conclusion that a lot of what we did was not so much a waste of time, but it was no longer relevant to me. Certainly daily journalism, I just find that now, in a way, irrelevant."
Life in the suburbs has its advantages. Popping out for a litre of milk used to be a 16-kilometre round trip. Here you can pick up the phone and dial a pizza.
"One of the first things we did when we bought down in the suburbs is take the 'no junk mail' sign off the letterbox. Because we hadn't had junk mail for 25 years and to this day my wife avidly reads the junk mail," he laughs.
But really, there's one reason they're here: it's safe.
"People go live in those [fire-prone] places for all sorts of reasons. After Black Saturday, I think they're crazy, I've got to say.
"We'd had the property slashed, and yet the fire sort of came up through slashed paddocks and it still found enough fuel in a slashed paddock for the flames to be over 10 foot high and the actual earth itself burned.
"So my advice to anyone now would be: don't do it. It's not worth it. Your property will burn. Each to his own, but I'd never go back and I'd advise anyone, don't go."
On the day of the fires the couple had two dogs. One ran and hid. Then the house filled with smoke so black and thick you couldn't see more than a foot in front of your face.
It was Gary who made the decision to get out. Later the dog's body was found under a chair inside the front door. They had left through the side.
"I could have gone back and looked for the dog. I could have gone back and opened the front door. That deeply affected my daughter, the loss of her dog."
For Gary's wife, it's fire alarms. Maybe they are set off by something as harmless as burnt toast — but she is borderline hysterical.
When fire engulfed the house in St Andrews, all the internal alarms were screeching. Until they melted.
You learn not to shut down the thoughts, because you can't. You learn to compartmentalise, to accept this is part of your life now and to live around it as best you can.
In the rebuilt communities Gary detects an understandable reticence to revisit what happened on Black Saturday.
"I think in a lot of cases, the people who lost their lives are remembered but not much talked about. I think that probably there's a feeling amongst the survivors that the newcomers who come in don't want to hear about what happened.
"They don't want to hear about the people that died. That's for various reasons. I suppose if you've just moved into an area, you don't want to be told it's bushfire prone and what could happen."
Part seven in this series will be published on Monday.
Topics: bushfire, community-and-society, st-andrews-3761, vic
