Melbourne had the strange experience, this February, of reading and listening to bushfire reports for five days while neither seeing nor smelling smoke.
1983 was a very different memory. On that Ash Wednesday night the metropolitan area was completely covered with strong eucalyptus smoke. Blackened leaves and twigs flew overhead, many still burning, to land in streets, on roofs and in gardens.
But this February, the senses felt an absence. The body lived with emotional responses but had no sensory backup connections. The winds kept blowing north. Everything was happening over the horizon. Melbourne lived the fires in its head.
When the mind has no sensory leads to interpret, words become critical. On the fourth day, Tuesday, Michael Leunig published a cartoon. It was a white rectangle containing just two things: the image of a tapering green gum leaf, and above the leaf five words, 'her beauty and her terror'.
The picture was primal. In the retreat of his mind Leunig asked for a line of poetry that helped somehow to fix what was happening everywhere around Melbourne. The green leaf represents beauty, but unstated and by implication the terror is the flaming leaf, literally a taper, falling wherever in ember attack.
Leunig knew that the line comes from a poem learnt by most Australian schoolchildren, Dorothea MacKellar's 'My Country'. By stripping the poem of its panoramic elation, we were confronted with the essence of MacKellar's vision. Again at breakfasts across Melbourne, the question was asked, 'How does Leunig get it so right?' Black humour and sentimentalism, typical Leunig features, were missing; the cartoon used the pure elements of the moment to make a notice. By week's end 'Her Beauty and Her Terror' was being used in headlines and articles like a talisman.
Effective words from leaders are part of the definition of statesmanship. Premier John Brumby's powerful warnings to stay at home on Saturday and not to drive in the country no longer sounded alarmist by Sunday morning.
The Prime Minister travelled quickly to Victoria. One of his prepared lines became the sentence of the moment, here and overseas: 'Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria.' It is a consolidated line. Kevin Rudd is half-remembering William Congreve's lines, 'Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.' The verb 'visited' is unusual, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was thinking of its use in the King James Bible, 'The Dayspring from on high hath visited us,' words from Luke's Gospel often heard at Christmas.
Rudd uses 'archaic' English to establish authority and meaning. 'The good people of Victoria' might normally be heard as ironic or even sarcastic, especially coming from a Queenslander. But in the context the expression served several purposes. It was an inclusive statement, all Australians are with Victoria and necessarily own what is happening. To say people are good means they are not malicious, the fires are not their fault. The manicheans and doomsayers in our midst will not have the day. Good people deserve our assistance in such circumstances. Rudd, too, is warning against the language of blame.
Malcolm Turnbull did not get off to a good start. He said he was at a loss for words about the bushfires. We all knew what he felt, no one was about to say they could adequately explain or describe what was going on. But leaders have to say something, not nothing.
His second attempt was to describe the fires as a 'terrible beauty'. Was he thinking of the transformative line in W. B. Yeats's poem 'Easter 1916' ('All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born')? Or was he just mangling MacKellar? Hard to tell. There is no arguable connection between the Easter Rising in Dublin and bushfire, and we don't know if he had seen the Leunig. But to give Turnbull his due, he was at least reaching after words to describe the scale of the disaster, its awesomeness.
ABC Radio kept up a permanent report of all the fires. Fire lines were described in exact detail. Lonely hills and remote road intersections in the bush became the focus of intense analysis. The names of familiar towns, mountains and valleys suddenly provoked surprise and concern.
When a distressed man rang through to say something very serious was happening at Kinglake, it was a new name to add to the watch list. Only later did Melbourne come to the realisation that within half an hour of that call, most of Kinglake had been destroyed. Like most people later, I sat asking, How fast is that? What does fast mean? What kind of fire are we talking about here? Fast?
The Dresden word 'firestorm' was accurate in terms of fire behaviour, but firestorm has become misused in the media simply to mean any big fierce fire. Kinglake was different. Witnesses said it was a fireball and who am I back in Melbourne but to respect their testimony?
The fire was like nothing in living memory. But 'fireball' made me think. The English vocabulary for bushfire is limited. My imagination could not get past flying meteorites in sci-fi movies, or the antics of that lunatic rocker Jerry Lee Lewis. I had to think deeper.
During the week people talked about introducing a fire grading system, Levels 1–5. What words would be employed for each Level? Total Fire Ban means what it says, but a fireball is not the same. One can only ponder on all the various words for fire that must have existed in ancient Indignenous languages.
In the first week of the fires everyone started telling stories, to family and friends, but also to strangers in shops, on trams and trains, at work and over lunch. The Weather Bureau gave Melbourne its daily one word prediction for the next day. Sunny, Windy, Cloudy. Everyone dreaded another hot day. Showers appeared only in dreams.
But for Friday, the seventh day of the fires, the Bureau made a satisfactory call for realism. Indeed, it was a relief to read the change, just one word: 'Smokehaze'.
LINK:
Red Cross Bushfire Appeal
Philip Harvey is the Poetry Editor of Eureka Street.