I didn’t actually get up close to this.
My name’s Rhonda Ayliffe.
I’m multigenerational from Cobargo.
I’m working on probably what a lot of people
are working on in my area, and that’s fire recovery, even though we’re what,
I think it’s 29, and counting, months past the fire.
Recovery is a very long process.
The Badja Forest Road fire was a really small fire
that had started a few days earlier over the hills, about 50 kilometres
to the west of my town, and
without really any warning.
We’d had a days notice
that perhaps we might have ember attack come to our town.
But through the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve
and the beginning of that day, the fire just turned
into a pyroclastic firestorm and it just raced through everything.
So it came from 50 kilometres away and it just exploded.
This was on the main street of my town and
right in the heart of my town.
This got taken out along with
all of the buildings on both the east and west of the street.
This sat in front of our public toilet with all of the gardens that were there.
And next door to it was Bangles Gallery.
And next door to that was the yoga studio and then it was the leather shop.
And then it was my family shop.
And then where my grandparents had owned
and when you saw it in the main street,
it was in amongst all of that rubble, it was in amongst all that destruction.
One of the things I think that’s really important about a phone box,
when you lose a phone box, it’s what it represented
that was lost immediately in just a handful of hours.
When you have a disaster of the magnitude we experienced,
you lose every single piece of critical infrastructure.
We lost
all communications.
We lost phone, internet, mobile towers.
The only way that we had to communicate was person to person.
And when you're in a community, person to person,
you have to trust each other and have each other’s back.
When you want to sort of talk about what what this also can be a symbol of,
it’s how major
infrastructure fails and community doesn’t.
When you live in a small community, you know everyone and everyone knows you.
So in the immediate aftermath, people looked after
people care.
You know, we wanted to know that
the people were okay.
And learning
that not everybody was okay was really hard.
It was interesting watching how
certain people came to the forefront
that you wouldn’t expect and just, they just did what had to be done.
And the first things that had to be done was people had to find a place to stay
and to eat and to have some clothes and
folk just dug into what they had and shared.
So it started from sharing.
And I think that sharing continues today, that we share resources,
we share ideas, we share a common desire to recover,
not to put back what was there from before, but to rebuild.
Holding the very best things that we are
and the very best things that any small place is, is community.
That’s the heart of any place.
That it sits next to a power pole from from Cyclone Tracy
sort of says a great deal about Australian history,
that these were pivotal moments, at least in my lifetime.
I can remember
Cyclone Tracy and I’m never going to forget the Badja Forest Road
fire in Cobargo.
I don’t think people should forget those things.
And so it moves me
that people will remember my town.