The Victorian bushfires of February 2009 captured the
attention of all Australians and made headlines around the world. One hundred
and seventy-three people lost their lives, the greatest number from any
bushfire event in this nation’s history.
In the wake of this tragedy much media and public commentary
emphasised recovery, resilience, community, self-sufficiency and renewed
determination. Peg Fraser, working as a Museum Victoria curator with survivors
in the small settlement of Strathewen, listened to these stories but also to
other, more challenging narratives.
The memories and thoughts that Fraser heard, and gives voice
to in this book, complicate much of what we thought we knew about the
experience of catastrophic natural events. Although all members of the same
community, Strathewen’s survivors lived through Black Saturday and its
aftermath in ways that were often very different from each other.
Beginning each chapter with an object from the bushfires – among
them a Trewhella jack, a burned mobile phone, a knitted chook and a brick
chimney – Fraser explores and reveals how each person’s identity, including as
a man or a woman with a particular social position in the town, impacted upon
experiences and understandings of loss, survival and even the future.
This is historical truth of the most vital, affecting and
powerful kind.
