Flames rise in Bunyip state forest, east of Melbourne, in 2009. The bushfires left the state of Victoria devastated yet some people are moving into areas at most risk if they occur again. Photograph: Andrew Brownbill/EPA
Saturday 7 February 2009 has been described as one of Australia's worst peacetime disasters. Following weeks of intense heat, hundreds of fires raged across the state of Victoria, on a day that became known as Black Saturday. These fires went on to claim the lives of 173 people and destroy almost 2,000 homes.
Kate McMahon, a Melbourne resident, remembers large parts of the city being covered by a fine layer of ash. "It was frightening and heart breaking at the time," says McMahon, an urban strategist at consultancy Hello City. "You could smell the smoke in the middle of the city and we all knew people who lived in bush properties or small townships who were affected by the fires."
As a backpacker living in Melbourne, I also felt the danger lurking in the city's backyard that day. Working in a dusty field to the west of the city, at a charity polo match, the 46C (115F) heat was stifling for the mainly northern European travellers who were providing the hospitality. As we returned by minibus later that afternoon, the sun was disappearing behind a hazy smog. Not that we realised at the time but that haze resulted from the catastrophic fires raging to the north and east of the city.
The areas around Melbourne had been hit by bushfires before, but the fires of 2009 were the most devastating for decades, with many more fatalities that previous instances. Fanned by strong winds, the fires spread rapidly. A sudden change of direction meant households became trapped just as they thought the danger had passed.
In the days that followed, the smoke seemed to linger in the area while names of the victims began to filter through. I began to hear firsthand accounts of the disaster and its aftermath, including from a friend who had been evacuated from the commuter town of Kinglake, where 120 people died. Returning to work on a major infrastructure project after Black Saturday, my friend's first task was to dispose of the charred carcasses of animals who had died in the inferno.
Weeks earlier, I had spent Christmas in a holiday chalet with fellow backpackers in the pretty little town of Marysville, 60 miles from Melbourne. It was virtually wiped out on Black Saturday, the surrounding gumtrees providing ample fuel for the fire. The inferno may not have touched Melbourne directly, but Black Saturday nonetheless forced Melburnians to re-examine their whole way of life, including the widely-shared aspiration to live in spacious, low-rise housing in the suburbs with a garden and a pool. The fires ruled out future development sites that were hard to defend, meaning that plans to accommodate Melbourne's growing population within the city's existing urban area took on a new urgency.
A house being rebuilt after the bushfires, on the outskirts of Melbourne, in 2010. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
Gilbert Rochecouste, founder and managing director of placemaking consultancy Village Well, says he knows of a nursery in a bushfire risk zone that stipulates that parents must work within a specified radius so that they can collect their children in case of a fire alert. Policies like this, he says, make it impossible for parents to commute into Melbourne from these towns and forces them to rethink their living or working arrangements.
Melbourne's suburbs are not as close to the bush as Sydney or Canberra's but they are still close enough to give urban planners a headache. In 2009, planning academic Professor Michael Buxton of RMIT University warned that thousands of undeveloped housing plots in peripheral areas could be in areas of future bushfires. At the time of Black Saturday, Melbourne was working out how to accommodate an extra 1 million people by 2030, and Buxton's warnings added weight to calls to restrict developments in urban fringe locations.
He identified "highly fire-prone" land that formed part of the Melbourne metropolitan region area, with the population of this urban fringe growing at 1.8% each year despite these risks. The state government's planning strategy for Melbourne had already sought to increase densities within urban "activity zones". In the aftermath of Black Saturday, these policies took on a new resonance, with calls for sprawl to be curbed and for development of holiday homes and hobby farms on dispersed sites to cease.
Man and the great outdoors
McMahon contrasts how other cities around the world in similarly precarious settings manage the relationship between the city and the environment more easily than Melbourne. She notes that Australian cities sit awkwardly in a landscape that most non-indigenous Australians do not fully understand.
"We are still working out how to protect the landscape from the people, and how to protect the people from the landscape," she says. "We will need to start to work out the relationship between cities and towns and the bush pretty fast."
Five years on, both Australia and Victoria have new governments, with the Liberal prime minister at national level, Tony Abbott, adopting a more sceptical tone over climate change than his Labor predecessors. There are also signs of an urban revival. Melbourne is regularly appearing in polls as one of the most livable cities in the world in publications including the Economist and Monocle. Recent statistics from the state government shows that Melbourne's population is growing more quickly than that of regional Victoria. Inner Melbourne's is growing most rapidly at 2.5% compared with 1.7% for Victoria as a whole. At state level, there is a new plan for Melbourne, which will guide development up to 2050.
With Melbourne expected to grow from around 4.3 million today to 6.5 million in 2050, the plan promotes growth in defined locations within an expanded group of activity centres including Frankston, Dandenong and Broadmeadows. But while there is evidence of an urban revival in Victoria, the popularity of the commuter towns that bore the brunt of Black Saturday does not seem to have diminished either.
Danielle Clode, author of A future in flames, a personal account of the bushfires, says people will still move to communities like the one she used to live in in Victoria, for lifestyle reasons. "People in those areas own horses or want to grow grapes." She adds: "Our memory and capacity to prepare for fires is very poor", a former resident of the Kinglake area. "It is the Eden mentality. You live in a paradise 99% of the time, you have a 1% chance that it will turn to hell."
An aerial view of the burnt=out ruins of houses in Marysville, north of Melbourne, in 2009. Photograph: Julian Smith/EPA/Corbis
In 2010, following the Victoria Bushfire royal commission's final report, the then state premier, John Brumby, announced a policy to offer some of the residents who lost their homes the chance to sell their land to the state. Some 550 households were thought to be eligible, yet fewer applications than expected were made – in the end around 115 went through.
Craig Czarny, a director of the Melbourne-based consultancy Hansen Planning, says he has found it particularly surprising to see how resilient communities affected by the bushfires have been, with many going ahead and rebuilding in what many would consider threatening locations. "I am often amazed at the short memory we collectively have," he says.
Dr Alan March, an associate professor in urban planning at the University of Melbourne, says research shows that most people living in high-risk areas tend to ignore the threats. "In contrast, many of those who were impacted by the last fires have left bushland areas to avoid reliving the trauma," March adds.
Five years on, with Melbourne again experiencing weeks of temperatures approaching 40C, part of the city's growing appeal is its apparent resilience to hazards such as bushfires, compared with the outer suburbs and commuter towns. However, according to McMahon, "it might be just a false sense of security".
Her colleague Sunny Haynes, an urban strategist who had arrived in Melbourne from the UK a year before Black Saturday, suggests there is "a kind of denial at both the personal and political level" about the increasing likelihood and ferocity of future fire events. "Somehow we saw it as this one-off catastrophic event," she says. "Yet, we're melting in unprecedented heatwaves again even now."
One of Haynes's memories of the aftermath of Black Saturday was driving through Marysville and seeing bright green shoots covering the still fire-blackened tree trunks. "I remember thinking, 'of course, this is all part of a totally natural, healthy, timeless way of being for the forests'. It's just humans who are completely devastated by it."
*Cross-posted from Guardian Cities
*Head photo: Elizabeth Donoghue, Flickr