Alpine Bushfires
Janice Newnham · 67 min
A beef farmer who lost 80% of her land to the Black Summer bushfires turned grief into a book, a community recovery committee, and a blueprint for healing that a trauma expert says captures the science of storytelling better than almost anything else.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Janice Newnham is a beef farmer from the remote Victorian Alpine community of Wawa. On 30 December 2019, during the Black Summer bushfires, she and her family found themselves in the direct path of a fire so fast and fierce that it created a tornado that leapt over the road and ignited the neighbouring mountain in seconds. While her husband Crandall worked a bulldozer and her son fought spot fires, Janice stayed on the property, moving cattle to safety, managing hoses, and watching the smoke close in. She drove diesel and supplies toward towering flames to reach them. When she thought the house was gone, her son told her to evacuate. Her husband saved it by returning through the smoke to extinguish the front trees. All occupied houses on their road survived; the unoccupied ones were destroyed.
For eight days after, police roadblocks meant Janice could not leave without losing the right to return, so she stayed managing the remaining cattle. The first time she left the farm, she went to the Gingelic Hub emergency relief centre and found something unexpected: the power of being in a room with people who had lived through the same thing. She discovered that formal counselling did not help her as much as community connection did. Men in her community, including Crandall, struggled to debrief because they felt they had to keep emotions buried; recovery workers had to find indirect ways to help them talk without framing it as mental health support.
Janice documented the fire and recovery in a self-published book called 'From the Inside', and became a driving force in her community's recovery committee, writing grants and building infrastructure. Three years on, she experienced a setback when the weight of the recovery phase caught up with her. She carries hypervigilance about her family's whereabouts, and certain triggers still bring her back to the fire. But the green returning to the blackened hills, and the trees regenerating, remind her of something larger than herself. Her message to others: it will be all right in the end, and if it is not all right, it is not the end.
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