Alpine Bushfires
Janice Newnham · 49 min
Trapped inside the Black Summer bushfires with her family fighting flames through the night, Janice Newnham reveals that surviving a disaster is only the beginning of the battle.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
On Boxing Day 2019, Janice Newnham cut short a camping trip with her family when smoke from a lightning strike drifted across the Murray River. Back on their farm near Wawa in regional Victoria, she and her son spent hours clearing gutters, positioning water drums, and moving cattle to safety while her husband Crandall left to fight the fire on a CFA truck. What followed was a night that tested everything: watching charred leaves fall from the sky as the fire jumped ridges, driving a water tanker in darkness with flames on both sides of the road, and repeatedly checking on neighbours while not knowing if her own house would survive. The fire came at them twice. Crandall, operating a bulldozer in the thick of it, nearly got caught by flames and was only saved by a last-minute wind shift. Through it all, Janice never photographed her husband or sons, held back by a superstition that a final picture would be the last one she'd ever take of them.
What made Janice's recovery different was that she couldn't leave the farm. Police roadblocks trapped her there for eight days, forcing her to keep feeding the remaining cattle and doing the jobs that needed doing. The real turning point came when she finally slipped through a roadblock to reach the Gingelic Hub, the community relief centre she had helped set up. Seeing people she thought might be lost, and people she'd feared she'd never see again, broke something open. She found that talking with neighbours and community members who were in the same situation worked far better than individual counselling. She documented everything in a book called From the Inside, using photographs and blog posts she'd written during the fire itself, to process what had happened. Three years later, controlled burning on her own land triggered unexpected panic. Healing, she learned, isn't linear. But she holds to a phrase from a Beatles song and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: it'll be all right in the end, and if it's not all right, it's not the end.
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