Alpine Bushfires
Jill Graham · 27 min
When Australia's Black Summer fires threatened to swallow two Alpine valleys, it was a neighbourhood centre manager — fielding panicked calls, worrying about her son three days incommunicado, and rallying her community — who held the fraying edges together.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
When the Black Summer fires swept toward the Alpine valleys in late 2019, Jill Graham was managing two neighbourhood centres while fielding panicked calls from people who had no idea what to do. The Ovens Valley and King Valley weren't directly hit, but fire was close enough that evacuation warnings sent people in different directions, some to places that turned out to be just as dangerous. Jill spent days deciding what to pack from the centres themselves, moving between locations, watching smoke cloud the valleys, and listening to people ask if they could drop their possessions at the centre because their utes were full. She learned at a community meeting in Moyu that strike teams were stretched so thin they couldn't help if fire reached the town. That meant the elderly residents who weren't on Facebook wouldn't hear the news at all.
While managing the chaos on the ground, Jill's son Peter was managing a caravan park near Batemans Bay with 17 women and children still there as the fire came down. When he told her the fire was about to reach them, the line cut. She didn't hear from him for three days.
Since then, Jill has worked on two major projects to close the gap between official emergency plans and what community groups can actually do in those first 72 hours when services are stretched thin. She's learned that people don't always ask for help directly, and that telling your story, even the hard parts, matters for recovery. Her advice to people still carrying fire trauma is simple: talk to family, friends, or strangers, because bottling it up only compounds the next disaster.
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