Alpine Bushfires
Mark Kettle · 67 min
Behind the smoke and headlines of Black Summer, a government advisor reveals the intensely human toll of managing a catastrophic bushfire season — and why that story has never properly been told.
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On November 20, 2019, the day before Victoria's Code Red bushfire declaration, Mark Kettle stepped into a role he did not expect to hold. As fire advisor to the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, he became a filter between the raw, streaming data of an unfolding emergency and the decisions that shaped how the government, and the public, understood what was happening. For weeks between Christmas and early January, Mark received situation reports twice daily, sometimes three times. He sat metres from his desk, conscious of how long he was away from his phone, reducing five-page briefings to the few lines a Premier needed before standing at a podium to address a frightened state. When the first death came through, a firefighter with a young family, the crisis shifted from numbers to raw human loss. Mark felt the weight of it personally.
What struck Mark most was witnessing the professionals on the ground. He attended emergency officer meetings where incident management teams presented maps showing not just where fire would go, but where it had been redirected by fuel management work already done. The fire behaved as predicted. That confidence moved through him to the Minister, to the Premier's Office, and out to the public. Yet Mark also wondered what might have been different had Victoria listened to Traditional Owners' land management knowledge 150 years ago instead of only recently. When fires swept through Budjebim, a UNESCO site, the government's partnership with Traditional Owners revealed new knowledge about the land itself. After the fires ended, Mark and thousands of public servants moved straight into the pandemic response without processing what had happened. Three simultaneous inquiries ran while government shifted to work from home en masse for the first time. In 2021, Mark's body and mind reached their limit. He left government work and built his own business. The adversity had reshaped him, clarified what he valued, and shown him what he was capable of.
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