There are bushfire images in the exhibition The Fire Did Not Beat Us so very vivid that they seem to radiate heat. To go up close and to peer into them is to fear the flames will singe your eyebrows.
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The exhibition (opened on Thursday, the first day of the bushfire season) asks us to think of the 100 years of bushfire fighting in and around the ACT. For if it is true (and of course it isn't ) that fire is a malevolent fiend that comes looking for us (after the 2003 Canberra fires there came the famous question "How did the fire know where we lived?") then that fiend has come here looking for us again and again.
On Thursday morning firefighter Pat Barling, co-ordinator of the exhibition was busy at work setting things up at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. He was resplendent in Billy Connolly lookalike facial hair and in a T-shirt that confided its wearer was "Cleverly disguised as a responsible fire fighter".
He hopes the display will alert us to the history of our region's firefighting here. And there has been a superabundance of fire to fight.
"Everyone is fixated on 2003," he reflects, "but the thing is that every 20-odd years we've had a significant fire event.
"Yes, 2003 was very bad. But it wasn't unique by any stretch."
He says that the organisation of local fire fighting has actually "evolved", since the first organisings in 1915, with changes made in response to those major fires and the lessons learned from them.
Of our fires he nominates the 1952 fires as especially harrowing. In the exhibition there is a Canberra Times front page of February 6, 1952, calling out "OBSERVATORY BUILDINGS LOST IN MOUNT STROMLO BLAZE". The paper reports menacing fires all about. The 1952 fires ravaged local farms and killed livestock.
We ventured that perhaps it is understandable that Canberrans have found the 2003 fires so nightmarish because so many homes were destroyed. Barling says that, yes, of course he understands that, but for a farmer of 1952 to lose all of his sheep (his livelihood) and farm buildings was "no different [as a tragedy] to people losing their houses".
"So yes, of course 2003 felt personal for people but people need to understand that those fires weren't unique. One could argue that there have been as many as 12 major fire events in the 100 years. It depends on how you define things. And we've had a couple of lucky escapes. We seem to have had a very lucky escape in 1965. Then there were the 1994 fires. The whole of NSW seemed to be burning then, but we somehow got away [relatively unscathed]."
Yes, a stark January 6,1994, Canberra Times front page in the exhibition shrills "FIERCE FIGHTING TO SAVE HOMES – 30 Curtin homes evacuated", and reports bushfire crises all around our region.
Then, one of the most eyebrow-singeing images in the exhibition (pictured here on our page) is from a January 1985 fire. Jeff Cutting's startling picture shows a disabled and blazing ACT brigade fire tanker abandoned in the nick of time in the Lands End fire at Belconnen.
Pat Barling hopes passionately that the exhibition will encourage us to appreciate and be grateful to all the men and women who, organised since 1915, have fought our bushfires.
"It's all about people. People are the ones that put the fires out. All the technology they may have and use is just a tool to assist the basics. In a sense we are still fighting fires the way we did 100 years ago. Technology has changed slightly but basically you do still have to put people on the ground. We all ought to know what awesome efforts those guys did back then [when there were no good fire trails and no assistance from bulldozers and helicopters]. They basically went in there and beat the crap out of the fire and put it out. And in some ways we still do just that today."
One especially evocative "back then" image in the exhibition (pictured here) is of a team of 1936 fire "beaters" pausing in their work of beating out fires using branchlets they've plucked from nearby trees. They have no true equipment, no protective garb. There are lots of bare arms.
"This sums up how we used to fight fires," Barling marvelled, looking at these dishevelled warriors.
Barling has no patience with the superstitious notion that fire knows where we live and that it wants to come and get us. He even thinks the notion may be dangerous because when we think irrationally about fire we may not take rational precautions against it.
"I don't think we respect fire enough. We sometimes make out that fire is evil. But it's not. It's not personal. It'll just do what it does. People are tending to sort of personalise fire and are making it into the bad guy. But if there's no fuel there's no fire. And you can't just on the first of October [official start of the fire season] start preparing your house. It has to be continuous. You can't be complacent and say to yourself 'It'll be a quiet season. I don't have to worry about it'. "
The Fire Did Not Beat Us exhibition has opened at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre and continues until November 15. Go to www.tuggeranongarts.com for more details.
