On the burnt, twisted metal of a garage door amid the wreckage of a house in Jindabyne Street, Duffy, are the roughly painted words in bright red:
Land for Sale. 13 Fireball St Duffy.
That land was first sold in the late 1960s or early 1970s as Canberra stretched further south and west into the treeless Woden Valley and Weston Creek.
In those days land cost next to nothing. The prize blocks along Eucumbene Drive with views over the city went for as little as $1000 in 1971. The entire infrastructure was in place. Electricity, water and sewerage were laid on and the streets laid out. What irony – given the firestorm last Saturday — that the streets in Duffy are all named after dams, lakes and water reserves. The charred remains around the streets of western Duffy are a different world from the cool clear waters of Eucumbene Dam, Jindabyne Dam, Lake Cargelligo, Jemalong Weir and Lake Eildon after which they were named when the suburb was laid out according to best planning practice at the time.
Some of that practice undoubtedly contributed to the high toll of houses in the fire. But that is no cause for radical change or the abandonment of planning the city.
Just as there was a freak confluence of conditions that made the fire so ferocious in the first place, there was a combination of planning and building factors that made the toll on houses worse when the fire got here. The heat, winds, drought and Canberra’s good response to water restrictions in allowing gardens to dry out were predominant factors, but if you build a Bush Capital bush fires come with the territory.
When Walter Burley Griffin, of Chicago, designed Canberra he was heavily influenced by the City Beautiful Movement. The movement grew out of Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893. It was a reaction to the squalid cities that arose out of the Industrial Revolution. Factories and workers cramped dwellings made for an unhealthy combination. Griffin wanted a city that had open space for relaxation and relief. His plan decreed that there should be no building on the hills so people anywhere in the national capital could look up and see green.
It has resulted in a lot of bush in the city which is susceptible to fire. Until now that has been managed well. In the past 30 years, fires on Mount Ainslie, Red Hill and O’Connor Ridge have come to the doorstep of those suburbs without loss of houses.
In Duffy’s case, the city was allowed to develop to the edge of the pine forest. The pine forest was there first. One of the attractions of Duffy when it was first built was that the pine forest would prevent adjacent development. Moreover, under the Griffin principles Eucumbene Drive was the building limit anyway because beyond was the ridge.
After Griffin, the Depression and War, Prime Minister Robert Menzies wanted to make something better of Canberra. He set up the National Capital Development Commission and transferred Government departments. The NCDC abandoned Griffin’s radial road plan in favour of circular streets, crescents, circuits and cul-de-sacs. The aim was to reduce traffic in suburbs. But the NCDC was faithful to the aims of the City Beautiful Movement and created a series parks, walkways and cycleways through each suburb and treed them well. Again, more trees and shrubs to burn. In the case of Duffy, Chapman, Holder and Kambah these very pathways were pathways through which fire could travel deep into the suburb.
In 1912 the Limestone Plains were largely treeless. The treeing of the capital was critical to the Griffin plan. Another of the ironies of last weekend’s fires is that the area most affected – Weston Creek – was named after the man who led the charge on putting the trees into the capital – Charles Weston.
Weston, and after him Lindsay Pryor, headed the variously named parks and gardens administration. Fifty million trees have gone out of the government nurseries in Yarralumla into suburban Canberra. The Government issued 10 trees and 40 shrubs to each new leaseholder. Such a policy was fine if the species mix took account of fire resistance. But in the late 1960s – when Weston Creek was built the trend was to go almost totally native, substantially increasing the risk of fire.
And then there are Canberra’s wooden fences. Again paths for fire.
I cycled through the area early on Thursday morning. I cycled primarily because ActewAGL, Telstra, Transact and others have a difficult enough job without unnecessary vehicles in the way, but also because a cycle can go down the cycleways and footpaths where the fire went. And you can cover more ground and get a better impression than on foot.
Detailed research might reveal a different picture, but it seemed to me metal fences and brick walls helped the adjacent houses and proximity to pathways and reserves was a disadvantage. But would you significantly change suburban layout in the rebuilding and in the creation of new suburbs?
Oddly, the answer to that lies in the ruins themselves. Going along Jemalong Street, into Eildon Place and up the pathway to Eucumbene Drive was horrific. Unfortuately, the journalism of exaggeration and hyperbole has now blunted adjectives needed to describe scenes of true horror and distress. The scene engenders a physical reaction verging on nausea.
Many houses were taken to the foundations. Others had half a wall left standing with fallen beams around. It was like an earthquake zone. Burnt out cars made it look like a war zone.
The scene is made more poignant by the occasional house that survived.
We have seen the newspaper photographs and the television. And we have our own thoughts about how we might feel to lose our home. But these things miss an essential point. The collective devastation means even those whose homes have been spared have lost their neighbourhood that has taken 35 years to create.
You can understand the despair that led to the For Sale sign at “13 Fireball Street’’. I hope it is not permanent.
As you go back down the hill away from the main fire front there is a dappling effect. It goes from a street with virtually every house destroyed, through to half and half, then back to an almost normal suburb with only the occasional burnt out house to remind you of the wreackage behind and then within in a fairly short distance back to complete normalcy.
And that is the point about the Bush Capital. Right now the burnt zone – without any vegetation, just masonry, steel and burnt-out cars – represents the ugly part of the urban landscape.
As one resident – a regular morning walker around the suburb — said on Thursday, he was sick of seeing it (in just five days of suburban walk). He wanted to see some green, some relief.
Maybe there is a case for changing the species planted; for changing some building requirements and changing fencing material. But the essential character of the built form integrating with the natural landscape should not be changed.
We have to weigh up the benefits and detriments. Fire risk maybe greater in a Bush Capital. But all the statistics show that Canberrans live longer, do more exercise and are generally healthier than people elsewhere in Australia because it is a well-planned Bush Capital. We have fewer car deaths and injuries because the way the city is designed. We get the benefits of both city and bush.
Chief Minister Jon Stanhope hinted that planning changes might be made. In the case of the Weston Creek suburbs, though, all the roads are laid out and the blocks owned – as the sign at 13 Fireball St attests. Planning changes will have to be restricted to building controls. And you can’t stop people planting trees.
Prime Minister John Howard – like the Duffy resident in search of green — had a better feel. He said, “But remember that this is a city that is built close to the bush. It is a city that’s quite properly in my view has prided itself on having plenty of bush, plenty of trees, being environmentally a nice place to live in and I want it to continue that way because it is a very attractive city and the suburbs of Canberra are very nice places in which to live, notwithstanding what has happened this weekend. . . .
“My hunch is that we’re not going to want to give up the advantages of living cheek by jowl with the bush, there may be other decisions we make about the detail of that but I don’t think Australians are going to want to do that and I don’t blame them.’’
Whatever the planning and building changes, will the fires affect the way Australia sees Canberra or the way Canberrans see themselves?
Canberra is often seen as spoilt – because large amounts of money were spent on it up to the late 1980s. It was seen as a city of politicians and public servants, not in the “real world” and a “city without a soul”. It is seen as the author of bad news as newspapers headlines confuse the city with the Federal Government — “Canberra cuts pension”, “Canberra imposes tax”, and so on.
Last Saturday, the rest of Australia saw a different Canberran.
As Shakespeare’s Shylock put it: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
Canberrans are human, too.
The fact the Prime Minister pushed this message must have had a major impact in the short-term, with perhaps some lasting rub-off.
At one stage he said, “We’re all Australians, I mean we’re Australians before we’re Canberrans or people who live in Sydney or Melbourne or whatever, that’s always been my credo. And Australians are essentially the same wherever they are in our country, in adversity they chip in, club together, work together, help each other and extend the hand of mateship to somebody else who’s done it hard. And it doesn’t surprise me that people living in Canberra would do that, they’re Australians.”
He was asked, “What do you think this might mean for people’s perception of Canberra as the national capital?”
He said, “It will enhance, in my view, in the eyes of the rest of the Australian community the great individualist spirit of the Canberra community because what the rest of Australia has witnessed over the last 36 hours is the national capital under attack from the summer terror, if I can put it that way, of bushfire in an unprecedented way and the rest of Australia has seen the people of Canberra respond in this quite remarkable fashion.’’
The media coverage of the fires will help improve Canberra’s image. National Capital Authority surveys in the rest of Australia have shown that greater knowledge of Canberra helps instill pride in the capital – especially by people who have visited the city. Media coverage of a human tragedy and non-political event is not the same as a first-hand visit, but it is perhaps has similar effect.
As for Canberra’s view of itself, Howard said, “Oh Canberra will recover. The Australian spirit is alive and well in Canberra, as it is all over our country. They will get a lot of help, those that have been left homeless – not only from governments, but also from community organisations and their fellow Australians. But it’s not something that will ever disappear I believe from the psyche of Canberra.”
But in time, the imagery of the fires will fade and the media- and politician-inspired put downs of Canberra will continue. The tall-poppy syndrome is as much a part of the Australian psyche as helping mates in adversity. Instead of aspiring to lift urban standards to Canberra’s level and being proud of the creation of the capital, they want to drag Canberra down so it is like everywhere else.
Even this week, Paddy McGuinness in The Sydney Morning Herald used the fires as an excuse to argue for the virtual abolition of the Australian Capital Territory. He wrote, “The trouble in Canberra has always been that upper-level bureaucrats and academics have had too much input into the planning process, and as always created a dysfunctional socialist Utopia. There has been an artificially sponsored belief among Canberra residents that they could work in highly paid urban conditions while enjoying the benefits of a semi-rural, or at least fringe bush, lifestyle. The bill for this is now in.”
Indeed, some care needs to be taken that the recovery does not engender jealousy and resentment elsewhere in Australia – that once again they are paying for Canberra. Canberra is an affluent city. The individual loss is not financial – most are reasonably well-off and have insurance. The loss is emotional and sentimental – photos, mementos, neighborhood and the memory of it, the loss of gardens and the work that went into them.
Inevitably there will be media coverage of the recovery and the high standard of housing in Australia. Despite last weekend’s horror, it is asking a lot of human nature for expect people elsewhere in Australia not to revert to their old view of the capital.