Compton's Comment

A Town Like Marysville

^{Everald Compton | April / May 2009}

As often as we can, Helen and I hide away in the Australian bush, staying at delightful bed and breakfast retreats, talking to the locals about what is happening in their world and enjoying the peace and tranquillity that prevails.

January of this year was no different. We drove our five-year-old Lexus from Brisbane to Inverloch in Gippsland to visit our daughter who has a very pleasant holiday cottage there. We travelled down via the inland and drove home via the coast, carefully bypassing Sydney and Melbourne. We stayed in small towns off the beaten track.

One of the more delightful of those villages was Marysville in the majestic mountain country north-east of Melbourne where we spent two nights. We found it to be a quaint and interesting place. It looked like old England, mixed with colonial Australia, just the place for city escapees like us. Our B & B cottage was on the outer edge of the village, set in the woodlands beside the Stevenson River in what seemed to us to be a magic environment, but it was tinder dry and very short of water.

We had lunch in an upmarket patisserie that served trendy food. It overlooked the sports field that would become a safe haven for fire victims just a few weeks later. We had dinner at one of the finest restaurants in which we have ever dined anywhere in Australia. Called the Terracotta Room, it was located down a picture postcard laneway. It had a touch of real class, a quality menu, splendid wine from local vineyards and hosts who were friendly and interesting conversationalists.

Now, Marysville is a charred graveyard, burnt to cinder, with 100 of its 500 residents dead, and almost everyone homeless. Sadly, we all know that Marysville is just one of many rural towns that have gone, Kinglake being tragic.

These horrendous bushfires have indelibly implanted in our minds the long overdue recognition of our vulnerability to the elements that prevail in this harsh continent, particularly bushfires.

Yet, for 50,000 years before Europeans arrived, Indigenous Australians survived bushfires with ease because they understood the land and all of its perils. They did not erect any permanent buildings and they were highly mobile, being able to move entire communities in minutes.

Our modern Australian society can’t do this and we have never acknowledged the fact that we must adjust our lifestyle to the inevitability of bushfires breaking out with regular certainty in the hottest and driest continent in the world. We simply don’t have building and safety codes that will protect rural housing and we have never ever tried to assemble enough water to give rural dwellers a fighting chance of safeguarding themselves and their property. It is time that we did, as hundreds of thousands of Australians still aspire to the splendid vision of a “tree change” and they should not be denied this choice.

Our greatest tragedy is our failure to recognise that the enormous surplus of water in northern Australia can be channelled south, simply and economically, by using existing river systems and a few connecting pipelines so that rural communities in southern Australia can have adequate water for agriculture, grazing, mining and bushfires.

If you have an atlas at home, you can work out for yourself the waterways that can be used. I have and I am sending my plan to Kevin Rudd. You should do likewise as it will create safety for those who choose to live in places like Marysville.

Shortly after the fires, I was able to contact my splendid hosts from the Terracotta Room. Google and Telstra helped me to find them at Orange in New South Wales where relatives were caring for them. They have lost their restaurant, their home and their treasured village, but they will fight back and establish another first class restaurant somewhere in rural Australia, in a town like Marysville. Long may they prosper.

After all, they escaped with an absolutely priceless asset – their lives.

Everald Compton
Chairman
National Seniors Australia