Aftermath

Some heroes are named on plaques. Some are thanked in speeches. Some are remembered only by the people whose lives they helped steady for a moment when everything else had fallen away. This book is for them too. By the way Tracey was awarded a medal for her work, along with many others in this most trying of times

Looking back, that first day was not the beginning of recovery in the neat way people might like to say it was. Recovery had not begun just because we had opened a hall, made tea, found bedding, and written down names. For many people, the worst of what they had lost was not even fully known yet.

Opening the doors did not fix anything. It simply made a place where the fixing, grieving, arguing, feeding, worrying and starting again could begin. At the time, that felt like nowhere near enough. Looking back, I think it was the only honest place to start.

Those inspection tours were the beginning of recovery for me, although I did not understand that at the time. I thought recovery would begin when we opened the proper recovery centre, with services in place and people at desks and brochures in stands. In truth, recovery had already started out on those roads, walking beside people through ash, learning not to promise what we could not deliver, learning to sit quietly, learning that a blue vase or a melted tyre or a row of water jars could hold more meaning than any official report.

I can still walk down the street in Corryong and have people know who I am. Amanda and Jen can too. That means something to me, not because I need to be remembered, but because it tells me the relationships were real. The trust did not vanish when a funding stream ended or a role changed. Jen is still working in that space for council, and some of the liaison people we later put on became so trusted that when fires went through again, they were brought back straight away. That is not a small legacy.

That is the part that still sits with me. There were no simple goodies and baddies. It would be easier to tell the story that way, but it would not be true. The community was not always easy. Government was not always wrong. Council was not always the problem. BRV was not always the answer. Everyone was looking through different lenses, using different tools, and working toward goalposts that did not always line up. Most people were genuinely trying to do the right thing, and still people got hurt.

Recovery did not arrive in a meeting with an agenda. It came in small ways, through loud rooms and quiet rooms, through notebooks and cups on tables, through difficult conversations, through people turning up when they were too tired to turn up, through a bloke standing up for Towong with too much already on his plate, through mental health workers watching gently from the side, through Tony bringing people in carefully because he knew what fire had taken from them. It came through plans, yes, but the plans were only the surface of it.

Recovery was never about returning to what existed before. That was impossible. Too much had changed. People had changed. The land had changed. The towns had changed. Even the trees, where they were replanted, were not the same trees. Community projects helped people move from staring at what had been burnt to asking what could still be made, not as a replacement for the past but as a way of living with the new normal.

That was the uncomfortable truth of being in the middle. I could criticise the system and still work within it. I could feel angry at the hoops and still help people jump through them. I could believe communities deserved more trust and still know that a badly written application might cost them a project they desperately needed. Recovery was full of those contradictions. Very little was pure. Very little was simple. Most of it lived in the grey area between what should have happened and what we could actually make happen.

When I look back at commissioning works, I do not think first about contracts or project plans. I think about how much people needed to see something real. A truck arriving. A court being repaired. A hall being worked on. A burnt house site cleaned up. A pile of firewood stacked for winter. A piece of timber from a damaged landscape being used to repair something else. These things mattered because they told people the aftermath was not only about what had been lost.

The danger is always that by the time the story reaches Treasury, it has become a number. My job, as I understood it, was to keep putting the person back into the number, the valley back into the region, the farm back into the statistic and the voice back into the plan. That was not always neat work. It was not always comfortable work. Sometimes it meant arguing gently, sometimes arguing firmly, and sometimes driving someone down a road until they could see for themselves what no report had managed to explain.

So transition planning was never really about ending recovery. It was about admitting that our part in it had to change. It was about stepping back without turning away. It was about trusting that the people of the Upper Murray, with the right anchors still in place, could carry the next part without us standing quite so close. That trust was not simple, and it was not sentimental. It was a difficult, uneasy, practical kind of trust, the sort you build because eventually you have to hand the weight back to the people whose lives it is.