Somebody has to do it, Kerre told me. For most of her life, that somebody was her. Her greatest hope now is that somebody else will continue when she no longer can, because the real inheritance of the Ferguson family has never been land, money or possessions. The real inheritance has always been the willingness to show up, to care and to remain there for each other.
Books
The Unwitting Matriarch Chapter 22 – Epilogue
Around that table, future generations of Fergusons will laugh together, argue together, help each other and remain connected without giving much thought to why they do those things. They will simply see it as normal because it is the way their family has always worked. What they may never fully realise is that they are living out lessons passed down over decades, following patterns established long before they arrived and continuing traditions of care, loyalty and responsibility inherited from those who came before them.
AFTERMATH Prologue – The Fire Came First
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
AFTERMATH Chapter 1 – Putting on the Virtual Kettle
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 2 – Opening the Doors
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 3 – The Inspection Tours
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 4 – Transition to Recovery
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 5 – The Shift to BRV
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 6 – Community Recovery Planning
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 7 – Community Project Development
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 8 – Grant Writing
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.
AFTERMATH Chapter 9 – Commissioning the Works
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.