Books

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.

Downsizing the team was practical. It was expected. It was probably inevitable. I can say all of that honestly and still say it hurt. The hurt was not because I felt discarded, because I did not. The hurt was because I had become part of something, and something had become part of me.

It also changed what I am willing to accept now. I do not want to compromise anymore on the things I know are my strengths. I am not happy in roles where I am not working with community, not part of complex decisions, or not able to give what I know I can give. A simple job that bores me to tears may sound peaceful to some people, but after that work I know it would not be enough.
It gave me perspective too. Someone once said, “We save PDFs, we don’t save lives,” and that has become a bit of a mantra for me. It is not meant to dismiss ordinary work or ordinary frustrations. It is just a useful reminder that not every problem deserves

Recovery, I have learned, is full of repeated questions. Are we there yet? No. Are we better than we were? Sometimes. Has the community recovered? Which community? Which family? Which farm? Which person? Which day are you asking about? The answers can sound the same for a very long time, not because nothing has changed, but because change after disaster does not move in a straight line. People rebuild one thing and then find another has cracked. They get through an anniversary and then fall apart over a smell, a wind direction, a road closure, a bank letter, a child’s question, or the sight of new grass growing where everything was black.

Recovery is hard because it is not restoration. That may be the simplest and most important thing I have learned. Restoration suggests putting things back the way they were, but that is not possible. Recovery means finding a way to live with what has changed. It means building something that may work, even if it does not match the memory. It means accepting that some losses cannot be compensated, some mistakes cannot be undone, some relationships will not return to what they were and some people will carry the fire quietly for the rest of their lives.

In the end, I hope people finish this story with empathy for the humanness of recovery. Not admiration from a safe distance, and not pity, but empathy. We are not talking about processes, grants, agencies, services or structures, although all of those have their place. We are talking about human beings, the ones whose lives were burned and the ones who walked beside them afterwards, all of them trying in their own way to work out what was still standing.