#Aftermath

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.