AUSTRALIA: Academics die in bushfire inferno

Professor Richard Zann, an internationally respected ornithologist and birdsong expert who taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, died with his wife Eileen and their daughter Eva in the bushfire that almost wiped out the Kinglake township on the outskirts of Melbourne last Saturday week.

Zann, 64, was one of at least half a dozen academics believed to have been killed by the disastrous fires that raged across Victoria. Other university staff saw their houses and all their possessions destroyed in minutes during the worst natural disaster Australia has experienced.

Eva Zann was about to leave home to be closer to her work and her father was looking forward to continuing his research into the zebra finch in his retirement, along with his wife Eileen, a musician and former dancer with the New Zealand ballet company. The three were found huddled together in one room of the Canadian cedar home that Zann had built more than 30 years before.

As with many other victims of the fires, the Zanns had decided to stay and try to save their home but they had no idea of the raging firestorm that was to descend on them, leaving them no time to put their defensive plans into action.

"Richard was a lovely guy, a dedicated teacher and researcher in ornithology. He had a house at Kinglake but they had only two minutes from when they heard there was a fire before everything went up," Professor Graham Lamb says, still finding it hard to accept that someone he knew well, who had worked at La Trobe University for 37 years, could be gone in an instant.

Lamb is a researcher in the zoology department at La Trobe where he is involved in researching the behaviour of muscle tissue. He shakes his head at the unexpected and dreadful suddenness of the worst bushfires in Australia's history that swept across the state on a day when temperatures hit a record of more than 46 degrees.

"We are having trouble believing it," he says. "Richard was here on Friday afternoon talking about what he would do in his retirement and now..."

Several other academics and university staff may have lost their lives among the 300 Australians who are now believed to have perished in the 400 separate fires that destroyed large parts of Victoria on Black Saturday. Many staff lost their homes as the fires, fanned by 100 kilometre- an-hour north winds, roared through thousands of hectares of forest, destroying entire townships, people and their pets, along with an untold number of farm and wild animals whose bloated carcases litter the blackened earth across vast areas of the state.

More than 7,000 people are homeless, dozens are in hospital suffering severe burns, and no-one yet knows what the final death toll will be. Among the missing are a high-profile education expert, Dr Ken Rowe, research director at the Australian Council for Educational Research, and at least two international students from Indonesia.

The students went to Marysville in the ranges outside Melbourne on Saturday for a day trip to see one of Victoria's most picturesque towns. Marysville no longer exists and forensic scientists say identifying bodies there and across the state will take weeks and for some there may be no way of knowing who they were.

La Trobe University has campuses in rural Victoria, at Bendigo and Beechworth, and both were threatened by the fires. Monash University's campus in Gippsland in the east of the state has been converted into a fire-fighting headquarters and was also not far from the fires that ravaged that region. Monash, La Trobe and Melbourne universities have made beds available in their rural campuses for emergency workers and homeless survivors of the fires.

"The destruction in the vicinity of my place was nearly complete," says another academic who survived. "One death further up the road, my two nearest neighbours' houses razed, a very anxious 36 hour shift on my part fighting off the fire (alone) dressed to protect in 46 degree heat, including fire coming under and through my front door, fires on the external roof, windows shattering but very luckily staying in place. The sort of firestorm that working for the university trains the mind to cope with..."

In a commentary in the Melbourne Age newspaper last Wednesday, Philip Chubb, an associate professor of journalism at Monash, told how Victorians died doing exactly what they had been told to do. Chubb said he and his family had moved into a classic mud-brick home amid rolling paddocks and bush on the north-eastern outskirts of Melbourne a decade ago.

Country Fire Authority officers visited and assessed the risk. Chubb said that mostly they described how the family could survive: "The idea, they told us, is you wet down your house and fill the gutters so that flying embers ahead of the flames don't grab hold. When the fire gets close, everyone takes the hoses and scurries inside to wait it out in the darkest corner you can find, away from radiant heat.

"When the fire has passed you take the hoses out again and squirt those nasty spot fires. Nerve racking? Sure. But effective? You bet. So on Saturday we all did what we were told to do. We implemented our fire plans. We had our two fire hoses taut and ready for action, our two pumps primed and our all-cotton gear donned. But then the wind changed and the fire that was ripping through the lives of our neighbours just to the north of us turned away with minutes to spare."

As Chubb pointed out, Australia is facing a new reality, that the world is heating up and what may have worked in the past, in the dreadful fires of 1939 that claimed 71 Victorian lives or the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires that killed 75, no longer apply. Environmental conditions have changed but the advice to the community on how to cope with a bushfire has remained the same.

South-eastern Australia has endured a decade of drought, water storages are lower than they have ever been, and the country is now experiencing record high temperatures. Victoria's forests were tinder dry and ready to explode before Black Saturday, either from lightning strikes or, as seems likely in several places, from fires deliberately lit by arsonists.

None of the firefighters trying to control the blazes had seen anything like the speed or ferocity with which these latest bushfires travelled across the landscape. Fireballs hundreds of metres away from the fire front ignited trees or homes, creating a new inferno before the fiery parent that had sent it on its way came up behind.

People who had been warned to leave their homes early in fact had no warning of the imminence of the fires that engulfed them. On numerous occasions, stunned survivors described how they saw smoke kilometres in the distance only to discover a fire rushing towards them.

"As I was standing out the back of the house on Saturday, just after I had heard about the first three deaths down the road at Strathewen, I suffered a moment of blinding clarity," Phil Chubb wrote. "There I was, hose in hand, equipment gleaming, fire plan laminated, just as I had been advised. But if the fire had come barrelling over the hill behind me I knew we'd be dead."

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com