fire: a brief journal

(Sunday a.m., the morning I got up, opened the browser, read about Marysville and made these notes)

When I was in Healesville for a week late last year, doing some quiet stuff on my own, I kicked over the traces on my last day and hired a car and drove to Marysville.
Today  I hear it's the last time I will see it. There is possibly one building standing in the town. We stayed there on a hot Easter weekend once, one of the very first holidays we had away as a family that we paid money for (yes, we've been borrowing houses for evah.)

On the last day I was there, I bought lollies in the lolly shop, bought some antipasto bits and bobs to put in my pasta for my final dinner alone that night, walked into the model toys shop and asked questions about the road to Woods Point,  met a young fellow who quite probably had Asperger's who asserted that Wicked would finish now 'because Rob Guest is dead', and ambled along the river through one of the prettiest caravan parks in all Victoria, thinking it might be nice to come back and camp there sometime.

I walked back to the Information Centre and out through Gallipoli Park, where the entire population of the township is sheltering this morning,* and admired a wisteria colonnade in full bloom. Unfortunately I took no photographs. I can't believe that now. I went off then on the Woods Point road for a little bit to look at some myrtle beech thickets along there that I'm fond of, at an old culvert in the forest, and an old settlement at Cambarville that I hadn't been brave enough to drive up to the last time we were there.

I am crying for Marysville. It was full of guesthouses and holiday cottages, including the landmark Cumberland convention centre, and as pretty as a picture: there is a spot near the bridge and the main road that was magnificent. It is horrible to think how it must look this morning (and later that night, as first film emerges, I cannot look).

The Black Spur area no doubt has a history of burned out establishments - there is a History of Healesville Guesthouses book in the library at Healesville where every third or fourth place was burned down due to lack of water to put the fire out (this was a problem till the Maroondah Dam was built sometime around the '20s.)

Notes later in this week of horrors:

I heard later on Sunday that Marysville missed the fires in '39 and '83. I'm still numb. I will always miss it and its kind people. Kinglake, too, I know fairly well - I've driven through it on foggy days and marvelled at how high it sits above the northeast.
Where are we headed with all this?
Still on Marysville, harping in my distress, I find that fortunately a fellow called Ben took photos a while back, on the Net for all to see. I was going to post one, but I think the conversation there is a better resting place for this story.

This was all I could come up with this week. David has come up with something much more lucid, here. It is overwhelming.
One more post, which I drafted last week before all this, and then I'm having a blog rest, letting the shock settle. If it ever does.

I think I'll get my youngest son to string my old guitar back to right hander, I have a difficult young man living here who has no idea what's going on in the world, and I feel the need.

*Unfortunately, fewer of them than was first thought. And regrettably there is much more to read here about all the Victorian fires.

Comments

[boynton]

Like so many other Victorians, it was a special place for our family to visit. We spent a few weekends in guesthouses in the 60s, the eight of us, because my parents loved it. They'd spent their honeymoon there. My sister rang on Sunday morning as the ABC showed the razed footage -
look at Marysville...

The stories that are emerging are so horrific.
The terror and trauma is unimaginable.

[meli]

oh that is so so sad.

[lisa]

I'm also feeling very numb about the fires. It's horrible, just horrible. I was out of town all week and news was getting fed to me second hand, I felt bad I wasn't in town while it was happening.

[LiteraryMinded]

:-(