Opinion: Life’s lessons forged in fire

SIMON BEVILACQUA: I know what it is like to watch your home burn before your very eyes. Years ago, I stood beside firefighters and watched the house I was living in burn to the ground. 

RELENTLESS: Fire does not discriminate. It is unreasonable, uncompromising and overwhelming. Very little stands in its way. Illustration: JOHN TIEDEMANN

I KNOW what it is like to watch your home burn before your very eyes.

Years ago, I stood beside firefighters and watched the house I was living in burn to the ground.

A lovely old house razed, nearly all my possessions were inside and, in an hour or so, were violently turned to ash and smoke.

A beautiful pet dog — so bold, brave, alert and alive — was lost to the flames.

Photographs, guitars, amplifiers, paintings, clothes, everything I had bought or been given was gone.

My clumsy attempt at writing a book and scraps of paper etched with words were gone too.

That special coat I had bought when just 15. Earnest heartfelt letters from my first love. The gorgeous Bolivian bag I had bought in New Orleans. The huge Wolfgang Grasse painting I had acquired from the artist after listening for two solid days to his epic story of survival in Dresden when it was bombed in World War II. All gone.

I recall, as the flames reached into the night, looking at the scuffed old leather boots I had on my feet and cursing the fact I hadn’t been wearing my new ones. The woollen jumper I had on was holey and thin. They would, however, have to do. They were all I had.

Next morning, I woke with no possessions, no home, no money and no job.

As I pondered my sudden poverty and homelessness, I watched eerie blue and purple smoke rise from a corner of the razed ruin.

I stepped over the charred fragments, the twisted black metal of guitar strings and truss rods, and the proliferation of fine dusty ash to investigate the emissions. They were coming from the bubbling, smouldering pile of my vinyl records. Purple haze indeed.

Fastidiously collected over decades, my 2000-strong LP collection also included the first albums I owned as a boy, and those of my older brother and sister.

The last record I listened to just hours before it melted into the smoking toxic puddle was Highway to the Wind by Ian Ainslie and Bruce Morgan, North-West Coast singer songwriters with a Dylanesque folksy acoustic feel. I had not listened to it for 20 years before that fateful final spin.

A good friend had once remarked that my vinyl collection was a fine example of the guitar music of the last half of the 20th century. It was not intended to be so, but I guess it was.

I could go on for pages about things lost in that fire, and for years I thought about them a lot. But gradually the episode lost its sting and I now wonder why it ever made such a big impression.

Many Tasmanians have been through similar. The 1967 wildfires affected thousands, the 2013 blaze did too. My experience was nothing compared to that of others.

The 1967 disaster left 7000 people homeless, killed 62 and injured 900.

Fire delivers such a psychologically challenging blow.

On days like these when the mercury soars, the wind gusts and fires blaze, I feel scared and anxious for those whose homes and lives are threatened.

Fire delivers such a psychologically challenging blow. It does not discriminate. It is unreasonable, uncompromising and overwhelming. Very little stands in its way.

I cannot imagine how it feels to lose a child or wife or cousin or aunty to fire.

One thing I learnt from my experience is that nothing anyone can say can make it better, no matter how hard they try. What’s done is done. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I learnt that at times what people say after such trauma can grate and irritate, no matter how well-intentioned or true their words.

But I also learned that people care.

In my fire’s aftermath, one good friend lent me his acoustic guitar. My younger brother gave me shirts that I still wear to this day, much to his amusement.

A muso mate got me a cheap deal on an electric guitar and was organising a small benefit concert until I intervened and told him “not on your life”. Another friend got his friend to sell me an amplifier at mate’s rates. A former colleague got me a job at the Mercury.

I got cards, wishes and thoughts. Mum and Dad gave me everything.

So many cared, and gave their time and concern.

If any good can ever come from such trauma, it is friendship, camaraderie and community.

I would love to tell you that my experience taught me Buddhist detachment and that I now shun material possessions. However, things that store memories have become even more special and meaningful to me since the fire.

The lesson I learnt is they are not forever and nor am I.

Ex-Beatle George Harrison once sang All Things Must Pass and while his song’s sentiment is true and wise and lyrical, it is an example of one of those irritating statements people say in trauma’s wake.

Words cannot turn back time, but later, when the smoke has gone, they can help.

They are all we have.