Fireground

Every frame in this album was made on or after a fireground in Victoria, most of them with the Country Fire Authority. I hold CFA accreditation as an emergency incident photographer, which is a formal way of saying I am allowed past the tape, and a less formal way of saying I owe a great deal to the volunteers who let me stand beside them while they work.

Fire in this country is not an event, it is a season, and it is getting longer. What the pictures try to hold is the whole arc of it: the wall of orange smoke that turns afternoon into evening, the front moving through scrub at a walking pace, and then the morning after, which is where most of these were taken. A farm shed folded into its own roof. Power lines down across a paddock. A kangaroo on the black ground where it stopped running. The road sign that survived when the house behind it did not. Aftermath is quiet, and it is where the real loss sits: the people who come back to a chimney standing in a rectangle of ash, who have to decide in a morning whether this is still home.

Displacement is the word nobody uses on the day, and it is the one that lasts. Families in community halls and relatives' spare rooms, livestock gone, the fences that marked a life now wire on the ground. Some of them rebuild. Some of them leave, and the landscape they knew leaves with them, because a forest that burns hot enough does not come back as the forest it was.

And through all of it, the CFA. Mostly volunteers, mostly local, mostly people whose own places are somewhere behind the line they are holding. Trucks staged on a country road at dawn, crews who have been up for thirty hours talking quietly over the bonnet, the yellow of their kit the only clean colour left in the frame. I photograph them with as much respect as I can manage and as little interference. They are the reason the aftermath pictures are of sheds and not of streets.

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