MC: I was supposed to do this event last year and, I had written a story that was inspired by my sister being caught up in the fires in the eastern states and, I had to pull out for COVID reasons. So I didn’t get to tell that story. And when I was asked to do this event this year, I was going to tell this other story. 

And then, about a month ago, some really close friends of ours lost their house in Gidjiganup in the Woorooloo fires, and I decided it was actually more important to tell you this story. So, on New Year’s Eve in 2019, I, probably like lots of you, was glued to the media watching the fires rage up and down the East Coast. 

My sister lives in Batemans Bay, and it was pretty much ringed by fire. The roads were cut, they had no power, no water, and she and her family had to pack their car and get ready to drive down to the beach to be safe. Luckily, their house survived. They didn’t lose anything more than a little bit of sleep. 

But I found that the thoughts of them evacuating their house really stayed with me. I live in this beautiful part of the world, the city of Kalamunda, and as you can see, when you look around, it is two thirds burnable, it is two thirds beautiful bushland and forest, and it’s a really lovely place to live, but it’s actually really dangerous as well. 

And everybody who lives here is supposed to have a fire plan, and I don’t. I mean, I do, but we haven’t, we’ve got really bad water pressure at the top of the hill and there’s no defending our house. So, we’ve decided our fire plan is that we just get in the car and we drive away. But I know that I’m supposed to have a list, a list of the things that I should take with me when I go. 

And I don’t have that list. I live in a really big house and it is full of art. So I’m an artist. My husband’s an artist. All our friends and family, the house is chock a block with artworks. It’s also full of books. We’ve got a huge, art and design library and it’s full of beautiful illustrated children’s books and all the classics. 

We’ve got one off really quirky pieces of furniture. We’ve got lots of designer clothes. So how do I choose what things of all my things? that I take with me when I have to go. 

You know, I’ve just been wafting away listening to my daughter sing and I’ve completely forgotten where I am. Yeah, okay. So, what if I make a list? And my bowl hat, and my box set of Jane Austen, and my hand stitched family tree are not on it. And they stop. looking at me reproachfully every time I catch their eye in the house. 

What if a fire comes really close and all of the things that I left in the house to face the terror themselves, my portraits of my children, my great grandfather’s antique meat cleaver. What if they start looking at me with great menace when I returned to the house. How can I live in a house full of things that I was willing to abandon? 

I think it’s this as much as anything that prevents me from writing my list because it’s not the list of things that I will take. It’s the really long list of things that I will not take, that I’m struggling with. 

What if? What if I put everything that I think I need to take in a box and I seal that box up and I put it in the garage near the car ready for a quick exodus if I need it and I never get to see those things again. If I can live without them happily at my fingertips, then why am I saving them? What am I saving them for? 

My friend also had a house full of treasures. And she had a really big art collection as well. And a lot of the work was my work. And in the midst of my distress over all of her losses, there was a clear, sharp pain in my heart. For the things that I had made with my hands, for those things facing the flames and the heat and the smoke, for the ash of them being blown across, above the trees, across the city, raining down on your houses, on your washing, on your gardens, like a warning. 

It was a really illuminating moment that in 1941 on Christmas day, when my mother was eight, she had to evacuate her house with her family. In Rangoon, in Burma, where she lived, because the Japanese were bombing the city. Each man, woman and child could take one small suitcase full of their belongings on their trek, by train, by car, by boat, on foot, by elephant, by elephant through the jungles of the foothills of the Himalayas to safety in India.  

Now, what do you take when you’re eight? And you’re about to lose everything forever. My mother packed her toys, not necessarily the toys that she had just got for Christmas that day, but the toys that had proved their ability to comfort. 

She took Splash and Splash was the head of the playroom and he was brave and he was strong. 

She took Snow White because she was beautiful and the beautiful are never left behind. 

She took Piglet who was tiny and he could fit into a really small corner of the suitcase. These things survived, the evacuation, relocation, internment camps, army bases, typhoid, diphtheria, elephants, and eventually migration in 1947 to Australia when my mum was nearly 15 and she no longer needed her toys or the pink party dress that her mother had made that no longer fitted her. 

And lots of other things that were not useful or valuable in themselves. And as you can see, some of these things are now in my possession, and when I look at them, I realise that it’s not that you have to save the important things. It’s that whatever you save becomes important just because you saved it. 

My friends are currently sifting through the ashes of their house and every intact recognisable object that they pull from under the battered, burnt, corrugated iron that’s all that’s left of their house, everything they find is a miracle. And these things will take their place in her new house  as the most important things that she owns, because they will represent everything that she lost and they will become imbued with all that power and be potent and valuable. 

If I get the text from DFAS, and we’re told that a fire’s coming and I have to leave my house, what things am I going to put in my car? Some things seem really obvious, but the cat has been peeing on my new carpet, and she is by no means guaranteed of a birth. But there’s things like old photos, and hard drives, and really important documents. 

These are things that will help you to get back on your feet after, you know, a disaster like this. My friend is the most sensible and straight talking and no nonsense person you are ever likely to meet. And she runs whole government departments. And she had a fire plan, of course she had a fire plan. But when the fire jumped 2J Road. 

And was coming close and she had to evacuate. She put her horses in the float. She put her dogs in the car. She put her family in the other car. She took her work computer and one other computer that had her photos on it. And she left every single thing she owned behind her in her house. Now, I don’t know if it’s just not possible to imagine that your house won’t be there when you come back. 

Maybe, maybe you feel a bit embarrassed that you’re taking all your things and then afterwards you’re just going to have to go and put them all back again and everybody’s going to say, well, you overreacted. Maybe there just wasn’t time. I don’t know, but it proved one thing that I’ve always suspected about my friend and that is you can trust her with your life. 

But the belongings, not so much. 

She said the most important thing that she learnt from this experience was that it’s not about having a fire plan, but it’s about writing it down. She hadn’t written it down. And once you’ve written it down, you have to follow it. And that’s the problem, I think, because even if I have a list and say, say it’s got my grandmother’s letters and my handwritten book of my early poetry, my father’s first watch. 

So even if I have a list with these things on them, I think that my panicking self will not recognise the wisdom of my calm self and the list will just look like nonsense and I will go running through the house and I will just grab, indiscriminately, my True Religion jeans that I’ve had for 10 years and do not fit me anymore. 

Or… my battered copy of the Taylor of Gloucester. Or, my jiu-jitsu certificate. I think that I will just make stupid, irrational decisions and just dump anything in the car and go. But even if I lose my three-metre long hue and pine campaign table or my giant turtle sculpture or my antique glass cheesebell, I know that I’ll be able to build my life again with whatever I save in the same way that my mother did and in the same way that my friends will now. 

There was one other toy that my mum took with her when she was packing her suitcase in 1941 and it was a toy that I thought had been lost, but it turns out my brother has it safe in his keeping in Melbourne, which I was so happy to discover. Now I told you that she had Snow White and I don’t know and I never thought to ask mum while she was alive, whether she had all the dwarves, the movie, the Disney movie came out in 1937 and the merchandise was much sought after, but back then kids weren’t showered with toys in the way they are now. 

And it’s possible that she had only one of the dwarves and the rest were going to be given to her in subsequent Christmases and birthdays. But I like to think that they came in a set and that she had all the dwarves and in the midst of the bombs. and the screaming and the bodies in the street. She had a moment of pure clarity and into her suitcase she packed happy.  

Now I know that should I ever have to evacuate my home Splash and Snow White and Piglet will be the first things that I put in the car because they have earned the right to be saved. But whatever else I take, I hope that I can learn from my friends and remember to pack some of the lesser dwarves like Sturdy and Hardy and Plucky and the French one, C’est la vie.

And I hope that, should it ever happen to any of you, that whatever you have written on your list, you never, ever, forget to pack happy. 

Thank you.