Archbishop of Sydney

Bushfires

By + George Pell
ARCHBISHOP OF SYDNEY
6 January 2002

Victorian-born a remember the devastation of the 1983 Ash Wednesday, of the friend who had just built a holiday house to lock-up stage, had not started the fire insurance and lost the lot. My parents impressed on me the memory of the terrible 1939 Black Friday fires.

We are told that Captain Cook saw the smoke from fires as he first made his way along the East coast, just as we are told that the aborigines burnt off the undergrowth much more than we do now. South Eastern Australia, from South Australia to New South Wales, ranks with California and Southern France as the worst bushfire country in the world.

These fires are regenerative for much of our local trees and bush, the gums especially surviving with their massive hidden root systems. Imported European trees succumb much more quickly.

Fires that wax and wane for days are something new for me. Waking up each morning to check whether the pall of smoke was heavier or lighter, hoping the winds would drop, praying for heavy rain storms and watching a violent orange sun set through the dust and ash are something new.

Not new are the heart-breaking stories of families who have lost everything, even family mementoes and are condemned to start again. As always these are lucky escapes, as the fires go in and about capriciously. And not new are the best and worst of human nature that these natural disasters reveal.

It is only right and just that the hard work, skill and bravery of our fire-fighters, professional and volunteer, and all the support staff from the police and military and other volunteer organisations should be widely acknowledged. A would like to add my own few words of admiration and thanks for their mighty efforts.

We should not take all this for granted, because it involves not just hard tiring work but exposure to considerable danger. Thank God, so far there has been no loss of human life. The arrival of many fire-fighters from other states to help in this emergency is another source of Australian pride.

At the other end of the moral spectrum are the crimes of the fire-bugs, the arsonists. Public outrage is completely justified, as these wicked acts are incomprehensible to most people, although they are a regular feature of such outbreaks.

All human beings are mysteries, sometimes even to ourselves. Not one of us can be sure how we might perform under extreme pressure. We should not join in that conspiracy of silence which pretends that evil only exists elsewhere, that evil can be eliminated by education and prosperity. These help, but 1930s Germany was the best educated and most socially progressive country in Europe. Why is there arson in prosperous Australia?

Arson is the ultimate act of vandalism, an attack on society generally, because its consequences are so unpredictable and sometimes so immense. It is usually a remote, hidden and cowardly cause of great damage and suffering. Public opinion is right to be completely intolerant of these malefactors.

They should be confronted with the damage they provoked and enlisted somehow in the reconstruction programmes.

Some, perhaps many of them, are probably neurotic or psychotic, and drug abuse is producing more and more unbalanced people. Therapy and help should be available to all these criminals to help them turn from this destruction. Forgiveness should be given, when repentance is genuine.

But it does not help victims, or society generally, or the malefactors to refrain from stating that arson is criminal and evil.