Testing our spirit
And when it finally rained, it poured, writes Simon Mann.
The ‘Big Dry’ and climatic events were common themes helping define the Australian condition in 2007. The calendar year provides natural bookends of summer and heat, and with them comes the peril of bushfire, but this year that threat extended well into the autumn and was already cranking up again by early spring.
And when rains finally fell, they did so in a deluge that bore witness to Dorothea Mackellar’s anthem about a sunburnt country with its “droughts and flooding plains”.
With dour understatement, the Country Fire Authority officially labelled 2006-07 “a very difficult fire season”. The numbers told why – nine total fire bans and 11 partial bans were imposed throughout Victoria, double the number of the previous year; a mammoth blaze engulfed the Great Dividing Range, burning for a record 69 days straight and charring 1. 3 million hectares (an area the size of Greece); 64,000 calls to the state’s bushfire information line were logged, six times more than in previous years.
And by late September, when thoughts were turning to the Grand Final, the spring racing carnival and “schoolies”, the heat was searing again, with lightning strikes setting off blazes across the state. Were these extremes the likely result of climate change and a pointer to the future, or just freakish weather? Either way, the bushfire season now seems eternal, and never before have such demands been made of the CFA’s 60,000 volunteer army.
Gippsland copped more than its share of heartbreak when floods followed the fires. In fact, June was a cruel month: storms lashed the eastern seaboard, wreaking havoc in the Hunter Valley and central coast of NSW, where nine people died, including a family of five whose car was swept into a ravine when part of the old Pacific Highway collapsed beneath it. The storms pushed the freighter Pasha Bulker onto Nobby’s Beach, near Newcastle, where it remained liked a beached whale for nearly a month.
Within days of the NSW battering, the worst floods in decades left eastern Victoria awash. One man died, hundreds were left homeless, roads were severed and towns isolated after days of torrential rain. Some parts of Gippsland recorded falls of more than 100mm in 48 hours. In November, the rivers swelled again, causing residents in Tinamba and Newry to evacuate their homes for the second time in a year.
Such drama can surely test the human spirit. But sometimes Australians invite such examination, with varying fortunes. An extreme example was lone kayaker Andrew McAuley, who tried to paddle from Tasmania to New Zealand and disappeared, presumed drowned. At 7.15pm on February 9, he was within sight of South Island. But an urgent radio plea proved the portent of disaster: “My kayak’s sinking. I need a rescue.
“While adventurers were pushing the boundaries, Australian scientists were claiming new frontiers. The bionic eye came closer to reality. Within a couple of years, Melbourne’s Eye and Ear Hospital is expected to start implanting the microscopic camera device that can restore sight. And at Sydney’s Children’s Medical Research Institute, scientists made a breakthrough in the study of a substance in cells linked to 85 per cent of cancers. They cracked the makeup of an enzyme (telomerase) that gives cancer cells longevity; the “find” could lead to a single drug to treat almost all tumours, including breast, colon, lung and prostate. And Professor Colin Masters was awarded the Victoria Prize for unlocking some of the mystery of Alzheimer’s disease.
Such scientific enterprise was welcome news for Australians generally – all 21 million of them, the milestone having been reached in June.
The nation’s melting pot remains typically cosmopolitan, but debate about Australia’s ethnic makeup and how best to accommodate new arrivals came to the fore in September, when Sudanese teenager Liep Gony was bashed to death in Noble Park. The incident and tensions in the south-east Melbourne community appeared to underscore a decision by former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to cut Australia’s African refugee intake. His reasoning, in part the “inability” of Sudanese people to integrate, was blamed for fuelling riots in which a policeman was injured.
Andrews reiterated the privileges of being Australian when introducing the former government’s multiple-choice citizenship test in which migrants and refugees needed to know the nation’s capital, national flower and national anthem, as well as historical pointers and sports trivia.
In its first week of application in October, 297 people sat the test; 51 of them failed. One of the test’s questions is: ‘Who do you call the elected head of a state government?’ Premier, obviously. In Victoria, it was a title shared by two men in 2007.
In early May, Steve Bracks was trotting the world stage, meeting Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to discuss climate change, and being seen with officials from New York to London. It turned out to be a farewell tour of sorts – Bracks resigned his office on July 27, after eight years. Deputy Premier John Thwaites also quit. Treasurer John Brumby was named as Bracks’ successor. There was speculation that son Nick’s late-night drunken car crash a few days earlier was a tipping point in Bracks’ decision to put family time ahead of fanfare and factions.
There was something of a cascading effect. In September, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie also quit while he was ahead, paving the way for the state’s first woman premier, Anna Bligh. Then, in November, Clare Martin quit as the Northern Territory’s chief minister.
While politics remained a staple of the year’s hard news, so did crime and tragedy. A Winchelsea man, Robert Farquharson, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his three sons, whom he had driven into a dam and abandoned on Father’s Day, 2005. Around the same time, a judge ruled inadmissible much of the evidence against Carol Matthey, a Geelong mother accused of killing four of her children. Prosecutors claimed she had smothered them one by one over five years.
New chapters were written in Melbourne’s gangland war: kingpin Carl Williams pleaded guilty to three murders and was sentenced to 35 years’ jail, while drugs dealer Tony Mokbel, already sentenced in absentia to 12 years’ jail, was tracked down to Greece and faced extradition on more than 20 new charges, including two of murder.
Notorious killers were also in the news. Homicide squad detectives were rounding on child killer Derek Percy over a string of decades-old unsolved child murders, and Peter Dupas, already serving life sentences, was found guilty of the stabbing murder of 25-year-old Mersina Halvagis while she tended her grandmother’s grave in Fawkner Cemetery in 1997.
The judge praised the investigators’ tenacity and said the trial was important because “victims matter”. He told the court: “Ms Halvagis matters. Every victim matters.
“Two other crimes gripped Melbourne. An early-morning CBD shooting rampage in June left local solicitor Brendan Keilar dead and two others injured, including Dutch tourist Paul de Waard, later commended for his heroic efforts to detain the alleged gunman Christopher Wayne Hudson.
Meanwhile, the plight of a little girl found abandoned at Southern Cross railway station on September 15 also captured imaginations. She was dubbed “Pumpkin” because she was wearing Pumpkin Patch clothing. As details emerged, it was learnt that the girl was three-year-old Qian Xun. The hunt for her father became a homicide investigation after the body of her mother, Anan Liu, was found in the boot of a car near the family’s home in Auckland. Her father, Nai Yin Xue, became the subject of an international manhunt and remained at large after fleeing Melbourne for the US. A Family Court judge in Auckland granted custody of little Qian Xun to her maternal grandmother, Liu Xiaoping, who would take her to live in China.
In late May, one of Australia’s most divisive political and social debates reached a denouement of sorts when David Hicks arrived home in Adelaide after more than five years in the Guantanamo Bay prison, where he had been held by US authorities who declared him a prisoner in the war on terror. Upon his return, Hicks was transferred to Adelaide’s maximum-security Yatala Labour Prison. In March, he’d been sentenced to seven years’ jail, with all but nine months suspended, the remainder to be served at Yatala. His scheduled release this month comes with an order restricting his freedom.
The year was also marked by inexplicable tragedy. At Kerang in June, a V-Line train was derailed when it collided with a truck at a level crossing, the impact tearing apart its carriages and leaving 11 passengers dead. They included a Rowville mother and her two young daughters, a Swan Hill great-grandmother, and a Robinvale farmer and sports identity and his teenage daughter.
Early in the year, a horror smash in Melbourne’s Burnley tunnel caused a conflagration that incinerated vehicles and their drivers. Three people died, including former Olympic cyclist Damian McDonald.
And in a fateful piece of symmetry, year-end threw up another terrible event when four young men burnt to death in a vehicle that left the West Gate Freeway at top speed on a Sunday evening this month.
Police believed the Commodore was racing another car at speeds of up to 160kmh shortly before it careered out of control and into a tree. Despite the evolution of safety devices, speed traps and driver education, Victoria’s annual road toll stubbornly refuses to fall below 300.
Simon Mann is a senior writer at The Age
source:smh