Living With the Bush

The Age: Fighting sadness with soap, water and determination

GUY Williams sits in overalls at his kitchen table with coffee poured from his mother's Thermos, as she rubs sugar soap on a blackened wall.

''That's not quite working,'' he says. The thick, sticky soot just seems to move around. It's the legacy of the scorched bush outside, and three burnt cars that were parked in the adjoining garage.

''It is working,'' Bev Williams says. ''It'll take several applications.''

She notices a small black picture frame, camouflaged on the wall and wipes the glass.

''Oh, it's got a nice little photo in there,'' she says. There are lush ferns and trees. It's a bush landscape. ''I thought it was just a black square.''

Mr Williams has not moved back to the Steels Creek home he sheltered in with his dog, Buzz, on Black Saturday.

It took him three years to build it; now he visits two or three times a week to fix the damage.

He designed the house to withstand fire and built it with aerated concrete bricks. It sits on a 37-hectare bush block and became one of the most striking images of the fires: the one thing left standing in a ravaged, unrecognisable landscape.

Little has changed but there are signs of life. Some of the black trees have shoots on their trunks, and bright green moss creeps across the ground, feasting on the nutrients in the ash.

The fire that roared through Steels Creek killed four of Mr Williams' neighbours. It was quick and fierce. Mr Williams, an engineer, estimates it reached 1200 degrees. This helps explain why recovery is slow.

Stephen Platt, of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, says spring rains and warmer weather will help Steels Creek, which has shallow soil lacking in nutrients.

The messmate and peppermint eucalypts that cover the area are adapted to fire and will return; their shoots indicate the plants are alive to that point.

Mr Platt says eucalypts have buds protected underneath their bark, and other buds in a woody growth - a lignotuber - at the base of the plant, insulated by the soil. And Steels Creek is also home to the rare Grevillea repens, which should do well out of the fire.

The bush has not been destroyed, he says. ''It's been burnt and there's major change happening but there's this fantastic natural process where things will come back.''

For now, the bush seen from the balcony of Mr Williams' two-storey home is silent.

Now and then you hear a distant chainsaw, or a lone bird. Once there were rosellas and currawongs, and the soft thump of kangaroos at night.

Although Mr Williams is restoring his house, he doesn't think he could bear another fire.

With the $23,000 he gratefully received from the Bushfire Relief Fund, he has installed three tanks to capture 66,000 litres of water. He is yet to fix the solar panels, his only source of power.

About three months after the fire, Grocon removed the three burnt cars and the destroyed shed. Again, Mr Williams is grateful and impressed.

On the day, his biggest worry was the thin steel double door linking the house to the carport. Through it came the heat and fumes of the burning cars. He has filled that wall and will install a single cement and steel door. ''You don't imagine anything will be fire proof, but it'll be fire resistant, something that'll last a couple of hours,'' he says.

Six of his double-glazed windows cracked in the heat, and later shattered. He would still like to put shutters on them.

He is living at his girlfriend's place while his house is a building site. ''It's just like a job. It has its good days and bad days,'' he says.

''If the sun comes out and there are some birds around, I go and stand outside and it's great. But other days it's dead quiet and cold and bleak. I have to keep a memory of what it was like.''

The bush, not the house, was what he loved. ''Losing all that has been a big blow,'' he says. ''From time to time I think about the neighbours who died up here, and the animals and birds. There's a lot of sadness, but apart from that, it's just getting on with it.''

He hears the chainsaw start up and winces.

''People who come here and their first instinct is to start clearing all the trees, shouldn't be living here, that's my feeling.''

His trees are no more than two or three metres from the house, and he is not tempted to change that, despite new Victorian laws allowing him to clear trees within 10 metres of the house and ground fuel within 30 metres.

''My problem was caused by burning cars and nothing else, just burning cars, not twigs or leaves or trees,'' Mr Williams says.

None of his neighbours have returned. One is building nearby, with a steel frame. Another property is for sale.

''I think what's happening is a lot of people are just wondering what to do. They might have got their insurance premium for the value of the house and they come up here for a day to have a look and they think: 'Do we really want to live up here?'

''I can understand people not wanting to come back.''

Elsewhere in the area there are timber houses without concrete slabs. ''Some people haven't learnt much.''

His insurance took five months to come through, and his next job is to check the state of the wiring. The plasterboard ceiling may need to come off to get to the cables.

This morning, a dozen of Mr Williams' relatives will drive up his dirt road past the driveways that no longer lead anywhere, to that last remaining house. They're staging a working bee, before his 50th birthday on Monday.

It's the first such effort.

''People did offer immediately after the fire,'' Mrs Williams says.

''But immediately after the fire you can't get a group of people up here, they'd be wondering what on earth to do.''

The sugar soap will be allocated with buckets and water. If they can clean a square metre or two each, it will be a start.