Transcript of Chief Minister’s Governance Lecture, 2024
Professor Jacki Schirmer, Director of the Centre for Environmental Governance, University of Canberra
Introduced by Mr Adrian Cunningham, Deputy Chair of the Territory Records Advisory Council.
I would like to pay my respects to the First Nations people and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging. Thank you all for coming tonight. We've got a really terrific program, not just a lecture, but also a panel discussion to look forward to, so I'm sure it'll be a terrific night. I'm here in lieu of the special minister of state who gives his apologies, as does the chief minister.
It's a tremendous honor to be the deputy chair of the Territory Records Advisory Council, which performs an important statutory role in helping the Territory Records Office discharge its vitally important community obligations and administrative obligations here in the ACT and the Territory Records Act. I think it's over 20 years old now, so we've had quite a bit of experience at this. And I would say that the Territory Records Office, and the legislation that empowers it, is not just nation leading but world leading. So I think we can all be very proud of Dani Wickman and her team.
The ArchivesACT and Territory Records Office help connect our community with the stories contained within the ACT Government Archive Collection which help us to understand, interrogate and debate our past. The Chief Minister's lecture has become an annual institution, and it's focus is linked to the 20 year access rule that the legislation confers on government records. When the Territory Records Act was passed in 2002, I think it was the first jurisdiction in the country to go from a 30-year rule down to a 20-year rule, in the interests of open, transparent and accountable government. Most other jurisdictions, I think, have followed the ACT's lead in that respect and changed their laws to reduce the closure period for government records.
The aim of this annual lecture is to invite a researcher to delve into a particular aspect of the recently released government records and share with the community the results of their investigations. This year, the spotlight is on the events of 2003, which was a traumatic year, particularly January, a very traumatic month for those of us who were living here at the time. It's indelibly marked in our memory that terrible day. But tonight's lecture, is not so much focusing on the trauma, but focusing on creative ways for recovering from that trauma and helping the community find a way to move forward and beyond.
Four Canberrans lost their lives in the bushfires, almost 500 homes were destroyed, and the scars are still present on the landscape today. Just drive out to Weston Creek, somewhat disguised now after 20 years, but impossible to completely obliterate. With such widespread impact, you might think that the city's response to the fires would naturally dominate the archives and we can now provide access to records from that year. While so much government and community effort went into the long process of recovery from the fires, the everyday business of life goes on. It’s the way our community banded together following those traumatic events, the way people helped each other in sometimes often small and unexpected ways that is perhaps, the most important memory of that year.
During 2003, the Government considered submissions on amendments to the Financial Management Act, the Forde Land Release Program, Community and Affordable Housing, Discrimination against LGBTQI+ people, and the future of the Australian National Hotel School, to name but a few topics. Amongst these many submissions, in the weeks following the fires, was a modest proposal to assist people to reestablish the gardens that had been destroyed or damaged by the fires.
While almost 500 homes were completely lost, it is estimated that another 1000 sustained significant damage to well-established and well-loved gardens. Reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the fires last year, members of the Hall Community Herb Garden wrote:
During those days after the fire, it was apparent that those dwellings left standing were housing traumatized people. There was no colour, green life, no birds and sounds, only black smouldering days. So the first belladonna lily, poking its pink flowered head above the charred remains, was a sign of hope that recovery was indeed possible.
Only three weeks after the fire, the Phoenix Garden Group was born. The files held by the Territory Records Office help to tell the story of how the group, alongside others such as Anglicare and the Chapman Action Group, marshalled volunteers, sourced goods and sponsorship, provided advice and perhaps most importantly, provided a listening ear to show that recovery was indeed possible.
We are privileged to have some of those volunteers with us this evening. The garden regeneration project would go on to be a flagship initiative of the asset recovery efforts. The October 2003 report of the Bushfire Recovery Task Force noted that the project success grew from the community of leadership of the work and the partnership approach between the community sector, schools, business and government.
The fact that a gardening project was so vital to Canberra's recovery tells us something important about the community and individual wellbeing and it's interesting also to reflect that, Canberra is the bush capital. We've always loved that sensation of living amongst the bush. But in 2003, the bush, instead of being our friend and ally and a source of succour, became a source of fear and a source of trauma.
And so reconciling those conflicting emotions about living amongst the bush has found a really, really great nexus with this Phoenix Gardening group. A safe place to live and access to food and clean water are obviously important to wellbeing and development of a city. The ACT Government’s Wellbeing Framework shows very clearly that Canberrans place a high value on the many elements that contribute to living well.
The wellbeing domains which we use as a lens to think about and prioritize city government initiatives include connection to nature, social connection, being able to express identity and belonging to a community and building trust in institutions by being able to have a say, be heard and work together for better outcomes. Our speaker this evening, Professor Jacki Schirmer, is well placed to help us link the work of the Garden Regeneration project with notions of wellbeing and community resilience.
Her leadership of the Living Well in the ACT Region Survey provides vital data to help understand the wellbeing of our community. Her research looks into the social dimensions of natural resource management resilience to extreme climatic events and the intersection between health and wellbeing and access to natural resources. There's possibly no one better to show us the links between the work of those volunteer gardeners in 2003 and our discussions about wellbeing today.
The Territory Records Office, alongside our other cultural institutions, is also an important contributor to the community's wellbeing. It serves to promote trust in government by advancing government transparency and accountability. It also supports identity, belonging and social connection by preserving and sharing the stories that make us a community. Canberrans learned many lessons in the wake of the 2003 bushfire, amongst them, the importance of community connections. It is the role of archives to help us remember those lessons so that we can draw from them next time we are faced with different, difficult experiences. Thank you very much.
Professor Jacki Schirmer, Director of the Centre for Environmental Governance, University of Canberra
Thank you very much. It is such an honour to be here tonight. And I have to say at the start, I really hope I can do justice to the people and their work that I've been reading about in these new releases. It has been absolutely humbling for the last few weeks, reading through thousands of pages of documents, the incredible work that so many people did after the bushfires. So my apologies in advance if I don't do them justice, but I'll do my best.
I do want to talk today about the archives and also about the lessons they provide us for today, because we are facing more than ever, the need to answer the question: how do we live well in a changing climate? And that's a very challenging question when we know that a change in climate is bringing about more frequent heatwaves, more frequent days of extreme fire risk, and changing rainfall.
We are experiencing these extreme events more often, and so increasingly people are saying, how do we adapt?
To answer that question, we need to think about what it looks like when we're living well. When we talk about living well with the changing climate, what does that mean? And we also need to remember that we live well not just when we have shelter overnight. That's a critical part, we live well when we've got a good quality of life, when we live in communities that support our wellbeing. We need to think about all those dimensions of wellbeing when we talk about how we manage disasters.
We need to think about all the things on the ACT Wellbeing Framework. You'll see the little flower on the screen, each of those petals shows different aspects of wellbeing that we need to fulfill if we want people living life to its full quality.
So this talk will be about more than just connection to nature. Because when we garden and we connect to nature, it actually provides pathways to many of the other things that are important to our wellbeing, like social connection, but also feeling a sense of security in the future, feeling a sense of community.
Talking about disaster governance, increasingly people who work in disaster management, not just recovery, but disaster preparation, are asking the question: How do we do disaster management in a way that supports wellbeing?
We've had a big shift in the last five to six years, particularly away from this idea that we manage a disaster when it happens. In the past, we would put in place a big response and then stop, and wait for the next one to come along. The current approach focuses on how “do we support communities from the ground up to live well with uncertainty,” because that is what we live with a lot of the time, and how do we make sure we support ongoing capacity for community-led action in local communities. We're still struggling with that.
We still haven't quite got it right. And these records that have been released give us an example of what can be done. So let's talk about what helps us minimize our loss of wellbeing when we experience challenges, what helps us recover wellbeing. We know a lot about that. We know that when we experience any extreme event, shelter and food are the first priorities.
We know that securing people's safety is critical, but just as important within days is making sure people are feeling a sense of control over their own future. After a disaster, people can begin to feel a sense that things have been taken from them. But even worse, they’re not sure how they’re going to recover them or overcome those barriers in the way to achieving that. That is incredibly detrimental to wellbeing.
When people lose social connection in the days after an extreme event because they've had to shift elsewhere, or because other people that they've been neighbours with for years have gone somewhere else, they lose that sense of belonging to a community, that's where we see the impacts.
So most of the things on this slide become so critical. As identified in wellbeing theory the three basic human needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness play a critical role in your long-term wellbeing.
By the way, if you have high wellbeing throughout your life, you will live seven to 10 years longer and need less access to health care. So when I talk about supporting wellbeing, I'm not just talking about a fluffy concept, I’m talking about a very real one that makes an incredible difference to society. And in order to have it, we need to feel a sense of mastery and control over our own lives.
We need to be given the means to have control over our life and our future, and to experience a sense of belonging. All of those things become so critical after a major event, like a fire impacting your community. The other thing that we need is, connection to nature. Let's talk a little bit about that. We often talk about getting out into nature, it’s been connected to wellbeing for several hundred years.
There are records documenting that after people have experienced trauma, they have been prescribed getting out into natural areas to support their recovery. We see soldiers as early as the 1600 to 1700s in Britain being sent to restorative places because it was known that would speed their recovery from wounds, from loss of family, from loss of property. We know from thousands of studies, if you get out into nature, you experience reduced stress, depression, anxiety, and improve self-esteem.
If you exercise outside instead of on a treadmill, you get better health benefits from it, including improvement to your blood pressure, and significantly faster recovery from stress and trauma.
Too often when we talk about connection to nature, we think about getting out and doing a really big bushwalk in some remote place. A giant trail feels a bit impossible to do a lot of the time, but that shouldn't be the only way we think about connecting to nature. Just as importantly, we can go to the local nature reserve, we can go to a park and encounter a strange new creature like a magpie. We can find some water that's flowing under a bridge and make sure we reach down and touch it and explore it. Feel the sensations right near our homes. After rain we can go and jump in puddles.
We shouldn't lose that willingness to go do that, although my daughter still does it at 13 and occasionally it's frustrating, but it's fantastic. It's connection and you can be in your garden and growing the biggest pumpkin that anyone's ever grown. All of those things are connection to nature, they matter and improve our wellbeing. And even more than that, even if you don't really think you like nature, you get a benefit from being out in it.
Now my son, who is in the picture here, is a living example of this. I drag him out. This is him on Cooleman Ridge on his mobile phone after having climbed up on top of some rocks.
I know that even though he tells me that he is a gamer, nature is not something he cares about, he is getting a wellbeing benefit from getting out there. I also know that in Canberra from our Living Well survey, 62% of Canberrans like gardening. I think in this audience it's more than that, just quietly. Twenty-five percent say they hate gardening, but if they get out, they will still get a wellbeing benefit from getting out into their garden.
So that brings me to the 2003 bushfires. I won't talk more about the day itself because we've heard about that too. Not only from a governance point of view. So many lessons were learned from those fires and we often hear about the ones that were learned because of what went wrong on the day and those were important and incredibly hard lessons that have led to profound changes in the land management around the ACT.
But in the 2019-20 case, we still hear discussion about how we still haven’t learned some lessons yet. But we really have seen lessons learned from the recovery processes as well, and we sometimes forget about those. So I'll just give you a picture from both the documents I've been reading in the last few weeks. And more generally, what we know happens in the weeks after fires.
We've already talked about it a bit, but we get wellbeing challenges that are about people losing income, property, memories and lives. They take us to those real needs like shelter, food and safety that consume us. But they also immediately take us to issues around sense of belonging. We hear people talk about that sense of fear: how do I get through this, what do I do next?
That sense of helplessness is one of the biggest impacts on wellbeing initially, as is feeling a sense of: can I control and guide what's going to happen to me? And we've got this sense that we're living in a changed landscape and community, and that when you walk out of your door and your community has changed in a flash and when you've had days, weeks, months and years of living in that community, that's a profound change.
But the things we sometimes don't talk about are the people who want to help but don't know how. There is an impact of disaster on everyone in a community. And for those who don't experience a direct impact themselves but want to help and don't have an avenue for that, it can impact wellbeing and unfortunately it can also lead to a common problem in disasters, which is an inundation of well-meant donations that don't actually help that much.
I'm seeing that a few people have had that experience. We still get it and we fail to find a role that people can have that enables them to helpfully help rather than unhelpfully help. So it remains a big issue.
Let's talk about the role of nature now. We've already talked about the fact that when we have events like this, sometimes the first impact we have related to nature is that sense of grief and loss.
And we have a name for that in academia, Solastagia, the grief and loss of environment and nature that has held a special meaning for you. It is such a common thing that we now have hundreds of papers talking about how do we support people through that? And in many of the documents that I've been reading, I can definitely identify people experiencing it.
Let me read the quote that’s at the bottom of this slide:
For many of us, 30 years of gardens have vanished in a flash. We did not know where to begin and how to pay for the costs of landscaping and replanting. How would we remove debris, gain access through nature parks at the back of our properties, what assistance was available…what assistance would government provide in rebuilding houses, communities, broken hearts and spirits? – Don McFeat
That's taken from a book called Our Story, produced by the Chapman Residents Action Group, one of the community groups that came up after the fires. At the same time that people are seeing nature broken, they're also looking to nature for signs of hope and regeneration. We see our own recovery when we start to see those first signs of hope.
We see people talking about having been up to Cooleman Ridge to look at the damage. But then some weeks later after rain, walking the ridge once more and finding the regeneration of the gum starting with fresh green and red shoots, native bluebells and wild yellow daisies regenerating down the bottom, we hear about a person whose favourite camellia burned to the ground and had begun reshooting.
So we want to regenerate nature to regenerate our own wellbeing but to do that we need to come together. After the 2003 fires we had community groups begin to spring up, which we often see in disasters, wanting to work for common good.
The Phoenix Gardening Group was this incredible group of people who had both, lost in the fires homes and damaged gardens, but also had incredible skills in horticulture and gardening that they could bring to bear on this challenge. They felt a great need to make the suburbs green again. We also had the Chapman Residents Action Group, who through the anger at seeing the suburb they loved so damaged, found the determination to make sure no one was left to cope alone through tools like community forums. Anglicare, who provide disaster recovery assistance to communities in need, were actively asking What do you need from us?
A pressing need to clear away burnt debris and provide safe access to the affected suburbs led to several teams of volunteers coming together quite rapidly. It was amazing.
So we're only three or four weeks after the fires and already this needs being identified and people are forming small bands of volunteers. They're working with people, they're offering help. Suddenly lots more people are putting up their hands and volunteering and saying, Can I join them? I would like to. You can see the quote on this slide says, Removal of burnt debris, pruning shrubs and attempting to restore and begin again gave hope and encouragement.
Plants started to be donated. Propagation groups met, hardware chains started donating, and not just the Canberra ones, the ones from Melbourne and Sydney – the records show there were donations from everywhere. The ACT Government donated mulch and a few resources. Initially the Western Sydney University School of Horticulture donated a large shade area. So many people wanting to come together and bring things to this.
But at the same time, when you read the final report of the Garden Regeneration project, there was some pushback. How dare you focus on gardens when there are so many more important things going on? And that is again, a common thing we see after disasters. Such an enormous thing has happened. So what should we focus on? Surely we should only focus on this even though we see a need for that much broader range of activities.
These groups kept on pushing and saying that addressing the need to regenerate gardens does help. It creates a big difference. It is what is needed to restore wellbeing along with all the other work that needs to happen. And at the same time the government was seeing this need. Cabinet documents as of the 10th of March 2003 are already identifying that community recovery processes have to date followed the pattern that's been documented in national and international experience of disaster.
Most government assistance to date had been provided to address the immediate and primary effects on those who lost people or properties. But the taskforce was now identifying secondary effects, especially on people whose properties, including gardens, were damaged but not destroyed, whose houses are in the damaged areas and are impacted by the long-term changes to their neighbourhoods and communities.
There are estimates in the Cabinet documents of how many gardens were destroyed in addition to the houses. Their initial estimates, a few weeks after the fire were 500 to 1000, that later increased to a much larger number because so many gardens were damaged. As it was so widespread, they immediately agreed, yes, we should have three plants being offered and we should encourage funding now by 17th of April, the volunteer groups that have been coming together and trying to coordinate things are having so much success that they're risking failure.
And that is all so common. Volunteers are coming in from everywhere. And this is a letter to the chief minister which was received on the 17th of April from the Phoenix Garden Group, Anglicare and the Chapman Residents Action Group. It's talking about how they've got a problem.
Hundreds of plants are already in the ground, but tens of thousands are on the way and hundreds of hours of labour and expertise have already been donated. But we've been promised thousands more.
This is groups of people who have been impacted by fires and are being asked to coordinate this inundation of help.
We simply don't have the time or expertise required to manage the distribution of donated goods and services to meet the demands. Both of those who want to help and of those who need it.
So you suddenly find yourself in the centre of this. We've created this group and it becomes the focus of so much demand.
Please help us ensure that the Canberra community's gift of gardens a clear and simple gesture of faith in the long-term future for effective communities, isn't lost through our inability to connect all those who want to help with those who need it.
And that brings me to the role of government. We want to enable community-led recovery. So what's the role of government when community can’t? Should it be for the government to take over to say, well, you don't worry, love, we'll get on with this and do it for you? Or should it be to enable and to say, what do you need so you can keep leading, but we give you the resources that you need. The ACT Government decided to go down the second road.
So they said, great, we will provide a coordinator, and we will fund that coordinator through the bushfire recovery Taskforce. But that coordinator operated with a committee being guided by the community and that is a fantastic way to achieve fantastic outcomes. So we see a letter coming back from the Chief Minister at the time, Jon Stanhope, saying we're committing a coordinator to this is in May 2003, and providing that coordinator enabled that goodwill to translate into action.
From there I wanted to include thousands of pages of so many things. You know, people could fill in forms expressing their interest in what do you need in your garden? How can we help it? Was it removing stumps? Is it getting new plants? Is it do you need advice on what sort of plants do you need advice on how to restore organic matter into your soil?
There were people who were real experts in how to achieve these outcomes. Notices went out in the community recovery, the recovery taskforce, community updates, calling to those volunteers and saying, Hey, here's how you can apply to get stumps removed using the government grants towards stump removal. Here's when the next Sunday morning in the Gardens are happening to help rebrand the neighbourhood.
Here's where you can get some support and here's where you can volunteer, if you want to give support. And one of the things that was very successful is that this combination of Anglicare, which had expertise in linking people to counselling, to financial support, meant that it could also help train volunteers who were going into gardens to work with people who had experienced significant trauma.
That partnership with the Phoenix Gardening Group, which had people who knew everything about plants but possibly weren't experts in trying to interact with traumatized residents, and the Chapman Residents Action Group, meant that they could share and pool those resources and expertise, and the gardening activities can become almost like a front for referring people. When you see a need, making sure that if through gardening you identify needs, you can get that broader need met as well.
And there are many examples of that in the records released talking about how we've come across someone who might need a bit of extra support. Can you please pass this on? Can you do that? So that helped so many people get support and the work directly impacted wellbeing. When we look at what's documented, we see quotes from people. Here's one from a resident that had the old garden bed along the edge of their driveway dug up and replanted and mulched.
I found myself smiling each time I drove into my home, probably for the first time since the fires. They were like a band of angels arriving on my front doorstep. You can't imagine what a lift it gave me to see the burnt material removed and an area prepared for planting. And it encouraged me to keep going with all the parts of the garden.
And there is a kind of magic in a project like this, where people get brought together and they make something happen, and that something becomes bigger than the sum of all the parts. And that really did happen here. So, so many people volunteered, so many school kids, like from Canberra Grammar.
Now there's the usual challenges of how long should this go for? There was a successful extension of the coordinator applications for funding. One thing I note was that applying for funding was a little bit easier back in 2003 compared to the forms I see today, and that is a critical lesson for us working in disaster recovery today.
You shouldn't need to have a professional grant writer for a local community group to get funding and be able to apply for it. And this provides a great example that I may have actually already shot off to someone to say: This is what a form looked like 20 years ago. This is what it should still look like today, because I don't see it very often now.
I haven't even begun to give justice to the immense amount of work and the many people who did it. But I do need to talk about what happened at the end. A good recovery project comes to an end, and it should because it's exhausting because so many people come together and it needs to end at some point. The Garden Regeneration Project was conceived as a project with a use by date, and it was understood by the project management group that the effort required to maintain it was not indefinitely sustainable.
By November 2004, the Garden Regeneration Project had co-ordinated the activities of over 400 volunteers, obtained, distributed and spread 420 cubic meters of mulch, 202 cubic meters of soil, 140 cubic meters of stable mix established a nursery and plant production process that propagated grew on and delivered over 16,000 plants and contributed to the regeneration of 350 fire affected gardens and many more people who lived in the community.
And all of that was starting to come to an end. The volunteers were dropping off and the organizing group was exhausted. Running that kind of effort for that long is an amazing effort, and one of the biggest challenges we face in disaster recovery is when we burn out our volunteers. A very sensible decision was made: this is where we stop to enable people to maintain their wellbeing instead of losing it through what they give to us.
Now, the Garden Route Generations Project's outcomes went well beyond the garden. You can see it in the quotes that talked about gardening and giving enabled many of us in the group to begin our own journey of healing and connecting to our community brought a sense of togetherness and hope for the future. Gardening led the way to recovery from dark black days and gave us a sense of renewal.
And when we look at what worked, remember when I talked about wellbeing? Wellbeing was benefited through reducing people's sense of helplessness, looking at a garden and going, I don't even know where to start. Providing those pathways to starting makes a profound difference and it does it through all those fancy terms that we talk about in academia, increasing people's competence and autonomy, but doing it in such a meaningful way, it increased social connection and linkages between people who would never have otherwise come together.
It helped restore a sense of belonging to a community that had been profoundly changed, and provided support to re-establish a connection to nature through gardens.
I want to finish by reflecting on lessons learned and unfortunately unlearned. And some of them I've already talked about. Community-led disaster recovery is something we see talked about constantly, but it is really hard to achieve in reality.
And if we leave volunteers to work unsupported, we get high burnout and collapse of activities. But on the other hand, if government takes over too much, we can remove that control and ownership that's actually critical to the wellbeing of those who are recovering. We have to walk that fine line now. I'm sure some of you will have different opinions about whether the ACT Government walked that line the right way.
I think it tried its hardest. I think it got some distance to doing that. While always there will be limitations, I think they also walked a good line to some degree between that need for government oversight but the need to enable people to easily access funding, to support activities, to not make everything worse by putting in place a massively complex administrative barrier to getting support.
And that's something we're not learning in today's disaster recovery processes in Australia in general. And fortunately, we had great collaboration between groups, but that does bring challenges and we really are seeing similar challenges today. And this project is an example of what can be done. We need to learn and apply those lessons when it comes to nature, connection. I think the lesson we need to learn is that we can do this in more than the garden. Let's take it beyond the garden, because nature connection doesn’t just happen in the garden.
There were profound benefits from this project. It's an example of what can be achieved when we connect people with nature. We need to take that connection to the broader landscape, particularly local ridges and reserves and natural areas.
In the records, we see things like Stromlo High School having schoolchildren who went up and monitored the regeneration that was happening up on Cooleman Ridge, and through that that helped those school kids process what they were experiencing, and see nature is not static. We see processes of change and regeneration and we need to understand them. The reason we need to this is because one of our big issues in disaster recovery is when we don't understand nature.
We sometimes don't support the activities we need to do for disasters. So there's some really cool science being done about this idea of how complexly we understand nature and getting people out into gardens, getting them to see the regeneration cycle of plants, understand the life cycle of different plants, understand the different plant communities, is a way of helping them think more complexly about their landscape, and it's actually more likely to mean they then support activities like traditional burning, like traditional landscape management and welcome that rather than opposing it, because it might include things that feel initially to someone who doesn't have that complex understanding is destructive.
So we need to build that complex understanding of nature if we're going to get better land management. So it's almost there. Living with nature as it regenerates provides a pathway for human recovery, and we need to understand nature connection as being fundamental to disaster preparation, response and recovery. And I would like to leave you with a quote, not from 2003, but from the Inquiry into the review of Emergency Service responses in 2019-20 bushfire season.
It talks about the fact that:
Aboriginal people managed this same land…under various climate conditions with fire stick farming…If Aboriginal knowledge was applied and landscape hydration with carbon sequestration in the soil prioritised, land management choices and operations [in the ACT] would be different.
And it calls for working with the whole community, including farmers and Aboriginal people, saying that it's complicated, but we need to do it to “bring the wisdom skills and labour to increase resilience of people and places.”
That submission was made by the ACT Rural Landholders Association. That to me is one of the lessons from 2003: when we bring people of different knowledge together and they work collectively, we get great outcomes. We still have a long way to go to achieve that across our land management in the ACT and we've got some very big gaps that need to be filled.
I'd like to finish by saying a big thank you to all of you who volunteer, advocate, donate, give your time and work to support your communities because you help us shift from this after a fire to what we see today when we look on Google Earth, which is a very different landscape indeed. Thank you very much.
