Transcript for
Families who have experienced disasters (part three): What happens when you lose your home

Narrator (00:02): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Families Podcast. 

Nadia (Host) (00:06): 

Hi, I am Nadia Rossi and you’re listening to an Emerging Minds Families podcast. We would like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors and elders past, present, and emerging from the different First Nations across Australia. 

(00:30): 

This podcast discusses bushfire dangers and survival as well as traumatic events experienced during a fire. If you feel this topic may bring up difficult feelings for you, perhaps give this week a miss or join us next fortnight, or you can find resources for support in our show notes. 

(00:51): 

Disasters like floods, bushfire, and drought are becoming more frequent across Australia and can leave a lasting impact on the families and children who experience them. This episode is part of a series where we talk with families who have experienced disasters. We are going to hear how they supported themselves and their children, and how they navigate the ongoing recovery process. Today, we are speaking with Bron. Bron, her husband and two young children survived the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. They have since relocated to the ACT where Bron works for the federal government. Bron is here today to share their story with us. Welcome, Bron. It is great to speak with you today. 

Bron (Guest) (01:33): 

Lovely to speak with you as well. 

Nadia (Host) (01:35): 

Bron, can you tell us a bit about who makes up your family? 

Bron (Guest) (01:39): 

Yeah, sure. My immediate family is my husband, Shane, and then I have two children, or we have two children. We’ve got Dom who is now about to turn 18 and Lola who’s about to turn 20. And then, I have three bonus children who are adults, so Max and Vicky who are in their 30s, and then there’s Piera as well, who’s nearly 30. 

Nadia (Host) (02:02): 

Wow. What an amazing group of people to have around you. 

Bron (Guest) (02:05): 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Nadia (Host) (02:07): 

I mentioned in our introduction that your family survived the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. How old were your children when this happened? 

Bron (Guest) (02:16): 

Sure. Dom and Lola were with us. Max, Vicky and Pi were adulting elsewhere, but Dom was two and a half years old, and Lola was four and a half years old when the fires came through 2009. 

Nadia (Host) (02:27): 

So really little. 

Bron (Guest) (02:28): 

That’s right. Yep. 

Nadia (Host) (02:29): 

And did you have time to prepare, and in that time, how did you talk to your children about what was happening? 

Bron (Guest) (02:38): 

One of the things is that it happened so quickly and I guess some of the things that we were doing in the lead up to the 7th of February, 2009 kept us really busy so we sort of probably weren’t, I guess, paying quite so much attention to what was potentially going to happen on Black Saturday. Shane had been away filming a TV commercial up in Sydney. I had just finished my very first week of teaching, and it was a huge week leading up. 

(03:05): 

On the actual day, Black Saturday happened so quickly as well. It was a really, really hot windy day, but it wasn’t until around midday, 1:00 in the afternoon, that it became apparent that there was a fire over 60 kilometres away to our west, which was a long way away given any of our previous exposures to bushfires. We’d had a fire in the area in 2006, which was relatively close and very slow moving. I was actually pregnant with Dom at the time, and so Lola and myself and Piera, our bonus daughter, we actually left the mountain and went and stayed with friends down in Melbourne. I guess there was always the intention that we would never be on the mountain in a fire, but Black Saturday just happened so quickly that we had to pretty much make do with whatever resources that we had at the time. 

(03:55): 

The preparations on that day were we got the fire box out, we always had clothes that anyone would be able to fit into, and that was really a little bit funny because the children thought it was a bit strange that I was dressing them in their winter clothes, long sleeve tops and their jeans, but I said, “We’ve got to get dressed because if the fire comes this way, we need to protect our bodies.” 

(04:17): 

And then, I guess as the fire came closer to where we were, I said to the children, “It’s going to get really loud. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stay in the middle of the house here. We’re going to play wet tents.” I’d gotten a whole lot of towels and a woolen blanket, and I’d wet them down and we sat in the middle of the house and I sat under there with them and I said, “Look, it’s going to get scary, but you need to stay with me and I’ll be able to keep you safe, but it’s going to be really, really noisy and dark.” 

(04:46): 

That was pretty much our preparation, so not a huge amount, but I guess the fact that we had some fire clothes there and was able to dress them and I was able to talk them through what was about to happen, even though I had no idea the sort of ferocity of what was going to happen. 

Nadia (Host) (05:01): 

And I guess you do that as a parent, you find a way. We try and talk about age appropriate ways, but how do you talk to a two and a four-year-old about what could potentially happen even though you’re unsure and you’re trying to reassure even though you’re unsure, and so there’s a lot going on. But yes, trying to prepare them for this, I guess what you said, the sound as well of what they might experience. 

Bron (Guest) (05:21): 

The only reason I thought to tell them this, it’s serendipitous all of the things that led up to our survival. One of them was actually years and years ago, I don’t know if you recall the book Four Fires by Bryce Courtenay. He wrote a book about living in the Australian high country and in Victoria, which is very prone to bushfire. There was a chapter in there where a young CFA volunteer came across a house that had a mother and some small children in it, and they were sitting in a valley and there were fires coming around, and he basically walked into this house and came across this mother who was quite, I guess, panicked, not sure what to do, and he said, “Okay, what you’ve got to do is put as many blankets and stuff at the bottom of the doors and dress the children.” 

(06:12): 

I think the thing that really helped me convey what it was going to be like to the children is the way he wrote about the sensory experience in fiction allowed me to predict for the children what it might sound like. I can’t remember whether in that chapter he told the mum to sing nursery rhymes or not, but I know that I sang nursery rhymes to the children when we were under the blanket when the fire front hit the house, and I did that to try, and I guess, give them something that was familiar and comforting, but also that singing of nursery rhymes helped keep my voice calm and stop me from panicking because obviously that would make things worse for the children. 

Nadia (Host) (06:53): 

That’s so amazing that you can read something in a book so many years ago and it can come to you in that moment. I guess that shows how important, I mean, even though that’s a book, but having resources or the retelling of stories and people’s experiences and lived experience, it’s so important. 

Bron (Guest) (07:08): 

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, because Bryce Courtenay was still alive at the time, but I tracked him down and I wrote to him and I said, “Look, I just wanted to say that your book and that specific chapter helped contribute to saving our lives,” which I think he really appreciated. He sent me a whole set of every single book of his, which was lovely. 

Nadia (Host) (07:29): 

Oh, that’s amazing. Just going back to the singing of the nursery rhymes, and I guess how that’s regulating yourself and then helping them to regulate, how else did you communicate? 

Bron (Guest) (07:37): 

There wasn’t really a huge amount that I could do to communicate with them because it was so loud and because it was so dark apart from, I guess, maintaining as much physical contact with them as possible. Not leaving them alone or if I had to leave them, made sure that they were together and they understood to stay in the one’s place and I would be sort of away for a few seconds to help Shane with something inside the house. I guess providing that physical contact was really the only thing that I could do because you couldn’t see and you couldn’t hear. You could only feel and smell and hear what was happening around you as well. 

Nadia (Host) (08:13): 

As a result, Bron, of the bushfires, your family lost your home and you found yourselves experiencing homelessness displacement. Can you talk about this time and what that was like for your family? 

Bron (Guest) (08:26): 

I might start that with one of the things that I’ve always been really grateful for is when we’d finally gotten out of the house that ultimately burned and we were between the two water tanks, the children in a blanket, there was at one point where Shane stood the children up between the tanks, and the house was completely razed and it was still burning, but you couldn’t even see a frame. It had all collapsed. Shane said, “Say goodbye to our home, children,” so I’m grateful for that because they would always understand what happened to their home. It wasn’t like they left and came back and found a razed mess. Yeah, it’s funny. I’m grateful for that, that they were able to sort of witness that and say goodbye to it in their little voices. 

Nadia (Host) (09:13): 

Have a little closure moment in a sense. 

Bron (Guest) (09:16): 

I remember my daughter, I think at this point the sun was starting to go down, so we must have been there for quite some time, but Lola was like, “Where are we going to have dinner? Where are we going to have dinner tonight? We’re going to go down to the pub?” Because there’s no kitchen there to have dinner. There’s no home to have dinner in, and she’s very routine. You have to maintain that routine. 

(09:38): 

What happened being displaced? It was, I guess for us, I don’t think we ever felt homeless per se, but we were very much displaced. What we did when we left the mountain that night is we went to a friend’s house probably about 45, 50 kilometres away, and one of the reasons why we went straight there is that the children knew that family really well. They knew the house really well, so they were really familiar and they would’ve felt safe, a bit of routine. I think, for me, it was really important to try and find things that were familiar and routine to the children because everything else was disrupted. 

(10:15): 

And then, we stayed there for about a week and got to the point where it’s like, “Well, we need to find somewhere to live,” and there was no rental properties available in the area because they’d all been taken off the market and given to other people who’d lost their homes. We did eventually find somewhere to go, and it was really odd moving into a rental property. We had all of these donated goods because we had nothing. It was really funny because you had donated linens and donated clothes and everything smelt different because there’s a whole different mixture of washing powders and stuff like that. It’s funny how some of those things you wouldn’t realise were a thing until you experience them. 

(10:58): 

But for Dom, I remember him, because he was this two and a half year old who lived on a two acre block up in the mountains and he loved digging holes and being a little adventurer, and then all of a sudden, we’re in this suburban court, which had about six houses in it, and he didn’t understand that everybody has their own block of land and you don’t go over to the neighbours and dig a hole in the front yard, which is, we would find him wandering around. And that’s why I probably say we were more displaced than we were homeless because we left one environment and went to something that was very foreign to what particularly our children’s lived experience was. I think that that was hard for them because you couldn’t just behave like you did when you were up in the mountains with free reign. 

Nadia (Host) (11:47): 

During this time of displacement, what was your main focus for you? Was it just getting through day by day? 

Bron (Guest) (11:55): 

For us, particularly in the early days, it wasn’t necessarily getting through day by day. It was really small moments of time, which eventually over time got longer and longer, but it would be, how am I going to get through the next half hour? How am I going to get through the next hour? And there was so many things that you had to do because you not only had little children who were extremely distressed and didn’t feel… They needed to be with either myself or Shane all of the time. You couldn’t leave them with anyone. Their attachment needs were really, really significant. 

(12:27): 

But at the same time, we had to go to recovery centers to fill out paperwork, Register.Find.Reunite, which the Australian Red Cross runs so that people could find us and know that we were still alive and okay. We had to go to the recovery centers to get access to small amounts of cash so that you could go and buy some milk and bread and those kind of essential needs for the children and register to get your driver’s license reissued. There was a lot of administrative stuff that we had to do that took a huge amount of time in those early days and there wasn’t any other option. 

(13:06): 

At the time, I think Shane also had to fulfil a contract that he had. He actually went away after about, I think, two weeks after the fires, he had to go away to finish off a month long contract. I was left with the kids and trying to set up a house, and so we would turn up to recovery centres, the three of us in tow, and that was a really interesting time. The children would get taken away by a volunteer and, “Come and have a look for some clothes,” and stuff like that. The children would come back with bags and bags of stuff, and then I would go back to the house in Greensboro with the kids and people would’ve dropped off donated goods at the door. And so, it just became this tsunami of trying to manage all of this donated materials and do administration while still having to look after your two children. It was really tough, and all I wanted to do was cook a meal for them, and I didn’t have the tools and the implements to do that. 

Nadia (Host) (14:02): 

What are the supports like in that time because you’re not in your home, you’re not in your usual environment and the children’s usual environment? What would you want people to know when experiencing that? 

Bron (Guest) (14:11): 

I think some of the important things to know is that these children have seen and experienced things that many other children will never, ever in their entire lifetime experience, and these children are going to need to be able to stay close to their parents or their trusted caregivers as much as possible in those early days. 

(14:32): 

I guess, don’t take children away from their parents if you’re going into a recovery centre or if the child is showing signs of distress, whether it be out in the shopping centre or dropping them off to kindergarten or primary school or daycare and they’re not looking like they’re coping, then I think don’t force the issue. Just maintain that safe space with the person that they, I guess, trust and know will be the safest person for them at that time. 

Nadia (Host) (15:01): 

That’s really vital information and so simple as well. I think people may think they’re helping in some ways, but really it’s that connectedness that children really want. 

Bron (Guest) (15:10): 

I think one of the things that I’ve always pondered about what could have been more helpful for me at the time would’ve been instead of someone else trying to look after the children while I got the administrative paperwork done, have someone support you to do the paperwork side of things, and then provide avenues to maintain or reconnect with your children or my children. 

(15:37): 

One of the things that I really struggled with after the fires, because of the intensity of the experience that our family had, was that connection and attachment to my children. And so, having supportive ways to help me feel safe enough to reconnect in those early days would’ve helped me, but it would’ve also really helped Dom and Lola. It was tough because it’s like, “I have to do all of this paperwork and lodging the grant applications and collecting things to create a home again,” but I also needed to be very hands-on and present for my children. There was not a lot of support to enable me to be present for my children in a way that we all felt safe. 

(16:20): 

It’s really tough because a lot of the supports that are provided to get people back on their feet again, they’re only there for a finite period of time. And so, when you’re in it it feels like if I don’t continue to advocate and work on that side of the administrative side of things, then we’ll miss out and then that will make it harder in terms of the recovery and reconstruction and for us to get back home again, so you feel like you have no choice. 

Nadia (Host) (16:49): 

Bron, you and your family chose to rebuild on the same place where you lost your home? 

Bron (Guest) (16:54): 

We did, yes. 

Nadia (Host) (16:55): 

What was that experience like? 

Bron (Guest) (16:58): 

It was mayhem. Probably took us about three or four months before Shane and I decided that we wanted to give it a crack at going home and rebuilding. Going backwards in time a little bit from when we decided to go back and rebuild, we had a friend give us a caravan that had an annex on it, and so that went up onto the block pretty much where our shed, Shane’s studio used to be. We set that up, but we didn’t stay in it until the children gave us permission to stay there. Shane and I really felt that it was important for them to lead on that. They would give us signs that they were comfortable and felt safe enough to stay when they were ready to. The caravan was set up there for quite some time before we moved back onto the property. 

(17:46): 

I think there was just one evening where we were starting pack up to drive back off the mountain and the children, I don’t think they said anything, they just looked like they were ready to stay the night. I think Lola might’ve asked if they could stay the night, and so we did, and we never ever, ever went back, stayed another night in the rental property. It was like that was the beginning of our way back home, which was really nice. I’m really glad that we let the children lead on that decision. 

(18:12): 

We made a decision to rebuild. How on earth are we going to do this? We didn’t have a huge amount of money. We weren’t insured to build what we built. We were insured for a little wooden cottage up in the mountains. We were extremely underinsured and so that’s why we had to, I guess, do it tough in the caravan and do a lot of the, I guess, owner building ourselves. We built something beautiful, but it was a tough couple of years because there was four of us living in a caravan. Really, it’s kind of like a pressure cooker because I guess all of us had traumatic injury from our experience. And so, I know for Shane and myself, our threshold for tolerating noise was really, really low, and how noisy are two and 4-year-old children in a caravan? 

(19:02): 

But we had some incredible experiences while we were living like that. We had lots of parties and there was always someone visiting. I think part of that was, I guess our experiences as a family of four because the intensity of our experience in the fire, in the house, it was almost like our family dynamic had also been disrupted and received a traumatic injury because it never really felt safe to just be the four of us alone in a small space. We would often have friends over for dinner. As soon as it was no longer four, so it might’ve been a four plus one or a four minus one if someone went somewhere else, things started to de-escalate, always felt a little bit calmer. 

Nadia (Host) (19:48): 

I guess when you experience something like that, you think about the individual supports and everyone getting looked after or finding external supports for mom, dad, kids, but then what happens to the family unit as what it was and now how it is now and how that changes and how you process that and how you can help mend that or get that to a space. What do you do with that family picture that you had and now what the new one is and how do you find your new in that? 

Bron (Guest) (20:21): 

I guess, particularly for little children, their parents or their primary caregivers are the ones that create safety for them. They’re going to always protect and keep them safe. I guess our experiences was that we couldn’t do that. I mean, yes, we survived and that’s a wonderful thing, but they had an experience where they know very clearly that the world is not safe, and so how much do they trust that? How much do little children intuitively now trust that our mum or dad or both will be able to keep them safe as well? 

(20:57): 

I had an experience probably about a month after the fire. Dom had terrible eczema and we would have to go and get allergy tests done quite frequently. We went down to the dermatologist and Dom wouldn’t let me hug because they have to do it down his sort of bare back. 

Nadia (Host) (21:14): 

Sure. 

Bron (Guest) (21:15): 

And Dom wouldn’t let me hold him tight to keep him still because in the fires, I was laying on top of him and putting a lot of my body weight so he couldn’t tolerate mum holding him close and tight for a long time afterwards, just that sensory experience and being close to me. Shane had to hold him, and that was fine. 

Nadia (Host) (21:36): 

And you find your ways to get through it until he feels able to come back or find that new way, the new normal. I want to talk, Bron, about you didn’t end up living in the place that you rebuilt. 

Bron (Guest) (21:47): 

We lived there for about two years, I’d say. 

Nadia (Host) (21:49): 

Oh, okay. 

Bron (Guest) (21:51): 

Yeah, it took us 12 months to design the house and get the permits and everything through, and then it took another 12 months to build the house. We lived there for a while, but yeah, we were struggling as a family where we were and we thought I had an opportunity working for the government to go up to Canberra for 12 months and they were going to move us up there. And so, it was kind of a low risk experiment to see if a change of environment would help our family to heal. Now, that was 11 years ago and I’m still in Canberra, and I do often ask myself, “Did that help our family heal?” 

Nadia (Host) (22:25): 

Can you tell us what it was like to move from a place while there is that trauma, but there is a shared experience that you and your family and your community all went through and the supports in your community all shared, what it’s like to then transition and move to a separate state or place where that shared experience isn’t there? 

Bron (Guest) (22:47): 

I think that was really tough and I think sometimes it can continue to be tough because even though for us it was 15 years ago, it’s still very present in our everyday lives. I think taking the children out of the school that they were in. They went to Strathaird Primary School who were extremely supportive. I mean, the school had been destroyed by fire and impacted families and teachers impacted, and so that shared experience was really, really supportive in those early days. But I’m sad that my children weren’t able to continue their education in that really supportive and understanding environment because they came up to Canberra and they went from a school of 36 students in the entire school to a school of 400 students. I remember my son coming home one day and he said, “The only way I can tell my friends is by looking at their runners because they’re the only things that are different,” because they wore a uniform. 

(23:41): 

But Dom, I think in particular, didn’t cope with large crowds, a lot of noise, lots of sensory overload, and he found it really difficult to learn, particularly writing. He could read but he couldn’t write. The teachers because they had no shared experience or they just didn’t understand what he had actually been through, he had very negative experiences at school. Dom, I think, had a really hard time in those first few years adjusting and we had to find additional supports for him to help him with learning, particularly with the writing. 

(24:17): 

Once we got that sorted, a lot of his behavioural issues in the classroom started to, I guess, settle down a lot. It was tough, I think, going from an environment where it was extremely understanding and supportive to one that really didn’t have a true appreciation of what the children had been through. 

Nadia (Host) (24:37): 

And looking back, what would have supported your family in that transition? 

Bron (Guest) (24:41): 

For teachers to have a greater understanding of how traumatic experiences can impact children, can impact their behaviour and their ability to learn and retain knowledge. A lot of schools say we’re trauma informed and that, but when it actually comes to the crunch, they might do the professional development but maybe not necessarily understand, I guess, able to put what they learn into practise as readily as they could. 

(25:12): 

I think being sensitive to children who’ve come from traumatic experiences, and it doesn’t have to just be a bushfire or we’ve got a really mobile population both coming in from overseas but also moving around the country where people might have been impacted by a disaster and they choose not to live there and they want to move somewhere else that might make them feel a little bit safer. Schools just having an awareness that there are going to be a lot of these children that are coming into their care within the classroom and just, I guess, making those reasonable adjustments to support them because they’re not malicious in terms of their behaviour. It’s just that they’re really heightened sensory arousal. 

Nadia (Host) (25:55): 

Bron, I’m interested in talking about self-compassion. Is there any advice that you would have for parents and caregivers on practicing self-compassion when things are difficult? 

Bron (Guest) (26:06): 

Yeah. Oh gee, it’s the hardest thing when you’re in the midst of all of this mayhem. So many people would say, “You’ve got to look after yourself first in order to look after your children.” Do you know, as a parent in the midst of that, it’s the hardest thing to do as well, but it is absolutely important. I think once I started to look after myself a lot better, I was then able to look after and be more present for the children in the years afterwards. 

(26:35): 

As a parent, you can’t blame yourself if you end up in a situation where you and your children have been exposed to something terrible. I think that’s the first step in self-compassion is that we were put in a situation or we were in a situation that was bigger than us and that what’s happened, it’s not my fault, it’s not my husband’s fault, and it’s not my children’s fault. That’s a really important practice to acknowledge that this is something that happened to us and that we did not bring it on ourselves so that we’re not blaming ourselves. 

(27:04): 

One of the bigger pieces of advice is that it’s okay to feel like you’re not okay. It’s okay to feel stressed, and it’s okay to feel like you can’t. I’m quite a sort of visual person, and I always imagined myself as sometimes it was having to put little ropes on your knees and lift your leg up to take that next step forward. You had to help yourself to move forward, even if it was just a little bit. I think it’s really important as parents and caregivers to know that you can take, when things are all going pear-shaped in whatever situation to, I guess, give yourself permission to take time. There’s no race in this. The only race is against yourself, and so slowing down is a really important step in self-compassion, I think, because it gives you time to bring down whatever your arousal level is, whatever your level of distress or stress is, so that then you can let that wave pass and then you can be back and present again, whether it’s for yourself or for your children or for your partner or for your family. 

Nadia (Host) (28:15): 

Just allowing or giving people permission to take time. There’s such a rush, I think, to fix things. As a mum, you want everyone to be okay, and you want everything to keep going as the way it was, and let’s just keep moving forward and just letting everyone know that there’s not a race and that there’s no rush to it. 

Bron (Guest) (28:30): 

I think the other thing is ask for help. There’s no shame in saying I’m not okay, and that I need someone to kind of step in and support and hold a space for me so that I can, again, bring myself down so that I can come back to where I need to be. 

Nadia (Host) (28:50): 

Absolutely. Are there any supports or resources that you think are missing for families who have experienced disasters? 

Bron (Guest) (28:58): 

What seems to be missing from my experience, and I’ve looked, is that therapeutic support and intervention for families who have been through trauma, and I sort of describe it as each individual within the family. For us, in our immediate family, the four of us, each one of us had our own traumatic experience and injury. But then the family collective, if you think about that as a fifth person that has also experienced an injury, and where is the help to heal the family itself? I guess that’s one of the things that is really key. 

(29:33): 

I think we touched on it before, the support for the parents or the primary caregivers to take away some of the administrative burden of recovery and the things that you need to do, you must do, in order to get access to other grants and supports and stuff like that so that you can rebuild. Having someone support that process so that, I guess, the parent, whether it be a mother, grandparent, primary carer, father, can actually spend the time with their children and be present for them so that the children’s needs are met, and then providing support to that parent who might’ve had some attachment challenges afterwards. How do we support that parent to reconnect with their children in a safe non-confrontational way? Because when you almost lose a child, you don’t want to lose them again, so that reconnection needs to be really well supported. 

Nadia (Host) (30:28): 

Bron, to families that have experienced disasters, what advice would you have for them as they try to find their way through that difficult time? 

Bron (Guest) (30:37): 

I think the first piece is that this is not a race. This is going to take time, and to practise that self-compassion around giving yourself time. Reach out and ask for help, and when help is not helpful, give yourself permission to say, “No thank you.” I think that’s really important because there’s a huge amount of people that want to support and do something, and sometimes those supports might not be quite right for you or your family. Advocate for what your needs are because they’re the most important, not necessarily for someone who wants to do something because they’re hurt by what they’ve seen. 

(31:15): 

I think one of the really important things, particularly from a family perspective, is prioritise your family and your children over rebuilding, reconstruction, because that will help you recover in a way, I think, that’s far more sort of supportive and effective than if you try to do everything at once. I feel like my children were probably there in the background watching me run around, doing a million things to try and rebuild and recover, when really what I needed to do is sit with them and be with them and let all of the other stuff go until the time is… It’s tough though, because when you’re displaced, you need to rebuild a home. 

Nadia (Host) (31:54): 

Speaking of your children, we always try and have a moment for children’s voice and give time and space for a children’s voice in these discussions, because we are talking about the family. In your discussions with your children, were they able to feed back what they would need or what kids need to feel comfort, safety, listened to in those times? 

Bron (Guest) (32:16): 

Yeah. We do talk about their experience from time to time. One of the more recent conversations that I had was with Dom. His experience in the Black Saturday fires was he, in that critical time, was unable to run because I was laying on top of him inside the house to keep him safe. His, I guess, instinctual reaction was out of fight, flight, freeze was flight, but he was also fighting me at the time. He was scratching me, trying to get away from me so that he could run from the fire. And one of the things that he found really helpful when I spoke to him about this a couple of weeks ago was doing something really active. For him, when we moved to Canberra, it was a number of years later, he started doing gymnastics, which is a very physical sport, and that really helped him to heal from a lot of the, I guess, instinctual wanting to fight or flight in every other part of his life. 

(33:13): 

He said to me, “If there was anything that was really helpful for me in terms of my recovery, it was doing something extremely physical,” because when it was really important to him in the traumatic event, he was prevented from doing that. He was almost able to kind of physically work off or integrate his traumatic experience by doing gymnastics. 

(33:35): 

For Lola, it’s different. She doesn’t necessarily acknowledge the fires as being an event that has impacted her, so it’s a lot harder to talk to her about that because, I mean, we obviously see and have known her whole life, so we’ve seen that it has had an impact, but she doesn’t necessarily… I think, she just doesn’t feel ready to talk about it. 

Nadia (Host) (33:57): 

I find that always so fascinating that you can have two children experience or grow up in a home or have the same lived experience, but how they become who they are and how they process things can be so different. 

Bron (Guest) (34:10): 

Yeah, no, it’s all very, very different. Lola, I think looking back on how she coped afterwards, it was interesting when we went to recovery centers, one of the things that she would often pick up to take home was really tight clothing. She obviously needed to… Almost the clothing that she would bring home would be two or three sizes too small, so it was almost like she needed strong compression on her body in order to bring her sensory levels down. 

(34:40): 

The other thing I think that she noticed, I remember a conversation that she had with Shane, or would’ve been a while ago now, living in the caravan, you know how some caravans have got little bunk beds for children? Lola, because she was older, she slept on the top and Dom because he was little, slept on the bottom. And I think, it’s a bit sad, but one of the things that she felt like she missed out on was those stories in bed with mom or dad because we couldn’t get up onto the top bunk. Dom got stories in bed that we never were able to get onto the top bunk to do the same, and that was something that she noticed. 

Nadia (Host) (35:15): 

It’s so interesting, isn’t it, what they remember, and you are just kind of trying to just go day by day? 

(35:22): 

Bron, thank you so much for sharing your family story and your lived experience and the journey that you’re still on as well. Thank you so much for your time today. 

Bron (Guest) (35:34): 

No worries. Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Nadia (Host) (35:37): 

And thank you to our listeners for joining us. If you would like to keep up to date with our latest conversations, we’d love it if you like and subscribed to our Emerging Minds Families Podcast channel. You can also find us on Instagram at Emerging Minds AU or on Facebook at Emerging Minds Families. 

(35:54): 

You have been listening to an Emerging Minds Families Podcast. If anything spoken about today has been distressing for you or you find yourself struggling, please reach out for help. You can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or for more resources for support can be found in our show notes. 

Narrator (36:12): 

Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au/families for a wide range of free information and resources to help support child and family mental health. Emerging Minds leads the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health. The Centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.