I’ve had a lot of conversations over the past few months with people who lost everything in the January fires.
Different properties, different stories, but I’ve started noticing a pattern, and it has nothing to do with how much they lost.
It’s about who they’re talking to.
The people who seem to be coping best aren’t necessarily the ones with the least damage or the most insurance.
They’re the ones with a golf club.
A coffee group that meets most mornings, rain or shine, land or no land.
Somewhere they show up and someone notices if they don't.
The ones doing it hardest are often the ones out on their own.
Fencing whenever they can fit it in, around everything else that still needs doing, for a job that will take the better part of a year.
Work that is entirely self contained. No-one to talk to but the wire and the posts and the birds in whatever trees remain.
To be very clear, I’m obviously not a therapist. Full disclaimer.
I may sound like one for a paragraph, though, because the research backs up what I’ve been watching with my own eyes.
Studies out of the 2009 Black Saturday fires and more recent bushfire recovery research both point to the same thing: people with strong social connections before a disaster, recover better after one.
Not because talking about the fire fixes it.
Because being known by other people, being expected somewhere, having your absence noticed, does something that no amount of paperwork or payout can.
And here’s the part that makes me angry on their behalf.
Therapy isn’t cheap. If you’re staring down a rebuild, or rate notices landing in the letterbox on top of it all, a psychologist’s bill is not making the list.
Neither is the drive, or the time off, when the day is already fully spoken for.
Book a Mental Health Treatment Plan appointment with your GP in person.
It gets you rebated sessions and, importantly, you choose who you see.
I watched Jack O’Sullivan (Red Gum Reflections, regional and rural men’s counselling based in Avenel) do extraordinary work in those critical days right after the fires.
I saw it first-hand and will be forever grateful for what he did for this community.
You don’t need a qualification to help, though.
Some people will never sit in a therapist’s chair, no matter how affordable or available it is.
That’s where the rest of us come in. Drop round with a casserole.
Shout them a coffee. Bring fruit from your tree.
Rock up, and keep rocking up, and let them know you’re there whenever they want to talk, and just as happy to sit there if they don’t.
Grief and trauma don’t go away because you’re too busy to deal with them.
They just find another way out later.
Staying connected, in whatever shape that takes for you, is not a nice extra.
It’s part of how people actually get through this.
None of us can fix what people have lost, but we can make sure no one is fencing it out alone.
Mental Health and Wellbeing Local based in Shepparton now covers Strathbogie, free, no referral needed.
The National Centre for Farmer Health connects farmers with a psychologist online with no GP referral.
And Lifeline’s dedicated line for bushfire and extreme weather recovery is 13 HELP, on 134 357.
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