Film - 'Ash Wednesday 30 - Ashes Cricket Match', 2013

JAN VENABLES:

On the day of the Ash Wednesday fires, we were burning in Airey’s Inlet and we had many friends in Macedon who were suffering as well, and not long after that there was a wedding and my ex-husband Ray and I and a chap from Macedon called Greg Kennedy, who’s here today also, just came up with the idea. Why don’t the two towns, the two experiences, get together and make something good of a bad, bad day?

[Music plays – acoustic guitar]

GREG KENNEDY:

I think there’s five of us here today that played in the original game, 30 years ago. But it’s good fellowship, nothing’s too serious now. Mainly about having a beer and barbie, and wine for the ladies, as cricket should be probably.

[Music plays – acoustic guitar]

PAT HUTCHINSON:

We’ve had some great games. So, it was in the mountains one year and then the seaside the next. I suppose the original players are Hector and myself. And then the next generation, and then the next gen. So, there’s probably three – over the 30 years – three generations here today.

ANDREW WALKER:

We’re now priming a younger generation. We’re starting our under-11s and then next year, we’ll do under-13s, so that we’ve got generations of kids coming up to keep that tradition going.

30 overs, each team bats for. And we’ll change over and then – well, Mt Macedon are batting now, after their innings, we’ll go in and bat and hopefully we’ll get a nice win.

JOHN EWELS:

I was fortunate enough to play in the first game. Been fortunate to be at every game and probably played in a good two-thirds, maybe more I’ve played in.

HECTOR MOORE:

The original one, that was a terrific crowd, yes. I suppose it would have been about five or six thousand people here.

KENNEDY:

Yeah, it was down here. The ground’s certainly improved since then.

VENABLES:

Not green and beautiful like it is now, it was a lot more black surroundings. The first game was a game of hope I would say, because it had been 12 months on. We sat around the ground and we had a little sign that said ‘Airey’s town won’t go down’ and ‘No worries mate’, and funny little Australian things, because we are good people Australians aren’t we? So hope, the first game was hope.

HUTCHINSON:

It was a very intense game and it got down to the last over. Scottie Holmes, one of our players, made 111 and put us right into the game.

EWELS:

First game down here, the ground was packed and we had bay 13 from Macedon and a bay 13 from Airey’s Inlet and the old behind the shorts got dropped and all sorts of revolting things. But it was a great atmosphere. It’s sort of run along a bit since then, but today was a bit of a high in emotion at the end because of the closeness.

[Music plays]

[Cricket ball hitting bat]

[Crowd cheers and applauds]

[Music plays]

[Crowd cheers and applauds]

EWELS:

You know, the old adage in cricket, the games never over until the last ball’s bowled? And it got down to that eventful last over and we finished up a run ahead. So, in terms of a cricket match, you know, if we had 40,000 here they all would have been on the edge of their seats.

Back in Macedon, in 1983, I was principal of Mt Macedon Primary School and that school got burned down and throughout the next 18 months at that school, we spent all our time trying to get their minds off, you know, living in a caravan, living in burnt-out land. So, there were street parties and games like this is the same thing, it just gets their mind off it and draws them all together. So it’s extremely important.

HUTCHINSON:

Anything that can lift the spirit, whether it be a game of cricket or something else, I think encourages people to get on and build their lives again, yeah.

[Music plays – acoustic guitar]

MOORE:

That urn that we play for, that was dug up by a friend of mine after the fires. The ashes of the fires at Macedon and Airey’s Inlet are mixed in the urn together. And, so I’m led to believe when I cark it mine are going in there as well.

[Laughter]

[Music plays – acoustic guitar]

Film - 'Ash Wednesday 30 - Rob Gordon', 2013

DR ROB GORDON:

My name is Rob Gordon. I’m a clinical psychologist. I’m currently a consultant to the Department of Human Services for disaster recovery and I have been involved since Ash Wednesday, when I was part of a Children’s Hospital team working in the Macedon area.

I remember clearly, I’d been working at the Children’s Hospital in the Department of Psychiatry for about six years and then, of course, when Ash Wednesday occurred, I was asked to be part of the team, and that took me out of the hospital regularly and into a completely different area of work, and I had to learn all my skills again.

See, at that time, there was a notion that people either had a diagnosable mental health condition or they were within normal limits. There was beginning to emerge the concept of stress, but the links hadn’t been made very strongly to stress as a component of post-traumatic stress or stress as resulting in mental health problems. This was emerging at the time. We began to recognise that we needed to define a different way of helping people that was more informal and flexible and didn’t fit the normal structure of a clinical consultation.

I remember that one of the then-psychiatric hospitals sent up a team and they had a caravan with a big label on it: ‘Stress counselling’, and parked it in the main street. As it happens, opposite from one of the surviving buildings that was the community information centre and, of course, when people looked at this stress counselling sign, they thought, ‘I’m not going in there.’

There were actually people that went in there. They were generally people who’d already had experiences of using mental health services, and they would say, ‘Thank goodness,’ and they’d go straight in there, but all these other people who were suffering from confusion and stress and anxiety and not knowing what was going on for themselves, they all went across to the community information centre.

So, we made sure that we made good relationships with them, and we found that we actually spent quite a lot of time providing advice and consultation to these local community members who were actually managing, and I remember the bar maid at the hotel we got to know, and she had a whole case-load of the sort of people that would come to the bar at 11 o’clock in the morning and stay until 10pm. These were vulnerable people, and she was case-managing them all.

So, you know, we realised the absolute necessity of finding out and integrating with these community volunteers that emerge in every community after disasters, and this is a very central element of the Victorian recovery strategy now.

What’s important is to provide people with an opportunity to talk about what actually happened to them and what the impact of that was, rather than going into their emotional experience and their background history and all the other things that we would deal with in a clinical context, and so, in those next few years, between ’83 and ’85, all these ideas were beginning to emerge from the work. Not just in our hospital team, but in a number of other teams working.

So, really, Ash Wednesday was an enormous, sort of, leap into new areas of activity.