Scott McKinnon: Okay. Welcome back, everybody here in the theatre with us, and welcome, everyone online. And I've just hit the clicker when I didn't mean to. There we go. Yes, welcome, everyone online who's joining us. We are here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country and acknowledge elders past and present and acknowledge country wherever you are Zooming in from to join us here at the Library. Those of us at the Library have just had a screening of an amazing documentary directed by one of our panellists and executive produced by another one, 'The Day She Stole the Sun'. What we're going to do this morning is talk a bit about the making of that documentary and also talk about an oral history programme about memories of bushfire that was undertaken here at the Library as well.

So let me just find my notes so I can introduce our amazing panellists. So yeah, this is about memory making. It's about memory making through the making of documentary and through the recording of an oral history programme. As I mentioned before the screening, the National Library in conjunction with the Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre recorded 63 interviews with residents of Cobargo, Quaama, Yowrie, Nerrigundah, a range of other areas across that region that were affected by the Badja Forest Road bushfire. Two of us on the panel today were interviewers on that project.

So without further ado, I'll introduce myself, which I realised I'd forgotten to do for the purposes of people online. I'm Scott McKinnon. I'm a senior advisor in Curatorial and Collection Research here at the National Library. I'm a historian and a curator, and before joining the National Library, I did a lot of work looking at how communities recover from bushfires and interviewing disaster survivors.

Our fabulous panellists here today. Sitting next to me is Rhonda Ayliffe. Rhonda or Ronnie is a creative practitioner and PhD candidate at the University of Canberra. Her PhD research project is a creative exploration of disaster recovery work she has been involved with in her fire impacted hometown Cobargo on Yuin Country on the south coast of New South Wales. Ronnie's the vice chairperson and project lead for the Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre and was the project manager of the Badja Forest Road Oral History Project and the executive producer of 'The Day She Stole the Sun'.

Sitting next to Ronnie is Dr. Mary Hutchinson. Mary is an oral historian and honorary associate professor at the Centre of Heritage and Museum Studies at ANU. She's conducted over 50 oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia collection, including for the Library's Australian Generations Project and the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Project. Prior to her work on the Badja Forest Road Fire Project, Mary was the interviewer for the Library's oral history of the 2003 Canberra Fires.

And sitting next to Mary is James Logue, a director, cinematographer, and editor in sound and film. Jimmy's the creative force behind Crewcible Studio where he brings more than a decade of independent media production experience to the table. As the lead director and producer at Crewcible, he has built an exciting Australian video production studio and inspires a dedicated team of specialists. And we've seen this morning an example here at the Library of the quality of his work, which was pretty amazing.

Join me in welcoming our panellists this morning. So let's see if I can press this thing along here. No. There we go.

So Ronnie, I'd like to start with you, and I guess for me, one of the reasons I wanted to have this panel and put this together is in my work researching disasters in the past and in doing interviews for this project, one of the things that's always been really important to me is how communities remember a disaster after it's over. And both the importance that communities put on recording their memories and also some of the challenges of that, of the desires to forget and move on, but also the importance that's placed on recording memories and recording stories. So in the large amount of work that you've done in the recovery process for Cobargo, where do you see the role of recording memories and why did you want through the oral history project and through the documentary to record those memories?

Rhonda Ayliffe: I think most people, when I go out and I say, "I come from Cobargo," and I then situate that with how people might know about Cobargo in terms of the fire, what usually comes up is I say, "Oh, we're the town that don't give out handshakes." And people then go, "Oh, I get it. That's the Prime Minister's visit." And that's kind of where it starts, that everybody else told our story for us, everybody, the media filmmakers came in and told what they thought the story was of Cobargo and the Badja Forest Road Fire. Well, they didn't even know it was called the Badja Forest Road Fire most of the time.And many people in my area went, 

"Well, that's not me and that's not my story, and that's not how I saw things and that's not what I remember." And other people around in my area, like out the back at Tinpot and Belowra and Nerrigundah, nobody knows the names of those places because no film crews went there and nobody was interested in them. And so the Badja Forest Road Fire Oral History Project, it was about trying to give them a voice, give them a chance to take back your own stories, to say what they wanted to say about what happened with them and not have any judgement . It was for them. It's for the communities there, not for media.

Scott McKinnon: Right. So yeah, that's an interesting point around both the documentary in which Jimmy is a local to the region as well. So the documentary is community-led, it's community-produced, and that was really important to you, I know from the oral history as well that this comes out of community. So could you talk a little bit more about that, about the importance of these projects coming from the community?

Rhonda Ayliffe: Often when something really bad happens, sometimes there's an expectation that somebody's going to come in and fix it, and that never really fixes anything. And the way that you fix something is to listen deeply into a community, and the community actually know what they need and what they want, and they have a bit of a clue about how to get there. So you need to actually draw on what's in the community and listen deeply into the community and respect the differences in community. And it's having people connected to community that is how you build trust as well. People would come to trust the likes of Jimmy because he's connected into community rather than "who the heck is that person?" And that same thing came through with how we approached the oral history as well. Yeah.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. And I know in an oral history interview for the project I did, I asked someone how they felt about the way the media was portraying the disaster, and their first response was, "We didn't see most of it because we didn't have TV, we didn't have electricity." But that desire, I guess to, after the disaster, not have a narrative imposed on the community, that the community takes a role in constructing the narrative itself, I guess.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Indeed.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, yeah. And so in terms of a community recovering from a disaster, how Cobargo has recovered from this disaster, where do you see both the documentary and the oral history project? Do you locate them as part of the recovery process?

Rhonda Ayliffe: The long term. There's some short term parts of it, yes. But longer term, as part of the idea of what the Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre would do, it is to actually give a place for those stories to have resonance long into the future. And both here at the Library where that archive sits forever.

There's a great thing that happens in community when you feel if you're useful and of purpose and you can actually help somebody else. You heard it probably in the documentary, "If I can do something for someone, I will." And that was the idea more than how you would see the short-term triaging of response where you need hay or you need food or you need a fence. This is about the long-term of how you need to build community, community trust, community social capital, and how that can impact other communities as well as your own.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, that's such an important point and something that struck me actually in the documentary, Zena Armstrong, who is James's mum, one of the people in the documentary, and she said as part of the recovery process about people learning how to raise money, how to set up a charity as part of planning for a disaster, you think about how you're going to recover and what systems you need to put into place to recover. I thought that was a really important point. Beyond the put sprinklers in, cut the grass at your place, there's these other things that can come into place as well, which your mum, James, was very involved in doing. Yeah, yeah.

So Jimmy, I wonder, as the creator of the documentary, as the director, I'm springing a question on you here, but how did it feel as the director to be sitting in a theatre watching it here today?

James Logue: Well, I've been watching it for the past two years in various forms, but I think it's a great honour to be able to watch it in this heritage listed theatre. And I guess Steve, my editor, was behind me, and we always watch it from a technical mindset to a degree, but we still get fully enraptured into the emotional aspects of the story as well. So it's confronting because you challenge yourself to try and figure out how you can improve the viewing experience. We're probably a bit too harsh on some of it. But it was also an amazing experience and to be able to have an emotional impact even on me after being fully ingrained in it, the whole process of the journey, it's a really nice experience and I'm honoured to be able to showcase it at the National Library, which is an amazing chance for us. Yeah.

Scott McKinnon: Well, we're delighted to have you here. Is it the same bits that hit you every time or is it a different part in terms of that emotional reaction?

James Logue: It changes a little bit, but it's like a mix of pride of having been able to go through documenting it and having a final piece of art that we can call our own, and then having it completed, to a degree. But the music, it was a massive part of that. So we had a wonderful composer, Brynn, who worked on it, and Hugo, and the emotional aspects of the music that sort of cue you in on when you have to feel certain things and the story is so important. So yeah, and it is a lot of the actual fire and the impact that it had on the community that impacts me emotionally while watching it as well.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, sure. So as a filmmaker setting out on a project like this, as we've said, you're a local to the area, you had your own pretty intense fire experience during the Badja Forest Road fire. So what was your goal in creating the documentary?

James Logue: Well, I've thought about the answer to this and realistically it was to do a good job for Ronnie, and also for my mum who's a community leader there, to make sure that we didn't make them look bad in front of the community by telling the story. It's a pretty tough crowd up in Cobargo. They're a very discerning audience and viewers, so we wanted to make sure that we told the story with the right honour and integrity. And I did have a job to do in terms of this was a product for a client that had a destination. So to make sure that we hit the right resonant tones for them so that they were proud to showcase it and that the project followed through all the way to the end and everyone was happy with the result. That was the most important part for me.

Scott McKinnon: I know the first screening was in Cobargo at the community hall. Is that the first screening?

James Logue: That was second screening. The first one was in Merimbula at the Far South Film Festival where we got the People's Choice Award. Yeah, but in Cobargo, that was a pretty, that was more a challenging sit down for me because as I said, the audience, they're all somewhat, proud of Cobargo. And if we didn't build enough trust with the community and also depict the story in the right way, then we probably would have got a couple of grumpy community members who wouldn't have been happy with how it was portrayed, or that we didn't get the story as accurate as we could have.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, there's a lot of pressure to represent a community in a way that they feel happy with, I guess.

James Logue: There is. Yeah, especially such a proud and tight-knit community with such a long-established history as well.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. Ronnie, you were telling me backstage before that screening, setting up for that screening. Can you tell that story again?

Rhonda Ayliffe: Sure. We didn't do a lot of promotion in Cobargo that this was happening because even doing promotion, when you're doing something that's a sensitive topic, and a lot of people are still reeling, even five years later are still feeling that, we didn't want to put out a lot of imagery saying, "Yeah, come see this film, it's all about the fire." So we said it very quietly and I thought maybe 50 people might come. So I set up about 50 chairs and it's about 45 minutes before the start of the film and I thought maybe I'll put out another 50 chairs. I don't want it to look scatty though. And by about 6:30, which was when we sort of said, "Be here," I went, "We're going to need a bigger boat."

James Logue: It was a great time.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Yeah.

Scott McKinnon: What was their response? How did people feel about it?

Rhonda Ayliffe: I know that they were anxious ahead of time, "Oh, I don't know that I could go and watch that, particularly with a lot of people. I don't know that I could do that." And there were ups and downs. You could even hear, as it was said, intakes of breath. Laughs.

James Logue: Yeah. It's a cathartic release in terms of a work like this can actually offer some healing because it allows people to process things from a different perspective other than their own as they hear the stories of how, other people who were impacted by it, how they dealt with it, what they faced. And they can all go on a journey together and it can bring people together.

Scott McKinnon: I imagine if you've been through this kind of experience to see that imagery that would look very familiar at times, the fire behind the mountain, coming up behind the mountain, that kind of imagery must be a very confronting experience for a lot of people.

James Logue:Yeah. When you're editing it though, and you're like, "Oh, look at that shot. We got the most  amazing dreadful shot of the fire barrelling over the mountain. I'm so glad." Yeah, because with Roger, we did his interview and we didn't even know that he had vlogged the whole thing until after we'd interviewed him. He sat us down in his living room, he's like, "Oh yeah, I shot some mobile phone footage. You want to have a look at it?" We put it up on the TV and he had actually vlogged it like a professional. So that opened up a whole new angle of storyline for us.

And as those community responses into the callouts for the footage come in, that's really exciting for us as we start to gather more content to be able to edit in and express the story more holistically. But that was one of the biggest challenges, reaching out to everyone, reminding them that we're building something and that we need more content, we need more vision, who's got it? And we had to bang on doors. We had to continually call people and demand it sometimes because they had to dig through old phones that weren't being used anymore or figure out how to charge them so they could get the footage off the phones and then send them to us. So that was a really challenging aspect, doing all the gathering.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting that there are good, exciting kind of footage versus-

James Logue: Well, it's horrifying for someone who was there, but for us we were like, okay, that's going to be really-

Scott McKinnon: Evocative, I guess it is.

James Logue: Yeah.

Scott McKinnon: It's like giving people an actual understanding of what that experience is like. Yeah. And I know some people do their preparation for a fire, part of their preparation people have told me has been going on YouTube and looking up that kind of footage so that you know what it's going to look like, if it does hit your property, what it's actually going to look like. So it's a good learning process I guess.

James Logue: Another challenge was that some people were a bit possessive over their footage as well. They were like, "Okay, who's associated with this project? I'm not sure I'm going to release it if this person's associated because I don't want them to be associated with the footage that I got." And they get quite clutchy over allowing us to use. So negotiating and building trust with a variety of people is important for them to relinquish the rights to the footage to be able to use it in the documentary.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. And so that brings me to the question of there's a politics to a disaster in a community. There's a politics around climate change. There is amazing community coming together, but there can also be fractures in a community that rise up. And there was a specific politics for Cobargo in terms of politicians being there, and some people have been happy for them to be there and others are not. So in creating this documentary, how do you navigate that kind of politics?

James Logue: Well, we discussed this very early on, and the approach was to just ground it in the science of the way the bushfire behaved and to stay away from it completely, because it could have opened up a whole can of worms if we started to build a political agenda into it, or started to lean one way or the other. So we decided to just avoid all that happened in the media and news and politics landscape, and just work with bushfire behaviour experts to talk about the actual. The fire was the main character and we kept it that way. And everyone else was just talking to what their experience was like of the fire travel and how it behaved.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, that's interesting. The fire's the main character, centering it there. That's really interesting. And Ronnie, in executive producing the film in getting the funding behind the film, who were you imagining as the audience for the film in the creation of it?

Rhonda Ayliffe: We didn't set out to make this.

James Logue: That was my selfish request, to make a documentary.

Rhonda Ayliffe: This was funded through predominantly the BCRRF, the Bushfire Communities Resilience and Recovery Fund, which also funded part of the archive along with the National Library of Australia. And what was meant to happen was we had short films that helped to ground the archive here, sort of on the photo fund and the community recovery fund and the Badja Fire itself, just the facts and nothing but the facts. And they were short form, 10 minute, maybe a 20 minute here. And Jimmy actually said, "I think there's a feature length documentary here." And I went, "Let's count it up and I'll see. I reckon I can make that pass on a grant." And that's how this actually came about. It never started out that way.

Scott McKinnon: Right.

James Logue: Yeah, I think it would be hard to get funding specifically for a featured documentary off the bat, but it was going to be chapterized in an iPad menu opportunity for the theatre within the Bushfire Resilience Centre. But we make a lot of content that gets repurposed into various formats. You shoot 30, 40 terabytes worth of video, then it's just up to the challenge of figuring out how to build that into a feature story as well. And you can whittle that down into other needs.

Rhonda Ayliffe: And this wasn't designed to be put here or in film festivals that it's going globally. It was actually designed to be seen inside the resilience centre when it opens. So it's always intriguing to see this, like today, with a completely different audience and how they react to it.

Scott McKinnon: Could you tell a different reaction here from in Cobargo or at the film festival?

Rhonda Ayliffe: Yes.

Scott McKinnon: What was the difference?

James Logue: Um, well, in Cobargo there was, I mean, I was sitting at the back in Cobargo rather than the front, but there was a lot of heavy sighs and people who were triggered, I guess, by the experience. But a lot of tears. Whereas here, I think people were sort of brought into the story from a third party perspective, whereas they were reliving the first party's perspective down in Cobargo. And also the sort of prestige of showing it in the Library versus the heritage of the art hall down in Cobargo also makes a difference for the viewing experience as well.

Rhonda Ayliffe: That hall was in this picture. That where you saw Zena being interviewed, that's the place that we then showed the film in Cobargo, that curtain behind. Yeah.

James Logue: Yeah.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, which is right near the main street that a lot of the buildings were lost. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, amazing.

I want to talk a little bit more about, um, the oral history as project as well. So just to set the picture I guess a little bit, as I've said, the Library conducted 63 interviews with locals in the region impacted by the fire. The project came about through an approach by the Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre to the Library. The Library matched funding that had been sourced elsewhere. And I wasn't working full-time at the Library at the time, but the Library set up this project initially by going into the local community and having community meetings where we were able to introduce the project, meet people, and give people a sense that this project was intended to be community led. It was intended to be about their story.

At the National Library, we're always really concerned that we don't want to set up a project where it looks like we are just arriving from Canberra and taking your story and bringing it back here. We want this to be about the community telling their story in a way that works for them, and that the Library can act as a kind of custodian preserving those memories in our collection, but telling the community stories.

Mary, you conducted a bunch of the interviews for this project as well, and you've worked on a couple of bushfire related projects, as I mentioned, the Canberra Bushfires Project as well. Can you talk a little bit about conducting interviews with bushfire survivors?

Mary Hutchinson: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that's really important in it as an oral history interviewer is the creation of the archive. And it's a bit like creating a documentary, it's got its own set of approaches and so on. And there are two things that I think are really important in thinking about how you go about it.

One is that there's a personal, often very life-changing experience, a major experience in an individual's life that contains all sorts of things, terrifying moments and really awful loss, devastating loss, and long-term effects. And the other is that there's a big public discussion that goes on about management of bushfires, and particularly in the contemporary climate of things. And that tends to revolve around people who are in key public positions, experts in various fields, and the kind of perspectives that politicians bring to it.

And I'm interested in bringing those two things together in the making of the archive. And particularly because individuals who decide to be involved in a project like this one are keen to tell the story from their point of view, to tell their experience, to actually have an impact on the public discussion, and to put it on the historical record for the same reason, that it's there for the future. They don't want certain things that are often ignored to be ignored, and they're prepared to walk over hot coals to do that. And it's my job, I think, to help them do that, to be part of that journey.

And so it's really about focusing on how we do that together. So allowing the story to be told in a way that's comfortable for the person, but also supporting their interest in talking about things that are really important to them and that they don't want to be missed out, that they really want to be heard.

And so I think that. Well, I don't want to go on and on forever about this really, but there is a lot of things that could be said about it, but I think I'm really connecting with what you said before, Ronnie, about that thing of people telling their own stories in their own way and having a voice. And there's a thing that somebody said in an interview that really sticks in my mind. She was reflecting on the issue of communication and warnings in her community, and she was thinking about her own experience as a child in a small rural community that dealt with alerts. And she said, "I want a siren." And I thought, well, that is fantastic. Why not have a siren in a place that needs a siren because other forms of communication aren't working? But it also is a way of claiming her voice in the larger discussion. And so for me, that's something that I really hang onto in thinking about this kind of project and the creation of the archive.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, thanks Mary. And I guess something to mention is that when we're doing an oral history interview, we don't have a set list of questions. Our role, I guess as interviewers, like you say, is to set about this together on helping people record their story, but to help people tell the story in their own way, to prompt memories. And could I get you, Mary, to talk a little bit more about that process when it's someone who's been through a traumatic experience, the kind of challenges there of talking about that experience?

Mary Hutchinson: So I think that talking with people before I do the interview is very important in any case. And to work out what the issues of difficulty are and how we'll deal with them together. And often people, because they've got to the point where they're really wanting to tell their story, are quite pragmatic about that, and they'll say things like, "Oh, well, don't worry if I cry, I'll get over it." And things like that. Or, because you're interviewing somebody in this really close relationship, I mean, I'm often quite on, "I think we need to stop now." And somebody will say, "No, no, keep going, keep going." It's the hot coals business. But I think it is that discussion, that sense of building trust that we've talked about, and just people knowing that they're in charge of their position in the interview. They can stop it. They can say they don't want to talk about that bit or whatever it is. You make it clear from the start.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, yeah. I also had someone once say just before the interview, "I'm going to cry the whole way through this and it's fine. It's absolutely fine. I just cry when I talk about this." So I was simply saying all the way through, "Do you need to stop?" But, "No, I just cry when I talk about it."

Mary Hutchinson: Yeah, similar.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. I'm going to, if I can get the technology to work for me, play a little clip from an interview that Mary did with a guy named Benjamin Tett as part of this project, and I chose this little clip. It's at the very, very end of the interview. And Mary, you'll hear, asks Ben, what was it like doing this interview and talking about the story? And he reflects on how difficult it's been. It wasn't an enjoyable process, but there's something interesting about the desire to remember and to tell his story that comes up in this. So hopefully this will play

Mary Hutchinson (over recording): A final question, and it sort of goes with this thing of, you've written out your fire experience, you've sort of not wanted to go back there and you're very definitely moving on, but how's it been to actually do this, which has taken you back into it?

Benjamin Tett (over recording): It's been really surprising actually. I knew there were a couple of things that really broke me up, talking about things. I can't remember them now, but probably just little things that come back to me that really get you emotional. And I knew that probably would be hard to talk about more than one or two times, but talking about this at length, it's really made me really surprised on things that I never thought that would make me emotional but have. For example, the first thing that really broke me up was my dad ringing me to tell me to get out of there. And that's never been emotional for me. But yet talking about it yesterday, I felt that, it was a very, very big surprise.

And so yeah, it's been really surprising and certainly, after today's experience, I'll certainly do my best to put everything out as well. I've got the memoir so I can forget about this and I'll probably have to forget about everything. Fortunately, it's been a lovely chat, but I'll probably try to forget about everything. And yeah, even yesterday after our first chat, I felt like it's a great experience for people to learn what people like myself can go through, but yeah, I haven't enjoyed it at all, respectfully. So yeah.

Mary Hutchinson (over recording): Thank you very much for doing it without enjoying it.

Benjamin Tett (over recording): I love chatting, as you know, but also, yeah, and I really appreciate your job too because it is very rare. It must be very, very difficult to take on and communicate with people like me who are quite emotional. So yeah, thank you for allowing us to record this history.

Mary Hutchinson (over recording): Oh, thank you.

Mary Hutchinson: It's so interesting listening to that, isn't it? What I love in that is that he didn't enjoy it. Well, who would enjoy it in some ways? But he was really ready to move on and he wanted to forget it, but he was also wanting to make sure that he wasn't really criticising me. And I found that really lovely. But I also noted in other parts of his interview this thing about moving on, and I think he's the youngest person that I interviewed, and there was a section, I think in that interview where he was talking about him and his son, his age group peers, how they all knew about the importance of talking about these things, but really they didn't want to get stuck in it. They just wanted to get going. I think that's where, when you have a diversity of interviews, you get these perspectives that if you're thinking about recovery management are actually important to know.

Scott McKinnon: Are there, from the interviews you've done for this project and for the Canberra Bushfire Project, things you've learned about how people recover from a bushfire?

Mary Hutchinson: One thing is that it's really complex if you're thinking of it as a big project, the recovery, but it's very individual and who knows when it starts or stops? And there are all sorts of things that impinge on recovery as well, which might be to do with life experiences that were happening at the time of the fire or traumatic childhood experiences which come back into play when it comes to recovery. Personality, the way people connect with the idea of recovery or support or that kind of thing. It's all very difficult. And another thing I've noticed that for some people, they have to get to some kind of resolution before they can actually go into some kind of recovery. For some people it's rebuilding, and then if that's taking ages to happen, that can be really problematic.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, it's an important point you bring in there about how childhood experiences might come into it. And the interviews we do at the Library, we interview people about the fire or COVID or whatever the particular topic of the project is, but we also interview people about their whole life story. So it's not just about that topic, it's what we call a whole of life or a life narrative interview. So we get a sense of where the disaster sits in someone's broader life story and how those other factors might play into being prepared or not and being able to recover or struggling or how that process goes on. I think it's a really valuable way of interviewing.

Mary Hutchinson: Yeah, I do too. Sorry,

James Logue: I just wanted to go back to you saying that people don't actually often want to be interviewed. That was certainly the case with the documentary that we were making. We had to convince them of what the value was for them to tell their stories and to build a picture of what the whole output is going to be. But I've got another person here who I'm making a documentary with, and they don't like being on camera. They don't like telling their stories. So being able to show them that this is okay and give them a safe platform, then later on they can come back and be like, "I'm glad I did that. I'm glad I got that captured."

Mary Hutchinson: I suppose that connects with one of the aspects of this oral history was that it was actually opened out to people to say they wanted to tell their story. So they were doing it on that basis, which sort of goes to the way I was talking about being really determined to do it, even though it was going to be very difficult. So it's all about how people fit into the project that you're working on, isn't it?

James Logue: It is, yeah.

Scott McKinnon: From the interviews you did, did you also get a sense of the recovery process for people and noticing that across the different people you interviewed for the documentary?

James Logue: I guess everyone has a different way of dealing with it. Some people would just get up and go on with it and distract themselves, and some people were very logistically grounded in preparing for the next stage. But I think that sort of came through in the documentary, how different people were dealing with, how they were processing what happened.

Mary Hutchinson: It is how people just choose to do it. And something I did become aware of on occasion was that for some people who might be on the edge of community or vulnerable to exclusion, how they felt about community and the tensions that could come up in community. And I know that Zena was referring to that sort of thing when she was talking about the pitfalls and how skilled you really need to be to be working in that end of community recovery, really.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. Ronnie, you were interviewed for the project by someone who I think you're going to say was an amazing interviewer, because it was me. Why did you want to record your story? Why did you want to be part of the project?

Rhonda Ayliffe: I was different to pretty much everybody else who was in the project because the Badja Bushfire Resilience Centre's funding and talk with the Library here was for 60 interviews. And you've said there's 63 interviews. Well, I'm one of those ones that's past the 60 point. And one of the things that convinced me to be involved was not really my personal story from Cobargo, anything else like that. It was thinking about how parts of things that I've been involved with might be useful to somebody else. Most particularly in this case about this archive itself, it was a way of how to capture how it came about, what we thought the purpose and the use of it was in community. And hopefully making that useful to anything else that was of an oral history project, whatever nature it was that people could see, its usefulness, its purposes, its good and bad bits. It might feel uncomfortable. It might be the most horrible thing I've ever done, but geez, I'm pleased I did it. That was the reason why I thought, okay, perhaps might be useful to capture that. It might do good.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, and that was great to talk to you about in the interview, it was kind of meta in a way because it was your experience, but also your desire to set up this archive and to do that. Yeah, yeah.

So I want to talk next a little bit about next steps, and to you, Ronnie, specifically about the building of the Resilience Centre. Actually, I'll just point out that before I go to that, if you do want to listen to these interviews, this is a screenshot of our catalogue. If you search Badja Forest Road Fire oral history project, you'll bring up this page and right down the bottom of the page there you can see 63 records kind of highlighted. If you click on that, you'll be able to access these interviews. And not all of them, we give people control over how accessible the interview is made, but many of them can be heard online there.

But I'm now going to the Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre. So Ronnie, this is being built on the main street of Cobargo. This is the artist's impression, and these are some images of where we're at or where we have been as we replicate the image there, that amazing curved wall that's going up there, which is incredible. Can you talk a bit more about the Centre and where it's up to?

Rhonda Ayliffe: Sure. Oh, how long have we got? Can I talk about the Centre? Yes, indeed I can, forever and ever until people here have great-grandchildren. The idea of doing something on the main street and as a point of recovery started probably even within the week of the buildings being razed, and you don't know this, but some people here do, that one of those buildings that you saw in a fiery mess was my family's shop on the main street. And next door to it was my grandparents', what had been their home from the 1940s to the 1980s.

And my parents, Brian, who you saw in there, yeah, that's dad, offered one of the box of land to the community to perhaps do something to start. Because nobody knew how would you actually even clean up this intertangled buildings? It's such a complex problem. And then how do you think of something into the future? That's kind of the little seed. And of course when you've got a parent who comes up with this brilliant idea of giving away your inheritance, you have to figure out who's going to then do that. And so instead of just giving away your inheritance, "Hey children, do you mind?" It's then also how do you actually make it come about? And if there's not somebody who gets involved with that, it ends on a napkin in the pub.
So this is where we're at at the moment. This is probably the fairly recent pictures. We've got to be finished by June this year. We will be finished by June this year.

We will be finished by June this year. We have to be finished. And that beautiful copper that's exterior, we have a copper shroud all around our building. Yes, beautiful copper like the Library here, cousins in Copper.
It's such a big topic for me to actually start to figure out where you even go in about what does it do, what's it made of, what's underground? Yeah, we've got underwater tanks underground and a bushfire thing in it, BAL 29, et cetera, et cetera. It just goes on and on and on. And sometimes one of the best things I like to do with that is actually do it with questions as well. People, wherever I go have different questions. Some people question, what's it going to do? Okay, it's going to lead the rebuild and recovery of the main street. And that's what it did. It's the first building out of the ground and it'll be the first building completed. And it gives a bit of hope and a bit of direction for other people to feel the confidence that you can have something come back. It will hold the documentary here, that's what the documentary goes into. It will highlight the archive here, the stories of people here that you can see into and how we share that.

But the word that's important in our title is resilience. It's not the word bushfire, it's actually the word resilience. That's important in our title because we see this as something that the community can make their own and turn into what it needs to be. It's a commemorative place so that it's ground onto the ground, the actual ground. We touch the ground in that hole there that touches the ground with our giant rock. But we allow community to make this what it needs to be into the future. It's not always just looking at the past and saying bushfire, bushfire, bushfire. It's saying community, community, community. And it will develop into what the community decides it will be. That's the best way I can figure it.

Scott McKinnon: Wonderful. When's opening date?

Rhonda Ayliffe: I thought Ian up there was going to be the one who'd give me the curly question and it's you. Early 2026.

Scott McKinnon: Excellent. And Jimmy, the documentary will have a life in the Centre, but what else is next for it?

James Logue: It's playing in the Riverside International Film Festival in California next week as the lead documentary there. They've just requested to download it. So I think they'll have a big attendance of people who are close to the Palisades fire watching it. And then there's probably 10 more film festivals, which we're waiting to hear back from. So it's played in five countries now, and hopefully it continues to do the job of raising more awareness about how we can maybe defend or maybe not defend our homes. I don't want it to be a documentary about you must stay and defend your homes because I don't think that's a good idea for everyone, but also that other communities are going through these types of changes and impacts and that we can learn from them. And so many houses burnt at the Palisades fire, maybe they shouldn't rebuild them with this in mind.

Rhonda Ayliffe: From our point of view, maybe this actually shows them there's hope. Your community isn't destroyed. Your house might be, but your community isn't.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah.

James Logue: Exactly.

Scott McKinnon: Powerful message. Yeah. I will in a moment ask for questions from the audience, but before I do that, Mary, as an oral historian, I know one of my fears as an oral historian is that our interviews just sit on an archive or on a hard drive somewhere and aren't heard. Can you talk a bit about the life of an oral history or how it can be used beyond an interview?

Mary Hutchinson: Well, I think that the way Ronnie and Jimmy are talking about it is one fantastic example. It's about how you find a wider audience for them, wider interest. And often that starts with what's of interest to a community, brings that audience to it, and that's exactly what's happening. It's not the exact material of the archive here, it's the archive that you've made, but it's the same sort of thing. So there's lots to be learned from the idea of finding audiences through creative projects as much as anything. So exhibitions, audio installations, and radio, theatre, poetry. There's a whole wide range of things that have a wide range of audiences. I know there's a great song that was written about the Badja fire. I don't think it ever made it into the Library's collection. I'll have to find out. But yeah, all those kinds of things that open up the connection between the individual's experience and the way we understand those things and what can be passed on for the future.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I'd love if anyone in the audience has questions. We have the fabulous Kelly and Jane here with microphones. And for the purposes of the people online, we'll get you to talk into the microphone with your question. Hey.

Audience member 1: Thanks. Thanks for that. Is this, yep. Question for you, Ronnie. Just you talked at the end there about the centre being for the community and whatever the community wants to make of it. Can you just talk a little bit about how the community has responded? Because this project's been going for a few years now and it's had its ups and downs, but it's literally rising from the ashes now, people can see it. How is the community responding to that?

Rhonda Ayliffe: For a lot of time there was uncertainty. All it was was this idea, oh yeah, you got funding, great. We'll believe it when we see it. And it took a long time for anything to come out of the ground because bureaucracy is a bitch. I'm sorry. For the first part there's uncertainty. The same sort of uncertainty that Jimmy found in the interviews is like, what is it? What's it going to be? What's it going to do? Who's in charge of this?

James Logue: Who's involved?

Rhonda Ayliffe: Who owns this? What's going to be inside? There's still some of that in the town because it's still a thing that's coming out and you can't tell everybody all the time what this is, no matter how many interviews you do and Rotary Club presentations you give.

When we put the copper around the building on the local Facebook page, some dear soul made a comment like, "It's a lot of money for a pin of copper. Great use of government money." And I was waiting for it. And the next parts that happened was extraordinary. Somebody from the local community then pops in like, "I think it's beautiful." And the next part goes, "Yeah." And then they've got a few other ones that go, "Why don't we deserve it? What do you mean we don't deserve having a copper building in Cobargo?" Until I'm watching this and I'd answer a couple of things quite matter of fact because, "No, that's actually not correct, it's this, this and this." But the avalanche of support then that came for this building, I thought then people might have thought that I'd written the comment myself so that you could actually see what the community thought about it. And everybody then is now so pro Cobargo Bushfire Resilience Centre that my job is done.

But that's probably the best way I can answer that is that without us really being very imposing, they've taken this on board themselves and they're starting to actually see this. "Yeah, this is ours. Yeah. Don't you be knocking our Resilience Centre." Yeah.

Audience member 2: Question for Jimmy. Jimmy, you gave us a bit of a hint in the end credits 'The Day She Stole the Sun'. It's a beautiful title. Can you just tell us where the title came from?

James Logue: Yep. It was pinched directly from a children's book written by the Cobargo Public School, with their permission of course. So we were pondering a name for the doco for a few weeks and we didn't really have a focus point yet. I think we floated a couple of names with Paul over there, 'Cobargo Strong', but it just didn't sit quite right for us. It wasn't poetic enough for what we envisioned for the story.

So there was a children's book which was illustrated by, I think they were year six students the year that the fire had happened. And it depicted what their experience was like of the bushfire. And I contacted the school teacher who commanded the class, who led the class and asked if he would be open to it. And of course after going through all the necessary channels, I think the students wrote the book in year six, and by the time we got permission, they were in year 10. So they didn't care anyways that we called it. And then we revitalised the name of the story and we had ideas of animating the children's drawings into the documentary, but we had to put a pin on it somewhere. So that didn't happen.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Next project.

Scott McKinnon: Next project.

James Logue: Next project, yes.

Mary Hutchinson: Into the Resilience Centre.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Indeed.

Audience member 3: And now we'll take it in turns. I've got a question for Mary, if I may. I noticed that the interviews, it said on the record, commenced in October 2022, which is quite a while after the actual event. In between, let's say, admit there was some COVID and other things, but is there such a time as the right time between allowing reflection and recovery to capture those stories?

Mary Hutchinson: I think that's a really good question. It's about time. And I know when I did the Canberra bushfires, I thought, "oh, it's late", because it came on late. It was about one to two years after. But I was so pleased that we did it later. And I do think that even though this was even more delayed really because of the COVID thing, it was still appropriate to have that time lag. And people, I mean, I certainly wouldn't do it straight away, which is what happens when you have the kind of rush in by the media to get the best stories. And time for reflection. I mean, these things stay with people for a long time. And one of my questions is often, where is the fire for you now? And it's usually present. And yeah, I don't know, Scott, you might have some thoughts about that.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, I agree with everything you've said there. I think it's great to give people time to reflect and process. Oral historian, Alessandro Patelli says that memory is a conversation between two points in time, the time of the interview and the time when the thing happened. And whenever you do the interview, that will probably change a little, so people's relationship to the event changes over time. But I think giving that time for reflection and also that point you've already made, Mary, about, I don't think when people are still cleaning up the rubble of their homes, they need us turning up with a recorder necessarily. Not to disparage the work of journalists doing reporting on stories, but that oral history is a very different kind of interview, I guess. Yeah.

Mary Hutchinson: Yeah, I mean there have been some fantastic, really respectful interviews by journalists, but they're the ones that have tended to go a bit later and with people who are less traumatised by it.

Audience member 4: Hi Scott. I'm actually Jimmy's mum. I'm Zena Armstrong who was in the documentary, and I'm actually really proud to be here. And I see that there are some others who've got really close links to Cobargo who are sitting in the audience during the film and probably still here today. So there's a bit of representation that's come up from the South Coast.

I've got a question for both Scott and Mary. And as you know, my focus is very much upon community recovery. I chose to focus on community recovery and not so much helping individuals recover. But I'm interested in how you document community recovery rather than the stories of individuals? Because I think that's a really important part of recovering from trauma and recovering from these massive impacts that of course reach very deeply into the individual, but they also reach incredibly deeply into communities.

And Mary, you touched on the comments I was making about the potential for fracture. Very significant given what happened to us quite early in the piece. And we are an incredibly diverse community. One of the things I think that has been able to carry Cobargo as a community through is the extent of the social capital that was pre-existing before this disaster. And something that Ronnie and I and other community do, we call ourselves activists, Ronnie? I don't know. Community people? Leaders is okay. We are really focused on what it takes to hold communities, to create the spaces where communities can come together and connect in order to heal and in order to help us continue this quite challenging journey. So does the oral history touch on that? Do you collect those kinds of reflections?

Mary Hutchinson: Well, I spend a lot of time in my interviews talking about recovery because in some ways it seemed to be just the kind of key to the whole thing in some way. And for people too. And those individual stories tell their story of recovery, which connects with community. So you can see where community is operating in that recovery, or for some people not operating. And so that's one way in which oral history collects that material.

But then equally, it would be useful to, in those situations, make sure that you interviewed people who were involved in that community activity so that the kind of reflections you're making now, Zena, would be part of it. And I'm trying to remember, I don't know about across all the interviews that were done, there were people who had community roles in their communities. I certainly interviewed a couple of people who had very successful, or one person in particular in Quaama. Very interesting, very skilled kind of process that had gone on there, but not necessarily to everybody's satisfaction. But who knows? How can that be?

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, and I think for the interviews I've done, and this is another good reason not just to interview about the fire, but to have a solid part of the interview talking about what was your life like before the fire? And you get a sense of what the community was that people were involved in before the fire.

Mary Hutchinson: That's right.

Scott McKinnon: And you make such a good point, Zena, about social capital being so central to how a community recovers. So in some ways, I think something like the Cobargo Folk Festival is a bushfire preparation-

Mary Hutchinson: In itself.

Scott McKinnon: ... in itself just because it brings the community together. It's making community connections that when the disaster happens, are there ready to fire into action. Fire is a terrible way to talk about that. Launch into action. And communities that don't have those kind of structures in place before the disaster, even if it's not specifically related to bushfire, if it's other forms of community engagement and collaboration on different things. I think Cobargo is a great example of how having those kinds of things is such an important... yeah. So definitely, that's stuff that I've only learned from doing the interviews. Yeah. We've probably got time for a couple more questions.

Audience member 5: Thank you. This is probably becoming more of a reflection or starting out with a question around, Jimmy, I think you were saying that in the documentary, or Mary as well, it's often hard to find people who want to be interviewed and people who come forward are probably the ones who feel comfortable sharing their story and others, other voices might not yet get heard. And I was curious about the process of when you start a longer term project like that, whether you also make available the interviews that you're doing in the beginning, and whether that then prompts other people who are maybe a bit more shy to come forward and go, "Actually, that really resonates with me and I now feel more comfortable sharing my story," and then the whole fabric becomes a lot thicker? And that sort of resonates, I think, with what Zena was saying as well.

Have you had that experience during that project that it starts to thicken but also become more complex? And if you like that cloth, the tapestry of the community starts to build as you're doing these interviews? Is that sort of a common experience or what are your thoughts?

Mary Hutchinson: Was that question for me or Jimmy?

Audience member 5: Probably for everyone.

Mary Hutchinson: Oh, right. I think having worked in community that that is the ideal way to do it. And I think that's something that did work through those conversations that you had in the early stages. Do you want to talk about Scptt?

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, so the community meetings that we had, so we had one in Cobargo, one in Quaama, and one in Nerrigundah. And it gave people a chance to come and talk to us. And I know that sometimes people arrived quite suspicious about what we're up to and what was going to happen with this project. And so we were able to reassure people and it also gave people a chance to meet some of the interviewers beforehand so that, it's a weird thing that some complete stranger is going to turn up at your house and press record and say, "Tell me about the worst thing that's ever happened to you," it's a very weird thing to do. So we got a chance to have a conversation. And so yeah, there were definitely people that came to those meetings thinking that they probably weren't going to be involved in this, quite suspicious about it, but reassured that it was about their story and that we weren't trying to construct any particular narrative, that it was very much about them telling their story.

Rhonda Ayliffe: I'll actually add into that because being the project manager of that and the architect of the grant section of that and having set up things with the Library, probably before both of those were involved was the discussions. And it was the way in which we actually did the framework of how this would go out. Why they went to community was because we actually saw that if you just put a website link, people aren't going to know what that is. They're going to be very suspicious. If they meet people, and some people don't even want to go on the web. They want to meet people.

I met with Mary before they went down there and Mary spent a couple of hours with me when she'd been put into this project getting all of this information about even how to pronounce names of towns. So they were incredibly respectful and already went with a lot of knowledge about the area, about the fire. So they don't go in there making people tell them that part of things. They already got a lot of trust that they've built up because they've spent time thinking about that story.

And the Resilience Centre itself, what we saw our role in doing down in the communities was we knew a few people who wanted to tell their story who would never approach them. And we quietly worked with a couple of people to give them the confidence that yeah, these guys are okay. And vice versa, these guys worked with communities going, "Yeah, Cobargo Resilience Centre, they're okay. They're not after your story, that they want to use it in a bad way." It was mutual respect and trust between us. And the same thing happened with Jimmy, that same thing. We couldn't always get what we wanted to do.

James Logue: Yeah, it's a little bit more of a challenging experience when you have to spend a day or two doing portrait shots, moving hay bales, getting all of the B-roll that you need to showcase what a person's life is like over their interview. So it's quite demanding to do a video production and it's quite confronting for people who are camera shy or who don't really enjoy being on camera in the first place. And they have to give up time of their day. They have to take time off work, you can't do anything else. And you get bossed around by me all day to, "Stand there. Walk over there. Look this way." So a lot of people didn't want to do it actually for that sense.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Again, the Reliance Centre, that's where we worked a lot with Jimmy was we had to convince some of them, one in particular, "Who is this guy? Who's he related to?"

James Logue: Yes, "Who's his father?"

Rhonda Ayliffe: "What's he going to do? What's he doing with my story?" It's okay.

James Logue: Oh, baby.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Or back the other way, the same thing with the library people was us not being all in the face of the community and letting Jimmy actually talk with and Crewcible talk with that and then build their own relationships and show that, yeah, we are not the mouthpiece of Resilience Centre. We are respectful of the story first.

James Logue: And we've got another short list of interviews, which if we get the funding or if we get the opportunity-

Rhonda Ayliffe: We will.

James Logue: ... we'll move into a greater community story, national story about bushfire resilience. So there's a big list of people and then there's people who rose to the list in the preliminary interviews who are like, "Oh, they'll be easy to work with, maybe we'll go spend a day with them."

Scott McKinnon: So just one last question. Thanks, Katherine.

Audience member 6: Actually, that last comment is a really nice segue into what I was going to say. So this has been wonderful to learn about these fantastic initiatives. I've been working a little bit with a project that's been done in Braidwood and they've produced films and podcast and a oral history project that you guys might know about. And it strikes me that there's so much to be done in bringing these together. It's the Cobargo story, learning about what happened in Braidwood and vice versa. And as you say, hearing the community's narratives not a narrative that's been imposed on them. So I was wondering about if you guys were involved with any of those or were aware of or if the National Library is interested in doing projects that can kind of bring these things together and create larger archives or resources that collate multiple voices from across these natural disasters? And what an incredible resource that would be for Australia and for the world actually in tackling these issues.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah, it's a great idea. Ronnie might need to get us funding to. I can certainly put the two of you in touch to talk about these amazing stories there. Yeah, yeah. Because it's such a great point and such an important thing to do is not to silo community stories, but to have conversations across them.

Mary Hutchinson: Actually that was something I was aware of. There were lots of community activities going on, it was hard to know how they would connect in and it was the Belowra Fire project that was so close to Badja.

Rhonda Ayliffe: It was. The Belowra fire actually got subsumed by the Badja fire, so its name disappeared and it was subsumed into the Badja Forest Road Fire.

Mary Hutchinson: But they remained separate.

Rhonda Ayliffe: But the people in Belowra always hold tightly as they should to their story with it being the Belowra Fire and, "I'm not giving up my name on my Belowra Fire to be named by the RFS headquarters into the Badja Forest Road Fire. How dare you take away our fire name?" Yeah.

Mary Hutchinson: Okay. That's how it is. That's working with community. It's fantastic.

Scott McKinnon: Yeah.

James Logue: One more.

Scott McKinnon: One more.

Audience member 7: Hi. Is that working? Yep.

Scott McKinnon: It is.

Audience member 7: Fabulous film, fabulous project all around and it's been such a privilege to hear from all those different perspectives about what's been achieved through this. The thing that really struck me as I watched the film was that you did take control of the narrative. So those short grabs by politicians and the media at the time of the disaster, and now I'm really pleased they didn't feature in the film because it has taken the story away.

But the narrative that isn't really taken away is the public narrative. How people who aren't directly affected forget very quickly and you're left picking up the pieces. And they construct their own narratives about things like, "People shouldn't live in areas like that. They don't know what they're doing, they're under-prepared." There's a whole lot of other narratives. Ronnie's nodding. You've heard them all, I'm sure.

And I think it's really important, it's great to hear the film is going overseas, but it'd be great to see that it does get out to the Australian community to interrupt those narratives of blaming the survivors. And also this film showed how much expertise was in the community already. There was community capital, but there was also a lot of expertise there and people saying, "You couldn't have stopped it." And people outside don't get that. So I think it's a really important film and I think it ought to be released in a way that reaches the Australian public.

Mary Hutchinson: Can I just make a comment on that? I think that's a fantastic thing to talk about, the public narrative, and that's what I was attempting to do, perhaps not very well when I was talking about bringing the experience, the experience of experience, real on the ground experience to the public discussion so that it's visible. And one of the things I think is that a lot of the things that are intrinsic to fire management are much more visible on the level of intimate and personal experience than they are when they're discussed in that large public environment. So it's about making that visible and giving people the voice to make it.

Rhonda Ayliffe: If I'd comment something to yourself though, how you picked up on expertise in a community. One of the things I talked about with Jimmy, and it's the absolute itty-bittiest tweak on that is when you see people's names at the end there and isn't it nice to know who they are, is actually to understand who they are. For example, Bruce, Board of Australia Medal, has done incredible work on winds and fire behaviour. He's not just talking just from his forestry perspective. He has a depth of understanding about that behaviour and just the climactic conditions that's absolutely world-class. You saw Brian, what isn't behind his name is Australian Fire Service Medal. The guy who was a retired Group North captain, chair of the Bega Valley Bushfire Management Committee since its inception in 1996. When he says, "I've never seen a fire like this," he means, that's coming from an experience of seeing decades of fires. In that quiet comment for me is a person who understands that "climate change is actually a thing and I didn't realise it until my fire came through and wiped out my village or inside."

Another piece of expertise in there is Zena, who her role in the community wasn't just, oh, I set up this fund and I'm with the folk festival, but the way in which she is respected within the community is shown with the fact that she was a citizen of the year. I think it was about 18 months after the fire, two years after the fire. That's because we recognised what has happened with here and what sort of skill base we have in our community. Tony, ex-mayor, he's not just talking as a dairy farmer, he's also probably one of the biggest exhibitors at the Royal Easter Show and prize winners in dairy cattle. Yeah, these sorts of things. They're not just these random people. That with each of them, they are people with tremendous local knowledge and expertise. I think that we could highlight that just slightly so that folk actually see them where their stories are ground, in real depth of local expertise.

Scott McKinnon: Thanks so much.

Rhonda Ayliffe: Sorry.

Scott McKinnon: That's a great point to end on. I'm just going to pop these numbers up on the screen in case anyone, if this is brought up anything for you, this discussion or the film today, do reach out for help if you feel you need it.

A few little housekeeping notes. So we found somebody's headphones in the theatre this afternoon after the screening. So if you want to talk to the lovely Kelly, if you want to claim those, do so. We have our Fit to Print exhibition is on upstairs at the moment. A chance to look through that while you're here. Bookshop is open as well. But beyond that, will you please join me in thanking our amazing panellists.

Mary Hutchinson: Thank you. Thank you.