The Australian Library Journal

What do you take with you?

The bushfire season came upon us as usual in this dry country, Australia, and as usual we were not quite ready and were taken by surprise. We live at the end of a three-kilometre gravel road which climbs 300 meters from the tar to our place. The house was built on a shelf between two 500 metre-high ridges and has survived six major bushfires since the first pioneering baby was born in it around the end of the 19th century. But there is no room here for complacency: we learned early in our twenty-year stint that just as tradesmen are reluctant to come out this far, if the conditions are catastrophic, neither will those unsung heroes the volunteer firemen. So we put in a five-horsepower petrol pump, bought fire-service quality hoses, installed additional water tanks (no town water up here) to bring our reserve capacity up to 45 000 litres, below which we never allow it to drop in high summer, and cleared all around the house. Came a coolish day, a blustery southerly; I was working on this issue of ALJ, had my head down and the blinds drawn. The phone rang: there was a fire at the bottom of the hill. I put the phone down, started a backup, and the PC died. No power.

Although I had laid out the hoses, they weren't connected: I did that, with one eye on the now billowing plumes of smoke three kilometres away. Got into my heavy overalls, picked up the hard hat, gloves and goggles, let the chooks out, put the dog in the back of the ute, and headed down the hill to see if the fire could be stopped there. As I drove off looking down, the colour of the fire smoke changed, and for a brief moment, turned from white to oily black, the colour that only a burning house or car produces: as I turned a corner two kilometres down the road, I could see that there was no point in continuing. The road was closed, and only an idiot tries to drive through flames if the exit is not visible. It is a narrow road, with deep gutters, so turning was not a possibility: I backed up 400 metres until I could turn and head back up the hill.

There now ensued one of those curious calm interludes: and I had time to consider what if anything, absolutely had to be saved if the house went. Books, precious though they were, were too heavy and too bulky, paintings and drawings the same, and we've never been much on photographs, preferring to rely on memory and imagination. Passports, legal documents never entered my head, and they stayed in the filing cabinet. What should I load if I had to run or hide? In the end, due to not having had time to backup everything, I disconnected the PC and put it in the ute. [On the previous occasion the fire's arrival had been much more leisurely and the back-up disks and paper copy for ALJ and for some other work I was doing, were all wrapped in plastic and buried in the spud patch, and the PC left where it was in the office. It was time for an upgrade, anyway.] In the end, I thought: what is it that I could not replace? The answer was curious and unexpected: the hand tools, mainly gardening tools, which had been collected over thirty years, their hardwood handles burnished and worn by days spent summer or winter, meditatively moving, shaping or cutting, soil and wood. Not the machine tools, nor the chain saws: insured, easily replaced. And not a single document, which in retrospect, I found extraordinary, having spent my working and much of my private life surrounded by them.

The fire was contained, but two houses and all their contents had gone in the first five minutes of the fire. After an anxious [for her: not for me - I was too busy] five hour wait at the bottom, parked out on the fishermen's jetty, my partner was allowed by the police to come up the hill and join me. For the next three weeks we were on tip toe, scrutinising the sky to windward for smoke. About 100 kilometres upwind, in the Derwent Valley, fires lurked, gathered their strength and threatened in the same way as they had in 1967. Canberra [unthinkably] caught fire, and many people there and elsewhere in Australia endured much more in the way of actual disaster, discomfort and apprehension than did we.

We bided our time, packed and stored books [I packed my absolute favourites, the ones I would find it most difficult to replace. Mary packed her run of the mill books, and kept her favourites on the shelves where she could see them. Curious.]. But we got no closer to resolving what we would grab and run with in the last resort, other than those documents which we carried on our person: the means of establishing our identity if we lost everything else, especially the files of correspondence. The fire threat has receded somewhat: it won't entirely be over until we get about 100 millimetres of rain, and that's still some time away: we've continued to move stuff into safer storage in diminishing order of preciousness: partly because the property is now in the process of being sold. And we've been reflecting on the curious difficulty of deciding what, in the final analysis is important: of all those, files, documents and effects accumulated in a lifetime of accretion: which would you snatch up and run with? Why?

In this issue: Jack Gilding and Carol Fripp reflect on what is an extraordinary achievement: the conception and establishment of AEShareNet a unique 'collaborative system to streamline the licensing of intellectual property' so as to facilitate the use and interchange of training materials in vocational education. Fiona Drum and Sally Anderson of the newly re-christened NSW Agriculture's Information and Library Service review for us the administration and outcomes of a client services survey. Alison Fields surveyed consultants and contractors in librarianship, records management, archives, information management and knowledge management in Aotearoa, those islands to the east of Australia and her contribution from across the Tasman is a welcome one. May there be many more. Elizabeth Jordan's UQ Library has been highly successful in the challenging task of providing professional development in the tertiary environment for librarians from developing countries, and she gives us a stimulating account of just what can be done. Tracy Foggett, a mature age student, found her research feet in an exploratory case study of how a class of year 4/5 students assimilated and practised information literacy; one of ALJ's key roles is to encourage such contributions, and this is a good one. Margaret Pember looks back on ten years of recordkeeping education at Curtin University, and she too, used a survey to find out how Curtin Graduates were faring out there in 'the real world'. And the answer was: very well, thank you. Another good handful of reviews: eclectic, quirky, informed, occasionally very critical. Interesting reading in their own right and invaluable as a means of keeping up with current trends.