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‘A story of hope’: how the Covid downturn could help Australia rebuild from its black summer

As a bushfire raged through north-east Victoria late last year, leaving destroyed houses and blackened bushland in its wake, Cudgewa man Joshua Collings, his partner Kate and their young son Tully joined a convoy of cars snaking their way down the mountain.

Their home was gone. They wanted to get out of there. But back at the evacuation centre in nearby Corryong, police had given bleak warnings about what they would see out the window. The couple landed on an idea to distract Tully, who was then three years old, from the devastation.

“We thought, we’ll play this robot game,” Collings says. Whenever they said “Shut down”, Tully had to turn off by closing his eyes, and wait for the signal to turn back on again. “Kate’s got this really cool robot voice. She’d be like, ‘please shut down Tully’. And Tully would be like … ” He makes a powering down sound. The little boy’s eyes were closed as they drove past burned animal carcasses on the roadside.

From that drive, Collings vividly remembers seeing cattle standing motionless in the smoky gloom. He could barely tell if they were dead or alive. “It looked like Pompeii,” he says. “These things were like charcoal.”

It was the last day of 2019, and the family’s first venture into a much changed world. The climate crisis dominated headlines as Australia burned over summer. But since then, many communities devastated by bushfires have struggled to embark on a recovery, let alone an eco-friendly one.

In Conjola Park on the mid-south coast, where 89 homes were lost, community meetings about how to rebuild sustainably were cancelled when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Down in Mallacoota, where people huddled on the beach under blood red skies on New Year’s Eve, many were still having their wrecked houses cleared in June, the process slower than they would have liked.

Still, green shoots are poking through.

Tiny Cudgewa (pronounced Cud-gee-war) and Corryong – combined population just 1,600 – are 11km apart, and nestled in a valley at the foot of the Snowy Mountains. The beef and dairy region is a conservative pocket of the north-east Victorian wilderness. But here, the devastation wrought by fire has created a unique opportunity to do things differently.

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Twin crises

Amid the epic disruption caused by the bushfires and Covid-19 lies a unique opportunity for Australia, according to Prof Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University.

Here, the monumental task of rebuilding bushfire-ravaged regions has coincided with the sore need for stimulus to combat the coronavirus downturn. Done right, a response designed to straddle both disasters could create jobs, develop regional economies, install better energy systems and lower emissions all at once, says Howden.

“If we could design activities that overlap between [the bushfire] rebuild and the coronavirus response, that gives us long-term strategic and structural changes to the economy, that deliver on those multiple dimensions, then I think that’s actually a story of hope.”

“Then we’ll see the pain we’re going through at the moment deliver something better at the end of the tunnel.”

A number of recent reports have proposed large-scale economic recovery programs that could address this overlap. The Climate Council last month released a roadmap for how Australia can create 76,000 jobs over three years by investing in sustainable projects. It followed the ambitious Million Jobs Plan released by climate change thinktank Beyond Zero Emissions in June, which said 1.8 million job-years could be created over five years through large-scale projects aimed at lowering Australia’s emissions to zero.

Aspects of the plans can be applied to the bushfire rebuild, says Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie. For instance, her organisation’s analysis predicts 2,000 jobs could be created from the installation of community microgrids and batteries. This could be targeted to bushfire-affected areas – in particular, the rural communities that experienced power outages in the fires, exposing the need for a more resilient energy source.

The 3,000 dwellings that burned down over the summer also present a big opportunity for change. Housing is a “really, really significant” contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, Howden says.

The government could prod the building industry into taking up more innovative options, such as modular homes that combine sustainable materials with a higher fire rating, and consider if building codes are slowing progress, he says. “There’s an element of leadership which is actually about being out there supporting change and showcasing innovation, which can actually provide a significant window for the change.”

“You don’t have to build the building back in the same way, in the same place.”

The houses

Collings didn’t get back to his home in Cudgewa until a few days after the fire, but he knew it was gone. He had been watching the blaze rise over the back of Mount Mitta Mitta the night it hit, hopeful that the flames appeared to be heading away from his place – and then the wind changed.

A relentlessly positive 39-year-old who has spearheaded multiple local recovery efforts, Collings decided he was excited to rebuild. He had spent hours retrofitting the 117-year-old miner’s cottage on his property before it burned down, and wanted a new house that was sustainable, affordable, and quick.

But his search wasn’t going well, and the advice at the recovery centre was byzantine: you’ll need this test, that study, these permits, those phone numbers. “I was like, ‘what the fuck?’,” Collings says. “We were told this was going to be a streamlined process with no red tape.”

“I was stressing, [and] thought if I was having issues – my mindset’s pretty strong – this is probably actually devastating for other people. That’s when I started grabbing other people together and looking for a solution.”

He started a Facebook group called “I Lost My Home” and through that connected with Felicie Vachon, a Cobargo resident who also wanted to rebuild sustainably. They quickly discovered their communities faced similar problems: confusion, a dearth of tradies, slow clean-ups, high costs, and a looming one-year deadline for temporary accommodation insurance.

Now, Collings and Vachon are part of a growing, cross-state group of about 40 households who plan to rebuild with Atomic 6: a brand new, Melbourne-based modular housing company that is frantically ramping up production in the wake of the fires.

Atomic 6 uses unorthodox building materials like basalt fibre and vermiculite to make off-grid housing that founder Andrew Lennox says is fire-proof and hugely energy efficient. The parts are created on a production line using robots and assembled on-site. “We don’t see ourselves as builders at all, even though we can and we do. We see ourselves as innovators,” Lennox says.

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It didn’t start out as a sustainable enterprise. “To be fair, I’m not a greenie. I’m not into saving the planet. Or at least I wasn’t,” Lennox says. “This all of a sudden became a challenge and that’s where I stepped up, going, ‘Cool, now we’re doing this, let’s see how far we can go’.”

The company has emerged as a popular compromise among bushfire victims who want sustainable and energy-efficient housing, but live in areas where rebuilding traditionally, or with eco-friendly materials like rammed earth or straw bales, would be expensive and slow.

For Vachon, who has a toddler and a 10-month-old baby, a sustainable recovery is a no-brainer. “I’ve got two kids and I’m absolutely completely freaking out about climate change,” she says.

Trusting Atomic 6, which had no fully constructed houses when Vachon signed up, is a leap of faith. “There’s nothing we can look at. It doesn’t exist yet.” But Vachon is excited about what the company is doing.

In a few short months, Lennox has drawn up plans with people across two states and opened a second factory in Moruya on the NSW south coast, where the company’s first house has now rolled off the production lines.

Is he worried about pulling it all off? “I work 90-hour weeks and I’ve done that for two years developing this,” he says. “There’s not a millimetre or part of this we haven’t thought about.”

The power

The night the fires hit, Collings and his family sheltered at the relief centre at the high school in Corryong. The town, right at the end of the electricity line stretching out from Wodonga, had lost power and there was no generator.

The high school hall is one of four buildings in town – along with the local Country Fire Authority and Victoria Ambulance stations – that would be fitted with solar panels and a battery under a plan, still in its early stages, by renewable energy company Indigo Power.

It’s a two birds, one stone situation: essential services can keep going next time Corryong loses power, and the rest of the time, they’re using renewable energy anyway. Plus, down the track, the buildings could be used as energy anchors for a community microgrid.

“If you can include getting ready for bushfires in a way that does something about the broader problem of climate change, why shouldn’t you?” says Indigo Power managing director Ben McGowan. “That seems to make sense to me.”

Indigo Power will seek philanthropic funding, hopeful of finding something in the spate of recovery money available. Recently, the federal government knocked back a different grant application to create a mini-grid in Corryong, although according to local federal MP Helen Haines, energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor has said the town should reapply.

Electricity accounts for 33% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and the majority of Victoria’s electricity still comes from brown coal. But converting to renewables remains a hard sell in certain areas.

Locals in and around Corryong, including Ian Cesa, who owns a beef cattle farm at nearby Tintaldra, are hopeful the bushfires will be the catalyst for a switch to renewables.

“Before the bushfires, we would have been talking about it purely from a sustainability angle, from a renewable energy angle, and as you can imagine there are some people who are not really interested in that,” Cesa says. “But if you talk about it from a reliability standpoint, it’s a completely different story.”

It’s also an important economic recovery step, Cesa says, with potential to create jobs and keep money in the area.

Recovery is slow, and the residents of Cudgewa and Corryong are taking things one step at a time. But the bushfires, in all their tragedy, have also presented a rare opportunity to rebuild a different future.

When Tully initially learned his house was destroyed, his first thought was for Ziggy, his toy zebra. “Does that mean Ziggy’s dead?” he asked. Six months on, now four years old, he is doing really well, says Collings. He understands and talks about what happened: “Our house is gone, we’re building another one, and it’s going to be robotic.”

Collings does want a better world for Tully to grow up in. But he says his efforts to help his community recover are driven more by a sense of simply knowing what is right, and what needs to happen.

“You can see when something’s working,” he says, “and when something’s not.”

• The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the economy but also presented a unique opportunity: to invest in climate action that creates jobs and stimulates investment, before it’s too late. The Green Recovery features talk to people on the frontline of Australia’s potential green recovery.