This is how Tablelands Fire Recovery Hub volunteer Coll Furlanetto describes the mental fallout for people, particularly children, after an event such as the Longwood bushfire.
“With trauma, we know that 70 per cent of adults have lived experience and brain capacity to sort of try to process whatever this has been,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
“Thirty per cent of us will need some support, and of that 30 per cent, about five per cent will need a lot more support.
“But what I’m told is that 100 per cent of kids need support.”
She said that without being equipped with life experience, children did not have the cognitive function to process traumatic events as well as adults.
“We have to remember that, otherwise this will be a screensaver in their memory for ever, and that trauma will be with them for ever,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
The school buses started commuting again recently, transporting kids from their homes in the burnt hills to their schools in town.
“They weren't as distracted on the bus, so they were just looking at black all the way down to Euroa and all the way back,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
“They were dysregulated when they got off the bus, they were, you know, angry and just a bit unsettled, very unsettled.
“So that's a symptom of something we need to make sure they’re supported and that their parents are supported.”
As the hub in Ruffy has been operating since almost immediately after the fire, nine weeks before The News visited this time, it has begun to transition into a new phase.
“We’re wanting to start up groups now to work together, to be together,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
“So young parent groups and a women’s group, and kids as well, just so they can have a regular catch-up and parents, particularly around kids.
“We’re hoping for a really enlightening art movement day or several days, sessions with an organisation ... that might be here or it might be Mansfield or Alex(andra), but again, we’re doing it together as a collective, but the kids are a real focus.”
She said parent groups were important to help participants build capacity and process things with support from people in the same boat.
“Sometimes we don't look after our clinical health, and sometimes we can have an infection that we don't know we've got that's making us not think or feel well and whether it's a virus or a bacterial infection, it’s something that can sneak up on you,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
“If you're not going to the doctor, that can manifest into something else, or someone being really angry and unwell and a child not being themselves, but it could be for another reason that's compounded by this trauma.”
With donations for many essential items mostly taken care of by various groups and individuals who have answered earlier cries for help, the hub is now in need of resources such as vouchers to buy fresh items, including bread and milk, that need to be replenished daily, and fuel cards.
“Or some dollars to put towards kids’ days we want to start up,” Mrs Furlanetto said.
The kids in the area are consistently being included in happenings at the hub, with evidence of their presence outside school hours in handwriting and drawings on whiteboards and posters around the hall.
They recently created artworks to gift to 45 visiting truck drivers from the Need for Feed project, a Lions Club of Australia initiative, who delivered around 2000 hay bales on 57 trailers to about 180 fire-affected properties in the region on the Labour Day weekend, when they stopped for a meal.
And when asked whether the new resident koala, who has moved to the patch behind the hub, has been named yet, Mrs Furlanetto didn’t falter when considering a suitable candidate to delegate the job to.
“Not yet, I might get the kids to think of a name,” she said.
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