For those of you who didn’t hear about the Australian bushfires, let me catch you up. In February this year, a number of fires burned across south eastern Australia. The intensity and scale of the fires resulted in high numbers of casualties and millions of dollars of damage. Whole towns were wiped out. People trying to flee in their cars were incinerated. All told, over 200 people were killed by the fires, with a great deal more injured and homeless.
Similar events dot the history books. In 1983, fires raged through southern Australia, burning 2000 square kilometers and killing 75 people. I was just two years old at the time, so I had no real conception of the event. However it affected my father deeply. He was so moved by the senseless loss of life that the fires caused, that he designed a shelter, that families may place in their garden and run to should fire threaten their property. It was an invention that cost an incredible amount of time, money and effort on the part of my parents. But it was designed, built and tested under real fire conditions with my father, a chemist and a brave news reporter inside, while I watched from the sidelines.
A place of proven safety only seconds away.
The success of those tests, coupled with the cheapness of the shelter made it seem like a no-brainer. Yet, years later my dad had to give up the project. Not only was the shelter hard to insure, but at every level of government asked for assistance, the same reply was given: it’s a great idea but we don’t want to get involved. As a result, only a few shelters were sold, despite great interest following it’s appearance at the Royal Melbourne Show (of which it was the prize winner for best exhibit) and on TV current affairs shows.
Why there was so little interest, why no-one in the country fire authority or on local councils stepped up to support the shelter are questions we need to ask. For it’s damned sure that hundreds of lives could have been saved, had the shelters been available. As an attempt to offer up a history of the shelter, and of the long process of it’s development, I made bushfireshelter.com. Over the coming weeks, I will publish details about the shelter, along with photos, letters and articles from it’s inventor, my dad, Ray Toyne.
What is certain is Australia needs this shelter. With conditions in the south being the dryest on record and summer bringing inevitable heatwaves, there must be a way for people in the bush to protect their lives and the lives of their families.
For more information on the Little Beauty, please visit bushfireshelter.com
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Tags: Australia, bushfire, fire, little beauty, Ray Toyne, shelter