He wanted his photo taken standing in front of the old Burrumbeet pub! He explained that it was sentimental, his great-grandfather had been the first publican and hence he dragged me out of the car beside the highway for this snap.
The pub sits alongside a bald, oddly shaped hill named Mount Callender. Many similarly-shaped hills run back towards Clunes, others eastwards to Mount Macedon, south and west, and across to South Australia’s Mount Gambier. They are all old volcanoes, extinct for millennia. The oral traditions handed down through generations of Wadawurrung custodians, record the creator spirit’s violent capacities, mythic battles weaponising the ‘volcanic’ fire across the land.
But here today I look at an industrial landscape. Each of the hills is now interconnected, part of a massive fracking infrastructure, tapping rich, proven fields of natural gas. Thousands of kilometres of underground piping, huge white storage tanks, steel columns, roads, all connecting the hills into the international gas-export facilities at Portland. The pub now sits abandoned, derelict, with the glistening steel backdrop nearby.
In the 2030s, successive Federal Governments had largely addressed the national energy emergency ineffectively. Coal had gone, wind and solar were generating 90% of the country’s needs. But high-voltage distribution remained a weakness, still more than a decade away from completion. Bickering between those pushing a nuclear industry, others wanting green hydrogen, and some of the landholders refusing high-voltage towers across their land, meant successive governments had allowed the electrical grid to slowly fragment.
Gas came back onto the agenda. Huge Chinese, US and European investment flowed, the old volcanic caldera were progressively tapped and a massive, underground network of interconnect pipes spread out. Gone were the bald, green hills of yore, as the extraction headworks sat immutable upon the hills. We were inundated with much-hyped media about the possible development of carbon sequestration: into the space recently vacated by the gas! A win:win, we were told!
So much for the pristine hills! I fiddled with the camera and got several pics – him smirking, another with one eye closed, looking away from the lens and eventually a nice smile, the pub identifiable, off to the right and the jet of smoke streaming upwards, on the left.
What the … At that moment there was an almighty, deafening explosion. Steam and a molten red column shot into the air. A fissure, unzipping rapidly, widened as it snaked forward, a ripped mantel vomiting red, hot terrestrial innards. He and the pub disappeared into the vortex.
The car was being pelted, rocks falling: but I ran. The ignition behaved and it started. Stunned, snivelling I drove erratically, confused – away from a rearview vision of unmitigated terror.
The media reported that six other caldera erupted that day. Mt Buninyong disappeared, along with its township, and more were to follow. In the days and weeks that followed, the old ‘extinct’ volcanoes went off, one by one. Much of Western Victoria slid into the abyss.
His photo sits on my mantlepiece, a memory.