Laura Zusters, ZedMedia

We’ve just finished making some videos for Australia for UNHCR, thanking their monthly donors for their contributions and showing them that they do make a difference to the lives of refugees.

Working with Catharine Campbell from Nine Lanterns, I just finished editing a series of videos for the Kids Matter Primary website, showing how KidsMatter Primary is a mental health and wellbeing framework for primary schools, proven to make a positive difference to the lives of Australian children.

FIRE STORIES: A LESSON IN TIME, which I directed and edited, can now be viewed via the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute website.

People can now also read all the stories that people submitted about their experiences. We collected so many interesting and wonderful stories about the 1957 bushfire, but only a small portion could make it into our film. All the stories are now collected in the one place and available for everyone to read. I really enjoyed making this film because the community got so involved in adding to the our knowledge of what happened on this terrible day. Hopefully it will help people be more prepared for the next big fires in the area.

FIRE STORIES: A LESSON IN TIME is back by popular demand. After the highly successful screening in Katoomba for upper mountains residents, the people of the lower Blue Mountains requested another screening.  The film showed on 27 July at the Glenbrook Cinema to full houses in two free public screenings. 

Community interest in this film has been huge.

I directed this film with the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute, for Blue Mountains National Parks and the Rural Fire Service. In this half hour film, we captured the human stories surrounding the devastating 1957 bush fires which tore through Leura and Wentworth Falls in the summer of 1957-58. The film documents the fire and it’s toll by tracing the stories of an ill-prepared yet heroic community, who faced these fires and then coped with the tragic aftermath.

The lessons from 55 years ago will help the Blue Mountains community to deal with fire in 2013, in a summer that may see serious bushfires. The Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute is now conducting research from feedback to gauge the effectiveness of this film in changing people’s behaviour to being more personally prepared.

FIRE STORIES: A LESSON IN TIME showed in five packed screenings today at the Edge Cinema. In spite of rain in the morning, hundreds of people turned up to see the film in the large 350 seat Imax cinema. Emergency services showed off a dozen vintage trucks outside the cinema and the foyer was so full of people all afternoon, it looked like a rugby scrum in there. So many people are interested to learn about this important legend of Blue Mountains history!

People came out of the cinema with a tear in their eye for the people who lost so much on the day – and rushed over to pick up their copies of the Bushfire Survival Manual, promising to fill them out. It’s so important to have a plan in place, in case another big bushfire does come. 

The publicity is out. FIRE STORIES will be screening at the Edge Cinema in Katoomba on June 2! Not only does the film celebrate the resilience of the community that faced the massive Leura fire in 1957, but also gently prompts people to consider their own fire plans for the ‘next big one’, which could be this next summer.

The Blue Mountains World Heritage Institiute and National Parks are getting a lot of enquiries already from people wanting to book a seat at the screenings.

Today we filmed an interview at Perry’s Lookdown with Ivan Thelander, who was one of nine teenage boys who got caught in the Grose Valley fire, two days before the great Leura bushfire of Dec 2, 1957. The devastating blaze caught the bushwalkers unawares and they tried to escape up the path on the cliffs. Four boys who tried to outrun the fire were caught by the flames and died. But Ivan and several other boys fled back through the flames and survived.

I found Ivan through the White Pages and he hadn’t talked about this terrible experience in public before, so it was an emotional experience for all of us to visit the memorial in this beautiful place.

I’ve conducted research interviews with some key characters for our film, but we’re sure there are a lot more stories out there. Our publicist Yvonne Hellmers placed a story in the Blue Mountains Gazette to ask for people’s recollections and I’ve been absolutely swamped with calls and emails. 

So many people were profoundly affected by the Leura fire of 1957! Each of their stories are so specifically about their own experience, so we are gradually piecing together a patchwork of stories to build up a picture of what actually happened on the day. There are so many amazing stories, it’s hard to know which people to include in the film.

Tricia Hogan remembers the fire coming down Leura Mall and helping the nuns save the children from the Catholic school

Jim Chivas has been a Rural Fire Service Group Captain and knows more than most about the behaviour of bush fires

I’ve been asked by the Blue Mountains World Heritage institute to direct and edit a documentary about the great Leura bushfire of 1957, the worst bushfire in NSW history, when 200 houses, shops and schools were destroyed.  Glenn Meade from Blue Mountains National Parks applied for Community Resilience funding to make the film and the Rural Fire Service have come on board as well, to honour the people who survived this devastating fire and to collect their stories. 

We will research the events and survivors this year and hope to film interviews in February next year. So far, we have newspaper articles from November 1957 to December via Trove, which show what a hot and dry season it was and how many fires occurred in NSW before the big day.