Peter Walsh with Barmah locals Jake and Dean Adams, who were collecting wood for neighbours unable to do it themselves.
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All roads led to Barmah on Friday, September 27, as hundreds of people scrambled for access to hundreds of tonnes of flood-damaged fallen trees rescued for use as firewood.
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Coming out of the Barmah Forest, the wood was originally pushed into 70 large piles and was going to be burnt by Parks Victoria staff. But a public backlash saw the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action change the decision.
Local charcoal burner Nick Marijancevic was one of the first to sound alarm bells when he saw the wood being stockpiled and approached Parks Victoria to see if he could access some of its for his business.
When that was rejected his second option of making it available to the financially vulnerable and pensioners in the district — to offset Victoria’s soaring electricity costs — was also dismissed.
At the time a DEECA spokesperson said “flood debris in the Barmah National Park will be burned during the coming weeks to clear strategic fire breaks ahead of this fire season”.
State Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh, who was in Barmah on Friday when the wood was released to the public, said “sanity finally prevailed, albeit on a very small scale”.
People arrived to collect wood at sunup and were still going at sundown.
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He spoke with a lot of people who all had the same story — utter frustration with the sheer scale of fallen timber they were banned from collecting while being forced to pay soaring electricity costs and being told their gas heating is going.
“For me though, the saddest and most disturbing thing I saw, and talked with people about, was local senior citizens out there trying to pick up the smaller bits of wood to supplement pensions,” Mr Walsh said.
“They didn’t have chainsaws or axes, so were scavenging the smaller broken pieces ... fortunately, in classic regional Victorian style, I saw several other collectors, who were armed with chainsaws, coming over to lend them a hand.”
Barmah resident Dean Adams and his son Jake worked through the day collecting several loads of timber to be distributed to locals without the capacity to collect it on their own.
Mr Adams and his family and friends also established Barmah’s Food Shack after the 2022 floods as a small step to help “a very damaged community” regain some independence.
The Food Shack is a small shed on the roadside near Mr Adams’s house and it offers food support to anyone who needs it.
Mr Adams gets some backing with donations “from local vegie patches to amazing support from bakeries in Echuca-Moama, including Beechworth and Moama bakeries and Aldi for all sorts of foodstuffs’’.
He said they also get help from FoodShare, but with the demand pressure it is facing those donations are shrinking a little bit.
Mr Adams said the wood was worth so much to so many local people it would have been ridiculous to waste it.
“You can drive all around here and see fallen wood everywhere, but no-one is allowed to touch it — it’s just wrong.”
A DEECA spokesperson on Monday said ‘’the designated firewood collection area at Corrys Rd, Barmah Island, has been exhausted and is now closed”.
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