After the Fire: a conversation

Inglewood Town Hall Supper Room

Cocktail-hour at the House Friday 3.45pm-5.30pm

An early evening opportunity to view the exhibitions, have a glass of wine and nibbles, meet the artists, and an After the Fire in-conversation event with Katherine Seppings and Robert Kenny, author of Gardens of Fire, who will talk about the emotional impact of bushfires, what they’ve learnt, and how art helps recovery. All welcome

Katherine Seppings is a photographer and writer, who lives in Harcourt, Central Victoria. She thought she was prepared for a disastrous fire, had her plans in place, and watched for the alerts. When the communication systems stalled, she still believed all would be well: “From my house I saw the massive plume of smoke heading towards me from the NW, the fire of which reached a street away. Being a grass fire, it wasn't possible to see flames on the ground, not with the smoke, the trees and the houses across my street. The power and communications failed early on. When the fire reached Gaaches Rd, that's when the terror took hold. When all my neighbours left, I felt terrified on my own.
I saw actual flames when I was in North Harcourt, when the grass fire raced up the valley from the wind change. Nothing obscured my view there, of the valley or the mountain.”

Katherine’s photographs are on show in Inglewood Town Hall, along with those of Lana Bertoni and Anthony (Red) Webster.

Robert Kenny’s house in Redesdale, Central Victoria, was destroyed in the February 2009 bushfire. An award-winning writer and academic, he wrote about that day, about seeing the fire race across paddocks, about trying to fight it, about sitting in a scorched field with a couple of belongings, waiting … for life after the fire. Robert’s moving and dramatic book, Gardens of Fire, is both full of useful information and a poetic document of a terrible time.