When Pietro Porcu made it back to his farm in Gobur, south of Longwood, he was greeted by darkness and ash. His home, and the free range, organic farm that for the past two decades has supplied his South Yarra restaurant Da Noi with seasonal produce, eggs and meat, was completely gone.
Then, amid the crumpled sheds, melted water tanks, ruined machinery and blackened trees, he saw movement. Chickens, goats, pigs and cows: somehow, miraculously, many of his animals had survived.
“It’s burnt everywhere. I have no idea [how they survived]. It’s amazing,” Porcu says.
The scale of the recovery effort ahead of him is disorienting. “We don’t really know what we’re doing, but first of all, we’re looking after the animals,” Porcu says. “We’re trying to be here.”
And from the minute he returned to the farm, the community has been reaching out to help.
The farmhouse was destroyed, so a vet in nearby Yea loaned Porcu a caravan so he could stay on site. His neighbours brought over a generator to power it. Others brought over a couple of bales of hay.
“I had a man giving me a drum of water the other day, and he was telling me, while he was giving me the water for me to wash myself and drink, that he also lost his house,” Porcu says. “And I was thinking, wow. He was in Yarck, lost his house, and he’s there helping people.”
Porcu is far from alone in feeling a groundswell of support from friends and strangers alike. Many of the fires are still not under control, but already affected communities and those beyond have rallied around each other.
Feeding surviving and evacuated livestock has been a priority for such a heavily agricultural region. The Victorian Farmers Federation has called for donations to its disaster relief fund, for distribution as cash grants to farmers. And grassroots organisers are already delivering feed to hungry stock.
Danny McNamara from Dookie United Football & Netball Club says a Facebook post the club made on 11 January, asking people to donate hay or fodder to support farmers in the Longwood area, was met with an overwhelming response.
“Prior to putting the post up we had already organised a truck load of hay,” McNamara tells the Guardian. “And since then we’ve probably got another seven or eight truckloads that have come in one way or another – from a small load in itself to eight or 10 rolls of hay at a time.”
Dookie, a small community north of Longwood and not far from Shepparton, is also home to a University of Melbourne agricultural campus. McNamara says the university has made “a substantial donation of fuel for the trucks and have jumped on board as a local community member”.
“We’ve got farms, businesses, sponsors and clubs that have donated time and trucks to get it to the farmers that are affected,” he says.
Racing Victoria also delivered feed to Nagambie, where some of the 800 thoroughbreds evacuated from the region – which is a hub of breeding and training facilities – were housed. Emergency transport for horses on farms in the path of the fire was coordinated by a 200-member WhatsApp group.
After spending days on fire-watch but being spared the flames themselves, the owners of Affordable Plants, a small nursery in Glenburn, just south of the Longwood fire zone, began gathering hay, chaff, non-perishable food, water and medical supplies to deliver to fire-affected communities.
‘A shoulder to cry on’
On Wednesday, Rachel Washington and her partner Jaidyn hit the road in a truck, travelling 400km via Seymour to deliver those supplies to community members in towns including Ruffy, Caveat, Yarck, and Maindample.
“We were able to help not only give out much needed supplies, be a shoulder to cry on and to lend a hand loading up valuables that were somehow spared by the flames,” the pair said in a post on Facebook on Thursday.
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Meanwhile in Castlemaine, Leonie New, a tattoo artist at Forest Creek Tattoo, says the whole community has been affected by the fires in neighbouring Harcourt.
“Our friends and fellow community members have lost homes, businesses, had loss of income, loss of pets, we’ve seen the devastation these fires have had on our local bushland and wildlife,” New says.
The shop will hold a tattoo flash fundraising day on 8 February, where tattoo artists create a sheet of small, usually repeatable designs, and clients line up to get tattooed. Sixteen artists at the time of writing had donated their time and supplies, and the money raised will go towards Harcourt fire recovery efforts.
It’s not the only local fundraiser people are jumping to contribute to: a rapidly organised lunch event at the nearby Boomtown Winemakers Cooperative on Sunday raised more than $130,000 for the Harcourt community and local fire brigades.
A few days ago, Porcu’s daughter, Romey, set up a fundraising page for her father to help him rebuild. Parts of the farm were insured, but they expect the recovery to cost much more than it will cover.
At the time of writing, the page had raised more than $20,000. It has also yielded offers of other kinds of help: provision of water tanks, and gratis electricity work.
“This makes me believe in humanity a little bit more,” Porcu says. “Even in this lost, totally lost kind of situation.”
There are things money won’t bring back: the years of labour Porcu and his workers poured into the orchard, gardens and olive grove; the decades he spent cultivating heirloom seeds; the cork trees that remind him of his home in Sardinia, Italy.
“I woke up so early and I was looking at the farm – that greyness – and I thought, there’ll be a little rain and then everything starts to go green, and you start to smile again,” Porcu says. “I want to rebuild everything and better.”
But it will take “a big hand” to do that work. “I couldn’t do it on my own. No way.”
