Under orange skies

Having being involved with numerous community recovery committees, emergency management boards and committees, and bushfire preparedness, response, relief, and recovery organisations, as well as having living in bushfire prone areas for most of my adult life both in Gippsland and the Yarra Ranges, I have experienced first-hand the impacts the ABC has on local communities during times of disaster.

The first time the sky turned orange, I thought it was a trick of light.

Not a miracle, nothing so generous. Just some strange atmospheric mood. Australia does this sometimes – a summer evening with heat still trapped in the bitumen, a low sun filtering through haze, the whole world briefly sepia like an old photograph. I stood on the back step with a mug of tea and tried to persuade myself that this was merely weather being theatrical.

But the orange didn’t lift. It thickened. It became, slowly and unmistakably, smoke.

And then the smell arrived, sharp, acrid, intimate. The smell of burning that isn’t a barbeque or a neighbour’s leaf pile, but something larger, farther, hungrier. It has a way of skipping past the intellect and going straight into the animal brain. Fire, it says. Move.

Inside, the house felt suddenly flimsy. Not physically, our walls were still walls, but conceptually. The kinds of assumptions that hold a normal day together started to dissolve. I caught myself listening, not for music or voices, but for the sound of wind. I found myself checking windows as if glass could tell me something. My phone became a nervous habit – unlock, refresh, unlock, refresh. I watched maps and warnings, numbers, and colour codes, and felt the modern sickness of being given too much information without any sense of what to do with my body.

If you’ve lived through an Australian summer that carries fire in its throat, you’ll recognise that particular feeling – the sense that your own suburb has become a small character in a much larger story you can’t fully see. You keep looking at the horizon, trying to decide whether the smoke is drifting towards you or away. You keep imagining routes out. You keep thinking about the dog, the photos, the medicine drawer. You keep remembering things you meant to do, clear the gutters, pack the bag, check on the neighbour, and you keep realising you don’t actually have a plan. You only have fear pretending to be preparation.

That day, I did what most of us do now when reality starts to tilt – I went online. I opened social media. I opened news sites. I opened group chats. I looked for certainty the way thirsty people look for water. And what I found, immediately, was noise.

A friend posted a screenshot of a warning that was already out of date. Someone else shared a rumour about a road closure that may or may not have been true. A distant cousin was posting, with heartfelt urgency, things that were factually wrong but emotionally persuasive. My feed was a blur of dramatic photos, some from my state, some from another country, some from years earlier, recirculated like ghosts. People were tagging each other, panicking each other, caring loudly, performing their care with exclamation marks. It was human, and it was unbearable.

It occurred to me, with a kind of embarrassed clarity, that the internet is excellent at making you feel something and terrible at telling you what to do.

I needed something else. Something slower. Something steadier. Something that could hold the fear without amplifying it.

I found myself doing a very old thing. I turned on the radio.

Turning to the Radio

The ABC came up in my kitchen the way it always has, without drama, without flourish. Just the sound of a local presenter speaking into the day as if the day could be spoken into shape. There was no urgent music. No “breaking news” theatrics. Just a human voice, calm enough to borrow calm from, reading warnings, naming places, repeating the kind of information you might otherwise miss in your own panic.

“If you are in the vicinity of, ” the presenter began, and then named the town like it mattered.

That’s when it hit me – in a disaster, what you need most is locality. You need a voice that knows the curve of your roads, the weird little gullies where fire races, the bridges that flood first, the back way out that locals take when the highway is blocked. You need a voice that understands that to name a place is to acknowledge the people in it.

On the radio, towns were not just dots on a map. They were communities. They were someone’s parents. Someone’s kids. Someone’s farm and shed and school.

And the presenter kept talking.
Not in a way that pretended everything was fine, but in a way that suggested panic wasn’t helpful. They read the advice slowly. They repeated it, knowing people were coming in and out of reception, turning on radios mid-sentence, trying to cook dinner while their minds were elsewhere. They interviewed the fire service. They asked practical questions. They checked details. They corrected rumours without shaming the people who believed them.

It was, in its own understated way, extraordinary.

In that moment, the ABC stopped being “media” in the way we usually mean it and became something closer to infrastructure. Like the power lines. Like the water supply. Like the roads that either let you out or trap you in. The broadcast was not entertainment. It was not content. It was a public service in the most literal sense – a service provided to the public to keep the public alive.

I stood at the kitchen bench and listened, and I felt something in my chest loosen. Not owing to the situation improving – outside, the light was still wrong, and the air still tasted of smoke, but because I had finally found a source of truth that didn’t require me to drown in the feed.

There is a particular kind of trust that forms between a community and a local radio voice. It’s not the blind trust of hero worship. It’s not ideological. It’s more intimate than that. It’s the trust you develop in someone whose job is to show up every day and speak to you as if you are real. Someone who has mentioned your town in the context of local footy results and council debates and school fetes, and therefore has earned the right, on the worst day, to tell you where the fire is.

In the weeks and months after that summer, the summer that scorched itself into our national memory, I thought often about what had saved my sanity, if not my life, in those anxious hours. It wasn’t a clever app. It wasn’t the speed of my internet connection. It was a familiar voice on the ABC telling me, with steady repetition, what was happening and what mattered.

Public broadcasting as infrastructure. That phrase can sound abstract until you live its reality.

Infrastructure is the stuff you don’t notice until it fails. You don’t think about the plumbing until the tap runs dry. You don’t think about bridges until they’re washed away. You don’t think about communications until the power is out and your phone battery is sliding towards zero and you realise you have no idea what the people you love are doing.

In a fire, or a flood, or a cyclone, communication becomes a form of shelter. It becomes a roof over the mind. Without it, panic spreads faster than flames.

That’s the very reason radio still matters. Real radio, not streaming, not algorithmic playlists. Broadcast radio, the kind that comes through even when the mobile towers are out and your data plan is irrelevant. The kind you can get in a car, with a cheap receiver, in places where the internet is intermittent at best. The kind older Australians grew up with and still keep as a habit, not due to them being nostalgic but because they know instinctively what younger people sometimes forget – resilience is often analogue.

That summer, when the sky was orange and ash was settling on cars like dirty snow, I found myself driving to work with the radio on.

The language was careful. It wasn’t emotional. It didn’t try to wring drama out of other people’s suffering. That restraint is part of what makes it trustworthy. Commercial media sometimes treats disaster like spectacle – the reporter in a helmet, the dramatic shots, the breathless tone. There is a place for urgency, but urgency is not the same as hysteria. The ABC’s voice, when it is doing its job properly, has the discipline of not turning crisis into theatre.

And that discipline, in a disaster, is a form of care.

It also gave me something else that social media couldn’t – a sense that we were all in this together.

The Shared Experience of Radio

Radio, by contrast, is shared by default. Thousands of people hear the same words at the same time. In a crisis, that sharedness becomes almost sacred. The presenter will say, “If you’re just joining us,” and you know that hundreds of kitchens and cars and sheds are filled with people who have, just like you, turned on the radio because they need help. You are not the only one listening for your town name. You are not the only one with a go-bag half packed by the front door.

Sometimes the presenter would take calls. Sometimes they would speak to someone on the ground – a fire captain, a local mayor, a person who had evacuated. The calls were often shaky. People struggled to speak through smoke and shock. But the presenter stayed steady, asking the questions that mattered, pulling practical details out of emotion.

That steadiness is trained. It is professional. It is the product of an institution that knows its role in a democracy and in a disaster.

We don’t talk about the ABC this way nearly enough. We talk about it as a cultural battleground, biased or not biased, left or right, funding cuts or programming changes. Those debates are real, and sometimes they matter. But what gets lost is the plain fact that the ABC is, for huge parts of Australia, a lifeline. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Think about rural and remote communities. Think about the shearer on a property hours from the nearest town. Think about older people living alone in small communities where the nearest neighbour is a kilometre away. Think about low-income households where data is expensive and smartphones are old and reception is patchy. Think about Aboriginal communities where English may not be the first language and where local radio becomes a key channel for community information and safety. In these contexts, the ABC, especially local radio, functions like a public utility.

When I say, “vulnerable communities depend on that voice,” I mean it quite concretely.

I think of an older neighbour of mine, a widower who keeps a battery-powered radio in a drawer. He’s not sentimental. He’s practical. He grew up in an Australia where you didn’t assume technology would always work. During the fires, he didn’t doomscroll. He listened. When the power flickered, his radio kept going. When mobile coverage dropped, his radio kept going. That simple device, and the ABC’s willingness to speak into it, gave him situational awareness without panic. It gave him instructions without noise.

What I learned that summer is that public broadcasting is one of the ways a society cares for the people most likely to be left behind by “market solutions.”

Markets serve customers. Public institutions serve citizens.

In a disaster, that distinction becomes stark. Private media will cover what drives clicks. Social platforms will amplify what triggers emotion. But a public broadcaster has a different obligation – to inform everyone, including those who are not profitable to serve.

That obligation is not glamorous. It doesn’t trend. It looks like repetition – warning, advice, update, warning again. It looks like interviewing officials and insisting on clarity. It looks like refusing to spread rumours. It looks like reading out the names of evacuation centres and road closures even when those details are boring to people far away.

It looks like turning up.

The Slow Erosion of the ABC

Therefore, the slow erosion of the ABC matters. You can feel it, sometimes, even as you rely on it. You can hear the stretched staffing. You can sense when local content has been reduced, when programming is more syndicated, when there aren’t as many reporters on the ground in smaller towns. The ABC has been asked, over many years, to do more with less, to cut and consolidate, to justify itself repeatedly in a political environment that treats public institutions as ideological trophies.

The danger of that erosion is not only cultural, but more concerningly operational. When you cut local capacity, you weaken the very thing that makes local radio life-saving – local knowledge.

In a disaster, details matter. Which road is open. Which bridge is flooded. Which fire is moving in which direction. Where the wind is turning. What time the warning was last updated. Whether the evacuation centre has power. Whether the town has fuel.
A presenter who lives in the region, who knows the geography, who has sources, who can call the right people quickly, that’s not a luxury. That’s the difference between accurate information and useless generalities.

The ABC belongs in that category alongside public hospitals and fire services. You don’t want to notice it until you need it. And then, when you need it, you need it completely.

I remember one afternoon in particular during those fires. The smoke had thickened so much that daylight looked bruised. The sun was a dim red coin behind a veil. Ash was falling in slow, lazy spirals. The world felt apocalyptic in a way that was both ridiculous and real, ridiculous because it was still my street, my suburb, my kitchen, real because the air was genuinely dangerous and the horizon genuinely on fire.

I had packed a bag by the front door – passport, laptop, a few clothes, medication. I’d filled water bottles. I’d put the cat’s carrier and food in a pile. I’d charged every device I owned. I’d done all the small rituals that make you feel like you can bargain with fire.

And still I had no certainty.

That’s when the ABC presenter said, quietly, “We know this is frightening. If you’re listening in your kitchen right now, if you’re in your car, if you’re wondering whether you should leave, please remember – if you are in doubt, leave early.”

The sentence was simple, but it landed like a hand on the shoulder. Not on account of it being new information, I’d heard “leave early” a hundred times, but because of the way it was said, and because of who said it. It felt personal, as if the presenter could see into the houses of the region. It felt like an adult in the room.

And then the presenter did something even more important – they stayed on the air.

They didn’t do one dramatic bulletin and then move on. They stayed. They became a steady presence you could keep tuned to while you made decisions. That continuity is crucial. It turns information into companionship.

Short Memories

In the months that followed, as the fires receded and the news cycle moved on, as it always does, I noticed how quickly people forget the role the ABC played. Disaster fades into memory, and with it the gratitude. Then the arguments return – why fund it, why not cut it, why not make it compete like everyone else, why not privatise bits of it, why not treat it as an optional cultural item rather than a core service.

But once you have sat in a kitchen with smoke in the air and listened to that steady voice, those arguments become harder to stomach. They reveal themselves as what they are – the comfortable debating whether the essential should remain available to everyone.

I also think of the people inside the ABC, presenters, producers, technicians, journalists, who work long hours in crisis, often under-resourced, often with little public recognition, because they understand the job. They understand that in a disaster you do not “clock off” because your shift ends. You stay on air. You keep the line open.

There is a kind of quiet heroism in that, too – not the heroism of fire crews on the line (though that is real and deserves reverence), but the heroism of those who hold the informational infrastructure together so the rest of us can make decisions. In emergencies, information saves lives. Providing it accurately, calmly, relentlessly, is a form of service that should be honoured as such.

That listening can be life-saving.

That question becomes even sharper as climate disasters become more frequent. The fires of that summer were not an isolated freak. They were part of a pattern in a warming world. Floods, cyclones, heatwaves, these are becoming normal features of Australian life. Which means the need for resilient public communication systems will only increase.

In other words – the ABC’s role as lifeline is a critical element of twenty-first-century survival.

By the time the worst of the fires eased, the sky returned, tentatively, to its normal colours. The smoke thinned. Rain arrived in some places, too late for some. The world began its slow process of pretending it was normal again, because that is what humans do after trauma – we normalise so we can keep living.

But I kept the radio habit.

Even now, long after the orange sky has become a memory, I find myself turning on ABC local when I need to feel anchored. Not because it is always perfect, not because it always agrees with me, but because it feels like one of the few remaining spaces where information is treated as a civic duty rather than a commodity.

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll hear the familiar tone of a presenter reading weather forecasts, and I’ll remember the other nights, the frightened nights, when that same tone carried warnings. I’ll remember how the voice didn’t panic. How it kept naming towns. How it kept telling people where to go. How it kept saying, in effect – We are here. We are watching. You are not alone.

And I will feel, again, the profound strangeness and beauty of that – a society building an institution whose job, among other things, is to speak calmly to its people when the sky turns orange.

That’s not entertainment. That’s civilisation. That’s a public promise made audible – that when the world becomes dangerous, we will still try to tell each other the truth in a voice steady enough to hold.