Anita and Josipa Batistić, whose roots are on the Croatian island of Korčula, are members of the Radić Brothers ethnic Croatian club in Sydney, where they gathered essential items before transporting them to Malua Bay, also home to an ethnic Croatian community.
Anita and Josipa Batistić, whose roots are on the Croatian island of Korčula, are members of the Radić Brothers ethnic Croatian club in Sydney, where they gathered essential items before transporting them to Malua Bay, also home to an ethnic Croatian community.
Australia has seen weeks of wildfires. The fires have caused devastation across the continent and are leaving little but desolation and death in their wake. Dozens of people and hundreds of millions of animals have died on these scorched lands. There are no clear indicators of when this cataclysm will end, with a new wave of hot weather forecast for the end of the week. In these conditions hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing or have already been evacuated. Two women, however, have decided to head into the areas where fires are burning to help the most threatened people.
Anita and Josipa Batistić, whose roots are in Žrnovo, a village on the Croatian island of Korčula, are members of the Radić Brothers ethnic Croatian club in Sydney. At the club they organised a collection for essential items before sitting in a vehicle and driving for hours through the dark and fires to get to those in greatest need.
“I now live in Sydney, but spent my entire childhood and schooling in Malua Bay. That’s where my father is, that’s where my nephews are, that’s where my brother used to live. My father helped build the local Croatian club. I am very attached to this region. Batemans Bay, one of the areas hit by the worst fires, is near Malua. I had to help them. I told the people at the Croatian club in Sydney before the weekend that I was going there, to Malua. I told them that I was going to visit my father as soon as the road opened. ‘I am going to go with a massive pickup truck with a trailer, and I will take my fiend Josipa,’ that’s what I told them. I asked them, if they could, to donate anything. From food and milk to hygienic necessities, water, diapers, anything. People came to me the entire weekend, bringing all sorts of things. They were great,” Anita Batistić told the 24sata news portal.
They started the trip on Monday morning, A third of the way there they began to notice the smell of burning, and everything was scorched. There was no electric power at all in Batemans Bay and her 83-year-old father had been spending the past week without electric power. The shops in the area were emptied out.
“After four and a half hours of driving we made it to Malua Bay and dropped off everything we had brought. From toilet paper to baby food. People came out, crying and hugging us. They even tried to give us money. We were the first to make it there. Others started coming after us. Because there was no electric power, people’s mobile phones had turned off. News of our arrival spread by word of mouth, people cried when their heard that we had brought them stuff, that we had come to help. More than half of Malua Bay will have to wait for at least a week to have electric power restored because the station that had supplied them was totally burned out. Generators are in greatest demand, everybody was looking for them,” Anita said.
Both of these places live off of the tourism industry, and they are now ghost towns. The scope of the catastrophe is unimaginable to anybody that has not seen it with their own eyes. The smoke from the fires has made it as far as South America and there is an air of the apocalypse in the burned-out areas.
“In the town of North Rosedale there is one street on which all of the houses are burned. When we passed the street, the police had shut it off, and we did not know why. Later we found out that the houses in this street were full of dead people. The police and army are constantly patrolling the area. People tried to save what they could. My father lost a friend who died trying to save his house from the fire. One acquaintance barely survived. He spent the entire night in his house and then at one point just gave up—he soaked some blankets with water, lied on the floor and covered himself with them. His wife found him in the morning, sleeping. And it was not only people that came to harm—thousands of animals died. We saw a completely burned kangaroo. I can’t even begin to describe it,” Anita continued, relating the disturbing details.
Anita and Josipa were not, of course, the only people of good will and humanitarian impulses to help out. One man in Malua Bay who runs a pharmacy is working in the dark and borrowing a generator for a few hours at a time to keep medications at the necessary temperature. He is not taking money and providing medicine on good faith.
It is little things that make all the difference in conditions that may get even worse. There was rain on Sunday, but it only slightly improved conditions, which the firefighters have tried to use to at least reduce the fires. A new wave of hot weather has been forecast. So far twenty-four people have died and about half a billion animals. Thirty percent of the already threatened koala population has been killed by the fires. The fires are burning in all of Australia’s states and territories with over five million hectares having been impacted by fires that continue to burn.