Airdate: Aftermath: Beyond Black Saturday

A decade after the devastating Black Saturday bushfires the ABC documentary Aftermath: Beyond Black Saturday hears from survivors about endurance and rebuilding their shattered lives.

In February 2009, the worst bushfires in Australian history ripped through Victoria in a series of firestorms so powerful that a million acres went up in flames, seven thousand Australians lost their homes and 173 people lost their lives.

Ten years later, Aftermath chronicles the personal stories of the people who survived the Black Saturday infernos to discover how they coped with unimaginable loss and trauma and how they picked up the pieces of their shattered lives.

While the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission forensically documented the public response to the Black Saturday infernos, Aftermath tells the intimate and often anguished personal stories of an ensemble cast of volunteer firefighters and local residents whose lives were turned upside down by the fires.

The ordinary people featured in Aftermath all experienced the same extraordinary traumatic event, but each of them experienced it differently and each had to find their own roadmap through the wreckage that it made of their lives.

By interweaving their stories, the film underlines how there’s no sure-fire path to recovery from trauma, and no cheat notes to help piece the jigsaw of a life back together again.

As the ten-year anniversary of Black Saturday approaches, Aftermath explores the long-term impact of Australia’s worst bushfires by giving each of the featured survivors the opportunity to reflect on their personal road to recovery, and the chance to make sense of the unexpected trajectory their life has taken in its wake.

This landmark documentary chronicles the challenging journey many Black Saturday survivors have been on in the decade since the firestorms transformed their lives. Out of the ashes of one of Australia’s worst natural disasters, emerges a film not about death and destruction but about the tenacity of life and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.

7:40pm Sunday on ABC.