Living through a natural disaster is a daunting experience for anyone, let alone a first-time mum with a newborn. 

When the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires tore through parts of Victoria’s Upper Murray, Rebecca Stockdale was left to fend for herself and her three-month-old son, Spencer, while her husband, Chris, a volunteer firefighter, fought the blaze.

“It was pretty overwhelming,” Ms Stockdale said.

“We didn’t get any notification to evacuate until it was too late. I didn’t even know people were leaving.”

Ms Stockdale lives in Corryong, in northern Victoria, about 120 kilometres east of Albury Wodonga.

She described an eerie feeling as thick, red smoke rolled over the hills and settled in on the town.

Loading…

Ms Stockdale hadn’t heard from her husband in several hours and said a lack of information reaching residents was unnerving.

“We didn’t know anybody in town so I didn’t really have anyone I could call and say, ‘What are you doing?’,” she said.

“I had a moment where I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this’. I had a baby. I had two dogs that I had to sort out and didn’t know what to do,” she said.

Eventually she decided to go to the local school, which had been set up as an evacuation centre.

“I literally walked out the door with nothing. I didn’t take anything with me, except for my nappy bag, my baby and my dogs. That was it,” Ms Stockdale said.

She could never have prepared herself for what she was walking into.

“It was just horrendous,” Ms Stockdale said.

“It was hot, it was crowded, it was smelly. There were animals everywhere. Big dogs, little dogs, cats, any kind of animal that you could imagine was there,” she said.

Evacuation centres

Evacuation centres were set up at places like local schools or basketball stadiums for residents displaced by the fires.

Ms Stockdale said it was organised chaos.

“Nobody really knew what was happening. There was no guidance,” she said.

“You pretty much just had to find a spare patch of ground and it was absolutely packed in there.”

Ms Stockdale laid a picnic rug on the floor, which is where she fed and nursed Spencer next to her dogs.

“In the end, I had him just stripped down to his nappy and I got a cool face washer and had that laying on top of him, trying to cool him down because it was so hot in there,” she said.

“I got to the point where I [didn’t] know what was my sweat on me, I didn’t know what was Spencer’s sweat, I didn’t know what was breast milk, I didn’t know what’s spew. We’d been sitting there so long.”

Loss of breastmilk

Spencer was born six weeks prematurely and Ms Stockdale said she had trouble breastfeeding him.

“He was born at home in my bedroom by accident,” she said.

Having to feed in the evacuation centre with no privacy, in front of strangers, made things even more complicated for the first-time mum.

“When you’re learning to breastfeed, I found for me, I really had to concentrate on what I was doing and it was really hard to shut everybody out who was around,” Ms Stockdale said.

“You feel like people are looking at you.”

Days after the fires started, she noticed she wasn’t producing as much milk, which she said was directly linked to the stress experienced during the emergency.

Prolonged stress

Dairy farmer Laura Hogg experienced the same loss of breastmilk production while feeding her first child, Audrey, who was three months old when the fires struck.

“After the first bit of adrenaline, the milk supply should come back. But I think because we had such a prolonged period of stress in the body, it just didn’t come back,” Ms Hogg said.

Both mums said there was a lack of support and with powerlines down and no phone reception it was difficult to find any information on what to do in the situation.

“Nobody was really supportive of breastfeeding and trying to build back up supply. It was really hard to find information about,” Ms Hogg said.

“I was pretty passionate about breastfeeding and I pumped so I had a supply,” she said.

“Our plan was that [my partner] Ash would feed Audrey at six o’clock at night, and then they got to have a bond together with a bottle,” she said.

Ms Stockdale also had a supply of pumped milk stored in a freezer but both mums lost all of it when the power was lost in town.

“I had planned that I could use that for however long and there was a lot there. All obviously defrosted and couldn’t be used.

“It was quite devastating really,” Ms Stockdale said.

Supporting mums

A study conducted by Monash Rural Health found natural disasters exacerbated stressors on perinatal rural women and could impede their access to support.

“We actually can’t pause the perinatal period. We can’t pause a pregnancy or a birth when disasters happen,” lead researcher Rochelle Hine said.

“We have to make sure that we’re thinking about the needs of women when they are at a particularly vulnerable time, and how we can support them, regardless of whether there’s a disaster or not,” Dr Hine said.

The study, published in March 2023, looked at eight maternal and child health nurses across the Upper Murray and Gippsland regions, including Louise Middleton, who worked directly with mothers during the bushfires.

Data was collected from their direct experience and perception of the mothers who had been accessing their services between 2019 and 2021. 

Ms Middleton said a significant decline in milk supply was evident with all the mothers she supported in the Upper Murray area at the time of the Black Summer emergency.

“We also found that during times of emergencies, mums reduce the time that a baby is brought to the breast [because] they’re busy with trying to deal with an emergency,” she said.

“With the production of breastmilk, it’s supply and demand. So if you’re not having milk removed from those breasts in regular [intervals] and it’s not an adequate amount being removed, it just won’t be replaced by the breasts.”

Ms Middleton said mothers also experienced a lack of nutrition given how busy they were, which added to their lactation stress.

“These mums had fully established breastfeeding and were extremely competent … it was fascinating,” she said.

Thrust into a disaster when vulnerable

Dr Hine said the environment some of these mothers were placed in at evacuation centres played a role in the decline of their breastmilk supply.

“It’s difficult enough in the comfort of your own home to be navigating the early days of parenthood,” she said.

“You don’t always know what’s normal and what’s not so it can be incredibly stressful and even traumatic to be thrust into a disaster with the rest of the community when you’re in that vulnerable state.

“Immediately after birth, there can be a lot of pain and women can be bleeding for six weeks after the birth.

“Being in a really busy and noisy environment with the whole population is going to be an extremely stressful experience for mothers and then that’s transmitted to the baby.”

Providing a safe place for mothers

The study found mothers felt a sense of isolation and that increased emotional support was needed during natural disasters.

Dr Hine said the data highlighted an urgent need for targeted investment in rural perinatal services to enable proactive planning and implementation of disaster strategies to reduce the impacts on women and their families.

“Every natural disaster is going to be unique, and we’ll need a unique response but if we have proactive planning, then we can have some tools in the toolkit to be able to respond in a really timely way to these disasters when they do occur,” she said.

Ms Middleton said maternal and child health centres, like hers, should remain open in emergencies to provide a safe and comfortable place for mothers to shelter in.

“We can nurture them during evacuations, rather than placing them with the community and placing them at risk.”

Both mums agreed more support was needed, even after the recovery process starts.

“It’s coming back in and having that weekly mothers group that’s so important, not just for your babies to be interacting, but for the mums to just offload,” Ms Hogg said.