At Simpson, west of the Otway Ranges, Deborah Smith is the coordinator of the Simpson District Community Centre and says the failure of the phone towers following a power blackout after a series of fires started was a nightmare.

Because there were so many other incidents across the state, the digital radios that the CFA had, they were...

There was a jam on that or something, so there was no messages going in and out on that.

The Telstra Tower dropped out, so nobody could communicate with their mobile phones either.

So we had no access to the Vic Emergency app.

It was just pandemonium, really.

It was people down Chapel Vale.

Give us the non-bio version.

Yeah.

Let's see.

I am a creative thinking human who did not love nine to five, like corporate, the avenue of like, you're going to work in this office space the rest of your life.

And so I moved to New York City when I was, you know, rushed out of college with like $150 and was like, I'm going to be an artist and live in the city.

And quickly, I had a background in marketing.

I'd studied marketing, but I really came to New York City in my young life to kind of embrace like just uncapped potential creative experience and have sort of lived a dual life in New York of working in the arts and theater and music and dance and all those things.

And you know what I mean? Yeah, image and whatnot.

She's a political scientist at Victoria University, and she researches violent extremism.

It's not a, a magic sort of, you know, de-radicalization program or anything like that.

It, it's essentially, uh, wraparound services based on what the particular needs of the person, uh, in the program is.

So we imagine that these young people coming back are probably gonna have seen some pretty terrible things, had quite, uh, you know, probably experiences of trauma-

Mm

... lacking education.

Uh, uh, so all these things will be, uh, assessed, and then the services wrapped around to try and make that transition back, uh, gently back into Australian society.