When I arrived at the cottage it was late, and it seemed to have been a longer time away from it than I had planned. But here it was, nestled among the trees in the dark just as I had left it: my beloved retreat.
Watching bushfires since they began in August, I’d mapped their growth first on the north coast, then the mountains, and then as the growing stain on the map that was the Currowan fire. Over the next month, it defied my belief as I watched it spread all the way to the coast, miraculously stopping outside the tiny hamlets of Bawley Point and Kioloa and homes of friends. It looked like an MRI scan of a tumour.
In December, this Currowan firebeast appeared to have stopped to catch its breath. Compulsively checking the map many times a day, it didn’t cross the alert radius on Fires Near Me. I kept refreshing the BOM radar, the Fires Near Me radar, my weather app, the wind map and Live Traffic. The highway closed, then opened. Then closed again.
I’d planned to have New Year’s Eve with all the family together in the cottage for the first time. This idea kept me going through the end of christmas season, the end of year work deadlines, and other responsibilities which depleted my energy stores. The now-normal heatwave humidity made it impossible to work in my studio, made me crave the cooler air and water down south. One particular afternoon at the studio it rained suddenly, and black soot poured from an olive-green sky that smelled of bitumen. I dreamed of the cold south coast water, the peace, the birds. The first time we would all get together in the cottage. I obsessively planned our activities, though it became clear that a bushwalk would not be one of them.
I spent the first days after Christmas at the cottage attending to chores: the gas tanks needed replacing, the property tidied of sticks. I bought a coffee machine and a little barbecue, filled the fridge with holiday food: champagne, wine, treats and even ice cream. I remembered to make ice cubes, turning those little ice cube trays and filling them back up. I filled the bird bath. And I tried to do my bit for the wildlife devastated by the Currowan fire.
Following advice, I had taken supplies of water, grass, leaves and fruit into the forest, but nothing prepared me for what I encountered in the harsh light of day. From the highway, all I could see was endless black charred trunks of huge old eucalypts, blackened tree ferns, and the charred and stinking remains of animals that couldn’t escape the fireball. Even weeks after the event, the smell was horrendous. Indescribable. Two wallabies lay black and still within sight of a small creek, buzzing with flies.
I ventured up the trail into the Boyne State Forest, aware of the risks, keeping my phone on, watching out for weather changes. Not far in, I pulled over, seeing movement. The bushland was so thin you could see any movement across valleys. A wallaby which had been foraging unsuccessfully near the trail fled when I approached and watched me from across a gully. Another stood motionless between the blackened trunks.
I filled my water containers, placing them where the wallaby had been standing. They weren’t very big, but I figured porcelain salad bowls wouldn’t melt, and not much fits into a small VW golf. I had large metal containers in which to stand grasses and fresh eucalypt branches, and I looped green apples high off the ground for flying foxes. I made an apple christmas tree for the wallabies, and felt foolish when a 4WD rolled past, a lone middle-aged woman making a Christmas tree in the charred bushland, conscious of my rubber soled runners, and my flimsy requisite cotton clothing. It was the RFS, asking me if I had called Triple Zero, and I answered no. They continued on, further into the forest, looking for a blaze in the as yet section of the area.
Everything was gone the next day when I went back to top it all up. A few ants in the empty water dishes, the greenery gone. The apples gone. I filled the bowls, replenished the leaves and grass, and redecorated the apple-christmas tree.
I left my car in the middle of the dirt road with the doors wide open, and I was just finishing replenishing the tree and the water when I saw a van approaching. I hurried to finish, closed the doors, jumped in, and began down the hill. Drawing level with me, the driver wound his window down.
As is usual, I was nervous and on constant alert. The shimano-cap brigade inhabit these parts, and I expected a dressing down on being alone in the burnt forest. But it was an old man, missing many teeth, who asked me if I was feeding wildlife. I answered, yes, waiting for the sneer or the criticism.
Great. he replied, smiling. I’ve been feeding the wombats under the bridge. There are at least two that survived. I’m just out looking for more.
He gestured to the sacks of feed in the back seat, and I exhaled, glad to feel I was not the only one patrolling for creatures and felt far less alone after that.
The next day my daughter and her partner arrived in their very practical and enormous ute. Adam’s car, fitted out for his recent exploration of Cape York, had a small fridge full of NYE food, a CB radio and camp equipment. Isabella brought in bags of shopping and after admiring the spotless cottage, the trees and the peaceful beach, we had drinks on the deck and played card games. Before bed I checked all the apps: an announcement of a possible highway closure, prompted me to call my husband, my son and his partner, and tell them they wouldn’t be able to get through. Disappointed, I told them to check again in the morning. Meanwhile, the three of us played and drank, and went to bed. I turned off my alarm so as not to wake them.
I opened my eyes on New Year’s Eve to find it still dark, and eerily quiet. A sudden noise of cars, which I thought odd since there are only four streets in the village. I got up and wandered outside in the dark, saw a neighbour putting out her bins, her car headlights turned on. I walked up the road to the headland, which was deserted for the first time I had been there. I tried to see further around me, past the trees. It was dark and silent, the growing light a weird brown. When I walked back down the hill, people were coming out of one of the houses with luggage. I assumed they were packing up for NYE! But asked them if they were evacuating, oh yes, they said. But where to? I asked.
Back to Canberra, they told me. I hurried back to the house. Checked my phone and found a warning text for the RFS. It read
MOGO fire alert. Evacuate by 8am and move toward the coast if you are in a bushfire prone area.
At this stage I still couldn’t process the fact that it was almost 7am and pitch dark. Was I supposed to evacuate to the coast? But I was on the coast already. Was in a bushfire prone area? I supposed anything could be bushfire prone. I woke the kids and they sprang into action. I decided, unbelievably, to have a cold shower and wake myself up. I couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything. Isabella zipped up my bag, gave it to Adam, who put it in my car. I stood wondering what to take in a fire and chose my watercolours. Adam was in the car, lights on, engine on, waiting for me. Inconceivably, I decided not to lock the doors in case the firemen needed to come in, and I didn’t want the doors broken down. I got in the car and drove.
Five minutes later, along with a stream of cars, we got to Malua Bay. Hundreds of people had chosen to stop there, and I pulled over. Everywhere were people, pets, horses, cars. Adam urged me to keep going, so we headed to the marina at Bateman's Bay, pulled over, and tried to make sense of what was happening. The fires app didn’t seem to indicate anything different, but when we got out of the car and looked south, I felt I was witnessing the end of the world. A blast of molten air burnt my skin, my eyes. All the oxygen seemed to disappear as the sky went black. Suddenly something from hell had appeared and was looming over us. Adam and Isabella urged me to keep going, all the way to Sydney. But I just couldn’t. I thought that was a dramatic idea and told them I would follow them in 20 minutes when I got a better idea as to what would happen. I just couldn’t believe I was going to flee all the way back to Sydney. Cleverly, Isabella phoned me and said they wanted me to come and have coffee with them, so I got back into the car and drove after them.
I drove past queues kilometres long for fuel. In my rear-view mirror, the blackness grew bigger. Ahead of me stretched the miles of cars fleeing home.
Arriving in Milton, I received another call from Isabella, saying that the road had closed again. She sounded panicked. They had tried to get to Lake Conjola but traffic chaos saw cars driving in all directions at once and a police officer throwing his arms in the air. They had aimed to get to the lake for safety but didn’t get through, returned to the highway came back south. I was stopped in Milton getting coffee and looking out for Adams car when the power went down. I sat next to an elderly couple on the phone to their daughter who was trying to put out the newly ignited fire burning their fence. Ordered an iced coffee because the power was off, I sat there with a huge pile of ice cream-laden coffee. They texted from Ulladulla pub, so I too turned and headed back south to find them.
Looking north, I could see a new front of billowing purplish-brown smoke. The sky went dark. I found Isabella and Adam at a table in the pub, looking north over the harbour with a full view of the new fire and the stream of people loading their cars with crates of beer from the bottle shop below. They blocked the street with their vans while they loaded. At the table next to us some guys who had come into Ulladulla to collect their NYE feast found themselves completely cut off from their wives and children at Lake Conjola. I watched the huge queue beneath the window lining up for bottle shop which was running its noisy generator. With no power, you could only use cash. With no power, you can’t use an ATM. I went down and joined the line, took my turn through the pitch black guided by my phone torch, easily finding two champagnes and not so easily two red wines in the darkness, and paying with my card just before the generator stopped. As Adam had brought his Christmas cash, he was able to buy drinks. He shouted a lot of the guys in the pub whose family hadn’t given them money in their Christmas cards. One of them returned later with a wad of cash from who knows where and returned Adams shout.
All the shops closed. All the fridges went off. The lights. The internet. The phones. There was no ice for eskies.
The stranded dads at the next table, who’d been facetiming their kids and telling them to jump in a boat in the lake, no longer had any communication. I’d been listening to the conversation they’d had speakerphone. Trying not to sound panicked, they started to sound hysterical. Their children were quite young, their little faces filled the phone screen, squealing.
Before my own phone went down, I got a message saying someone I knew was in nearby Mollymook, and was given an address. Things had started to look like a scene out of Bosch’s Last Judgement . People were everywhere, roads were gridlocked. The sky was dark and clouds of smoke mushroomed into the air. Without aircon, the awful heat seeped in.Ppeople and babies parked along the beach, stranded. I hadn’t packed any food, and just a bottle of water and my treasure from the bottle shop, we arrived to seek refuge with one of my husband’s work colleagues and his daughter. His wife, having left a little before him, had made it out before the road closed, and he was stranded while she attended a New Year’s Eve party in a penthouse on Cremorne point. The Stardust Circus, having evacuated, plonked two fully grown lions on the grass verge secured only by a bit of cyclone wire, and handed their generator over to the civic centre for the evacuees. We discussed lifting the side of the wire and letting them out, figuring that at least they would have plenty to eat, what with all the pets roaming about, but realised that the lions might prefer small children to dogs so concluded that lions roaming through the apocalypse, while aesthetically apt, may not really be a sensible choice.
Thankfully, we found candles. I couldn’t process having left the cottage at 730am and was now in a brand new mansion belonging to someone I didn’t even know, was filthy, sweaty and smoky, had no food supplies and was inexplicably worried about dirtying the furnishings of this very fancy house should we suddenly have to jump in our cars and get back onto the highway when it opened. We checked the traffic news by sitting in our cars periodically, and running the motor to hear the ABC emergency announcements.
Geoff and Georgia drifted around in silent shock. Adam cranked up the gas barbecue and cooked the food from his truck fridge. I opened the wine and we drank it all: Surely the road couldn’t be closed forever?
The sewage works failed and swimming was forbidden. Except tfor he lights powered by the generator down at the civic centre it was dark and eerie and quiet. I had a cold shower and fell asleep on the couch.
I didnt even register it was new year’s day next morning. The spectacular view was shrouded in thick smoke, we had no coffee, we were running out of food. I decided to try Bannisters pavilion as they were reported to have a generator. Small cafes and shops opened their doors and placed tables full of muffins and other café foods on tables outside. With no power, all the food was spoiling in the heat. Luckily, we managed to order coffee in Bannisters before they closed , but it was a one hour wait to collect it.
I was unable to find out anything about Guerrilla Bay: the fire app didn’t show anything probably because internet was down, or it had crashed. I had little power left on my phone, and with no news of power being restored I became increasingly anxious about the cottage. Although it seemed so unlikely, there was no guarantee. A stray text got through. News that houses burnt in Rosedale, right nearby.
I decided that I would have to go back and at least lock the door, perhaps grab some food. Nothing could open, literally. Automatic doors jammed with no power. No light. No fridge. Isabella put an alarm alert on her phone so she would come and find me if she didn’t hear within four hours.
I began the 45 km drive back, promising to text everyone and packing my car in case the road opened while I was gone, and they had to leave. As I drove closer to Batemans Bay it grew increasingly smoky and felt disturbing to be the only vehicle heading south. Approaching the bridge, I was diverted onto a side route because of the traffic backlog which I later learned was a petrol cue. On the radio they were urging everyone to leave, but with the circuitous routes and road closures, there wasn’t a way to get out, some people facing a 10-hour drive. Petrol stations were closing as they ran out of petrol. Pumps broke down. Without power they couldn’t operate.
I finally made it onto George Bass Drive, which was open according to the traffic map, but closed according to the radio. As I drove closer, I was shocked to see that Malua Bay had burnt so extensively. The whole hillside was cordoned off with police tape. The ground was black, and curls of grey smoke rose from it.
Mackenzie’s beach, which the day before was packed with swimmers and surfers, was black. A power line lay across the road. The houses on the main road at Rosedale were reduced to ash. Flames still licked at the bottom of a tree.
I turned into my street, terrified, but there was the cottage. Covered in ash, dirt and filth, but intact.
I tried to disconnect the gas tank, not knowing what I would do with it anyway, but my hands were shaky and weak, and I couldn’t do it.
There was a tiny bit of water left in the bird bath, and even though it was black and filled with ash, a dozen birds clamoured for a drink. Two currawongs and a kookaburra perched on my balcony.
Inside, I filled a bag from the pantry, and emptied the fridge as best I could. I was overwhelmed with sadness to have to throw away the NYE food uneaten. I had so looked forward to our days together, and they hadn’t happened. Still, the house was still there despite the fire front 800m away.
The kookaburra stared at me through the window, so I gave him a sausage, wondering how or why he expected a treat from what had been a vegetarian household! He killed his sausage and flew off with it, while I closed the windows, the shutters and the blinds. I smoothed my bed and closed the doors. Refilled the bird bath. Cleared all the outdoor furniture away and locked up. I felt desperately, completely saddened and overwhelmed.
It took two hours to return to Mollymook after two major gridlocks and slow traffic, and i had exceeded my four hour limit. Driving past the Boyne Forest turnoff, I saw that all the remaining wildlife had fled the firestorm and was now killed on the road. The kangaroos, the wallabies, snakes and goannas, all dead. Birds had cooked in the sky and fallen to the ground; their wings burnt off. Animals lay charred and stiff, or crushed and unrecognisable. The beautiful patterning of a goanna skin, the flash of a lorikeet’s feathers ground into a horrifying mush, a holocaust, death in all directions. My crying turned to screaming in my empty car.
After the four-hour round trip, back in Mollymook, the power returned, but It was reported that the highway was too damaged to open. Georgia quietly cooked some food and poured drinks, and we were able to see on the news reports that a person had died in their car on the Lake Conjola Road, right where Adam and Isabella had stopped. We saw reports of how the fire had gotten bigger and bigger. Mogo had disappeared but the animals saved. I wondered how the lions were getting on in Mollymook, and whether anyone had let them loose.
I was able to charge my phone after two days and was able to get a little intermittent internet. It seemed amazing to have power again. That night I turned off my phone alarm, tired of being on constant anxious alert.
On the second day of 2020 I woke to news that the road had opened at 6am, so it was another mad scramble to pack up, clean, and depart. Thanking Geoff and Georgia inadequately, we took off lest the highway close again. The usually green hills and fields of Milton were a charred black mess. the emergency radio issuing warnings of another bad, if not worse, day to come. I drove and drove, past endless burnt bushland, trying not to look either side of the road. Cows trying to get onto the road, away from the heat, eyes rolling and mooing in terror. A lone pig wandered in a dry creek bed. If this was not the apocalypse, the end of days, then perhaps I was already in the afterlife. As I drove round the bends, the radio played Love Will Keep Us Together. A jarring disconnect which drove me into a precarious non-time, of past becoming present…. singing along, totally unhinged, somewhere between trying to recover the feeling of holidaying with my parents in 1975, sitting behind my dad as he steered us up the North coast to holiday bliss, and escaping the horror, my voice breaks and I scream the words. And cry. Again and again.
Young and beautiful But someday your looks will be gone when the others turn you off Who'll be turning you on?I will, I will, I will
I will be there to share forever
I WILL
I WILL
I WILL
It’s not just a lost landscape, it’s a whole lost world. The past is a different country, and it just turned to ash.
More traffic chaos, a seven-hour drive, more fires breaking out, the highway closing behind me.
We all make it through. Adam chances a rat run through Nowra and gains 40 minutes on me before the radio announcers plead with drivers to stick to the highway. The smoke thins a little. The emergency broadcast provides a continuous narrative of events playing out behind me: fires creeping into Nowra, Kangaroo Valley, deaths in Cobargo. Finally, I arrive in Sutherland shire, hands clamped to the wheel, my face stiff from concentration. I stop for fuel, because there is no queue.
My legs are so shaky that I can hardly stand. I haven’t washed my hair for a week, I stink of smoke and I am still wearing the sack-like dress I have had on for days. My car, encrusted with ash and mud, looks like a military vehicle so I wash the windscreen. The car waiting behind me is clean and shiny.
People seem to be going about their business, normal. Smiling even. I feel like I have walked out of a war zone through the portal in the back of a wardrobe.
The agony of not knowing whether the cottage was surviving the next wave of firestorms was intense. I sat online for the next 48 hours, moving from one website to the next, refreshing, checking, reading. On the day of the next fire, I watched the BoM map and saw a small patch of still air over Burrewarra headland, where the westerlies met the easterlies. The onshore winds, miraculously, beating off the fire. I saw on Tv the hundreds of people displaced. I saw the street not 500m away reduced to ash. Over the shoulder of the ABC news reporter, I could see directly where the cottage lay shrouded in trees. A direct line of sight, though the building was not visible. I was completely shocked to see the scale and proximity of such destruction.
Amongst all of this, the nauseating climate change denialism and misinformation filtering into the media, the news reports, the papers. The bone-dry landscape, the lightning strikes and the roaring winds resulting from climate change effects, made this not a bushfire, but an incendiary explosion, the scale and force of which is not able to be controlled. The amount of loss is unfathomable, the lack of services, information and support astonishing. The deep dryness of the bushland and the earth, the curled and crackling bracken, the empty dams and creeks. The prospect of rain very unlikely.
All the ensuing hero worshipping shouldn’t have to happen, it’s the people who have shouldered this, by suffering and giving. The firefighters are largely volunteers, working week after week on long shifts, witnessing horrors beyond imagining. The Prime Minister, astonishingly, remained in Hawaii. The Murdoch press invents a campaign of misinformation that the greens have caused the oversupply of fuel that caused the fires. A member of the public raises 46 million dollars. The government takes longer to respond.
As someone who has known that this would come, my anger is boundless and fierce. It rises in me like poison. It has sat simmering furiously since Tony Abbott shut down the Carbon tax, unwilling to be beaten by a girl. Unwilling to accept what could have perhaps, at the very least, seen public preparation for what was predicted to happen. Perhaps a boat at Ulladulla? A fireproof tank? Emergency communications?
As I write this, nine days after my evacuation on new year’s eve, the power is till off in G Bay. I have promised to return and help the small community, but am hesitant to get trapped again. It’s been so long since I saw blue sky that I feel I’m in a different country. I AM in a different country; I am a changed person. We have lost everything. And that people now accept the narrative of aussie mateship and resilience, telling me to be positive, makes me murderous. People telling me not to make this political. How is it not political? Human greed ignorance has created this colossal disaster. Our country is dry, bled to death by industry, fooled by a false narrative that divides us into opposing forces. Heroes versus greenies, politics versus nature. I accept that not everybody has the time or inclination to read the science and the data on climate change and global warming, but it is unacceptable for the Murdoch press to target these people with child size bites of misinformation. Ash fills the sky, the beaches and the sea. Fish suck black leaves into their gills. Tiny charred honeyeaters fall dead into the waves with a hiss so brief as to be almost inaudible.
We have known this was coming for 12 years, Some of us have known it was coming for much, much, longer. My children never got to see the barrier reef in all its glory, now they will never know the lush green rain-belt that was Eurobodalla, filled with kangaroos and birds, bull-ants and cicadas, tree ferns and spotted gums.
Don’t tell me to be polite.
Don’t tell me to be nice. I’m Done.
I’m taking these bastards down, whatever it takes.
“We have known this was coming for 12 years, Some of us have known it was coming for much, much, longer. My children never got to see the barrier reef in all its glory, now they will never know the lush green rain-belt that was Eurobodalla, filled with kangaroos and birds, bull-ants and cicadas.”