In the path of the megafires
Firefighters near the Crags, Will Hall on left
Green Wattle Creek Fire started with a lightning strike in November 2019. It began deep in the New South Wales Blue Mountains wilderness, 60 miles through the bush from Mittagong. This is where my family have had a share in a rural MO (multiple occupancy property), the Crags, since the mid 1970s. I partly grew up in this valley in Gundungurra Country, surrounded by cliffs with one small rough road in. There’s a river, two creeks, some paddocks, dams and bush, about 600 acres in all. My sister Lucy lives there now with her daughter, and my brother, a volunteer bushfire fighter pictured above left, lives with his family on the property next door.
In December what was then a faraway bushfire jumped a water catchment reservoir in the Blue Mountains. The development led to a public gathering at our local bushfire fighters' headquarters. There was a wartime atmosphere, maps and charts on display. At some point, no one knew when, the fire would inevitably arrive. No let-up in the heat was forecast, the drought had been record-breaking. It does turn out in retrospect that it might in fact have been put out at an early stage. This would have required intensive effort and also a change of attitude from those in charge. At the time of this fire, wildlife and virgin forests were at the bottom of a hierarchy that prioritises people and buildings.
In the dry heatwave the fire kept spreading towards Mittagong. The Crags lay between it and the town. The days were 38 to 43 degrees. My sister describes how smoke arrived first, along with ash and burnt leaves tumbling out of the sky – the black leaves came from a long way away, maybe 30 or 40 miles on the wind. Ash was flying everywhere. The sky darkened and smoke so filled the air that you feared for your breathing. Normally in a heatwave you close the house during the day and open it to let in the slightly cooler air at night. This was now impossible because of the smoke so people shut themselves inside in the heat, night and day.
My sister began selecting items to be saved from our bush home and stored at her other place in town. She suddenly had to face what it would mean to lose everything a family collects over generations. She shuttled five carloads of things from the Crags to Meranie Street on the edge of Mittagong. Every day they checked the forecast including the ember maps. A major fire could instantly spark up anywhere within these areas. The Crags was always in the ember zone but then Meranie Street joined it. Lucy took carloads from there to a garage close to the centre of Mittagong but within a week that was unsafe too, so she moved the stuff to a friend’s place twelve miles south in Moss Vale - many trips, each time leaving more things behind. Then a new fire flared up from the south, wiping out parts of the town of Bundanoon and threatening Moss Vale. At this point she gave up. Nowhere was safe.
My sister and her partner Richard spent New Year’s Eve in Mittagong. The house was full of friends who were refugees from the fires. They tried to enjoy themselves along with their children and all their dogs. Chickens in cages were inside the house. That night Richard’s phone beeped repeatedly as his ex-wife texted from 200 miles away on the South Coast to say she and his children were all evacuating that night. From no fire there at all, a massive one had flared up and was moving at a rate no one had seen before. The family fled to the town showground and slept on the ground along with 5000 other people. They had no tents or mattresses. Almost everyone had dogs and some had brought their horses.
Richard drove to the South Coast at 6am on New Year’s Day, a solitary southbound car against all the other traffic queuing up the highway to get away, lights on in the dense smoke. Before that in the night, he had seen from an online map that this new fire was advancing on Cobargo, a village of nineteenth and early twentieth century wooden houses and shops where his friend lives. Rowan answered his phone: ‘Oh mate, the fire’s 100 metres away, gotta go’. Lucy and Richard knew Rowan was fighting the fire while they tried to sleep. He went out in the paddock with a barrel of petrol, spreading it around, lighting it and creating an instant firebreak. The fire took out half of Cobargo but his house was saved.
So, miraculously, eventually, was the Crags. Tongues of fire reached into the valley but the wind changed and the heat suddenly eased, giving the firefighters with their planes loaded with pink fire retardant spray and water bombs the backup they needed. Our valley with its river and dams was the frontline between the fire and Mittagong. Our bush had been roughly bulldozed to create firebreaks that no one expected to work but we ended up with a last-hour reprieve thanks to the weather. No reprieve though for the estimated billion wild animals that perished. Hundreds of thousands of hectares were burned, some at an intensity that even fire-adapted plants cannot recover from.
My brother Will spent weeks on duty as a trained volunteer fighting the fire in dense bush, regularly throughout the night as the emergency worsened. He suffered utter exhaustion and trauma. I couldn't speak to him for this article because the experience, in particular the never-to-be-forgotten sound of koalas screaming in the burning trees, is just too painful for him to revisit.
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When the fossil fuel friendly government of Scott Morrison lost power this year, the bushfires of 2019/20 played a key part. The Teal Independents, economically right-of-centre but environmentally engaged women candidates, won in previously safe conservative constituencies. Shortly after coming to power the new Labor government passed the Climate Change Bill committing the country to net zero by 2050.
Another small silver lining is that our valley is now part of a government scheme to provide sanctuary for koalas. Along with many other unique and vulnerable animals these shy creatures are critically endangered. Through the new Biodiversity Conservation Trust, landowners can apply to be paid to follow strict rules to protect koalas from habitat loss and feral predators. I haven't seen one of them yet on my visit but I keep looking up into the gumtrees.