After the Inferno...
There are places you don’t want to be during a bushfire. Places with no escape route. Places surrounded by snap-dry forest. Places with limited fire fighting resources and water scarcity issues. Hot places. Dry places. In the summer of 2020, regional Australia was that place, a fire waiting to happen.
The NSW south coast was especially vulnerable with its necklace of isolated towns dotted deep in the bush off the Princes Highway. Add a killer drought, the hottest year on record, scorching heatwaves and thousands of holiday makers spreading themselves far and wide with their Jaycos, their domed tents, and their neatly inscribed letters to Santa, and you’ve got bedlam primed and ready to blow.
Knowing all this, my family still made our annual pilgrimage to Merimbula, taking the Canberra route because the coast road was on fire, but not overly concerned about it. Bushfires are a part of the Aussie summer, and like cicadas, you learn to tune them out. Still, it was obvious this wasn’t a typical season. The bush had been flaming since July, surging down the coast from Queensland, leaving a black trail of chaos and destruction in its path. In November, my hometown of Forster was licked by a major blaze, which sent spot fires arcing into suburbia. Like so many others, we prepped our home, packed our bags and monitored the apps. By December, experts were already calling the fires unprecedented, and the news was an endless reel of flames and misery.
Down the coast, we tried to ignore the constant smoke, blood moons, Armageddon sunsets and black leaves falling from the sky. The fires multiplied and crept closer. At one stage there were hundreds burning up and down the coast and into Victoria. Then Kangaroo Island went up like a bomb. “Australia is on Fire,” screamed headlines all over the world. Not far from us, Cobargo was incinerated, and a father and son lost their lives. Just over the border, Mallacoota became a disaster zone, with a huge fire monstering the town and trapping hundreds of locals and tourists on the beach. And that’s how summer went. The death toll continued to rise; big fires became mega fires. We kept texting and receiving the same message: stay safe. There was talk of fire tornadoes and fires generating their
