“Hope too is contagious”

There had been smoke in the air for weeks but that Monday it was thicker, more pungent. Night fell and the sun went down “but the skies stayed red,” Cal More remembers. “We could hear something on the roof that sounded like rain. So we went outside to see, and it was black leaves just falling from nowhere. It was eerie.”

One of the reasons Cal and her partner, Deb Taylor, had bought the old convent at Cobargo was because they thought they’d be safe from bushfires. On the far side of Wadbilliga River, just beyond the western edge of town, it’s nestled between the Catholic church and the old school house, surrounded by gently rolling pasture, well clear of the dense bushland in the hills. Cal and Deb had both been through fires before – Cal as a child in the Blue Mountains and Deb in the rugged country west of Sydney near Warragamba Dam. Neither of them wanted to face a wall of flames again.

Of course there were other reasons they chose Cobargo. Cal, who is 59, had been working as a Uniting Church chaplain. “I was an LGBTQI support chaplain during the marriage equality debate,” she explains, “which was a bit