After the fires

Where I live in the south-east of Australia can certainly testify to the accuracy of Dorothea Mackellar’s words in her poem, “My Country”, where she spoke of this land “of droughts, and flooding rains”.

THE terrible bushfires which started towards the end of 2019 after a period of extreme dryness ravaged a vast area of the country, including my local hunting grounds, and the very wet years that followed have delivered a profound change in the environment and introduced new opportunities and new challenges.

Large areas of this land formerly consisted of open, dry sclerophyll eucalypt woodland, and some of it had a thick understorey of scrub of various species. Some areas were made up of largely unbroken patches of kunzea and melaleuca, and you could only wind your way along the few animal tracks to get through it. The fires changed all of that, dramatically.

At first it was largely scorched earth.