After the Fire 3 - A tiny miracle

In the midst of the chaos, the bickering, the anger, the grief – a tiny flicker of light.

A couple of days after the New Year fire in Mallacoota, birds of all kinds began to wash up on the beaches. Here’s a link to one of the news stories about it. Not for the faint-hearted.

I’m so glad I wasn’t here to see that.

Last Saturday morning I went for my first beach walk with my friend Jenny. We walked  through the charred remains of bushland that surrounded Betka Beach…

…through evidence of heat so intense that it split and sliced rocks…

                     ...so intense that it shattered the men’s toilet and melted the paper holder.

And down on the beach we discovered a tiny miracle. Two tiny miracles, in fact, running gaily about on the beach with their devoted parents. Look closely!

(Photo by Leonie Daws. Used with permission)

Why is this so miraculous? Because the Hooded plover (Thinornis rubricollis) struggles each year to survive. Its declining numbers reflect its annual struggle to overcome overwhelming odds. It’s endangered. It’s a beach-nesting bird and its breeding season coincides with the height of our tourist season.  Vulnerable chicks are routinely trampled – often by dogs – or taken by predators. They lose their eggs in king tides and storms. They lay clutch after clutch after clutch, often futilely. Their pluck and perseverance are magnificent.

This year the horrifying fires cut short the tourist season. The beaches are almost deserted. Perhaps many of the Hoodies’ regular predators perished in the fires. But somehow during the fire – as the bush around them burned to ash, as the rocks split, as birds in their thousands perished from smoke or heat or exhaustion from their escape attempts – our little Hoodie parents sat steadfastly on the eggs that produced these chicks. Hunkered down in the sand, they must have been low enough to avoid the worst of the choking smoke, sheltered by the natural undulations of the sand.

My point here is that the Hooded plover is possibly one of Mallacoota’s most vulnerable creatures – and yet it survived this.

To me, it’s a symbol of great optimism against almost insurmountable odds. That’s something we all need at this awful time, as the hard slog of recovery begins.

After the Fire 2 - Ordinary Heroes

When catastrophe strikes, people’s reactions can surprise. We see the very best (and sometimes the worst) in people. I think everyone in Mallacoota will have stories about ordinary heroes. Here are mine:

My next door neighbours. One, who thought of my chooks’ safety before evacuating, lost her home. My neighbour on the other side fought alone to save our homes. Amazing courage and determination. I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of appropriate thank you gifts, but honestly, what material gift can ever truly be an adequate reflection of the gratitude I feel for the heroism of these lovely people?

I finished my last post with mention of my two cats. Basil and Pollywobble spent Christmas in the Genoa Boarding Kennels. I was due to collect them on the morning of 31 December on my way home. From my place of refuge outside Michelago I mourned their almost certain demise. About 36 hours later I got a phone call from Jacquie, one of the owners of the kennels.

“Do you want to talk to your pussycats? They’re not very happy with me after I shut them in a box within in a box while all the colours of hell rained down around us.”

I’ve cried a lot of tears over this terrible time. They flowed pretty freely just then, and still do every time I think about it. The Age published a story about a week later – here’s a link to it. 

I can’t imagine the courage it took for Ron and Jacquie to shut themselves, their own pets and their furry “guests” inside a modified shipping container as that monster fire approached. The heat, the smoke, the darkness and the freight-train roar…  The thought of it gives my claustrophobic self conniptions, even writing this – there’s that knot of anxiety again.

Mail Van David is another “ordinary” hero. Basil got his prescription cat-food because David retrieved it from the Post Office in Mallacoota and drove through a devastated landscape to deliver it to that bushland setting while I fretted in Yass.

The extraordinary kindness of one of our local police officers used a medication delivery run to the kennels to reunite me with Basil and Pollywobble a few days after my return. The road between Mallacoota and Genoa was still closed, as was the Highway (and the bush access road to the kennels, undoubtedly). I’m sorry carsick Basil pooped in your car as you drove him home. I wish I could say that Basil is sorry too, but he’s a cat and a curmudgeon and was possibly delighted with himself. Thank you thank you thank you (cue more tears).

Heroes are the ordinary people who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times, and I am so very grateful to have so many of those wonderful people in my life.

After the Fire

I’m calling this series of posts  After the Fire, although that’s not strictly true. The fires are still burning, and will continue to devour vast swathes of this country, probably for some months yet. For me, it’s a month since fire consumed much of my home town and I’m trying hard to untangle the maelstrom of disordered thoughts drumming inside my head, to make sense of the awfulness. Is such a reflection therapeutic? That remains to be seen. I just know that it’s something I need to do -  to set down some sort of record of my own experience of this life-changing event. Anyway, here goes...

After the Fire - Part 1

This time exactly a month ago I was on a plane home from Perth. I’d spent Christmas with my grown-up kids. As I boarded the flight in Perth, Mallacoota was foremost in my mind. Huge bushfires had been consuming the east coast of Australia for many weeks. A warning for all tourists to leave East Gippsland had been published the previous day. A notification came through, as I caught a ferry across the Swan River, that a fast-moving fire had begun at Wingan, and that the Princes Highway was closed. Too late to leave Mallacoota, it had said. The next day I began my journey “home”- to Mallacoota.

I changed flights in Melbourne under an apocalyptic sky. While I waited to board, the VicEmergency app on my phone beeped. The Wingan fire was expected to impact Mallacoota between 5-6pm. The Genoa-Mallacoota Road had been closed. Mallacoota, at the far end of that road, had been cut off. I sat alone at the airport, sweltering in failed air-con, crying helplessly.

My wonderful friend Jane collected me from Canberra airport with news I already knew: “You can’t go home tomorrow”.

My house is on the Genoa-Mallacoota Road, a couple of kilometres outside town. My next door neighbour sent me a text before she evacuated – what did I want her to do with my chooks? We decided putting them in the house would be best – a place of last resort. Thank you, neighbour – the fact that you even thought of Sybil and Tibbs while you were preparing to leave your own home still amazes me and makes me teary.

The next morning – New Years Eve – I woke early after a night of broken sleep, knowing that my friends and neighbours had probably slept far less, if at all. How the hell do you get to sleep when you know that a monstrous fire is heading straight for you, devouring everything in its path - and that there’s no escape?

The ABC coverage of events on the TV, up and down the south coast of NSW and across the border into East Gippsland, was terrifying, compelling viewing. The fire still hadn’t impacted Mallacoota, but it was bearing down on my home town as “thousands huddled on the beach”, ringed by firefighters determined to save lives first, and whatever they could save of my small, beautiful, remote town, nestled in the bushland by the sea, next.

The world knows how events unfolded, so I don’t need to repeat them. What I can tell you is how I felt, watching and listening to the voices of friends and neighbours being interviewed, hearing that the morning sky had turned blacker than night, that “the sirens just went off”,  that people were preparing to jump into the water if necessary.

There was a knot of anxiety in my chest. I found it hard to draw in a deep breath. I didn’t want to watch or listen, but I couldn’t not. I should’ve been there. I was glad not to be there. I was watching a bigger picture than those in Mallacoota were watching, but from a distance. All they knew was what was right in front of them and coming for them, what they could see and hear and smell and feel. I felt grateful, but oh so guilty for feeling grateful. My imagination will never be able to grasp the reality of that terror, but I can understand every little bit of the helplessness they felt.

What I had in common with those who were there was a sense that my world had changed forever. Like them, I didn’t know whether my house was still there. I was certain that my poor cats had been incinerated in the boarding kennels at Genoa, a beautiful bushland setting where I’d left them 8 days earlier. I imagined their final terrifying moments over and over, the loop playing in my head refusing to be shut off.

It was devastating.