How a Continent Burns
No one expects to be on holiday during the apocalypse.
At first, you don’t really notice the thin layer of haze that isn’t normally there, until the locals point it out. Hazardous air; it makes the typically blue sky look like a dirty windshield.
You watch the news, unable to believe what’s happening 1,500 km away. The end of the world is a 15 hour drive. Fires inch closer, but never quite make it to the town you’re in, protected by subtropical humidity. So you go to the beach and try to enjoy the roasting sunshine and the roar of the ocean. An ocean now littered with the charred remains of burnt trees, blown in by the wind.
It’s eerie out here, in the deep sigh after catastrophe.
It’s mid-January 2020 and I find myself visiting my partner’s family in southern Queensland. My own family had warned me against going. At the time of writing, 33 people have been killed and an estimated 17 million hectares of land have been burnt by the most catastrophic bushfires to hit Australia in living memory.
It’s on the Golden Globes. It’s all over Twitter. Even Kim Kardashian is posting about climate change. There are terrifying public service announcements on the local TV stations during every ad-break; “How fireproof is your plan?”
You wake up every day expecting to see smoke outside the window, staying resolutely near water or not leaving the comforting sterility of air conditioning inside, as per government advice. On Channel 9, the Gold Coast news shows the heroism of wildlife conservation agencies air-dropping carrots and sweet potatoes to feed surviving possums and echidnas in afflicted areas. As if that’s enough. It’s a disaster too big for the local news.
When we cross the border into NSW (New South Wales), we start seeing signs in the supermarkets apologising for the lack of produce and thanking us for understanding. Heading south along the coast, we notice the skinny cows in the dry hick towns known only for having ‘The Big Banana’. McDonald’s advertises their community charity drive for bushfire relief in bathroom stalls. Similar appeals start showing up in every café window and shopping mall.
It’s hard to write about this year’s bushfire season without falling into superlatives. Temperatures rose to beyond habitable (reaching over 49ºC in South Australia in December), smoke started causing its own lightning, the sky turned red. And Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refuses to talk about climate change.
Australian bush is thick, dense. You can’t see the forest for the foliage. It’s policy to leave fallen branches and leaves on the forest floor to maintain the ecosystem. A NSW park ranger tells me, “these forests are kindling. That’s why Australia is so easy to burn.”
We’re in northern NSW, still over a thousand kilometres away from the most concentrated areas of burning. The forests on either side of the road start looking like autumn. Except Australia isn’t supposed to have an autumn. And it’s January, the height of southern-hemisphere summer. My partner and I are driving south along the Pacific Highway, following patches of green on Google maps in the van we’re calling home.
The tops of the trees are browner than usual. It’s like someone half-painted a forest, but gave up on the trunks and just filled them in black. The scorched trees mix with the unburnt silver-barked eucalyptus to create a patchwork forest.
One of our stops is Angourie, a tiny coastal village in Yuraygir national park, two hours south of Byron Bay. On Back Beach, I spot stones encircling a succulent in some kind of ritual to save it from the overheated earth. And just up the coffee rock cliffs, desolation.
What was once bountiful national park is now charcoal and ashes. It smells like campfires, instead of that sweet, rich smell of forest. The wind clatters through twigs instead of rustling through leaves. The deafening noise of cicadas and crows and kookaburras is replaced by silence.
It’s the remnants of the park signs that get me the most; the well-meaning warnings against approaching the endangered emus, information about the Aboriginal importance of this land, a lonely marker describing the variety of tree that used to be there. A graveyard.
Shark Creek fire burned through north Yuraygir park in October 2019.
The ancient coastal walk is broken. I clamber up impossible slopes and slop through muddy trails in inadequate footwear. Yes, mud. After the unprecedented fires came the unprecedented rain. Twisted hands of charcoal rise out of blankets of green new-growth that has already grown to knee height. Like the first ever plants to ever crawl out of the primordial slime.
Burnt, the forest is like the thinning hair of a middle-aged man. Boardwalks for children to run along and disabled people to enjoy the view, crumble into nothing. It takes swallowing a fly before I realise my mouth has been open in shock.
I emerge with skin blackened by charcoaled trees and the smell of campfires on my clothes.
On the drive back to the highway, we pass through another shattered forest. We don’t speak, mainly because we can’t hear anything over the rattling of the car as it shivers over the ridges and potholes pocketing the dirt road. A discarded pair of shoes lie 300m apart in the dust.
On one side of the road, autumn. On the other, high summer.
When I ask the locals about it, the timbre in their voices changes. They speak as if someone they know had died; with solemnity, a quiet. “We are in mourning,” a member of the Yaegl tribe, says. Despite the recent flooding, they’re worried about how much clean water they have left. The atmosphere is one of anger and fear and smoke.
“The weather reports here are always wrong,” says my partner’s mother, a South African émigré. She’s lived in Queensland for 15 years. A liberal party supporter, who only a year ago was convinced that accelerating global heating was just natural fluctuations in the climate. Now she complains about the authorities having seen the signs, but ignored them.
Australians care deeply about their wildlife. Countless roadsigns remind drivers to look out for fauna, like the dozy koalas crossing the road at dusk. But that doesn’t stop a lot of roadkill. Over AUS$500 million in donations have flooded in for bushfire relief, but victims lament the lack of aid coming their way. Resentment towards the government and yet another royal commission (the 57th formal public inquiry into bushfires since 1939) is seething.
When the rain finally comes, it’s in drops so fat you can see your reflection in them. Hours of white noise and damp clothes and leaking roofs. There’s an audible sigh of relief as the worst of the fires are finally put out.
My partner, a surfer, describes the bushfire crisis as, “our Chernobyl. They’ll have to do something now,” although he’s not sure what. Newspapers are full of expert articles, many suggesting that the Aboriginal practices of cultural burning could mitigate further catastrophic bushfires. It seems many agree that the answer lies with listening to the traditional custodians of the continent, and reading the land.
The worst of the fires may be out for now, but a scorched forest doesn’t grow back in a day, even if the rest of the world moves on. Australia will never have a more active group of people who have suffered so much. They’re the fresh shoots of greenery nudging out from the blackened trunks.
