Tag Archives: Currowan fire

We can be lyrebirds

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Posted by in Climate change challenge, Tapitallee tales

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Yesterday was hot. Oven hot. Even as the sun went down it was hot. Last night was hot. I woke from my final bit of restless sleep and, thirsty, reached for my cup of water. The water had become tepid overnight.

Today will also be hot. I sit in the shade with my breakfast and enjoy the light breeze – cool, disarming – while I can, before I’m forced into the house, blinds drawn, seeking out any habitable corner.

The bush is quiet. A small flock of birds flies overhead, quietly. Are they in mourning in this heat-scorched landscape? Lucky not to have burnt, large patches of trees are nevertheless covered in dead, brown leaves. I can almost see how the waves, the billows of heat came off the fire, landing in this patch, and this one.

A kookaburra calls. A deep throaty call. There is no reply. None of the hilarious groups of chuckling I was hearing a few months ago.

One of the good news bushfire stories I’ve read recently is about a group of lyrebirds sheltering in a dam while a fire raged around them. I’ve seen a photo, the lyrebirds in startled poses dotted awkwardly around the dam’s edge. The wonder is that they got there – fiercely territorial, they would have had to walk through each other’s territory to reach it – and the other wonder is that they stayed there, jostling, overcoming their innate competitiveness. Maybe ‘jostling’ is the wrong word. Maybe they were more like magnets with their same sides facing, only reaching a certain point of proximity before being repelled, maintaining a bare minimum gap. I look out at this silent bush around me and wonder if any unseen scenes of miraculous behaviour occurred around our muddy little dam. Last night, standing on the deck in the slightly cooler air, a sickly half-moon of cream-yellow above the trees, I heard a wallaby or kangaroo crunching through the leaves. I saw the quiet flight of an owl, felt a tiny bat shape its dive around my head. Did they all survive near the dam, each hunkered down in its own sweet way?

But I’m wary of these good news bushfire stories, these images of impossibly coloured leaves sprouting from thickly blackened trunks. Just as I’m wary of conversations that start with ‘We’ve always had fires’ or ‘This is how I remember summers in childhood.’ I’m wary of them being the beginning of a smoothing over, a covering up, a pretence of normality. A shrugging of the shoulders that accompanies a statement like, ‘Ah, nature! She’s a bastard.’ I want the agitation of emergency to endure. My little neck of the woods is safe for now but others aren’t. When Greta Thunberg says ‘Our house is burning’ she’s not talking about her family’s house, or her country’s house, she’s talking about the planet’s house. It seems to be human nature – and not an aspect of it that we can be proud of – to think small when we think of ‘our’, and to use ‘our’ as an exclusive force against ‘their’. The first – and maybe the hardest – step to take against climate change seems to be that we have to see ‘our’ in a different way. We have to quell the basic human desire to improve our lot at the expense of others, where ‘expense of others’ might mean exploiting others, ignoring others or using up the resources of others. If lyrebirds can challenge their instincts in order to survive, why can’t we?

Thank you firies

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When I turn off the highway I notice handmade signs dotted along the road. ‘Thank you firies’ they say. These are heartfelt messages. There are patches of burnt out bush and the ground is covered in leaf-litter from trees shedding their leaves to survive. Everything looks exhausted, drooping. The bush is quiet: few birds, nothing bigger. This is the land that the fire approached, having jumped the Shoalhaven River after days of sitting at its edge, slavering. You can see that the land itself couldn’t have resisted. You can see how the fire would have gobbled up that leaf-litter and bounced into the trees themselves, crawling up the trunks. How it would have leapt through the canopy, looking for more to devour.

The stories I hear from my neighbours are of miracles and lucky breaks. We’re lucky the firies chose this spot to try to draw a line against the mighty Currowan fire, so it didn’t spread down to the more inhabited parts of north Nowra. We’re lucky they contained it where they did, that a neighbour was here to show the firies from Queensland where the overgrown fire trails were. That a firebreak got out of hand but they firebombed it back into control. We’re lucky our houses didn’t explode like one neighbour’s friend. We’re lucky another neighbour has a son who’s a firie, who came up here to check on how it was going, sending back messages of reassurance.

We shake ourselves and say it again. We’re lucky that we didn’t join the hundreds of thousands, millions, of Australians disastrously affected by the bushfires that have been burning across the country since September. That we didn’t, along with so many others, lose our much-loved house. We had some days of worry, one night of complete resignation facing the worst. It is a holiday home, not our only house. And it is a house, not our lives, or our livelihoods. But it is our house. The house we’ve built over the last two years, and only lived in for the past year. Planned and furnished and filled with love. It’s the house Martin was taken from to the Shoalhaven hospital. It’s the house I returned to the same night, after a day of hospital staff stabilising Martin’s breathing, to find the whole community gathered nearby around the pizza oven. They flocked to me, invited me in, loaded me up with food and warmth. It’s the house and community I have planned to live in in years to come.

But even though the house is still standing and even the plants in the planter box have survived, something has gone. Through the missing trees I can see houses I never knew were there. I stand on the ashy ground and see burnt leaves everywhere. No insects bang at the night-time windows. More than that, it’s a sense of trust that has gone. The trust that fires can be controlled. That this little house would be here for me, that I would add to the garden and learn all the plants, all the birds in the bush around me. Having imagined the destruction of such a raging fire, I can’t unimagine it. It’s a version of the world that stays with me. In one moment, it all could have been lost. The fact that it wasn’t means I’m sitting in a ghost house, where ruins might have been. I can’t look at the bush or be in the house without that knowledge. It all looks transient now, shaky, the lines blurring in and out of view, dream-like.