Matthew Abraham: How we can end SA’s fire apocalypse, now

Holidays are meant to be fun, not marred by helicopters on bushfire mercy dashes, writes Matthew Abraham, who says there are simple ways we can help affected communities.

Mud and ash from a million trees wept gently on the holiday homes at Carrickalinga, dirtying everything it licked.

It was a welcome but unsettling rain, a reminder that a horror was unfolding on the horizon, just beyond the white sand and water that’s the same clean, deep blue as the Reckitt’s laundry Blue Bags mum would use to soothe bee stings.

Kangaroo Island was burning. It still is.

All last week, the heavy thooka-thooka-thooka percussion of the Army’s twin-blade Chinook helicopters played a weird symphony with the erratic, screeching flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos.

The military choppers are trundling across to KI, dangling giant rolls of hay in cargo nets beneath them.

You’re supposed to watch seagulls, not Chinooks on the beach.

A beach holiday is meant to be fun and carefree, a cross between Storm Boy and Clambake, with Elvis strumming a guitar. It’s not meant to be like the beach scene from Apocalypse Now.

They’re saying this is the “new normal” for Australia. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

When the smoke clears, you can see KI clearly from the beaches and hills of the Fleurieu Peninsula. It’s just 22km at its shortest gap, from Cape Jervis to Penneshaw.

It’s a strange experience enjoying a beach holiday knowing, just across the water, people are fighting for their homes, their farms, their stock, their livelihoods – and their lives.

This tinge of guilt mixed with fear might explain why it seemed so empty on the peninsula, at the one time of the year when the joint should be jumping.

The Australian Tourism Industry Council says even in some areas completely unaffected by the bushfires, businesses have suffered more than a 60 per cent increase in booking cancellations from domestic travellers who’ve simply decided to stay home. The council’s executive director Simon Westaway told The Australian last week the sector was suffering from the “contagion effect”.

“The level of spending in many holiday destinations has fallen through the floor, which will have a lasting impact on these small-to-medium-sized businesses,” he said.

Bushfires could cost tourism industry $1 billion

This is ridiculous, but this year for the first time I chucked a pair of red fire goggles, rated to provide protection from smoke and embers, in the back of the car along with the beach towels and sunblock. And I’m grabbing a couple of P2 smoke masks for next summer.

Driving around beachside towns, it’s hard not to be worried by the nonchalant, almost reckless, attitude many property owners have when it comes to bushfire threats.

Most properties are well planted with various eucalypts, often brushing up against outside walls and overhanging rooftops. It’s just nuts. Governments and local councils need to get over the whole “every tree is sacred” syndrome and start enforcing wide clearings around residential properties, even on the urban fringe.

The science is in on climate change – our “bushfire season” starts earlier, goes longer and the fires are bigger and badder.

Fires also scorch political reputations.

When Premier Steven Marshall was asked on ABC radio early Monday morning why he’d taken on the job of tourism minister, stripping it off David Ridgway, he explained that Ridgway’s other portfolio of trade and investment “requires a lot of overseas travel”.

“I think (tourism) is going to require a lot of work on the ground here in SA and I just think those two things are incompatible,” he said. Just hours later, the Premier farcically tried to slip out of town unnoticed for – wait for it – a trade mission to Singapore and Japan.

He’s since admitted he “probably got it wrong” by not telling us he was jetting off. No, he definitely got it wrong because he said a tourism minister needed their boots on the ground, not under a seat at the front of a plane.

The Labor Opposition could take a cold shower, too. Leon Bignell, the improbable Labor MP for Mawson, the electorate taking in KI, ridiculously bagged Marshall for attending a fire fundraiser basketball game.

He’s done sterling work helping to organise free generators for property owners, paid for by BankSA.

It’s a pity he felt the need to attach a signed, electoral letterhead note to the gennies, making it appear they were sort of a gift from him, too. Let goodness be its own reward.

Thankfully, all this political static is being drowned out by the orchestra of community support for those whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by these fires.

We can all help in the smallest of ways. How about buying KI eggs all this year? That’s my pathetically small rescue plan.

The very worst thing we can do is to stop enjoying the holidays that keep rural communities alive.

At dusk one night in Carri, an absolute mountain of a kangaroo materialised across the road from our holiday house.

It dragged itself across the street as if it had the weight of the whole of KI on its back. It then proceeded to snack on the rose petals in the front garden next door.

If a bone-weary kangaroo can take the time to smell the roses at the beach, so must we.