A summer of flame

This was not how Midnight Oil frontman and one-time federal environment minister Peter Garrett had planned to spend the early days of the new year: digging in with neighbours as fire bore down on the eastern reaches of the fabled Kangaroo Valley and its pretty, outlying hamlets.

Garrett had been the first federal politician to visit Kinglake and other devastated communities north of Melbourne after the Black Saturday fires snatched 173 lives in February 2009. He knew what the aftermath of an inferno looked like.

But nothing had prepared him for the enormity of this blaze - the Morton fire, an offshoot of the Currowan fire - as it raced towards him on January 4.

Peter Garrett in bushland near his property in Kangaroo Valley on Friday.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“It was massive,” he tells the Herald. “There was this mountainous curtain of smoke above the escarpment of the valley and then underneath that, almost like the footlights of a stage, this intense, pulsing orange and yellow furnace-like glow running the whole length of the escarpment, backed by a massive pyrocumulonimbus cloud. The Hercules water bomber looked like a toy plane flying through the middle of it all.”

The group had done everything by the book: cleared gutters, checked pumps, run out hoses, set up a local WhatsApp group to keep in close contact.

“But nothing, whatever preparation you have had or whatever previous experience you had had with bushfires, could have prepared you for the scale of this phenomenon when you actually got up close to it,” Garrett says.

The fire’s pace was terrifying. It had leapt the Shoalhaven that morning and the wind, like dragon’s breath, had carried it over distances in hours that the fires of previous years would have taken days to cover.

Abruptly it changed direction, sparing the properties of Garrett and his neighbours. But as so often would prove the case this blighted summer, one person’s change of luck was another’s misfortune.

The flames veered into the valley’s western arm, and across into the southernmost communities of the Southern Highlands – Bundanoon and Wingello among them – licking up houses, farms, stock and fences as well as the tinder-dry bush.

The remains of a home in Wingello on January 7.Credit: Isabella Porras

For months, the experts had known this summer of flame – this “black summer”, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison called it on Tuesday – was coming.

Along the South Coast, many places had had their lowest winter rainfall on record. In the state’s north-east, mean daily maximum temperatures over winter were unusually high. Virtually the entire state had been in drought since 2018. Former fire chiefs, led by former Fire and Rescue NSW chief Greg Mullins, had tried to warn the federal government as far back as May that the nation was under-prepared for the season ahead, and were rebuffed.

Yet even those most keenly alert to the danger were blindsided by the epic scale of what was to come: the searing winds fanning flame across super-heated pasture and forest, the choking smoke carrying the stench of charred bush into the heart of cities, the mass evacuations, the fire-generated thunderheads, and embers which could race 12 to 15 kilometres ahead of the fire fronts, malign emissaries of the destructive force at their backs.

“We knew we were in for a difficult fire season,” the deputy chief of the NSW Rural Fire Service Rob Rogers told the Herald at the end of January. “We were absolutely expecting that because of the drought and the weather briefings we were getting. But I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I had no idea of just how tough it was going to be.”

The fires begin

The first sting was felt in the north. In July, near the usually idyllic holiday hub of Port Macquarie, a fire took hold in dried up swampland south of the town, and refused to die, flaring up repeatedly from hiding places beneath the surface.

In the second week of August, three watch-and-act fires began menacing homes on the Mid North Coast around Kempsey, Port Macquarie and Port Stephens, even though it was still officially winter.

NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons at RFS headquarters.Credit: Cole Bennetts

On August 22,  chief of the RFS Shane Fitzsimmons warned that these early fires were “a hint of the conditions the upcoming season might bring”, and announced that nine local government areas would have their official fire seasons brought forward by a month, to start on September 1.

But the parched landscape wasn’t waiting for a starter’s gun. North-eastern NSW was experiencing weather never before seen that early in spring, as was south-east Queensland. Ecologists watched on in horror as stands of ancient Gondwana rainforest over the border – never previously known to burn – succumbed to flames.

On the northern tableland of NSW serious blazes broke out near Glen Innes, Drake, Tenterfield, and Legume, not far from the Queensland border. The Bees Nest fire north-east of Armidale doubled in size overnight on September 6-7.

By September 17, homes were being lost along with sheds, fencing and farm equipment with more than 26 fires already burning out of control.

On October 8 the blazes turned deadly.

The Long Gully fire, south-west of Casino, bore down on the isolated farmhouse of retired service station owner Bob Lindsey, 77, and his 69-year-old wife Gwen Hyde, at Coongbar, near Mount Belmore. It would be almost 48 hours before forensic teams discovered their bodies lying in the burnt out ruins of their home.

A customised fire-fighting 737 dumps retardant on a bushfire south of Port Macquarie in October.Credit: Nick Moir

By late October, the blazes were wreaking havoc along the Mid North Coast, including Crowdy Head, Tuncurry and Port Macquarie (again). In the desiccated landscape, fire showed an unnerving ability to gather momentum even under a north-easterly, a more humid flow of air not usually conducive to fire spread.

Critical koala breeding grounds near Port Macquarie were now being hit and images of burnt and injured animals flooded social media, galvanising audiences around the globe.

“By October it had got really bad up there,” deputy RFS chief Rogers says. “And we knew the fire season would travel down. But we didn’t realise that that pace would just continue, for the next six months.”

The fires were equal opportunity destroyers. Flames consumed the tiny, historic Bobin Public School, south of Port Macquarie. To the north, near Coffs Harbour, they licked at the no-expenses-spared sprawling retreat of Hollywood A-lister Russell Crowe.

Over November 8-9, five more people perished in the flames, in homes or cars, in scattered North Coast hamlets near Kempsey, Macksville and Johns River.

One woman was severely burnt by the time firefighters got to her, Rogers says. “They couldn’t get an ambulance in to her and those firefighters kept doing CPR all night trying to keep this lady alive.” She survived the night, only to die in hospital.

'Catastrophic' conditions

The arc of flame began its terrifying march south. On October 26, what would become known as the Gospers Mountain mega-fire took its first fiery breaths after a lightning strike deep into the Wollemi National Park to the north-west of Sydney.

The flames gorged themselves on bone-dry bushland, barrelling unchecked through country corrugated with steep ridges and deep gullies.

On November 12 the fire made its first feint towards the south-east, heading for Mellong and the hamlets north of the Hawkesbury River and by mid-November, it had burnt out 90,000 hectares with no signs of slowing. Eventually its blackened footprint would extend over more than half a million hectares.

Just after 5pm on November 10, the RFS warned of “catastrophic” fire conditions for the greater Sydney region and the Hunter – the first time this level of warning had been issued for the area since a new alert system had been introduced in 2009. People near fire-exposed bushland were urged to think about heading for major towns. Schools in high-risk areas were closed. “Homes are simply not designed to withstand fire under those conditions,” the service said.

The following day the NSW government declared the first state of emergency NSW had seen in six years. There were chilling words from Premier Gladys Berejiklian: “No matter where you are, everybody has to assume the worst. We cannot allow complacency to creep in.”

It would be “the most dangerous bushfire week this nation has ever seen,” fire chief Fitzsimmons warned.

The Hillville fire takes over a building on November 12.Credit: Nick Moir

Inside RFS headquarters at Olympic Park, senior staff watched in disbelief as the map lit up with a raft of new fires in the lower half of the state.

“I remember just looking at the map thinking, ‘This can’t be happening, how can we be getting so much fire?’” Rogers recalls. “We had all these [blazes] in the north and all the ones around Sydney and then we started to have all these lightning strikes down south ... That's what really happened, the mountain ranges from the very north of the state burnt to the very south of the state, and a lot of that was lightning .... I remember saying, ‘I can’t believe we are going to see the same kinds of areas burn that have burnt in the rest of the state’. But sure enough, we did.”

Now the Snowy region was feeling the lick of flame, as was wine country near Cessnock.  The voracious Green Wattle Fire had sprung up on the western side of Lake Burragorang, threatening Sydney’s water catchment.

Several weeks earlier, Fitzsimmons and Rogers had decided to bring in firefighters from New Zealand, the first time the RFS had ever gone off-shore for help. On November 29 they reached further afield, to Canada and the United States, for reinforcements.

It was a big call. “At the time, you’re still thinking ‘is this going to drop off?’” Rogers remembers. “Because that happens, things get really intense and then the weather changes. We mulled it over for a few days and then decided, yup, we’d rather call this and it be wasted than not prepared.”

Smoke billows at Colo Heights on November 19.Credit: Dean Sewell

With less than a month to go till Christmas, the largest of the fires - among them the Green Wattle Creek fire to Sydney’s south-west, the Gospers Mountain Fire to its north-west, the Currowan fire terrorising the South Coast towns and the Dunns Road- Adaminaby complex fires in the Snowies – had become forbidding, ever-present companions, stalking the days and nights of the communities living in their shadow.

'Pyro-convectivity' on the rise

That human-induced climate change was a key factor in the severity of the fire season was accepted as a given by every reputable scientist and academic in the field.

The Bureau of Meteorology declared 2019 the continent’s hottest on record, with Australia’s average mean temperature sitting at 1.52 centigrade above average.

El Niño, a meteorological event most commonly associated with a bad fire season, was missing. But a strong positive Indian Ocean dipole was still having a heating and drying effect on the country. And so was another, much rarer phenomenon.

On September 9, the bureau had issued a little-noticed article pointing to a “sudden stratospheric warming” over Antarctica – in fact, the strongest Antarctic warming on record. It predicted this, too, would contribute to increased springtime temperatures, heatwaves and rising fire risk in NSW and southern Queensland.

In the meantime bushfire experts were taking note of a marked rise in extreme fire behaviour or “pyro-convectivity”.

As the mega-fires sent heat plumes 12 kilometres or more into the atmosphere, they created their own highly unstable and dangerous weather systems, generating towering thunderheads (pyrocumulonimbus) capable of spitting out dry lightning.

Lightning breaks through while bushfires rage nearby.Credit: Nick Moir

Jason Sharples, a professor of bushfire dynamics at the University of New South Wales, says only 60 pyrocumulonimbus events had been officially recorded Australia-wide since relevant records started in 1998. Yet since September at least another 33 had been documented. “So we’ve added more than 50 per cent to the record in this season alone,” he says.

In the field firefighters were making the same observation. “Those fires going pyro-convective, that used to be quite a rare thing,” Rogers says. “This season it seems to have been almost routine.”

Lightning strikes and long-range ember attacks, not arson, were the major culprits breeding new blazes. On one afternoon on November 27, more than 100 new fires were ignited as storms swept across the state.

Nor was there anything “normal” about the scale of destruction being unleashed, despite attempts by some MP's and climate-sceptic commentators to suggest otherwise.

The death toll had been kept mercifully low, thanks to much improved warning systems, and more proactive evacuation measures adopted since the 2009 Victorian fires.

But the grim daily drumbeat of statistics – of houses, businesses and hectares burnt – barely began to capture the immensity of the impact on lives, livelihoods, native fauna and vulnerable regional economies.

'You have to take a risk sometimes'

In the three weeks before Christmas, the fires closest to Sydney were regularly threatening population centres lying on the outer south-west fringe: communities such as Oakdale, Nattai, Silverdale and Yanderra.

On December 5 the Green Wattle Creek fire jumped the lake and roared towards Orangeville, a semi-rural district containing hundreds of homes on small acreages.

Herald photographer Nick Moir was there alongside fire crews from Menai and Ingleburn when they witnessed a phenomenon none of them had seen in decades of firefighting. Superheated air and evaporated oils trapped under the lid of thick smoke suddenly ignited, triggering a simultaneous explosion of fire along an area some 300 metres long and 50 deep. As flames towered above the tree canopy, Moir could smell the hairs on his face singeing as the group ran.

Midway through December the Rural Fire Service took a gamble on a backburn to try and protect communities along the Bells Line of Road from the mammoth Gospers Mountain blaze.

There was good reason to attempt it, Rogers insists. “When these big fires are burning in the mountain ranges, the only way we can stop them is by backburning unless it rains. Otherwise they sit and come out on the worst possible day, in multiple places.”

But in the treacherous conditions, the plan went wrong. The winds took the fire and raced it towards Mount Tomah, devastating parts of the Botanic Gardens before razing a path through the fruit-growing orchards and farms around Bilpin.  Days later, family businesses that had been thriving for decades lay in ruins.

“The winds did something that they were not expected to do,” Rogers says. “People are beating themselves up [about it]. But it's not a zero-risk proposition. You have to take a risk sometimes. You have to be prepared to live by that.”

Embers fly at Orangeville on December 5.Credit: Nick Moir

On December 19, the state entered a second state of emergency.

Communities in the Southern Highlands – towns such as Thirlmere, Buxton, Hill Top, Colo Vale and Balmoral – were again in the sights of the rampaging Green Wattle Creek fire.

Captain of Balmoral RFS Brendon O’Connor says the “gates of hell” opened for his town on Saturday, December 21. “It hit us four times over a four-and-a-half-hour period”, the flames crowning 100 metres above the tree canopies.

More than 20 out of the town’s 140 homes were lost that day, with extensive damage to other properties. O’Connor was devastated. He’d sought permission to backburn behind the town several days earlier – a request granted to other communities – but says this was denied, on the basis that RFS computer modelling showed it was not warranted.

“I’ve spoken to so many captains, a lot of us talk to each other, and there is a lot of frustration at  [RFS managers] not listening to local experience,” he says. “Computer modelling has its place but can’t be the be-all and end-all.”

Rogers says senior officials of the fire service have met with O’Connor since. “We’ll have a debrief after this and if there are lessons learnt, we will agree to do this,” the RFS deputy added.

Fire hammers Bilpin on December 21.Credit: Nick Moir

Late on the evening of Thursday, December 19, at around 11.30pm, came the blackest of news: two volunteer firefighters in their early 30s, Geoffrey Keaton and Andrew O’Dwyer, fathers of very young children, had been killed when a falling tree rolled their truck on the way to fires around Buxton.

Rogers got the call first, then rang a shattered Fitzsimmons. “When he sees my name come up on the phone really late at night, he knows it’s going to be bad,” Rogers says.

For Prime Minister Morrison the timing couldn’t have been worse. Earlier that week, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, he appeared to have vanished. After days of fudging from his office, it emerged he was on a holiday in Hawaii with his wife Jenny and two young daughters.

The contrast between the nation’s leader taking his ease abroad while young men were losing their lives on the front line was political poison. He cut short his holiday and dashed back to Sydney.

Blood-red skies on New Year's Eve

Rob Rogers was out of bed in the early hours of New Year’s Eve.

Atrocious fire conditions were forecast for the day ahead.   There would be no less than 666 separate fire incidents that day, 565 of them coming in as new reports.

“My phone rang at something like 3.15am,” Rogers recalls. “I was told the winds had picked up really badly already, and we were losing property, phone calls were coming from people trapped in homes. I said ‘I’m coming straight in’”. Fitzsimmons was not long behind him.

The town of Mogo on the NSW South Coast was devastated by bushfires on New Year's Eve.Credit: James Brickwood

At dawn the RFS issued a series of urgent bulletins. The Badja Forest Road fire, already 64,000 hectares in size, was out of control with a strong southerly expected to push it north. Multiple fires were burning between Cooma, Bega and Batemans Bay. Coastal communities from the north of Ulladulla to south of Nowra were at risk. The Snowy Monaro region, including Kosciuszko National Park, was in lock-down.

Holiday havens up and down the South Coast were about to descend into scenes resembling a Hollywood disaster movie.

Within hours of an ominous dawn, thousands were sheltering on beaches under blood-red skies as flames raced out of the forests to the very edges of the sand-dunes. The main streets of iconic tourist towns like Mogo and Cobargo had gone up in flames. At Lake Conjola people took to boats, paddleboards or dived into the water to escape the infernos.

Holidaymakers on the beach at Currarong on December 31.Credit: Nick Moir

Of the myriad images taken that day, few were as powerful as the shot Allison Marion took of her son Finn, 11, as he steered their small boat off the coast of the northern Victorian town of Mallacoota, looking anxiously landward at the roiling crimson sky. The world watched in horror.

So wild and unpredictable were these fires that not even professional firefighting crews were safe in their path.

Twenty minutes’ drive south-west of Nowra that afternoon, two urban pumpers carrying eight members of a Fire and Rescue NSW crew were over-run by a fire-front that immobilised their vehicles.

One of the trucks, STP48, caught fire with the crew still inside. With the flames burning at hundreds of degrees outside and toxic smoke filling the cabin, the men had to hope they could stay alive long enough to leave the truck once the firefront passed over. They fell back on teamwork and training, captain Kayle Barton later told the Herald. They managed to access breathing apparatus stored in lockers outside the truck and trudged out through an ember storm. Outwardly, they remained calm. Privately, some had been steeling themselves for death.

By nightfall the fire-hit areas were smoking ruins. Communications were down; fuel, food and drinking water were in short supply.

Holiday makers who still had access to cars and caravans heeded official advice to leave, and took to the roads. But the exodus created its own problems.

The “nightmare scenario” says Rogers, was “a really bad fire coming up the road, and the traffic being bumper to bumper”.

Was it the worst day? “It’s pretty hard to know how low is low, because every time there was a new low,” Rogers says. “When you have whole catalogue of shit days, which one stands out more than another? I don’t know.”

As it turned out there was to be another, just three days later.

Morrison steps in

On January 4 the wind again seemed to blow in straight from a giant furnace.

A third state of emergency was now in force, and the RFS Twitter feed lit up with a string of warnings. Communities threatened by the Morton fire included Tallong, Exeter, Avoca, Fitzroy Falls, and Barrengarry in the Wingecarribee shire, and Kangaroo Valley and villages to the north.

The Dunns Road, East Ournie Creek and Green Valley fires were threatening to merge in the far south of the state, and the Snowies were again under threat. There were further emergency warnings for Queanbeyan, just outside the national capital. In apple-growing country, around Batlow, homes were lost despite intense efforts of firefighters. Fire was raging across from the Victorian border and residents of the far south fishing village of Eden were told to prepare to seek shelter.

Defence Minister Linda Reynolds and Prime Minister Scott Morrison during the press conference on January 4.Credit: AAP

In the thick of the day’s drama, Morrison held a press conference to announce he’d ordered the compulsory call-out of 3000 army reservists to help fire-fighting efforts across the country.

Defence had already been in the field providing logistical support to the RFS and other states' agencies for several weeks. Three days earlier, HMAS Choules had set sail to rescue some of the thousands of holidaymakers stranded at Mallacoota.

But this was a massive step up. Fitzsimmons knew nothing about it.

The first he realised the announcement had been made was when people started contacting RFS centres asking how they could access evacuation centres at military bases – one of the measures announced by Morrison.

“We said, ‘well, they are not’,” Fitzsimmons told the Herald later. “Then someone said, ‘hold on, the PM has announced it’ ... The Premier was in a back room in a dedicated space, and I went and said, ‘do you know anything about this? The answer I got was they had been called just a couple of minutes ago.”

Fitzsimmons said the shift in the Commonwealth’s posture, to a proactive “we will do whatever you want”, was “very positive. My only issue with it was the execution on the day... [in the midst of] that awful day, the second worst day we’d ever had”.

He hastens to add that he got an apology from Morrison’s office that night and that Defence help has proven invaluable. But the rushed announcement left many wondering whether the timing hadn’t been as much about optics for the federal government as it had been about operational efficiency.

Evacuees prepare to leave Mallacoota on January 3.Credit: Justin McManus

Morrison’s horror-run would continue when locals heckled him on a visit to the devastated village of Cobargo, and after a camera caught him turning away from a young woman who didn’t want to shake his hand until he’d listened to her plea for more RFS resources.

The Prime Minister has since been at pains to address what was widely seen as a leadership failure. There have been new assistance measures announced near-daily, from both the federal and NSW governments.

But the political catfights on the sidelines, including Barnaby Joyce's ill-timed Nationals leadership challenge, do not augur well for the months ahead. Moderates within the Liberal party, like NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean, want to move the dial on climate action and talk up the economic benefits of a step change towards renewables. But in Canberra the climate change-denying rump in the Coalition joint party room appears to wield as much influence as ever.

Morrison has called a royal commission and given it a deadline of August to report, but there could be an uncomfortable interface with the inquiries already announced by Victoria and NSW. The Prime Minister talks up the necessity for more hazard reduction. But Fitzsimmons has said it's important but no panacea and "has very little effect at all" on firespread in severe or extreme conditions.

In January the firefighting community was dealt another devastating blow when an aerial water-tanker crashed over the Snowies, killing all three of its highly professional American crew members.

Fires had flared again on the South Coast, taking more homes in the Bega Valley, and Canberra had flames at its southern doorstep.

Of the tanker crash, Rogers says: “You think you’ve seen the worst of it. Then something else happens and you realise you haven’t seen the worst.”

This weekend’s forecast rains promise a degree of relief. But in the wake of this season’s infernos lie nearly 2500 homes in ruins, 33 bereaved families ( with 25 of those deaths in New South Wales), mass trauma, entire regional economies on life support and deep silence in the charred forests. More than a third of the NSW national park estate has gone up in flames; nearly 7 per cent of the state in total.

Garrett says, “I think after this summer, many Australians would be as despairing and angry as I am about the fact that we have so comprehensively failed to take this seriously … What will be interesting to see is the extent to which parliamentarians across the board recognise this is a fundamental tipping point.”

Professor Steven Sherwood and 80 Australian Research Council laureates have penned an open letter warning that if the world went on as it was, “adaptation will no longer be achievable”.

Australian National University climatologist Joelle Gergis fears that “right now we are on track for 3 to 4 degrees [average global temperature increase] by the end of the century. That means the kind of summer we are experiencing … will no longer be an extreme”.

Rogers isn’t sure it’s over yet. Sometimes, thinking back to something that happened on the North Coast in September, he struggles to remember it was only five-and-a-half months ago.

“It's just been so long and so demanding on everyone, it feels like it's been four or five fire seasons in one.”

Spot fires breaking along the Monaro Highway near Bredbo on February 1.Credit: Dean Sewell