Amid bushfire’s smoke, there was kindness everywhere you looked

The life slap started the moment we set foot in the Blue Heron cafe in Moruya, a small town on the NSW South Coast.

“It’s going to be thrown out anyway,” the woman said to me with a matter-of-fact tone as she handed me a muffin, some scones and a few apple juice boxes.

It made up most of what food she had left in the cafe. She wouldn’t hear of me giving her any money. Her fridges had shut down because the power in the town had gone out.

Smoke from nearby bushfires billows across Moruya on December 31, 2019.  Credit:

Across the river from the cafe, where I sat with my husband and three kids, billowing clouds of grey and white smoke rose from the trees and nearly filled what we could see of the sky.

This was the last day of 2019, during what would be known as the Black Summer bushfires. And because of poor decision-making, my family was in the middle of it.

“The fires, the power, it’s like the end of the world,” said the woman who ran the cafe.

“Armageddon-like,” I said.

“Exactly.”

One crucial lesson I took from that summer was straightforward: do not, under any circumstances, travel within hundreds of kilometres of a bushfire. The bushfires had started when we drove from Sydney to the South Coast but were 200 kilometres or more from our holiday house. We thought that distance, plus a significant body of water in between might mean the fire wouldn’t get too close to where we were staying.

About 100 people huddled in the Moruya evacuation centre for two days as the fires raged.Credit:

When I think back to those two days we spent huddled together – first at the cafe and, later, sleeping on a basketball court at an evacuation centre nearby – it’s not, thankfully, my own shortsightedness that comes to mind.

There must have been more than 100 people huddling on that basketball court. Many were children. Some were babies. Quite a few were elderly.

And there was kindness every which way you looked. It was in the handwritten note on a torn piece of paper stuck on the women’s bathroom door at the evacuation centre. “LADIES. Sanitary products available at the Help Desk near the entrance. ALSO, Nappies.” (Volunteers from various charities had silently descended on the evacuation centre.)

It was in the young man with a shy smile who walked around at one point, handing out to the kids iceblocks from the nearby school cafeteria freezer that would have otherwise melted.

These moments wrapped me in a cocoon of comfort – and normalcy – that enabled me to forget, for hours at a time, my fears that the wind might suddenly change and send the fire that raged on the other side of the river darting in our direction.

A yellow haze above the car park outside the evacuation centre.Credit:

It’s these moments that I think of, not infrequently when the day-to-day realities of life make my cheeks feel sunken. That, and what my children – then aged 13, 11 and six – made of those two days down the South Coast.

“What about the coffee at the centre?” my 11-year-old daughter said to me with a defensive tone. This was on January 1, when we were packing up our car to leave the evacuation centre to drive to Canberra after the roads were declared safe. She was responding to what I had just said to my husband: that I couldn’t wait for an espresso.

Now, I was grateful for instant coffee, but I find there’s nothing quite like the acidic jolt of espresso to bolster oneself against the onslaught of everyday rejection and failure.

Cleaning up inside the centre.Credit:

Still, my daughter had a point. That centre, and everything in it, deserved every bit of my devotion. And attention. So, too, did the community near where we had vacationed.

A few days earlier, as though the universe knew I could use as much perspective as possible, I had met Deb on a wharf near the beach house that we’d soon have to leave.

A middle-aged woman with wavy hair, she told me about a class she once taught in the United States. And, in particular, one student, who was the grandson of the Hollywood actor Charlton Heston.

There’s a chance you might remember Heston from his title role as the buff nobleman sentenced to slavery in the 1950s epic Ben-Hur. There’s a bigger chance you’d know him from five words he once uttered: “From my cold dead hands.” As in, you could tear his firearm from him, but only from his cold, dead hands. Such was his love of gun ownership. (He delivered those words while holding a rifle triumphantly above his head; he was the longtime president of the National Rifle Association.)

But when Deb was teaching, gun ownership in whatever American city she was in was not the done thing. So, Heston’s grandson was being ribbed by some of his classmates.

Then, Deb told me, a little girl sitting behind him in class tapped him on the shoulder.

“Your grandfather just looked silly in a movie. My grandfather was the president of Mexico and killed lots and lots of people. He’s really somebody to be ashamed of.”

Sometimes, I think about that little girl and boy. It’s one of those interactions that grabs you by your lapels and shakes some sense into you when you wander into a mental cul-de-sac where your everyday problems are the centre of the universe.

There’s so much more at stake in this life if only I can bring myself to remember it. I met Deb only a few blocks from the holiday house. And that house, in turn, stood only blocks away from where the bushfires finally stopped raging.

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