‘When the fire came, my neighbours beat it back’
In this Herald series, we asked prominent artists, comedians, authors and journalists to write about their “summer that changed everything”.
If you have a favourite landscape, suck all possible enjoyment from it. Contemplate it. Photograph it. If there’s a tree involved, go hug it. In an era of climate change it can be gone in a moment, never to reappear.
That’s my sliver of wisdom from the summer that, for me, changed everything.
It was the summer of 2019-2020. The bushfires hit me hard. With family and friends I’d built a mud-brick house up in the wild land between Mittagong and Taralga. The work had taken decades and had changed me utterly – ruining my back but also allowing me to experience a useful sort of masculinity that made me feel better about being a man.
Richard Glover at the door of his mud-brick house that he built over many decades with family and friends.Credit:
At the time I used to say: “I built the house, and the house built me.”
The fire front reached the mud house on January 4, 2020. I was in an ABC radio studio in Ultimo, reading out the latest evacuation orders from the Rural Fire Service. Among the many evacuation orders on that terrible day: “All houses on Tallygang Road”.
This was my neck of the woods, a place with only a handful of homes. I kept my voice steady, I hope, while assuming my house was gone or going.
Glover’s house was saved but the fire blackened the surrounding bushland. Credit:
I hadn’t accounted for my neighbours, Mick Chalker and his son, Simon. Days before, they’d ploughed a protective moat around every house. When the fire came, they beat it back.
“No worries at all, it was nothing,” said Mick, or maybe it was Simon, or maybe Annette, wife to one, mother to the other, and all part of this amazing community – the existence of which, or rather my realisation of whose importance, was part of the summer that changed everything.
The fire had destroyed all the fences, the shed, too. The septic tank was a puddle of melted PVC. But worse, the fire had incinerated the surrounding bush. The landscape of my dreaming had been lost; the landscape I would summon up each night as a way of settling into sleep.
The first chapter of that loss was the blackened forests. No green. No animals. No sound. One memory: a wedge-tailed eagle circling, circling, circling, finding nothing, despondently flying south. Another: a dying kangaroo, trembling next to the house.
Surveying the fire’s destruction around Glover’s property.Credit:
Next chapter: the rains. Rains so heavy they washed the soil from the ravaged mountains. Landslides blocked the narrow dirt roads. Then – when we finally found a way through – the tree trunks started frothing with what looked like detergent.
It’s a eucalypt thing, apparently. Fire, then rain, then they froth. It’s a way of kick-starting replacement trees. And those came quickly. I called it “the Vietnamese jungle phase”. I have nothing against Vietnamese jungles, but prefer them to be in Vietnam. There is, quite soon, a Birnam Wood of saplings marching towards you.
Glover and his co-builder and friend Philip Clark during the construction of the house.
The old languid walk from the house to the dam paddock is now filled with a dense scrub of saplings. The fences are impossible to repair, buried in regrowth. The dawn view of the sun rising to the east is hidden by a wall of this green.
Those saplings are battling each other for survival. It’s the eucalypt version of Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”.
An ecologist, passing through, told me that in 50 years things will be back to the way they were. “Assuming,” the ecologist said, “we do something about climate change. Otherwise it will just be destroyed again and again.”
So, assuming we act on climate change, and assuming I live to 112, let’s make a date: see you on January 2, 2070, for a party on our bush block.
By which time it will look as beautiful as it did before the summer that changed everything.
Richard Glover is a journalist, author and Herald columnist, and was the host of the Drive program for 702 ABC Sydney for 26 years.
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