Australian bushfires: stories of heroism, heartbreak and hope
A simple enough drive. Batemans Bay, NSW, to Mallacoota, in the East Gippsland region of Victoria. But it’s never looked quite like this.
As green shoots return, photographer Nic Walker and The Weekend Australian Magazine’s Trent Dalton retrace the inferno’s path from Batemans Bay to Mallacoota. Along the way they meet everyday Australians whose lives have been forever changed by the summer bushfires - heroes with incredible stories of heartbreak and hope.
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Mogo
Mogo resident Tracey Campbell with her dog Toby.
“Why did our house survive and nobody else’s did?” Tracey asks herself.
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Bushfires devastated the small NSW town of Mogo.
The summer drive down the Princes Highway has never looked quite like this. Bald, scorched earth hills in the distance. Not trees lining those hills anymore, just black celery sticks with their heads hacked off.
Dozens upon dozens of family homes burnt to ash and melted corrugated iron and glass. A chimney standing where a family cottage used to be.
All that’s left are hard metal frames. Shells and carcasses. Signs and clues of ordinary lives lived in rural bliss.
Wazza Shaw knew the fire was coming. He chopped down the trees surrounding his house. He wet down the yard. He cleared the piles of leaves in front of his house. He was worried about the stacks of wood palings he keeps under his house. Spot fire and ember attack.
Wazza saved his home and that of his neighbour, Brian, who was out of town when the fires came through Mogo.
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Cobargo
On the edge of town, a soft-spoken and gentle man named Malcolm Elmslie pads warily to the edge of a rubble collection that once was his century-old Cobargo homestead.
“I know what I’ve lost,” he says, and he leaves a long, haunting space of dead air between his next word. “Everything.”
Malcolm woke at 2.30am on New Year’s Eve to see the terrifying firefront charging down from the hills surrounding his home. There was a long period during his frantic escape from the house when he couldn’t find his dog, Bonnie.
And then the dog emerged and he’d never been so grateful to see a living thing walking toward him.
Tom “Swampie” Wotton’s home in an isolated pocket far along Wandella Road, Cobargo was burnt to the ground and a lifetime of valuables was burnt with it.
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Mallacoota
Theresa McGovern grew up in this vast bush valley.
“There used to be a beautiful big deck on that place that we used for weddings and special family events,” Theresa says. “Seven-bedroom home. Gone.” She raises her eyebrows. Shrugs her shoulders. “Pot luck,” she says, tears forming in her eyes.
“Nearly all the family homes we’ve all grown up in at one time or another burnt down in this fire,” she says.
A forest of broken black trees, but life is slowly returning to Ben Boyd National Park near the border of NSW and Victoria.
Vicki Brown watches her two teenage sons, shirtless and soaked by saltwater, exploring the jagged rocks by the Bastion Point jetty. She and her family have returned to collect a camping trailer and other items left behind when they evacuated their Mallacoota campsite in the New Year’s fires.
“You know what,” she says. “We were anxious about coming back here. But now that we’ve come back and we’ve come down here and we’ve seen this beautiful beach again, it feels quite…” – she thinks of the right word – “… healing.”
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Nic Walker is a freelance photographer based in Sydney, specialising in photo documentary and portrait photography. He has won numerous media awards including a Walkley, a Nikon-Walkley, two Kennedy awards and a PANPA. Nic’s photography was recently showcased in a multimedia exhibition entitled ‘4 Horses’, a social commentary on the running of the Melbourne Cup.
Trent Dalton writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. He’s a two-time Walkley Award winner; three-time Kennedy Award winner for excellence in NSW journalism and a four-time winner of the national News Awards Features Journalist of the Year. In 2011, he was named Queensland Journalist of the Year at the Clarion Awards for excellence in Queensland journalism. His debut literary fiction novel, Boy Swallows Universe, was published by Harper Collins in 2018.
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