In the line of fire: it’s a calling for Matthew Abbott

Photojournalist Matthew Abbott has seen some bizarre things while documenting the bushfires. Among them, a car whose wheels started to melt and dribbled away

Apocalyptic: a scene on New Year’s Eve in Conjola Park. Picture: Matthew Abbott

Photojournalist Matthew Abbott has had some bizarre experiences while documenting the bushfires these past two months. He’s seen hundreds of airborne embers raining suddenly onto a grassy clearing, each ember starting a spot fire that propagated in a circular fashion, like ripples from stones dropped into a pond, until they joined up into a wall of flames. He’s wandered through evacuated settlements – “a very lonely feeling,” he says – to bear witness to the destruction even as the flames licked around him. He’s run for his life, alongside firefighters doing the same, as a fire front crowned in the trees’ canopy around them, the flames leaping 90m above the ground. And in ravaged Conjola Park, on NSW’s south coast, he found this car, its aluminium wheels having melted at 660ºC and dribbled away.

Abbott, a 35-year-old freelancer from Sydney who works mainly for overseas media – his bushfire photos have made the front pages of The New York Times, and The Guardian in London – had a compelling reason to keep himself safe during all this: he and his wife Anna-Lena, who married last year, are expected their first child in June. Still, it’s a balancing act, he says: in order to get sellable images – “photos that will move people” – it’s imperative that you’re in the thick of it. As he documented blazes from Taree to Green Wattle Creek, Bilpin, Buxton, Balmoral and Nowra, Abbott learnt to stay in “a constant state of hyper-vigilance,” he explains. “You’re always thinking, ‘Where’s the fire front, which direction is the wind moving, where’s my exit, where’s my refuge?’” In his Toyota HiLux, wearing a helmet, mask and yellow protective clothing covered in dirt and ash, he’d be waved through roadblocks, going in the opposite direction to the tide of people fleeing.

This shot, incidentally, was taken on New Year’s Eve. Abbott went absent from a family holiday on that awful fire day, such was his dedication to the story. “It was the last day of the decade,” he says, “and it felt like the end of the world.”