March. April 67V
ANTAGE POINTS were rare in Flinders Chase.
The densely wooded tracks through Kangaroo
Island’s beloved national park gave little away.
Drive south, however, and the road curves to
a lookout atop Bunker Hill. This ancient dune crest was
once a favourite spot to pull over at. Here, locals could
recount a miracle of rebirth, the resurgence of an entire
woodland realm following the December 2007 bushfires
that tore through 85 per cent of the park.
On the last day of last year I stopped here with a German
couple I was guiding around my island home. Under crisp
blue skies we gazed across an undulating expanse of close-
packed mallee scrub. This lavish sea of green growth
dipped and rolled all the way to the coast. Perky blue wrens
skittered at our feet as I shared the park’s revival tale with
my guests. Little did I know this would be my last such
vision from Bunker Hill, at least for a decade or two.
Three days later a devastating inferno roared south
through Flinders Chase National Park. Branded the ‘Ravine
Fire’, it moved with a speed and ferocity much greater than
the 2007 blaze. Just weeks earlier, islanders had celebrated
the park’s centenary and the pioneering field naturalists
who’d fought for nearly three decades for its creation. More
than just a refuge for plants and animals, ‘The Chase’ was
cherished as a bastion of the woodland diversity and vigour
long lost from mainland South Australia. In six brutal hours
this priceless natural enclave was transformed into a charnel
house of sticks, ash and blackened bones.
The Ravine Fire was not the end of our island’s woes;
nor was it the beginning. At the onset of summer, and
after two years of below-average rainfall, the island’s farms
and bushland were perilously dry. A mid-December hot
spell ended on the afternoon of 20 December. It was a
stif ling day of 42°C heat with bushfires charging through
the Adelaide Hills.
By mid-afternoon a dry lightning storm was blitzing
Kangaroo Island ahead of the change. Within an hour the
Country Fire Service (CFS) website was showing a dozen
or so separate grass fires f laring up across the island. Anx-
ious about our fate, I closed the laptop and drove up Cape
Willoughby Road to keep a lookout for lightning strikes
and smoke and passed a neighbour returning from the
same mission. Mercifully, the only fire on the Dudley
Peninsula, at the island’s eastern end, was quickly doused
by the Penneshaw fire crew.
However, further west a crisis was unfolding. The cool
change brought punchy southerly winds gusting to
80km/h. By late afternoon, fires were raging along heav-
ily timbered ridgelines and valleys that drop steeply to the
island’s north coast. As the Christmas Pageant trundled
through Kingscote beneath an eerie smoke-streaked sky,
the red CFS emergency warning zone was extended to
span 80km of the island’s northern hinterland.
This expanse includes some of the steepest and most
inaccessible terrain in the state, none more so than at
Western River. By nightfall the fires had descended onto
the homestead nestled at the base of the valley where
Caroline Taylor, a good friend, was home alone. With lit-
tle phone reception she turned to a Facebook group for
help: “Fire all around the house: inside garden. Hills both
sides ablaze. Smoke everywhere. Too dangerous for spot
watering but what do I do???” After two tense hours she
was courageously rescued, along with four backpackers from
the nearby cove, by local CFS Captain Michael Swaine.F
OR A SMALL community scattered across 4500sq.km,
Facebook became the indispensable lifeline for infor-
mation and news of friends during the following
weeks. The go-to page was The Islander, where Stan Gorton,
our local newspaper’s indefatigable editor, shared CFSKANGAROO ISLAND
Almost half of Kangaroo Island – 211,255ha, mostly in the
west – has been razed by bushfires this summer. Two people
died, 65 homes and hundreds of other buildings have been
destroyed. Among the endangered wildlife species further
imperilled are the KI glossy black-cockatoo and KI dunnart,
a small marsupial endemic to the island.Indicates burnt area