There were faint hints of renewal; ancient
grass trees standing shoulder to shoulder...
with a spurt of green growth.
Across all the island’s firegrounds, the
remarkable post-fire resurgence of the local
yaccas, or grass trees – Xanthorrhoea semiplana
tateana – are striking emblems of recovery.Elsewhere, thousands of hectares of plantation forest were
burnt, vineyards wiped out and scores of beehives destroyed.
As if this wasn’t distressing enough, all through January
fires kept breaking control lines, surging with the island’s
mercurial winds. It was yet another hot, ominous, blustery
day on 9 January. By mid-afternoon fires had f lared around
Parndana and Vivonne Bay on the south coast. Then, near
sundown, the wind swung and raged across the island
from the south-west, driving multiple fire fronts eastwards.
Smoke and falling ash streamed east to Cape Willoughby.
By midnight Kingscote was under an emergency warning.
Frantic residents and evacuees, many gathered at the town
wharf, faced the unthinkable as the fire’s shocking spectral
glow loomed in the western sky.
Then, in the early hours of the morning, the rain came.
Not much, but enough to help subdue the f lames and calm
the mood. So many stories from that long, sleepless night- and all the other dirty nights and days the island had
endured this past summer.
No slick summary can properly give voice to the heart-
break and collective grief, the grit and big-hearted com-
munity courage of these weeks.
But if there’s a bottom line it’s that we’re still here and
we’ll come back from this.
I
SLANDERS ARE STUBBORNLY self-reliant folk. That’s
always been the way. It’s their knack for surviving
without much in the way of back-up from afar. But
this summer was different. So many mainland fireys
came to join the fight, then the army too, and ferry-loads
of mates and strangers with food and other gear, plus all
sorts of bods to help us put up fences and rescue the roos
and koalas.
In their own way the waves of goodwill and generosity
from around the world were overwhelming. Maybe it’s
because we’re an island and people feel for our isolation.
But perhaps it’s also something about how the place quietly
managed to juggle its farming with caring for nature and
looking after visitors.
Along with the island’s stirring wildness there has always
been a bit of outback makeshift spirit here that travellers
warmed to.
A couple of weeks after Flinders Chase was burnt out,
my wife, Dale, and I took a drive through the park. Over
the years it had become a big part of our lives, a place
chock-f u l l of d iscover ies, epic weather, w i ld l i fe encounter s
and deep-layered memories.
The initial shock as we passed through once mighty
stands of sugar gum, now lying charred and broken, was
almost too much to bear.
Dow n at Remarkable Rocks, one of the island ’s most
recognisable landmarks, the boardwalk was gone, the
tight weave of scrub incinerated. The heat of the blaze
had shattered the very granite itself at the base of the
rocks. Up top, animal scats were littered across the sur-
face from where roos, wallabies and birds had frantically
sought shelter among the monoliths as the inferno
engulfed the coast. Yet nearby there were signs of life:
scrubwrens chattering in the burnt-out mallee skeletons
with fresh tufts of red growth sprouting from their base.
On the way back from the coast we paused atop
Bunker Hill. A gusty breeze was blowing spumes of pow-
dery white ash across the road. As we gazed south, the
landscape was more like snow drifts on the Bogong High
Plains than the Flinders Chase we knew and loved.
But here too in the distance there were faint hints of
renewal; ancient grass trees standing shoulder to shoulder- iconic survivors giving the next miracle a nudge with a
spurt of green growth. AG
70 Australian Geographic