A personal, place based experience of the fires
January 8, 2020
Braidwood, the town in which I live, has been on a war footing. The enemy blazed away relentlessly – as is the nature of fire.
Smoke and ash from the front have covered every surface, every minute of every day for more than a month now. The air we’ve been breathing these past five weeks has been rated among the world’s worst. The light is thick and creepy during the day, after dark on bad nights the town appears enveloped in one of our high-country winter fogs, but it’s a hot summer night and that’s not fog.
Smoky Braidwood by night
Braidwood, the town in which I live, has been on a war footing. The enemy blazed away relentlessly – as is the nature of fire.
Smoke and ash from the front have covered every surface, every minute of every day for more than a month now. The air we’ve been breathing these past five weeks has been rated among the world’s worst. The light is thick and creepy during the day, after dark on bad nights the town appears enveloped in one of our high-country winter fogs, but it’s a hot summer night and that’s not fog.
A typical mosquito rig on trailer
The experience of the landscape around town is entirely changed. The dense Kunzea scrub that obscured the shape of the topography itself is gone, now we can see the rise and fall of the charred ground in a way we’ve never been able to before. Houses previously hidden in the bush are now in plain sight.
Rae (middle) the morning after fighting through the night to save the family property
A couple of nights after New Year I chatted with Jake and Ang whose Dog Leg Farm just out of town was overrun by fire and completely burned out. I feel oddly connected to their plight; it was from Jake and Ang I bought the house we now live in while they moved on to hand-make their farm from scratch; every one of its elements a personal labour of love. Since the fire razed everything they’d created, they’ve been back in town staying in a room at their daughter’s place. An effort to get them re-established on the farm is already well underway with friends working to get a shed habitable, so they can move back to continue what they started, albeit it in a new way.
The rebuild of Dog Leg Farm
This is personal resilience and community spirit writ large. And yet it’s something more. What’s happening here, and in countless communities across the broader regional landscape that’s been connected as Yuin country for millennia, speaks of people’s deepest connection to place. Even when the landscape we experience as place is destroyed or entirely changed by the forces of nature, we hang on.
When the tangible elements of place that make it familiar to us are obliterated, something intangible replaces them.
Most people find to their surprise that they can bear the painful loss of the homes they’ve built, acreage farmed, the gardens planted, art made and acquired, objects inherited, photographs taken, and documents recorded.
But their absence opens the space for an otherworldly experience – a moment to transcend the material and glimpse the lived experience innate to the Traditional Custodians of this landscape. It’s not things that sustain us, rather it’s the land and place, country, that holds our consequential knowledge, our relationships, our community, our stories and memories, the essence of our spirituality and the foundations of our art.
– Mark McClelland