Read an extract from Currowan by Bronwyn Adcock

by |October 14, 2021
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The Currowan fire – ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest and growing to engulf the New South Wales South Coast – was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia’s Black Summer of 2019. It burnt for seventy-four days, consuming nearly 5000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. In Currowan, journalist Bronwyn Adcock tells her story and those of many others – what they saw, thought and felt as they battled a blaze of never-before-seen intensity.

Today, we’re featuring an extract from Currowan about the impact of the fire on rural communities on NSW’s south coast. Read on …


Bronwyn Adcock

Bronwyn Adcock

Chapter 7: The Shadow Of Dread Expectancy

Sarah and Phil Martin keep the doors of the pub unlocked in the days after the fire. It becomes a magnet, drawing in from the ruin not just regulars, but locals Sarah has never seen before. Some need a place to sleep; others, food and water. But mostly ‘people just wanted to be with one another’, she says.

All roads out of town are still impassable, but convoys of supplies are starting to arrive. One of the first is a donation of children’s toys. At first, she thinks to send them back; other than her own, there are no children in Nerriga. Surely there is another community who needs them more? But then she considers who is around her: ‘an awful lot of grandparents who’d lost everything’, including Christmas presents for their grandchildren.

On Christmas Day, the pub is full, beer flowing once again. Sarah digs out paper bonbons for the tables and hangs tinsel on the walls. Everyone knows the danger hasn’t passed – fire is still active all around the village and more homes have been lost. As publican, Sarah is ministering both to those grief-stricken by the loss of their home and those living in the fear that they are ‘still waiting to burn’. Mostly, though, the people of Nerriga are just feeling fortunate to be celebrating this Christmas at all. Later in the afternoon, a group of locals take to the deserted road outside the pub and dance the Macarena.

On the other side of the escarpment, Christmas Day celebrations are largely shelved for Brendan Cowled, whose property is now surrounded by fire. He’s been sleeping in shifts, with friends and more family rotating in to help. The spot fire he tried in vain to get water-bombed on Thursday, 19 December has continued to grow; it made a strike for the farm a few days ago. They saved the house and most of the fencing, but his father-in-law had only narrowly escaped when fire rushed his vehicle, and everyone is rattled. The Currowan fire is moving across the top of the escarpment behind him, passing through an old army artillery training area, with thunderous rumbles coming every ten minutes as it ignites unexploded ordnance. ‘Awe-inspiring,’ says Brendan – but anxiety-inducing.

Further south, in Bawley Point, I’ve reluctantly accepted this will be a Christmas largely absent of the usual traditions. My box of decorations was destroyed in our shipping container, and sourcing new ones – or a tree or a ham, let alone soaking fruit for a cake – seems too hard. The Currowan fire has been forcing constant road closures between Sydney and Canberra, meaning many extended family events are cancelled, so a large group of our friends gather at a beachside reserve for an orphan’s Christmas. The organiser insists there should be no formality: just bring lots of food and eat what you want, when you want.

It was overcast, and we sit on the beach under low grey clouds, watching the waves deliver large swirls of burnt leaves onto the sand, pulling prawns apart with our fingers. The water is stained ash grey. An enormous tribe of children and dogs run off largely unsupervised into the bush, returning only to eat multiple serves of dessert for lunch. My kids declare it their best Christmas ever.

Around the state, 1700 RFS volunteers are spending their Christmas on fire duty. Justin Parr is one of them – just squeezing in time for a sausage sandwich for dinner. People everywhere are exhausted. By now, the Gospers Mountain fire in the Blue Mountains has grown so large it has earned the unenviable distinction of becoming the biggest forest fire from a single ignition point in Australian history. A local man who’s been living with it for nearly a month and witnessed the terrifying sight of flames climbing up a 200-metre sheer cliff describes to a journalist a sentiment common across so many communities:

Growing up here, everyone is used to the threat of bushfires. We’re used to sirens going off. But when it’s on your doorstep and it’s been going on for weeks, you get tired. The NSW RFS are tired and exhausted. It’s been unrelenting for a month, there’s been no break and they’re not paid. They need more legs. A human body can only go so far.

On Boxing Day, on the other side of the world in a little village in the Andalucia region of southern Spain, an Australian fire scientist is sitting down at his computer to write a letter to the man in charge of combatting the fire emergency engulfing New South Wales: RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.

Nick Gellie specialises in fire reconstruction – like a pathologist, he carries out post-mortems, but on fire. Over the past fifteen years, working as a private consultant, he’s completed more than 100 of these reconstructions, including after the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, before moving to Spain in 2017 in search of a life reset.

Since the beginning of December he’s been spending every night in front of his computer, back on southern hemisphere time, using any data at his disposal – satellite images, weather observations, vegetation maps – to unpick what’s been happening back home. He’s concluded that the RFS is getting too many things wrong – missing opportunities to contain fires, using the wrong tactics – and wants to offer his advice on how to change course before it gets worse. Even given his level of experience, trying to school the commissioner of the RFS in fire strategy is bold. But watching fires continually consume the landscapes to which he feels a deep connection is leading him to despair.

In this letter, he tells Fitzsimmons that the firefighting community needs to accept that the rules of engagement have changed; to ‘recognise that we are working in a climate-change world and adapt our firefighting policies and practices accordingly’. He can see a pattern forming in which many fires are only being fought once they emerge from the forests and threaten properties. He tells Fitzsimmons a better strategy would be to use the days of mild weather to identify these problem spots in remote areas and go in hard – target the fire when it’s ‘at its weakest point’ with aerial water-bombing so as to ‘minimise the size of a fire and the width of head fire . . . before a blow-up day’. He tells Fitzsimmons an example ‘of how not to do it’ is what’s just happened in Nerriga.

Gellie has seen a satellite image of the area around Nerriga taken on 21 December, just hours before the arrival of the southerly change. It shows an enormous 23-kilometre fire front, burning back deeply into the ranges. Justin Parr’s suspicion that there must have been more fire lurking in the remote gorges and ranges south of the village than he realised was correct. For Gellie, this large body of fire provides a perfect explanation for why a pyrocumulonimbus occurred. A large fire like this, consuming ‘bone-dry fuels’, is ripe for such an event. Assuming the RFS knew it was there – which he does – he thinks that instead of ignoring it until it had formed into an unstoppable firestorm about to hit a village the weekend before Christmas, the RFS could have attacked it days earlier, mitigating its severity.

Gellie is also concerned about what he considers an overreliance on large-scale back-burning. He knows that lighting up long lines of back-burns drains resources, chewing up hours of time that could be spent on other tasks. But he is mostly worried about the way the perilously dry landscape is reacting to fire – making what has long been a standard practice inherently riskier. ‘I am also critical about some of the failed back-burning strategies that caused new fires well away from the main fire fronts,’ he writes to Fitzsimmons.

The RFS has already publicly acknowledged that one of the back-burns lit this season, on the Gospers Mountain fire, escaped and destroyed more than twenty homes in the Blue Mountains. But from what Nick Gellie has seen, there have been many more escapes: a multitude of smaller ones that served to make fires bigger than they needed to be, but also one with disastrous consequences. Gellie believes a devastating fire run into the village of Balmoral, in the Southern Highlands, in mid-December, was the direct result of a back-burn. From afar, Gellie could see that this burn was lit on the eve of forecast temperatures of 40-plus degrees and strong winds, and escaped under these conditions the next day. (An RFS internal inquiry, held after the fire season, will confirm this.) This Balmoral fire destroyed more than twenty homes.

Gellie doesn’t advocate abandoning back-burning, just reconsidering it in certain circumstances, like ‘the day or hours before a hot and dry and windy wind change which spread the fire’.

As he finalises his letter, Gellie is not hopeful he’ll be listened to. He thinks the state already failed to heed the most fundamental of warnings in the lead-up to the fire season. ‘Because of the severe drought across New South Wales, the State should have been prepared for very large areas burnt this fire season,’ he writes. Even before the climate started changing, Australia’s largest fires have almost always come after periods of prolonged drought. ‘This is not unprecedented,’ he writes, ‘going back in time 1.3 million ha were burnt in Victoria in 1938–39.’

Because Australia has always been a fire-prone country, there are many lessons in the past. Starting in 1937, a severe drought gripped eastern Australia. Two years later, the summer of 1938, a ferocious fire season launched along the eastern seaboard.

By the second week of January 1939, the state of Victoria was weary after more than six weeks of unrelenting bushfires. With more than 75 per cent of the state affected by fire, and nearly all the forests of the Great Dividing Range alight, it was hard to imagine how things could get worse.

But on 13 January 1939 – a day that would become known as Black Friday – extreme heat and wind fuelled several major fire runs. In a single day, six villages were destroyed and thirty-six people killed. The judge appointed to lead the royal commission into Black Friday, Leonard Stretton, wrote in his report:

Dry heat and hot, dry winds worked upon a land already dry, to suck from it the last, least drop of moisture. Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.

On 27 December 2019, the RFS starts warning New South Wales to brace for an exceptionally dangerous fire day on New Year’s Eve. Temperatures, already above 30 degrees in most places, are going to climb every day until 31 December, when they will soar above 40 degrees.

This dangerous day is coming as more than eighty fires still burn across New South Wales, with serious blazes also underway in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. On the South Coast, Mark Williams, incident controller for the Currowan fire, has just four days to prepare for this new threat.

The scale of what he’s facing is immense. The Currowan fire is still travelling through the forests that lie parallel to the coast, with the entire area of the fireground more than 2700 square kilometres. If you were to follow the Princes Highway along the fire’s north–south axis, from near Batemans Bay in the south all the way north to Nowra, you would travel a distance of nearly 120 kilometres.

The hot and dry weather that’s dogged Williams all season is now turning its screws. Since Christmas, he’s noticed a rapid acceleration in dieback – trees and plants dying where they stand. It’s both a sign that the soil is too dry to sustain life and additional tinder in the landscape. Even the wind is behaving differently. The nor’easter – which usually blows in off the ocean, bringing moisture and humidity – seems to be coming in dry.

He also has a new fire. A week before Christmas, a blaze broke out in bushland just south of Nowra. The Comberton fire is minuscule compared to the Currowan – just a few dozen square kilometres – but it’s hovering close to urban areas and burning through a swampy region layered with peat, which, once alight, can burn underground for weeks. This fire’s level of danger is disproportionate to its size, and so it is sucking up his scarce resources, consistently demanding water-bombers, heavy machinery and crews.

While the head of the Currowan fire is now hovering near Nowra, it’s persistently burning in many places within its guts, including areas not far from our property, where landowners have now been living with it for a month. Some of Williams’ divisional commanders, who are ‘getting flogged’ on the northern push of the fire, grumble to him about all the resources still down that way; he has to remind them that ‘no one is standing around with their thumb up their bum’. Everyone is flat out.

A new complication is that huge numbers of tourists are streaming into the fire zone. It’s peak holiday season along the South Coast, when the population swells threefold or more. Numbers seem slightly down this year, but they’re high enough to be concerning.

It’s a predicament for the authorities. Police working from the emergency operations centre housed inside the RFS fire control centre in Nowra can see that the influx of visitors is adding to the burden on emergency services. But the local economy relies on tourism. For many small businesses, summer trade is the only way they make it through the winter. The operations centre opts for a message of gentle deterrence, telling prospective visitors, ‘If you don’t need to be here, then we are encouraging you to reconsider your travel plan.’

Most won’t be budged from long-planned holidays. Some call ahead to ask their caravan park or Airbnb host, How smoky it is down there? Sydney is shocking! Mostly they’re told, Everything is fine. Please come.

Williams is again treading the floorboards at community meetings, focusing on the villages and urban sprawl around Nowra. It’s all happening fast. Just half an hour before he’s due to speak at the Bomaderry Bowling Club in Nowra, the Comberton fire jumps containment lines. He’s only just finished redirecting water-bombers when he walks out in front of the crowd.

Williams is speaking to an audience of the largely uninitiated – people who live in neat suburban blocks and have never had to consider the prospect of a wildfire. One elderly man asks, ‘Should I clean out my gutters before I put water in?’ A woman speaks with a hint of complaint: ‘How long are we going to be in limbo? I’ve got horses.’

Williams is patient yet blunt, warning that if the forecast conditions eventuate on New Year’s Eve, ‘We will not be in a situation where we can stand firefighters in front of the flames and expect them to pull this thing up. We are getting additional assistance in . . . but there cannot be, and there will not be, a fire appliance for every resident.’ In other words, don’t expect a fire truck.

As the year draws to a close, I am thinking, Good riddance. December 2019 has been a hideous month.

Later, though, I will come to judge this period less harshly. Yes, it was gruelling, sad, disruptive and terrifying, but even amid all this there was a tenuous sense of order to be found; a path through to normality, even if dimly lit. I will only come to this view once I am forced to compare it with what comes next. When this long-running disaster that is only tenuously being held in check descends into chaos.

—This is an extract from Currowan by Bronwyn Adcock, published by Black Inc.

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Currowanby Bronwyn Adcock

Currowan

A story of a fire and a community during Australia's worst summer

by Bronwyn Adcock

Currowan is the gripping account of the massive fire that engulfed the south coast of New South Wales in 2019-20. Ignited by a lightning strike near the Currowan state forest and burning for seventy-four days across nearly 500,000 hectares, it was among the largest and most ferocious infernos of Australia's Black Summer.

Journalist Bronwyn Adcock fled the fire with her children. Her husband, fighting at the front, rang with a plea for help before his phone went dead, leaving her to fear - will he make it...

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