Autobiographical essay 4

Black summer

Travel broadens the mind but it can also break our hearts. It was early December in 2019 when my wife Annie and I embarked on a camping trip in nature. We drove east from our home in central Victoria to Corryong, over Dead Horse Pass, past Thredbo and down onto the Monaro. Looking back we could see a quartet of snow patches hugging the eastern face of the Snowy Mountains. The summer sky was the same cloudless, hard blue as it had been for months, and the drifts would be gone by New Year.

Annie and I cruised past hillside after slope after valley of grey, bare paddocks cut by crumbling erosion gullies flecked with emaciated flocks of the Merino the plateau was famed for. The sheepscape and the odd fenced patch of unstocked green grass pointed to twin culprits for the agonised state of the land: drought and overgrazing. Everywhere we looked the Monaro’s scatter of signature old Snowgums were in various stages of decline. The least unhealthy ones were in those green paddocks or up on the granite rises. East of Dalgety we drove under a squad of behemoth wind turbines whirring on a ridge. Monuments to hope. Over Mount Darragh we dropped off the tablelands past tall, wet sclerophyll forests lining the highway. Ingeniously named ‘South East Forests National Park’, it’s the only sizeable unlogged block left of what was until 1973 the Wallagaraugh Wilderness before the NSW state government handed over most of it to the woodchip industry.

We camped at once-lovely Bittangabee Bay in Beowa (then called Ben Boyd) National Park. Annie had been here one summer back in the 1980s. What she remembered was not what we saw. Other campers who had been coming for thirty years said they had never seen it like this before. An Eastern Grey mother, bleary-eyed, open-mouthed, panting from heat and thirst ignored her distressed Joey bleating nearby. On our first night she came begging and drank our dishwater. We put out a bowl of clean water for them and any other creatures who needed it from then on. Midnight I was woken by the noise of crashing dishes: a couple of Brushtails and a Bandicoot had broken into the tent. When I unzipped the flap and whispered shoo, the Bandicoot cowered just like the blithering character in The Magic Pudding. Starvation.

The verge of legally protected foreshore where we lodged could not be more different than its landward back: a frontier of clear-cut destruction, a bulldozed mangle of chain-sawed, part-cut, log-splintered churned-up ground edged by a limp lineup of broken-branched, mature yellow stringybark and silvertop ash awaiting the mercy of drought, baking sun and windthrow. The broad, well-cambered corporate bitumen access road to the Eden export woodchip mill was better engineered than the public Princes highway it led to. The angry mess of clear-fell coupes, the road and its stream of trucks loaded with metre-girthed, centuries-old corpses careening to port bespoke not ‘industry’ or even indifference, but visceral hatred. Of country.

It was in the waters of Two Fold Bay where Eden and its chip mill now stand that the local Yuin people developed a tradition of sharing the carcasses of Baleen Whales with the Orcas who herded them into the bay. It was a symbiotic relationship between species that ended abruptly when commercial whalers began attacking Orcas to stop them taking bites from their hauls. The Yuin, the Orcas and the whales have all been decimated since.

Crossing back into Victoria we considered turning off to beautiful Mallacoota but the forest looked so dreadful, so dry, we knew it was ready to go up and didn’t want to be trapped. The scale of fires to the north in Lamington, the Blue Mountains and the Shoalhaven was already unprecedented. We made a side trip to visit an acquaintance in Goongerah: logging trucks eradicating the last of East Gippsland old growth hogged the road. Crossing the Snowy I was reminded it is now a trickle compared to the seasonal torrent it was back in Banjo Patterson’s day. The engineering marvel that diverted Snowy waters inland to drive hydro turbines and supplement irrigators, has robbed the country and future generations of something just as precious as cash crops, jobs and electricity.

Safely home a fortnight later, on the closing days of the year, what we feared came to pass. Over the next month, most of the country we had passed through on both sides of the border and more was incinerated. That ‘black summer’ across the country a hundred and eighteen thousand square kilometres went up in flames. Dozens of people and billions of nonhumans perished. Hundreds of species of animals and plants and numerous ecosystems were extinguished forever. That the conditions that led to it were indicative of anthropogenic global warming exacerbated by reckless land management was inarguable. Then the pandemic came.