Mogo Wildlife Park zookeeper Sam Ion with Oni the giraffe. Ion was woken at 6am on New Year’s Eve by the news that the Currowan bushfire was heading for the zoo. “I knew I had to get there,” she says. Credit:James Brickwood

With bushfires bearing down on them, staff members at a NSW South Coast zoo had to choose whether to save themselves or stay and protect their animal charges. It was no contest.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The way Fran Campbell sees it, she had no choice about becoming a zookeeper. “For me, it was tigers,” she says, explaining the attraction of the job. “More than anything, I wanted to meet tigers.” Campbell, 40, is speaking over the raucous calls of ruffed lemurs at Mogo Wildlife Park, outside the village of Mogo on the NSW South Coast. “I actually came and did a zookeeper-for-a-day experience here many years ago,” she says. “And I pretty much just stayed.” The clincher was feeding Kinwah, a tiger cub being hand-reared because he had a dodgy hip. “I gave him a bottle and it was like, I can’t not do this now.” Campbell smiles. On December 31 last year, she was one of a small band of keepers who fought a raging bushfire bearing down on the wildlife park, which is home to more than 200 exotic animals, many of them members of endangered species. The battle to save the zoo made news around the world. When I visit a few weeks after the blaze, I bump into an Israeli TV crew near the giraffe paddock. Clive Brookbanks, Mogo’s operations manager, understands the interest in the story. “It would make a bloody good movie,” he says, adding that when the smoke first cleared, all he felt was dazed disbelief. “I sat there and sort of stared into the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out what we’d just gone through.” Campbell, too, was profoundly shaken by the way events unfolded. “It’s something that’s going to take me a while to get over,” she says. Campbell is normally a steady sort of person. Down to earth. Not easily spooked. But on the last day of 2019, Australia’s warmest and driest year on record, she awoke with a sense of foreboding. “I walked outside my house in the morning and I knew something was going to happen,” she says. “It was so hot. It was really eerie.” She pauses. “You knew it was coming.” Zookeeper William Coombs, pictured with Kai the rhino, had hoped that Mogo Zoo had “dodged the bullet” for the fire season. Credit:James Brickwood The Currowan fire, so-called because it started in Currowan State Forest, had been burning in southern NSW since late November. For all that time, it had remained a safe distance from the zoo. William Coombs, a keeper whose charges include zebras, rhinos and ostriches, tells me his concern about the blaze had eased slightly as the weeks passed. “The fire just lingers in the back of your mind,” Coombs says. “You think you might just have dodged the bullet for this fire season.” Campbell, too, was cautiously optimistic. When she went to Sydney to spend Christmas with relatives, she told them the fire was to the north of the Kings Highway, which links Canberra to Batemans Bay, 10 kilometres north of Mogo: “I said, ‘We’re all good unless it jumps the highway.’ ”


Within days, the flames had done just that. Before going to sleep on December 30, keeper Sam Ion had checked the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Fires Near Me app and been reassured that the front was still about 20 kilometres to the north-west. “I was like, ‘Oh, we’ll be fine,’ ” she remembers. But the next morning she was woken soon after 6am by a call from Althea Guinsberg, Mogo’s curator of primates, telling her the fire was heading for the zoo. Ion leapt out of bed. “I knew I had to get there,” she says. "We’re all good unless it jumps the highway." Within days, the flames had done just that. Guinsberg and Coombs, who are partners, live at Broulee, a coastal town just south of Mogo. The RFS had sent residents a text message advising them to evacuate, so the couple bundled a few valued possessions into their car before setting off for the zoo. “Photo albums,” says Coombs. “Passports. Our dog. And the iron. I threw in the iron for some reason and I haven’t heard the end of it from my colleagues.” Sophie Miller, Mogo’s senior primates keeper, who also lives in Broulee, had her father staying with her. She asked him to drop her at the zoo, then take a suitcase and her dog to the waterfront, where people were congregating. Like Coombs and Guinsberg, Miller didn’t know when she closed the door behind her whether her house would be standing when she returned. Mogo, which is inland, received an evacuation order at 6.02am. “Leave now to the east towards the beach and shelter in place,” said the message that pinged on to zoo director Chad Staples’ phone. For Staples, who lives in one of two houses within the wildlife park, this was the signal to swing into action. Early in the summer, it had been decided that evacuating the animals was not feasible. “So the plan was to make this a place we could defend,” he says. “Our preparations had started a good few weeks beforehand.” Staples reckons it says a lot about the keepers that they dashed to the zoo rather than guarding their threatened homes. “They chose this place over their own property,” he says. While others were fleeing danger, his staff were driving towards it: “They get those notifications to head to the beach? They head to the zoo.” Coombs had to argue his way past a roadblock to get there. “I explained to the policeman that I was part of Mogo Zoo’s fire plan,” he says. “Sounded good.” While others were fleeing danger, staff were driving towards it: “They get those notifications to head to the beach? They head to the zoo." The zoo had two 120,000-litre concrete water tanks, both of them full. Two utes had been rigged up as firefighting vehicles: each carried a 1000-litre tank and a water pump. Hoses and buckets were at the ready. Staples knew that if a blaze really took hold on the 26-hectare property, dedicated fire trucks and experienced firefighters would be required. “We’d been in conversation with the Rural Fire Service,” he says. “We told them there would be people on site, animals on site. And we were assured there would be resources if we needed them. We thought, ‘All right, we are going to be equipped to some degree but if it gets beyond us, we can make a call.’ ”


Lion cub Phoenix, held by Mogo Zoo director Chad Staples, who waited until after the fire to name him. Credit:James Brickwood By about 7.30am, 10 keepers and four members of the zoo’s maintenance and gardening crew had turned up to help. With Staples and operations manager Clive Brookbanks, who lives in the second house in the grounds, that made 16 people (about half the total staff). Their first task was to hose down roofs, wooden buildings, dry vegetation and anything else that looked combustible, even if spraying water around felt futile because it evaporated almost instantly. There was an ominous stillness in the air. The fire was expected to come from the north, so the next step was to move 17 primates – eight marmosets, six tamarins and three capuchins – from enclosures near the boundary fence on that side. Staples says catching the monkeys wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. Moving a group of red pandas was trickier – “because they’re a much bigger animal, and awesome at climbing trees”. Once coaxed out of the branches, the red pandas were placed in pet packs, like the monkeys, and given temporary accommodation in Staples’ kitchen. Elsewhere in the zoo, Sam Ion was serving a group of small primates a hearty breakfast of mixed vegetables and boiled eggs. “We wanted to try to make it as normal as possible for them,” says Ion, who noticed some in the troop were uncharacteristically subdued. “The squirrel monkeys, for example, are one of the cheekier of the primate species – good pickpockets and that sort of thing. But they were a bit reserved. A bit quieter.” Larger animals also sensed trouble. The orang-utans, who usually love being outside, went into their dens and wrapped themselves in their blankets. “And our gorillas were really quiet,” says primates curator Althea Guinsberg. “They knew something was happening.” “When I woke up at home I knew it was going to be a bad day, so the big cats would have known as well.” Big-cat keeper Fran Campbell. As big-cat keeper, Fran Campbell looks after lions, tigers, a snow leopard and a cheetah. “You can’t put them in pet packs,” she points out. “For all my guys, the safest place was their night dens, where they’ve got their straw-covered beds and their food and water.” Of course, being moved into the dens in the morning was a break with routine. “But the rapport and trust that you’ve built up with them means that when it comes to situations like this, they go, ‘Okay, I’m going to do what you want me to do.’ ” Campbell kept her voice casual and her movements unhurried, as if it were just another day. But she didn’t think for a moment that the cats were fooled. “When I woke up at home I knew it was going to be a bad day, so these guys would have known as well,” she says. Eight days earlier, on December 23, the zoo had welcomed the birth of a lion cub. The mother, five-year-old Chitwah, was a favourite of Campbell. As the keeper tucked the pair into a den of their own, she hoped against hope that they were out of harm’s way.


The cub wasn’t the only recent arrival at Mogo. Chad Staples had been the director for barely a month, since the zoo’s founder, Sally Padey, sold it to Elanor Investors Group, a publicly listed company that also owns Featherdale Wildlife Park in western Sydney. Staples had worked at Featherdale for more than 20 years, starting as an entry-level keeper and ending up in charge. Running both zoos meant commuting between the two, which hadn’t left much time for befriending the Mogo staff. Kinwah the tiger, now 11, was raised by operations manager Clive Brookbanks. “I’m his world,” Brookbanks says. “And he’s mine.” Credit:James Brickwood “I didn’t know him from a bar of soap,” says Clive Brookbanks, who as a longtime employee was heartened when Staples asked him to direct the firefighting effort. “I knew this place,” Brookbanks says. “I knew what I was doing. And he allowed me to do what I needed to do. Didn’t jump in. Didn’t try to take over. To me, that’s a sign of a really good boss.” Brookbanks was aware that the task he had been given would involve more than telling people where to go and what to do. “The important thing was to keep everybody calm and focused. Early in the day, one of our keepers said she was scared. I said, ‘Look, we’ll work through whatever we have to work through. I’ll make sure you’re safe and the animals are safe. We’ll work as a team.’ And that’s exactly what we did.” Knowing the fire was approaching was unnerving, like waiting for an enemy army to invade. “We knew where the fire front was,” says Sam Ion. “You could see the glow, and orange rolling smoke.” Says Brookbanks: “There was this rumbling sound you could hear in the distance. An incredible sound, like waves on a really rough sea.” Brookbanks remembers a NSW State Emergency Service vehicle zipping through the zoo’s front gate and the driver yelling out the window. “He said, ‘Evacuate! You’ve got 10 minutes.’ But obviously there was no way we as a team would evacuate. It was about the animals.” When the fire got close, the sky darkened and the wind whipped up. Suddenly the air was full of projectiles. Fran Campbell knew the term “ember attack” but says she hadn’t fully understood what it meant. “It’s not like a little leaf on fire that just floats down. I’d describe it as meteors flying from the sky. It’s like fireballs coming in.” Brookbanks was shocked. “The size of the things that were dropping on us!” he says. “Some of them were chunks of wood. The power and energy in this fire – it was just phenomenal.” “Never before in my life have I felt like I might not make it through the day.” Singaporean keeper Rachel Yeo, who had started working at Mogo Zoo earlier in December. Sophie Miller, stationed at the front of the zoo, watched in awe as a wall of flame appeared on top of a hill just over the road, about 20 metres from the entrance. For a moment, she admits, her resolve wavered: “When you see it coming over the hill, that’s when you do kind of go, 'Mmmmm'.” William Coombs was similarly daunted: “You look at that fire and you look at the ute carrying 1000 litres of water and you think, ‘No chance, buddy.’ ” The heat is what Sam Ion can’t forget. “As soon as the fire front crossed the road, the wind got so hot that you couldn’t even look in the direction it was coming from,” she says. “Your face felt like it was going to melt off.”


Zoo keeper Rachel Yeo with squirrel monkeys. “It felt like something out of a nightmare,” she says of her experience fighting the fire. Credit:James Brickwood Spot fires sprang up around the edges of the zoo. Fran Campbell stood in the buffalo paddock and marvelled at the scene: “There were red embers going everywhere. There were grass fires everywhere.” And black. It was as black as midnight. “You’ve got bats flying around you in the middle of the day,” Campbell says. “At one stage, we had bats and black cockatoos flying together because they’d been pushed out of their habitat. Just weird.” Singaporean keeper Rachel Yeo, who had started working at Mogo earlier in December, remembers being so frightened her knees shook. “It felt like something out of a nightmare,” she says. “Especially when the fire surrounded the zoo. Never before in my life have I felt like I might not make it through the day.” The wind from the fire front was so hot, “your face felt like it was going to melt off”, says Sam Ion. Credit:Chad Staples That possibility flashed through other minds, too. “We were fighting on all fronts, on all angles,” says Chad Staples, who stayed outwardly positive but by the middle of the day was beginning to suspect the fire would overwhelm them. “You sort of think, ‘Far out, it’s everywhere.’ I’m sure there were moments when everyone thought, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ ” Althea Guinsberg, for one, feared the battle was lost. “You’re dealing with a force that’s a lot bigger than you are,” she says. “I thought, ‘When do we give up? When do we say we can’t do this?’ But you don’t express that doubt to anyone. You’ve got to be like, ‘No, we can do it.’ ” As Staples recalls, it was about noon when he called triple zero and asked that a fire truck be dispatched to the zoo. None came. He now knows the RFS had no trucks to spare: its firefighters were fully occupied trying to save houses in Mogo and combatting other catastrophic blazes in the region. But at the time, the lack of response was bewildering. Surely they deserved assistance? “You’re feeling a little bit angry,” says Guinsberg. “Abandoned.” Early in the piece, the zoo had lost power, internet connection and phone reception (Staples made the emergency call when he fleetingly picked up a weak signal in one corner of the zoo). The keepers had no way of contacting their families or getting news from the outside world. The Bureau of Meteorology had predicted that the wind would change direction during the afternoon: cool air would blow in from the south, acting as a brake on the fires. Staples thought this could be the lifeline the zoo needed, but without access to the bureau’s website, all he could do was hope the change was coming. “You don’t know whether the southerly is 10 minutes away or three hours away,” he says.

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