The rains have come but let's hope they don't wash away the memories of this terrible summer. They haven't for the animals – not yet. Up at our bush block, the kangaroos crowd around the few remaining structures. They are thin and bedraggled by rain.

The little ones, in particular, don't run away. There's nowhere else to go, just an endless carpet of black ash, stretching for many kilometres in all directions. One tiny fellow looks up into my camera as if to say, "What am I meant to do now?"

The Green Wattle Creek fire tore through this country, reducing over a quarter of a million hectares of startlingly beautiful bush to a blackened wasteland. The only remaining feed lies in the few metres around each building. In saving each shed or house, the RFS also saved a narrow apron of drought-weary grass.

It's this the kangaroos are relying on, and why they're clustered close around each isolated building in a way I've never seen before. They work away at what's left of the chewed-down grass. Sometimes there's a lump of sweet potato left out by the locals.

Our back deck is heavy with kangaroo scats, the result, I'm guessing, of the night they sheltered close to the house as the fire pushed in from all sides. Below that deck, there's now a wombat in residence – not the best news for the foundations, but, as part of the species who helped cause all this, who am I to question his choice of evacuation centre?