One of the things I most wanted to understand, however, was what had driven those remaining in Mallacoota to stay there, and how it felt to watch their paradise turn to ash. So I headed east, toward the firegrounds, and eventually boarded a military flight to the fishing village so mythologized and revered in my family’s collective memory.

In Mallacoota, I found miles of charred bush and flattened homes, but a resilient community, determined to rebuild as soon as possible. Our photographer, Asanka Brendon Ratnayake, and I stayed in one of a number of log cabins that had miraculously been spared by the fire — the “luckiest log cabins,” as one local described them. It was surrounded by scorched gumtrees.

Despite the devastation, there was a kind of magic: Inside the local pub, which was running on a generator, people drank cold beer and sang along to Don McLean (“This will be the day that I die…”). The burden they were carrying was revealed only in snippets; people became teary describing the fear they’d felt on New Year’s Eve, as they fought with buckets of water and surgical masks to protect their properties, and the sounds of the gas bottles wailing as they exploded.

At 8:30 a.m. on the morning of New Year’s Eve, Debbie Preston, who runs the local caravan park, said she “thought she was gone,” and texted a friend an expletive.

At 9:30 a.m., she texted again: “Goodbye.”

It was surreal to hear these stories in a beach town like so many others along the coast, where summer after summer I have taken my own vacations. The scale of the calamity created a cognitive dissonance: In many moments during the two straight weeks I spent on the road reporting, I would forget that I was in Australia.

I don’t believe I was alone in feeling this way.

Across the country, people who grew up here are grappling with seeing it transformed; with experiencing summer in an oppressive and polluting smog that seeps into everything; asking themselves if this is what this time of year is going to be like from now on, if we are experiencing the apocalypse.

As a reporter, I ask myself and my sources the same questions, and the answers are complex. One of the most frightening things about climate change is that we cannot predict exactly what will happen, and that at some point, we may tip into a cascading series of devastating events that we cannot reverse.