Everything was chaos, but at least he wasn’t being hunted by a lion. Chad Staples comforted himself with that thought as he crammed pandas, marmosets and tamarins into his kitchen until his counters overflowed with animals. Outside his home, giraffes, rhinoceroses, zebras and ostriches fended for themselves in flaming paddocks. Tigers, gorillas, orangutans and lions paced in enclosures surrounded by electric fences, while the power teetered on the verge of cutting out altogether.

Everything was on fire. It was the last morning of 2019 but for the 300 residents of Mogo, a tiny town on Australia’s south-east coast, it could have been midnight already. At this time, on this day, the town should have been swarming with tourists, enjoying their summer holiday, stocking up on food and drink for the evening’s celebrations. Instead, thick black smoke from nearby bushfires had cloaked the town, and its zoo of more than 250 animals, in a premature darkness.

The Currowan bushfire started with a lightning strike igniting the tinder-dry Currowan State Forest – 20 kilometres inland and north from Mogo – some time in late November. For weeks, the bushfire harassed the necklace of small coastal villages that hugs several hundred kilometres of stunning Australian coastline.


The fire intensified when hot, dry and windy conditions favoured it, before slinking back to smoulder in the dense coastal forests when the temperatures dropped, humidity rose and winds calmed. The blaze was simply too big to put out; all firefighters could do was defend lives and properties when it flared up, and hope like hell for rain.

December 31 was always going to be bad; catastrophically so, according to fire authorities. But no one had any idea quite how bad things would get. “No one would have expected it to be like New Year’s Eve,” says Staples. “It was just horrendous.” Mogo Wildlife Park, which Staples is director of, was better prepared than most.

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When Staples received the automated warning message from the state fire authority on his mobile phone at 6am, telling him to evacuate to the beach from his house on the zoo grounds, he stayed. Then to his surprise – and relief – employees started turning up. “These animals are family,” he says. “Of course it makes complete sense that everybody came, but it still amazes you. You couldn’t pick another business where anyone would come and defend it.”

All morning, the sky over Mogo was yellow with smoke. Staples’ team of 15 people – who would normally be going about their daily business of feeding and tending to animals, chatting to visitors or working behind the scenes – spent the first few hours frantically wetting everything down to reduce the chance of a stray ember triggering a new fire. Fires spread either through direct flame, radiant heat igniting new material, or by embers being blown kilometres ahead of a fire front, and in these windy conditions, all three posed a huge threat. Zookeepers ushered animals into their night dens, where they’d be safer from the heat, noise and smoke, and – for the more fearsome ones – be unable to make a break for freedom when the electric fences inevitably lost power, as frequently happens during bushfires because of damaged power infrastructure.


A Mogo resident attempts to put out fires on his property on New Year's Eve 2019 James Brickwood/The Sydney Morning Herald/Getty Images

When the fire came it turned the sky first a dark orange, then a furious red. Dense smoke descended like a shroud. “In the thick of it, when we were fighting it, it was black here, like it was midnight,” Staples says. Spot fires broke out all over the zoo grounds; dry grass and foliage ignited by glowing embers. The crew divided into small groups, two Landcruisers already equipped with large water tanks for just this purpose charging here and there putting out fires. But the hoses couldn’t reach to the other side of the river that runs along the bottom of the park. There, zoo workers fought the fire the old fashioned way: sloshing buckets of water onto the flames or slapping at them with hessian sacks. The taller trees were left to burn.

“From about 11 till two or three o’clock, it was worst,” Staples says. “It just seemed like we were attacked from every angle and constantly.” To make matters worse, the team was completely cut off. The entire telecommunications network across the south coast region of New South Wales had gone offline some time mid-morning, leaving tens of thousands of residents and visitors with no method of communication or power. Without mobile signal, Staples and his team couldn’t access the Fires Near Me app which showed – with varying degrees of precision – where the fire front was. No firefighters were coming to help.

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Later that same afternoon, nearly 80 kilometres to the north of Mogo, in the coastal town of Ulladulla, music teacher and bass guitarist Matt Skinner was getting ready to play a New Year’s Eve gig with his band SoulTonic. But Skinner had a sinking feeling that his house was going to burn down.


Skinner lives in Conjola Park, a town home to around 340 people, nestled into the sloping bushland that skirts the edge of Lake Conjola; a coastal lake popular with boaters and recreational fishers. It’s a typical Australian coastal idyll; blue waters, white sandy beaches, dense low coastal forests lush with birds and wildlife. For weeks Skinner and the other residents of Conjola Park had lived with the threat of the Currowan fire hanging over their heads. Just one week earlier residents had been evacuated when it crept too close for comfort. That time, Skinner and his family packed as much as they could into their trailer and hung out in the nearby town for a few hours, but nothing happened. They returned home and got on with life.

On the morning of December 31, Skinner went surfing. As he got out of the water, his wife Elissa rang to say she had received a text message telling them to evacuate. “I said, ‘don’t worry about it, it’ll be the same as last week, we’ll be back in a couple of hours’,” Skinner recalls. He told her to pack her party clothes for the New Year’s Eve gig that night, and an overnight bag for the kids.

As he drove back towards home, he came to a roadblock. No one was allowed into Conjola Park. Elissa drove past him in the other direction on her way out, so they regrouped at Ulladulla, he got ready for his performance, and went on with the show; a mix of funk, soul and dance covers that at any other time would have guaranteed a heaving dance floor. Meanwhile, Australia was aflame. The newspapers, radio, television and social media were full of nothing else but fire.

The venue was a luxury resort called Bannisters, on the headland at Ulladulla, with a clear view back towards Lake Conjola and the houses around it. Everyone, including Skinner, could see the flames. I was doing a gig for New Year’s Eve, watching my suburb burn,” he says. “You’re trying to smile and get people enthusiastic about how good this is, but no one was in the mood to celebrate.

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“Watching devastation on that scale is scary anyway, but knowing that it’s my suburb and my friends, people I know; it was horrific.” Elsewhere in Conjola, some residents retreated to the lake shore. The long-running drought – more than two years of record-breaking low rainfall – meant the lake was unusually shallow. As the fire bore down, people along the lake’s edge hurriedly cleared a path through the coastal bush with chainsaws and drove their cars out into the lake, water lapping half way up the tyres. Alongside people in canoes, others just stood in the water next to parked motorbikes and quad bikes and watched as flames consumed the bush right down to the water’s edge, sending thick hot smoke across the lake.

The next few days were stuck in a hellish limbo, with residents unable to return to Conjola Park. Skinner and his wife shuttled back and forth between a friend’s house, where they had sought refuge, and the local evacuation centre, where so many of the local townsfolk gathered, desperate for updates and assistance. News came in whispers and rumours; not always reliable. A friend at the evacuation centre told Skinner and his wife that she thought their house was safe, then fifteen minutes later returned and said apologetically that she may have given them the wrong information. Only a handful of people were able to get into Conjola Park in those anguished few days. Journalists were among them, to the chagrin of many. Some residents first learned their properties were destroyed when they saw the charred remains on the news.

The Currowan fire burned for 74 days, across nearly half a million hectares – including vast swathes of the ancestral lands of the Yuin nation, the Aboriginal people of the New South Wales south coast – and destroyed 312 homes. It was just one of hundreds of bushfires that scorched Australia this bushfire season.

Currowan wasn’t even the biggest. That dubious honour goes to the Gosper’s Mountain fire, which burned more than 510,000 hectares of New South Wales – an area the size of Northumberland – over two-and-a-half months. Most of the incinerated land was World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains wilderness. There was also the Green Wattle Creek fire in New South Wales, the Kangaroo Island fire in South Australia, the Wingan River fire in Victoria, the Cobraball-Bungundarra fire in Queensland, and the Grose Valley fire, also in the Blue Mountains, which burned to within fifteen metres of my own house.

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Altogether this season, fire burned 7.7 million hectares in south-eastern Australia alone; an area slightly bigger than the Republic of Ireland. It has claimed 33 lives, including six firefighters, destroyed thousands of homes and buildings, and incinerated billions of native animals and livestock. It took down telecommunications, power, water, sewerage, cut main roads in two and left tens of thousands of people stranded. The smoke generated by bushfires choked Australia’s eastern cities and towns for weeks on end, triggering spikes in emergency department presentations for breathing problems. When Sydney’s air quality exceeded hazardous levels by a factor of ten, emergency departments saw a 25 per cent increase in respiratory presentations and a 30 per cent increase in ambulance call-outs.

The New South Wales south coast fires had a disproportionately large impact not just because of their size, but because of the huge numbers of visitors who had flocked to the area – despite the dire forecast – for their summer holidays.

Canberra residents Margaret Morris and her husband Peter were staying at their holiday house in South Rosedale, about eight kilometres from Mogo Zoo. They knew the fire was close on New Year’s Eve. But the Princes Highway – a major national route – was a reassuring barrier between their town and the flames, and besides, the fire was travelling in a different direction, away from their coastal enclave.

“That billowing, bright orange smoke was probably three hundred metres away from the house,” Morris recalls. That was the cue to activate their bushfire plan, which was that Margaret would escape down a narrow bush track to the beach, and Peter would stay at the house for a bit longer to defend it. “I was just focused in the moment of ‘don’t rush down the hill, don’t fall and break your hip, this is a really bad time to fall and break your hip’,” Morris says. She took bottled water, and Christmas cake; “the two staples of life,” she laughs.

Many other Rosedale residents had also sought refuge close to the water, including a young girl who was screaming continuously with the stress and trauma. “It was like that Dante’s Inferno kind of feeling,” Morris says. Thirty or so kilometres north of Rosedale, Veechi Stuart was at her holiday home in South Durras with her husband John. That area had already had a close call with the same Currowan fire a couple of weeks before, so Stuart thought they were probably safe to enjoy their summer holiday amid the pristine beach wilderness.

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A house in Mogo on fire on New Year's Eve 2019 James Brickwood/The Sydney Morning Herald/Getty Images

“We were sitting drinking gin and tonics on the back deck going ‘it’ll be fine, it’s all been a bit overstated’,” she says. Less than 48 hours later, they were clustered on Durras Beach along with the rest of the community, trying to see if the fire had crossed the highway, which was the last obstacle in its path before it hit the town.

Deck chairs were brought out, coolers of party food and drink that had been prepared for now-cancelled festivities were shared. “I think being in a group of people who all had a plan, it didn’t feel like we were about to die,” Stuart says.

Then, as forecast, the wind changed; a gusty southerly that heralded the arrival of a cold front. It turned the fire away from the houses in South Rosedale and instead directed its fury towards North Rosedale. For Morris and Stuart, the worst had passed.

But a couple of hundred kilometres north of them, Donna Andrews’ bushfire ordeal was just starting. The usually lush green hills of Bundanoon in the southern highlands, south of Sydney, had been brittle and dry for months. All it took was embers blowing from the Currowan fire to ignite a new fire in the huge Morton National Park, south of Bundanoon.

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On January 4 – a scorching day, with a temperature of 40.9 degrees Celsius forecast – residents were told the fire was likely to hit within a matter of days. Donna and her husband John decided to prepare the house; they cleaned out the gutters, blocked and filled them with water, swept up leaves, brought their pet chicken inside the house, and packed a few things into the car.

That evening, they could see the towering clouds of a fire thunderstorm – a huge weather system known as a pyrocumulonimbus – forming over the fire, bulging and growing even as they watched. “It was unsettling because it was so strange,” Andrews says. Burned leaves started falling from the sky, but they were cold. Then she got a phone call from a neighbour. “In a really terrifying voice she said ‘we're on fire, get out, get out!’”.

They grabbed their computers, keys, wallets and the chicken. John ran a short distance up the hill to turn off the gas bottle that supplied the house, “and then there were flames.” They jumped into their separate cars, drove down their street and onto the road that led to town. Flames licked at both sides of the road. Andrews put her foot down and they barrelled through it. On the other side, she made a phone call. “I actually rang my brother because I thought if there’s more flames someone needs to know where we are.” She remembers being aware of the sound of her own breathing.

They spent the next few days at a friend’s house, waiting for news. It came in a snapshot of footage from a news broadcast. Their house was gone, along with three others on the same street.

A resident of Mogo looks on their neighbours' destroyed homes on New Year's Eve 2019 James Brickwood/The Sydney Morning Herald/Getty Images

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Linda Carlson spent New Year’s Eve sheltering in her car at the marina in Bateman’s Bay on the south coast. She had travelled into the town earlier that day from her office in Mogo, where she is CEO of the Mogo Local Aboriginal Land Council – which covers the lands of the Monaro and Yuin people – to do some banking.

While she was in town, a scorching westerly wind blasted through the area with fire on its breath, and she was forced to retreat to the only safe place she could find. “I had to sit in my car; the heat that came with it was incredible.” She watched water-bombing helicopters and aircraft flying overhead, not knowing what had happened to her home or office, and unable to find out. “I thought the whole south coast was wiped out.” The sky turned black, then red. Smoke wreathed the town, and Carlson used the car’s air conditioning to keep her tiny shelter liveable.

She felt an immense loneliness and sadness, sitting there alone, watching her world burn. “The country and land mean so much to Aboriginal people, and it’s heartbreaking to see what’s there now,” she says. “A foot deep of ash in the forest. Will grass and things grow there again? Will the animals come back?”

The loss of wildlife is almost impossible to comprehend. Conservative estimates suggest more than one billion native animals have died in the infernos, and that doesn’t even include insects. The grief of Aboriginal people for the devastation is compounded by the impact the fires have had on potentially thousands of sacred sites around the country.

Indigenous Australians have long known the importance of using fire to care for the land – not just to prevent larger fires, but to nourish these unique ecosystems. European invasion two centuries ago interrupted that ancient practice, and it’s only recently that there has been renewed interest in indigenous fire management. In northern Australia, Indigenous rangers have been once again applying traditional fire management during the early dry season for more than two decades but southern Australia has been slower to catch on, despite the efforts of Indigenous people and fire experts to raise awareness of the importance of the practice. However there are signs of change, with voices like that of Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen being heard and heeded.

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But it’s too little, too late, says Carlson. “The government was to blame for mismanagement of our country,” she says. “They don’t recognise Aboriginal people’s right to care for their country.” The Queensland government has even extinguished native title rights over 1,385 hectares of the traditional lands of the Wangan and Jagalingou people to pave the way for a huge open-cut thermal coal mine in the Galilee Basin that is predicted to be among Australia’s largest thermal coal operations.

The Australian bush needs fire. It’s an essential part of the life cycle for so many plant species. But not fire like this, coming on the heels of one of the worst droughts in recorded history. “The combination of extreme drought and then fire may make the recovery more difficult than other times,” says Matthias Boer, a landscape ecologist and associate professor at the University of Western Sydney. The size of the fires is also significant; Boer and colleagues have calculated that around 21 per cent of the entire ‘temperate broadleaf and mixed forest’ of Australia has burned this season; ten times more than what has typically burned even in the most extreme fire seasons. “The scale of the fires can make recovery different, just because of the size of the areas that are burned,” he says.

The aftermath of the Currowan fire photographed on January 5, 2020 Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

The sound of koalas screaming is something Mary O’Malley will never forget, as she huddled with her husband Larry, their son and his friends in a boat moored on the lake at Mallacoota, on the coast of Victoria. It was New Year’s Eve, and the Wingan River fire had surrounded the small town. Some sought refuge on the beach. Others, like O’Malley, fled to the jetty where they watched – and listened to – the fire approaching. “We'd been hearing these explosions, and these shrieks,” she says. “I'd asked Larry, ‘what is that?’ and he said ‘I think it’s koalas in the trees. I think it’s koalas dying’.”

Koalas wouldn’t have stood a chance against any inferno. Already on the back-foot from habitat loss due to deforestation, there are now estimates that one-third of the koala population in the state of New South Wales alone has perished. Ecologists talk of tens of thousands of dead koalas.

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The residents of Mallacoota were cut off for weeks, after fire closed the road into the area. O’Malley and many others were eventually evacuated to Melbourne by the Australian Navy. Even though their house was safe, there was no water, power or telecommunications. They had to leave.

Then in early February, eastern Australia received a three-day drenching that broke thirty-year rainfall records and triggered floods up and down the coastline. It extinguished many of the fires, including the Currowan fire.

Driving through the south coast in mid-February, there are already signs of regrowth. Tree ferns have put out luminous green fronds like tiny fireworks. The trunks of eucalyptus trees are furry with epicormic growth, as the fire triggers buds beneath the bark. But the bush looks wrong. The outlines of the land can be seen through the burned matchsticks of tree trunks, like a recently shaved scalp just starting to regrow.

In the end, nearly 80 per cent of Australians – around 19 million people – were affected by bushfires. Nearly three million of those suffered direct impacts: their house or business was threatened, damaged or destroyed, or they had to evacuate. The rest were impacted by bushfire smoke, by concerns for family and friends closer to the threat, by having holiday plans disrupted, or by the general background fear that plagued the entire country for months on end.

Unfortunately, this bushfire season has shown that Australia is very much on the frontline of climate change among high-income countries. This summer has seen high temperature records smashed twice in one week, with the western Sydney suburb of Penrith briefly earning the title of the one of the hottest places on the planet, at 48.9 degrees Celsius. The economic impact of these fires – estimated to be well above the AU$4.4 billion (£2.2bn) cost of the 2009 Black Saturday fires – is now likely to be dwarfed by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

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The climate crisis will increase the duration of bushfire season, contribute to more frequent and more intense bushfires as higher temperatures and lower rainfall lead to drier fuel loads. One attribution study examining the connection between climate change and bushfires suggests that the fire weather contributors in 2019 – in particular, extreme heat – were at ‘exceptional’ levels, and this factor bears the fingerprint of human-induced climate change. The authors wrote that heat extremes are now more than twice as likely because of the long-term warming trend.

This may mean Australians need to reevaluate their desire to live in close proximity to a wilderness designed to burn even under normal climatic conditions. Perhaps this bushfire season will be the catalyst for political, social and economic change in Australia. But those who were caught up in it are now just trying to recover, rebuild, and restore some semblance of normalcy.

The aftermath of the fire in Lake Conjola photographed on January 15, 2020 David Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images

My family had its own brush with the fires. Living on the doorstep of the Blue Mountains wilderness, we had watched for weeks as the Gosper’s Mountain fire crept closer and closer to our small town. There was an inevitability to our evacuation, caught as our town was in the pincer between two huge fires to the north and south.

We spent five nail-biting days at a hotel in Sydney, watching and listening through media reports, social media, friends’ calls and even the fire service’s dispatch radio, as the inferno advanced. But we were lucky: the fire burned across our block of bushy land on a day when conditions were calm and cool. It was kept away from the house, even my three beehives, by our neighbours and firefighters. We returned two days before Christmas, spent the next day putting out spot fires around our neighbourhood, then settled down to defiantly enjoy the festivities against a soundtrack of helicopters, sirens and water-bombing airplanes.

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At Mogo Zoo, Staples and his colleagues were saved by a change in the weather. While they battled against the encroaching wildfire, a cool southerly wind took hold and gradually beat the flames back. “Once it got properly in, the temperature dropped, we then felt like we had got on top of it for the first time,” Staples says.

His zoo reopened on March 1, after extensive repairs to the perimeter fence, which was almost entirely burned. Staples is finally catching up on sleep, “but it did take a long time to feel that you could let yourself not be on edge.”

At Conjola Park, everyone still feels “a bit raw”, Skinner says. The stress of the bushfire has been compounded by frustration and anger at the bureaucratic red tape that is complicating recovery and rebuilding efforts in Conjola Park, despite all the goodwill and donations. “We all feel, once the land is cleared, then we can start looking at rebuilding,” he says. “That’d be exciting, that’d be positive, that’d be good.”

After nearly a week at their friends’ home, the Skinners were allowed back to find their house – and their street – had survived. Not so lucky were 89 other homes in the small neighbourhood. Skinner’s garden was scorched, and had it not been for the quick action of his neighbours, who stayed to defend their home, it would have ignited the house.

Skinner is matter-of-fact talking about the ordeal, but the emotion comes to the surface when he speaks of the actions of his neighbours. “The thing that always does it for me is talking about the kindness of strangers,” he says. He learned that there were several moments when his house might have gone; the front fence ignited, the back fence ignited, the front garden ignited. But each time, someone put the fire out. “If any one of those guys hadn’t been there, my house would have burned down,” he says. “I see that as so selfless and heroic.”

Donna Andrews is dealing with insurance companies, while she and her husband wait for a rental property to become available. They want to rebuild, because they love Bundanoon and the national park too much to give it up.

Mary O’Malley and her husband are actively involved in the recovery of Mallacoota. “It's very much about being part of the community and the community working together on healing and working together on solutions,” she says.

But she’s afraid for the future; her son’s future, the environment’s future, and the planet’s future under climate change. “I feel that this is the turning point and if we don't heed the message we really are doomed,” she says. “We can’t continue to be so divorced from our environment and have such disrespect for land and water and sea, because what is the point of a hundred jobs in a mine if you've got air that you can't breathe, water you can't drink and the fish are dying in the oceans?”

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