Afterwards
by Meg Davis
The fires two years ago were devastating. The area I was most familiar with was by no means the hardest hit, although people lost homes, and the angst of waiting and losing and waiting again hasn’t gone away. I saw smoke on the horizon the other day and found myself shaken: I who hadn’t actually seen a naked flame in that awful summer, but who’d still been under threat for weeks.
In the face of this, it seems almost obscene to rejoice in the power of abused and neglected nature, which had recently been so unstoppably destructive, to regenerate. In my part of the world regeneration happened surprisingly quickly. These photos were taken along Waincourt and Bullocky’s Hut Road in mid-February. However, there are many places further west that are still not much more than burnt stick.
Spring, 2021, was another demonstration of nature’s capacity to come back magnificently. Again, I’m speaking only about the roadside and bush around Potato Point, and tracks in Bodalla State Forest. Wildflowers flourished in a way I hadn’t seen in the more than forty years I’ve been living here.
The bush was a carpet of hardenbergia; swathes of kennedia draped logs and curled up thin trunks; goodenia grew in luxuriant mini-forests; groves of grass trees stood tall, exuding sweet nectar; in spots the bush was a haze of blue from the flowers of stypandra and dianella; lilac lilies were a vivid mauve. I spotted eight different species of what I’d always lumped together as eggs and bacon, all loaded with flowers. Many hyacinth orchids, tongue orchids and snake orchids evaded marauding macropods and bloomed profusely. More than one species of lomandra erupted into bloom. New growth glowed in that inimitable low light of early morning. And this is only a sampling of the season’s bounty.
How do you come to terms with such a paradox? How can you rejoice in the beauty of afterwards when so many people are still living with its loss and its pain? But, equally, how can you ignore such gifts?
WOOEE May 2022
