Not long after the Black Summer fires, WOOEE visited artist and bush fire survivor Nick Hopkins to check out an extraordinary sculpture, made with love, tears and determination.
Whilst we might currently feel insulated from bushfire risk due to the high rainfall of La Nina, Nick’s experiences hold great importance as we seek to navigate a safer future for Eurobodalla, and our climate. The IPCC Code Red for Humanity report stresses that we urgently need governments and leaders to act fast and decisively on cutting emissions.
Below, Nick records the history of his sculpture, nurtured and created out of the ash and annihilation wreaked by the Clyde Mountain fire’s arrival at Malua Bay on the morning of New Year’s Eve 2019.
The sculpture commemorates the animals and plants lost. Nick’s love for Yuin Country continues. And his work to save native forests. Nick speaks about the actions required to arrest global heating, and to protect our communities and our remaining animal species and plants.
Nick, thanks for making time to speak again, and also for giving WOOEE the chance to visit right after the fires to see your Tribute sculpture before it was moved to the Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden.
It’s permanently installed at the Botanic Gardens now, for all to see. Can you help now, to preserve its story for Eurobdalla’s local history?
We appreciate it’s a tough story to tell. But it seems an important one to record as the pace and force of climate change escalates.
” Yes. On December 31, 2019 fierce and fast moving fire completely destroyed our home gardens and workshop here on the NSW South Coast. In the days following the fire the SES were active in the area and assessed this particular tree, a Coastal Grey Box, was too dangerous to remain standing as the fire had burnt right into the centre of it and hollowed it out up to about a metre. “
” I was sad to see this particular tree taken down and wanted to somehow honour its life by creating a sculpture from its trunk which stood about 1.5 m high. So I cut it off at ground level and hollowed it out completely from above to create a cylindrical ‘blank canvas. Using the chainsaw I created two images by plunge cutting right through the wall of the trunk and two other images were simply routed onto the vertical surface of the exterior. “
A tribute to all the plants and the 3 billion animals that perished due to the 2019-2020 Spring-Summer bushfires, Nick’s sculpture is hewn from the trunk of a large Coastal Grey Box damaged when the Clyde Mountain fire destroyed his home, gardens and wood working studio at Malua Bay.
That must have been such a raw and intensely challenging time Nick. What did this creative process mean to you in the face of such loss?
It was something of a cathartic exercise for me because all the while I was working I was saying goodbye to our beautiful 6 acres behind Malua Bay and thinking of the more than 3 billion animals that died so unnecessarily in the climate change fires of this black summer. So it became a tribute to not only the animals but also the plants which had perished.
Ridge Avenue, Malua Bay on
31 December 2019.
The BOM recorded that 2019 was the hottest year on record.
Working with my hands to create something unusual and even beautiful is also one way I can deal with the madness and frustration I feel from having worked as an environmental activist for the past 40 years and seeing so much of our natural environment destroyed.
The following images you have shared Nick, are so moving…
New Years Eve firestorms create their own weather systems (top left) Nick and Heike’s Ridge Road home burns (middle). The fire-beast’s bite marks on a turned pot salvaged from Nick’s gutted woodworking workshop (bottom left) Getting ready to transport the Tribute sculpture (middle right) during WOOEE’s visit.
A section of the charcoaled ridge beam from Nick and Heike’s home, re-crafted by Nick
You’ve memorialised a part of your home, and the shared life you’ve spent within its walls and its once safe and solid structures.
” Yes, after the fire I salvaged the last remaining unburnt section of our home’s massive oregon ridge beam. This was the backbone of our house and represented the sense of security that home offers so I wanted to honour this piece of timber in a simple sculptural piece featuring both charred and un-charred sections.”
I think you mentioned that there was something that became very apparent to you at this time, in terms of shared resources ?
I lost all my woodworking tools and machinery in the fire as well as most of my other possessions. My woodworking club also lost its entire workshop tools and machinery in the fire. As a tremendous example of strong social capital it continues to operate without a physical base and its members have flooded me with offers of spare tools and use of home workshops.
‘ Forests are more than just a collection of trees and other plants—they are integrated ecosystems and home to some of the most diverse life on Earth. They are also major players in the carbon and water cycles that make life possible. When forests are lost or degraded, their destruction sets off a series of changes that affect life both locally and around the world. ‘
WWF World Wildlife
” Public native forest logging in NSW is a major driver of deforestation pushing countless species further towards extinction. The state-owned Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) is responsible for all public native forest logging. FCNSW has recently resumed logging in South Coast native forests even though following the Black Summer bushfires, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) restricted logging on the South Coast to give the fragile burnt forests and wildlife a chance to recover. The EPA said that recovery could take over 100 years in some forests, so that tree hollows can form and threatened species populations can recover.
Pockets of unburnt and lightly burnt forest that are also threatened with logging have become critical refuges for the region’s stunning and diverse wildlife. Experts claim that following large bushfires, refuges for surviving animals are critical as they provide food and habitat immediately post-fire, and then allow them to grow their populations outwards as surrounding bush recovers. These areas are now included as targets of FCNSW operations on the South Coast.
Logging is slated for 78 compartments on the south coast between Nowra and the Victorian border. Areas of key concern include the state forests around Batemans Bay, at Mogo and Bolaro. Mogo Compartment 180A, which is currently being logged, and Mogo compartment 146A (with logging predicted to start here soon) have incredible significance to the critically endangered swift parrot which visits these forests each year on their annual migration from Tasmania to the south east forests. Compartment 146A has recorded 180 swift parrots, which is more than half the estimated number of individuals left in this entire species!! ”
https://conservationcouncil.org.au/blog/2021/07/09/south-coast-forests-still-under-threat/ July 2021`
After the fires – the value we placed on Country and our local surviving habitats felt even greater for a slim period of time.
There was a shared sense of gravitas in our community about what we’d seen during and after the fires. Yet there’s also this glaring disconnect in terms of land and forest management. It seems such a paradox, Nick!
We are blessed in this shire with so much forested landscape and yet we undervalue it to a very large degree. For instance not many people are aware of all the logging operations that are taking place in the state forests around us.
We tend to hug the coastal strip and not venture out to explore and begin to understand this country which our colonial ancestors stole from the Yuin nation. And since the fires the greatest unwitnessed tragedy is that logging contractors are moving into burnt forest with their so-called “harvesting” machinery.
They are substantially setting back the recovery of our native forests. The depleted animal populations, some of which are critically endangered, are struggling to avoid extinction after these massive fires. So to further impact the forest with commercial logging is an abomination I believe.
Swift Parrot (Lathamus discolor) – Logging and land-clearing have decimated their habitat. The Swift Parrot is listed as endangered in NSW and critically endangered under Commonwealth legislation.
image – Gunjan Pandey, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“There are fewer than 300 swift parrots left in the wild, according to research from the Australian National University. Around half visit the Mogo State Forest in winter.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-01/swift-parrot-logging-ban-call/100180868
You have been educating about the dangers of rising temperatures and climate change for decades now.
The fires were not unexpected. I have been aware of the increasingly dangerous conditions that have arisen in our country because of the cumulative effects of burning fossil fuels across the planet. It is just ironic that as a climate change activist I am not offered any special dispensation by the oncoming fire – it consumes everything in its path.
I am two parts shattered and three parts enraged that in response to all the calls over the many many years for successive governments to take this issue more seriously scientists and activists alike have been belittled, ridiculed, humiliated and ignored.
As a voting population we continue to fail to understand and expose the cosy relationship that exists between our two major political parties and the fossil fuel industry. So to be honest, whilst the complicated web of hidden donations and backroom lobbying continues our efforts to seriously address climate change will continue to be thwarted.
Nick’s Tribute sculpture has now settled into its ‘forever home’ in the Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden. If you haven’t seen it yet, do check it out! And spend a quiet reflective moment honouring what’s lost, and what we have to love and to save.
For ERBG’s opening hours click here
Read more about Nick’s art practise & story
https://cabbi.com.au/in-the-artist-studio-nick-hopkins/
TAKE ACTION
End Public Native Forest Logging in NSW – read and sign the petition here
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/la/Pages/ePetition-details.aspx?q=quge-8rdRlyn4PTcuMj_PA
Making native forest as cheap as chips, makes NO sense.
If you missed it, you might like to catch up on a very important review of native logging. It makes clear the case for leaving native forests unlogged purely on economic grounds alone.
” Ending native logging in the Southern and Eden forests of NSW and using them for mountain-biking and carbon farming could be worth more than $60 million to taxpayers, according to economic modelling. “
Read more here.
$20m loss: native forest logging cost NSW taxpayers $441 per hectare in 2021 :
Also of concern to our Eurobodalla community is the increased fire risk from logging native forest
” Logging of native forests makes them much more flammable and elevates the severity of bushfires when they occur, pushing some species closer to ecological collapse” according to a review of published science by two leading universities.
“The meta-study – which assessed 51 peer-reviewed papers – found logging increased the severity of forest fires from about 10 years after the trees are extracted with effects lasting more than three decades. Selective logging or thinning can also increase fire risks, according to the Bushfire Recovery Project, a joint project between Griffith University and The Australian National University. ”
You can read more about this meta- study & the finding that logging increases bushfire risk https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/logging-increases-bush-flammability-for-30-years-research-shows-20210210-p5719c.html?
MORE RESEARCH FINDINGS
‘An analysis of the fire footprint of the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires has found logging elevated the risk of high-severity fires.
A team of Australian researchers, including Professor David Lindenmayer and Dr Chris Taylor from The Australian National University (ANU), completed the study. ‘ 22 April 2022
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/logging-amplified-severity-of-black-summer-bushfires
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