After the Fires
Today I went for lunch in Narbethong, one of the towns which was affected by the Black Saturday bushfires last month. It is beyond words to drive through the Black Spur, known for being one of the most beautiful areas in the state, much of it now blackened from the fires. It’s nothing compared to coming into what remains of Narbethong though.
There’s a few shops still standing in the town, the few including the hotel (dating from 1893) which had fire lapping at its back door. Almost no trees have been spared as far as the eye can see in places, and the vegetation is punctuated by the mangled remains of homes. The spared homes often surrounded by blackened vegetation, a reminder of how close they came to the inferno and survived. All of this is surrounded by lush new grass growth, incongruously giving the sense that the fire spared the grass (of course, it didn’t – the grass has shot up in the five weeks since the fires, with help from the rain.)
We continued on to Buxton before returning to Narbethong for lunch, and the story is much the same for many kilometers. In the distance, the Cathedral Ranges loom eerily looking much like a patchwork quilt – some areas burned worse than others, but all burned.
The Buxton Road House was one building which didn’t survive Black Saturday, and we stopped momentarily to look at what remained. I’ve posted a few photos of it to flickr, although they really show a very small part of the devastated building, let alone the devastation which surrounds it. Not far up the road, on the opposite side, what’s left of a house sits destroyed.
Edit: This kinda reads like a newspaper opinion piece or something (and a couple of people have actually mentioned it to me.) It’s not intentional but probably because I cut it down fairly heavily after I wrote it. I’m not sure how that happened, but it happened organically so it can stay that way.